The Babbington Press

07/15/2024

War, Folly
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 57:
“Actually,” she said, “c’est la guerre. There was, you remember, a war. Isn’t there always? Hasn’t there always been a war? If we’re not at war, then someone else is.”
Imperial War Museums, “Timeline Of 20th And 21st Century Wars”:
Conflict took place in every year of the 20th Century; the world was free from the violence caused by war for only very short periods of time. It has been estimated that 187 million people died as a result of war from 1900 to the present. The actual number is likely far higher.

Mark Dorset: War and Folly

05/31/2024

Allusion: Chekhov’s Pistol (or Gun)
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 46:
At last, like Chekhov’s pistol, the cigarette got its moment. She lit it, took a long drag.
Sorry, but I can’t resist this:

Mark Dorset: Allusion: Chekhov’s Pistol (or Gun)

05/25/2024

Personages, Fictional: Gregory Tschudin�Books, Real and Fictional: The Films of Gregory Tschudin
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 45:
FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill:
“To Rarotonga,” meticulously restored as “Rarotonga,” has been included in the prestigious Hyperion Collection:
https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/topical-guide-736

05/21/2024

Travel: Ocean Voyage; and Plans and Schemes
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 42:
“SHE WAS FAILING,” said Ariane, “so the point of the deception changed. Now we wanted to get to Rarotonga before she died.”
On Saturday, May 18, 2024, I asked ChatGPT to show me a route from [a location on Long Island, New York where Babbington might be located] to Rarotonga by sailing ship.
Here is the response I received, lightly edited and re-formatted, by me:

Mark Dorset: Travel: Ocean Voyage; and Plans and Schemes

05/09/2024

Observation, Surveillance; and Dancing: Erotic
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 38:
[continuing the entry on Rarotonga from Scented Isles, a guidebook to the South Sea Islands by the Christensen sisters]

Mark Dorset: Observation, Surveillance; and Dancing: Erotic

05/07/2024

Books: Real�
Writers: Real
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 38:
At the library, she read all the works of Robert Dean Frisbie, a Clevelander who went to the South Seas as a young man around 1920. . . .

Mark Dorset: Books: Real; Writers: Real

05/06/2024

Personages: Fictional: The Gigantic Mortoni
What a Piece of Work I Am: Chapter 38:
“[…] generations of Babbingtonians were raised on the legend of the clamdigger who wandered all the way to the South Seas in search of the best clam beds. […] They called him the Gigantic Mortoni.”

Mark Dorset: Personages: Fictional: The Gigantic Mortoni

05/01/2024

Work: The Right Thing and the Time It Takes
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 36:
Grandfather . . . would scrape the loose paint and touch up the bare spots, painstakingly painting the half rounds that held the screens in place, slowly, so slowly, so that he wouldn’t get paint onto the screens themselves, teaching me—but only by the way, without a word—that some work not only takes time, but needs time, as if it were alive, and had its needs.

Mark Dorset: Work: The Right Thing and the Time It Takes

04/23/2024

Man’s Inhumanity to Man, Examples Thereof: Expulsion of the Acadians
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 34:
The Robertses were descended from displaced Acadians, as were several other families in Babbington, Grandmother’s among them, and like most of the displaced Acadians in Babbington they had abandoned their faith and their old-world allegiances long ago.

Mark Dorset: Man’s Inhumanity to Man, Examples Thereof: Expulsion of the Acadians; and World Views: Skepticism, Materialism

04/22/2024

Allusion�
Projects, Difficult
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 33:
It wasn’t an easy trip for Grandfather. Often, along the way, he had doubts about the wisdom of having set out at all. Sometimes he wished that he could just end it, put into any port along the way, and sometimes he wished that he could start again—better prepared this time, better equipped. […] At other times, the effort of keeping up the pretense seemed too difficult for him.

Mark Dorset: Allusion; and Projects, Difficult

04/19/2024

Imagination
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 32:

Mark Dorset: Imagination

04/13/2024

https://peterleroy.substack.com/publish/post/143517361

Mark Dorset: Places, Real and Fictional: Rarotonga; Reality: Making It Endurable; and Sailboats: Types: Yawl

04/11/2024

https://open.substack.com/pub/peterleroy/p/topical-guide-707

Mark Dorset: Drinks: Rum and Coke, Cuba Libre; Appropriation, Plagiarism; and Fact and Fiction

04/05/2024

Personages, Fictional: Gregory Tschudin
Books, Real and Fictional: The Films of Gregory Tschudin

Mark Dorset: Personages, Fictional: Gregory Tschudin; and Books, Real and Fictional: The Films of Gregory Tschudin

04/05/2024

FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill: A Little Mischief
Anne Coffin (Deirdre Frost) is a college student who has returned to her home town for the summer and taken a job as a maid at a resort. She’s from a working-class family that is just scraping by.

What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 28: FROM The Films of Gregory Tschudin, by Andrew Cargill: A Little Mischief Anne Coffin (Deirdre Frost) is a college student who has returned to her home town for the summer and taken a job as a maid at a resort. She’s from a working-class family that is just sc...

04/03/2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html

His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers.

03/31/2024

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/topical-guide-700

Mark Dorset: Salesmanship: Financing: Time Payment Plans

03/28/2024

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/topical-guide-699

Mark Dorset

03/21/2024

What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 23: “I’ve wondered sometimes—if he had been a glamorous bandit, a figure out of our folklore, the thief as hero—wouldn’t I have gone along with him? And wouldn’t I have been thrilled?”

Mark Dorset: Fiction: Stock Characters: Gentleman Thief

03/19/2024

From What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 21: The light coming through the venetian blinds cast sharp shadows on the bedspread, shadows that slipped over the edge of the bed, fell onto the floor, and vanished. . . .

Mark Dorset: Genres: Film Noir; Tropes: Venetian Blinds, Shadows; and Foreshadowing

09/10/2023

Where Do You Stop? Chapter 2:

The hill was actually a mound created by the builder of our house. Before construction began he had scraped the lot bare and flat, plowing all the scrub pine and scrub oak into a mound that ran along the rear property line like a drumlin deposited by a retreating glacier.

Mark Dorset: Geographical Features: Drumlin

04/06/2023

Issue 21 of the Babbington Review is now on Substack:

The beautiful Miranda and I were sitting in a restaurant’s temporary shed in Manhattan, on a street that I will not name, one evening a couple of years into the coronavirus pandemic. The evening was cold. We were wearing layers of sweaters under heavy coats. We had arrived wearing surgical masks, ...

03/24/2023

Issue Number 19 of The Babbington Review is now on Substack:

THE STORY SO FAR: Thanks to an old typewriter and my overheated imagination, I’d learned how to make my way to Kittiwake Island in Murky Bay, where the Peters clan resided when they weren’t off on an adventure in some far-flung foreign land. The difficult leap across the treacherous waters of th...

03/15/2023

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/topical-guide-449

Mark Dorset: Experiences: Unforgettable, Unusual, Unlikely; Annotator: Trials and Tribulations of; and Reminiscing: As Shared Experience (“Do You Remember?”)

03/14/2023

Issue Number 18 of The Babbington Review is now on Substack.

Ariane Lodkochnikov was for several years of her life what would now be called a performance artist, or perhaps she’d be called an improv actress, but she would have rejected that, because in the early years she claimed that she wasn’t acting. I think she was being honest about not acting, in th...

03/06/2023

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/443-effie-says-matthew

Reservations Recommended, Chapter 2 continues: “EFFIE,” says Matthew, so loudly that he surprises himself and everyone else; they all turn toward him suddenly. “Matthew!” says Effie, just as loudly as he did. “What’s happening with that woman who spent her rent money for tuition?”

02/25/2023

“Do Clams Bite?” an audio-video book on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZAgx_YpacP0

02/24/2023

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/438-the-conversation-17e

Listen now (4 min) | Reservations Recommended, Chapter 2 continues, read by the author

02/13/2023

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/topical-guide-429

Mark Dorset: Personages, Historical: Busby Berkeley; Genres: Movie Musical; and Genres: Film Noir

02/07/2023

https://peterleroy.substack.com/p/424-matthew-samples

Reservations Recommended, Chapter 1 continues: Matthew samples Belinda’s pork, the sauce, the aïoli (it is aïoli), the vegetables, the rice. While they’re having coffee, he consolidates his mental notes as he sometimes does, by reciting to Belinda important judgments he hopes to include in BW....