“He loved Peace Eagle (Irene Adler) purely, chastely, asexually, exclusively, in a way that put aside the female race most effectively, I dare say; a most proper chap, my imaginary friend—even for the 1890s….”

And yes: ‘Irene Adler’ implies German blood, and a Latin education: the world was the way it should be, (smiles).

It’s amusing…. Adventures are hardly ever about True Liberation (TM), of course, right…. A late Victorian guy dealing with death and murder and moral decay may have actually been unusually beyond-polite for that high noon of repression, you know, actually…. That Lord Dunsany guy’s signature book, for example, came later, a few years into the Jazz Age, right, and he was younger: and they were both adventure stories, but LD’s book was more…. Perfunctory; polite and nothing, right: whereas ACD’s first move apparently is to go immediately up to edge of respectability to demonstrate how far it was acceptable to go in ultra-pro-social hero-adventure tales, without straying over into things that should only ever be sung in Italian, rather than printed in English, right…. Which if you think about it, is ALMOST daring, right…. As opposed to just flowery vapid polite nothings, which would have been a dime a dozen back then and for many, many more years, as well, right….

…. (reads a few lines of technobabble discoveries) The adventure-technobabble does seem less stupid, cuter, than “The Martian”, though that’s a three-quarters case of being the difference between my mind-world a few years ago, when I was less sociable and less happy and more susceptible, therefore, to being blown off-course, by seeking fun, but not wanting it, basically: versus today….

Certainly there is that element of ‘a hero for worship’, right: it is curious how you could see one thing and make a few correct sly guesses about it, right—it’s far from impossible…. But sooner or later, you’d make more incorrect guesses than Hero Worship Boy Books would imply, right…. [It is true that, literally speaking, SH does encounter human limitations on a decent number of occasions: but the reader is never made to FEEL a sense that he is limited; it has no emotional meaning in the stories, IMO; it’s just…. I don’t know; it’s put in there for form’s sake, not because you’re meant to take that seriously, SH’s human limitations….], yeah, read poorly as a naive 7th or 8th grader, maybe even several grades earlier than that, whenever it was, this probably wasn’t the best influence on my development, given the context of those times—the 1990s—not that anything too substantial has changed, right…. (shrugs) But I expect it to be amusing…. It’s just so fascinating how the late Victorian times could be the high noon both of sentimental housewives, passive almost to the point of suicide by forgetting when to breathe, and, at the exact same time and place and class/race, the most robotic male super-cyborg intellectuals, right: you see kinda the same thing in the more ‘political/serious’ book ‘Resurrection’ by Tolstoy, although that’s not a book worthy of hero worship, either, really…. [If perhaps it also doesn’t deserve to get put down the memory hole on the sly, which is the treatment it has received, essentially, lol.]

(shrugs) But yeah: I mean, ~EYE~ guess wrong sometimes, why not Sherlock Holmes? I was watching the most putrid propaganda-romance film the other day, “The Proposal” (2009), and although I was taken in by no lie: I did guess incorrectly about what lie Leni Riefenstahl (and I did literally watch it out of curiosity due to the woman-director aspect, lol) had slated for the next scene, lol….

I don’t know. It’s entertainment. Novels are one form of entertainment. I’ll swap out the Dunsany for this, once I’m done: Elf-bride boy didn’t really write anything I’m glad to have read, today, in retrospect, and really nothing in that book rewards the award of time, right; whereas this does promise amusement….

…. It’s amusing how Sherlock both lies and indeed, breaks the law, right. I don’t mean that as criticism, of course. Who doesn’t fantasize about doing just what they like, legal or not? Evidently not people who solve crimes for a living, a-hahaha! 😁

And yeah, it’s funny how being an opera girl was like the next thing to being a high-price….

~”Back then, things were good, children! Women lacked power; men lacked desire! It was the way Jesus intended when he created the world, before there were Democrats!” (rolls eyes) “Yes, Grand-mama[/papa]….”

…. (finishes the Bohemia story) Rather nicely done. It’s very cute, and very aware of the current ideas, in an amusing way. Cute, and yet it could JUST have happened, right…. Sometimes the interpretations of life and society that the characters give are quite questionable: although they’re just what people would have said, at the time, right….

…. (The Red Headed League) I did read this book, I think, as an older-child Millennial 90s youth, right: I guess reading is a good habit to get into, right, but it is amusing how little you get out of it at a certain point in your journey…. (It doesn’t help if people don’t really raise you to see the actual important issues: they just coach you to be loyal—I think that the technical term is, ‘parenting’, lol—and have minimal “improper” behavioral expressions, right…. Although, I got into trouble anyway, because there isn’t a single, one-piece, simplistic sort of system to be loyal to, anymore, right…. Although I don’t know that our way of raising kids has really changed, right….) I thought that a ‘red headed league’ was just the most quixotic, most random thing, right, just take out a coin and flip it random, right: like a club for people whose name starts with A, right…. But this was the 1890s; for us today it would be more like, ‘A club for people whose name is Carlos’, right…. It’s the equivalent of having a Carlos Club, where people who are named Carlos get a chance at a computer programming job, right…. (At the time, encyclopedias were like, technology, right?)…. Although the whole thing wasn’t really what it seemed, right: although I don’t think/I hope that the REAL (criminal) plot wasn’t an ‘ethnic’ one, right; it was the Anglo handlers of the program who were up to a little something something….

…. It’s funny how the first two stories are almost modern, but in the 1890s British way, you know: ‘disreputable’ women, and then one of the ‘disreputable’ ethnicities, and both stories reference the USA, right!…. Not to backtrack, but it is funny, how the gossips talk about opera girls, now vs then, right….

…. “…. and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple cooking, and keeps the place clean….”

Well, I guess that’s the way it should be: the way of the ancestors, right? Wholesome, traditional womanhood, unsullied by feminism, living wholly within its own proper sphere, but not without a certain power, unique to that peculiar sphere, you know…. 😉

👽

…. Sherlock as a lover of music and leisure (and then-legal drugs) is curious. I rather believe it….

I wonder how unusual it was in the 1890s to portray the ‘ethnic’ British man as assimilated and un-harried—a little unimportant, you know….

…. (A Case of Identity) It’s not quite as Freudian as I was expecting; I suppose that even male lovers want more than (failing the other thing), flirting—but that, OTHER, thing, that is relevant to dalliances, right…. [💵….]. I suppose it’s the pre-Freud’s fame, ‘Freudian’ thing, right. It is true that these things do change from time to time, even if the sexy sexist Dr. Sigmund was correct, that they tend not to be ‘respectable’, right. To make a small tangent, Freud himself wanted people to be ‘respectable’, albeit in a non-‘respectable’ way; he wanted to be the superego, reminding people, (especially women, of course), to sacrifice ‘sufficiently’, for ‘love’, right…. But, I digress.

…. Oh, and I’m reading the story on a Kindle, which shows popular lines to underline: and apparently people tend to underline the one line, the callously sexist one, about how, women just love their delusions, right; the cautiously cross-cultural one about how Hafiz is as good as Horace, not so much…. Well, it’s the 21st century, ladies and germs: oppression is over: you can all go home now! That’s right, I said it: scram! Nothing to see here!….

Move along! 🏏 (the ball isn’t as relevant as the bat, lol)

…. (Boscombe Valley Mystery) A little rural murder to investigate…. Good, good: best to get out into the pure air…. ~People always used to talk like that, about country air: and I guess they’re right; I guess during Queen Vicky’s days, people still remembered that their cities produced pollution, right…. Though of course, American (to speak of myself) agriculture grows more and more unnatural every year, I suspect, to speak of only the aspect of society under review…. But yeah: it’s curious; city air versus country air—the thing too obvious to be retained in the popular imagination….

And it is funny how Watson’s wife emerges just long enough to underline her lack of importance, almost like the servant; and Sherlock underlines how they don’t trust country people, it seemed like he was saying, right…. Yes, the urban English male person, with money, right, back in those times…. (smiles, jazz hands)

…. At least there’s a lot of ambiguous woman characters in the story, right. Loads of ambiguous characters, you know: the male characters, you know, are of course not arranged in a hierarchy, right….

It is amusing to think that a man, especially if perhaps not only in the 1890s, (we just wouldn’t have this choice anymore, right), would rather increase his chances of being killed by the state, than disclose the nature of his romantic humiliations, you know….

I certainly believe that part, right?….

…. It is true, that it is amusing, how clever Holmes is.

…. (The Five Orange Pips) A story about the KKK is an unusual choice for 1890s England, so that’s certainly curious; however, ACD seems to have bitten something off without being able to chew and digest properly: he set himself the sort of task he was not adjusted to doing well. [Not exactly a BAD choice, being ‘ambitious’ like that, but it can affect the quality of the work, if you follow.] It’s fascinating, in an idle sort of way, to read these sorts of Technology of the 1890s Sleuthing Stories, but something more is required for an adequate investigation into the story of a white terrorist organization hunting traitors, you know?

…. (The Man with the Twisted Lip) Reading things “from history”, so to speak, can be curious. Nowadays, the “problem” is immigrants—they don’t even look like us! Back then, the “problem” was areas associated with the “emigrant ships”, right: they can’t even make it here!…. The societal attitude towards the districts which peopled emigrant ships, which is echoed, is by no means kind, right….

(smirk) But then, kindness ought to be the attribute of women, right: and not men….

…. And whenever Sherlock has the slightest difficulty with his powers, he is most inhuman with himself—but I suppose that, “all men are like that”, right. [😉]

…. I don’t mean to be precious about the poor—anyone can be greedy; viciousness is here there and everywhere; class lines are blurry; crazy is everywhere, people get used to it, shrug it off—but yeah: the Victorians, the English Victorians~ they told some far-fetched fantasies about the poor, you know. The poor…. They’re rich!…. They’re a real problem!

…. (The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle) It seems like quite a random, circular, goes-nowhere story, thematically speaking, but, here’s a funny line: ‘My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know’—That’s the character, right: right there. And that’s why his name is a byword for the intellectual-who-stirs-up-resentment-in-us: you know, that vaguely [USA] Midwestern phrase, ‘No shit, Sherlock’, all that sort of phraseology; they resent it—and why periodically people plunge however-many millions into Sherlock Holmes Costume Dramas, you know: because he’s the Grand Old Scientist From the Past, and people look up to him, right. [figure it out lol 🤷‍♂️]

…. (The Adventure of the Speckled Band) Obligatory trashing of the minority ethnic community (Gypsies, as they are sometimes called)….

…. So Sherlock is a strong man: lifts weights, apparently, or: some kind of strength training. Curious. Of course, there’s so little of that shown, as opposed to the (non-romantic) dandyism, and the intellectualism—that there is that possibility of male vanity/beauty; whereas the hero worshipper has even sometimes associated himself with virtue/strength he does not have, out of loyalty, and a sense of the abstract-ideal ‘male’, and fantasy, and all that….

But yeah: that is one of the benefits of a less technological time, (although hopefully one day we will learn the true sort of thought, and not the obsessive sort of thought, and learn to balance the true sort of thought, with the strength of the embodied creature, right): in old times, before powerful technologies—and even the Victorian times was an age of ~~very young~~ technology, right: there was more of a sense of the need of bodily vigor….

People think they can get their bodily vigor back by supporting old-fashioned prejudice: which is a bit like saying…. I don’t know, that learning French will make you a good cook: and I’m not talking about going to Paris, just doing some crazy ass thing like reading Petrarch in French, right; yes, I know where he was from, lol….

…. This isn’t about any of the stories, but, SH isn’t always bad.

~Sherlock in the Future!

“They tell me that this is food, my good man.”
~(examines plastic, then shakes head) An interesting hypothesis, of course…. (returns to him) But, there’s no evidence.

…. (The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb) “…. when the facts evolve slowly before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth.”

…. (a medical patient to a doctor) “Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man….”

Not that I don’t wonder what some medical historians of the future will think we were on about, with some of these chemicals of ours, and some of our ideas, but: but, yeah…. Progress has certainly been made in our civilization, upon certain lines, anyway. And it’s silly to have hero-worship notions about the past, sometimes, right?

…. ~The Cassandra: The men of the 1890s felt unconsciously guilty for sidelining women, and Christianity encouraged guilt as a positive experience, right. They were also naturally enough afraid of the machine of man, that they were a part of, right….

…. (The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor) “As to his dress, it was careful to the verge of foppishness….”

It’s funny, describing clothing style as ‘careful’, nowadays, at least if we were listening to a song (in the unlikely event that the words were non-liquid enough to describe anything as practical as clothing or even, in a concrete way/in any sort of complete way, appearance, even, right), or watching a movie: in something like that, today, ‘careful’ wouldn’t necessarily tend towards the idea of going for the heart-strings, IMO, right—more like, playing to the nostalgics/parents, etc. (Although clearly there is more overlap between the two strategies than either ‘parents’ or ‘children’ sometimes admit, right.)…. But yeah: in person, I do think that you’d get an idea that a ‘careful’ choice of clothes is going in for the kill, albeit by the very weapon of respectability, right. And in the early 21st century, the notion has indeed survived that pleasant appearance is indeed not suitable to Team Adjutant-to-the-Birth-Giver, right (‘foppish’). I’m not sure I want to seem beautiful myself; I’d rather be more like a practical woman (a drudge, lol), than a beautiful one, in order to be of service ‘to a lady’, right: although here the issue is more class, than gender considered in splendid isolation, right….

…. “We can’t command our love, but we can our actions.”

…. Here comes the crazy man, old chap, said Watson with disdainful glee. I wonder that his relatives don’t keep him locked in the attic or the cellar, with the dogs and the servants who have taken ill.
~I’m going to make money today, so that fate will never be mine, Sherlock declared, rubbing his hands together in material delight. But soft! What light from yonder window breaks! It is the customer, who will be properly serviced, and billed. 👻

~But yeah: I’m always so thrilled when my fellow white men take such a kind and egoless concern with my welfare, right. Aside from old white ladies going to church socials and being, correct-human-beings/helpless invalids, Black people being violent and American, white people being violent and American, and the woke people deciding that I am better off feared than engaged with, that has to be one of my absolute ~favorite~ things, when one of my fellow-white-men looks at me like, Hey Jim! It’s that guy! It’s that white kid who looks just like us! Yes, that random stupid kid with the fucked-up resume! The crazy one—the very same!…. (British gaze, from above) Do you think he can do any tricks? (considers this question with all deliberate consideration)

~(shrugs) I mean, they’re amusing stories, don’t get me wrong…. But they’re not about, me, even, you know…. I don’t know how to describe it….

…. ‘The only disadvantage to the girl, is that she is pretty, and men like her: but really she is a fine servant, truly serviceable and adequate.’

Oh, to be a girl in those times: just to ~live~ in those times!…. And all that has only been slightly changed: everything is loosened from its fixtures and changed, but not healed or at all different in essence: merely dislodged from its security, and risen up, therefore, in wrath!

…. Girl receives suitor, unknown person—get snippy at both of them

Girl has suitor, known felon, runs away—write her off, we have enough problems

But yeah: the information processing is indeed pretty remarkable. It’s the moral values, lol, that are lacking….

…. (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches)

~(SH) To the lover of art for its own sake, sometimes the less-prestigious art is of greater merit or interest….

~I’m surprised to hear him say that, given of what one takes his character to be, and of course the date: but it is true. It is very true. The prestigious things, the sort of things that cannot be avoided because they flow down from on high into everything else, are sometimes well, but prestige, and merit or interest are different things, and sometimes place ought to be yielded to that which also cannot be avoided, the flower of the ever-fertile valley, which abounds greatly, and as the air is clean and true up on high, so too is the earth soft and living down in the valley, wouldn’t you say?

Prestige, and merit or interest are different things, though not many of Queen Victoria’s subjects necessarily agreed, right…. But there was a lot of Aquarian energy on Arthur Conan Doyle’s chart: and God knows we’re strange people, we Aquarius sorts….

…. (SH) “Crime is common. Logic is rare.”

It’s not that he has a perfect personality, or is without a personality, or is never bent on receiving pride of place—a useless sort of location, right. (Though perhaps I don’t know that either; but then, it is hard to forget sometimes that “Sherlock” has entered the folklore memory as, at least in part, the caricature of an intellectual, and I hope I am not THAT, though I am quite sure that I have, some, at least, of the character defects of my general type.)

But yeah, there is, still, a sort of truth to that striking sentence, right: crime is common…. I have never been the logician sort of intellectual, even at the times when I have been most studious and withdrawn, right. But they too, have a certain claim to truth, right: the logic-finders…. Crime is common…. Logic is rare…. You could draw false inferences from that dictum; but it is, itself, true, you know?….

…. A man with money offering you way above the market value of your services is, “a philanthropist or a villain”, that’s so true, and in a book of crime and/or general misconduct adventures, we know which it is, right…. God, sometimes I feel like I’d get in trouble, you know, for tipping a girl ‘too much’, right…. What a world, gentlemen and gentlewomen! What a world! 🤪

…. This last story is wonderful. Obviously there is the issue of upper-class solidarity, and then too, it wasn’t at all uncommon, wouldn’t you say, for Victorian popular opinion to be awake to the issue of sexual abuse, albeit in its own peculiar way, right…. But it does seem to be very tuned in with sympathy to a woman with agency: ACD seems far more touched by needs of the woman with intellectual training, than many men of the 1890s would have been, right…. It seems almost to anticipate the good as well as the bad points, of a Betty Friedan, right….

…. So yeah: it is kinda a story about a polite society man making a fetish out of polite beauty (women’s hair); it’s a very good premise….

…. (SH) “I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.”

It does indeed go both ways…. Not to be laboriously autobiographical, although naturally what I, as well as what everyone else writes or says is under-written by lived experience: but it’s always curious when the parent is “normal” or “successful” or at least, I don’t know, “not too different from everyone else; just another working adult”, and the child, much less so, right: not that individuals are not distinguished, but often a line of thought that leads to madness was pursued in the child until the consequences flowered, that they learnt from the parent(s), as the parents possessed it, but which they themselves, (the elders), in a fit of instinct, extinguished partially just in time, or else by sheer whim did not pursue (their error, that is) in any sort of ‘logical’ way: thereby escaping the lion’s share of the consequences, or the ‘price’, so to speak.

Although it appears that the plot does not bear out my previous supposition, (“a fetish out of polite beauty”), at least, literally, although on psychoanalytic grounds, it would appear (vis a vis politeness and ordinariness) very strange a story indeed, substituting the one idea for the other….

So much of men’s lives is ruined by having power, right…. Our greatest wish, in our moments of bravery, is to show what powers of women overshadow us: but if women are nothing but passive vulnerability only, then our desires themselves are lies, and our lives, though surely spent and worn out, by and by, one way or another, burn out, but only in a half-lived way, right….

…. Yes, a drop of gore is the thing, right. It’s obviously kin—a sort of older cousin—to the sort of ‘crime’ reporting that often fascinates people who in fevers and delusions imagine that the fears it stokes benefits them: not infrequently even by those populations most obviously disadvantaged by that sort of thing, right; drops of gore, and pounds of foolishness…. Still, it is true that there are violences and wars and battles, in our so-called peaceful, unified, and rational society, right….

The themes in the stories are usually almost entirely laid out in their first half: with the second half being largely mechanical and more a matter of ‘cleaning up’, so to speak…. But he’s not a bad writer at all, ACD: competent, and also, amusing.

This one collects some of the most famous and iconic adventures, from the lighthearted Red-Headed League to an almost Poe like horror story in The Speckled Band. The narration from Jacobi is fantastic and he has a variety of voices for the different characters, though I think Steven Fry's narration wins out as the best Sherlock Holmes reader on his exuberance. ( )

You gotta love holmes! ( )

An interesting classic that remains easy to read, even more than a century later. ( )

These are the classic Sherlock tales, and they’re probably the best known of all the short stories. I remember my dad reading these aloud to my brother and me when we were children. These stories are distinctive and quite enjoyable, and in my opinion, some of Sherlock’s most memorable moments occur within these pages. I liked that not all of these stories involved traditional crimes, and I also liked that several of them featured strong women. Holmes fails in at least two of these stories, and it really was something to see the great detective in his lower moments as well. He is still a very human character, for all his powers, and he’s very well fleshed-out here. On the whole, a wonderful collection of tales. ( )