sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2021-05-03 01:03 am

I can feel the night passing by like a mistake waiting for me

The defining event of today—aside from opening to submissions—was laundry. Considering the varieties of excitement on offer recently, that was probably all right. Have some links.

1. Because I took to the internet to look up the significance of the "57 Varieties" on a bottle of Heinz ketchup, I ended up discovering the existence of Tony Rolt, where I guess thought of the Colditz glider and revolutionized four-wheel drive go together if you squint, but I still wasn't expecting them in the same person. The connecting dots on my end of the rabbit hole had to do with non-Newtonian fluids.

2. I am very pleased to read of the revival of Ivor Gurney in the form of his unpublished poetry and songs from his fifteen years of psychiatric confinement. I hadn't known he was a student of Ralph Vaughan Williams, but it made sense when I read it. I hope I'll be able to listen to the songs in June.

3. I have loved Arthur Shields ever since first noticing him in The Long Voyage Home (1940), but I've never actually seen him younger than that film—with the early exception of a couple of silents with the Film Company of Ireland, he didn't get into movies until John Ford imported him to Hollywood in 1936, where he rapidly became a prolific character actor; in his stage life he was one of the leading staples of the Abbey Theatre, including the original productions of Seán O'Casey's Dublin trilogy. I was trying to find a photo of him as Donal Davoren in The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), but I ran into an even earlier headshot of him instead:



If it's circa 1920, he's about twenty-four. (When he was twenty, he was part of the Easter Rising. This may explain why the closest thing I can find to a biography of him looks like it's going to be Fearghal McGarry's The Abbey Rebels: A Lost Revolution (2015), which I hope is what libraries are made for.) He looks very much like himself, and I still think it looks good on him.

P.S. Contrary to every one of my expectations, Fred O'Donovan's Knocknagow (1918)—Shields' silent screen debut—is not only not a lost film, it's streaming on the Internet Archive. It is an adaptation of the 1879 novel of the same name by Charles Kickham and the film feels very much like one of those page-to-screen compressions of a sprawling classic that hits all the famous scenes and leaves everything else to the audience's familiarity; it calls itself "a series of episodes" in an early intertitle and it isn't joking. About half of it feels like vignettes of Tipperary, 1848 and the other half like melodrama by the pound. There are evictions and emigrations. There's a gun and a frame-up. There's romances and hurling and a death scene competitive with Little Nell's. There is an infant Cyril Cusack. (His stepfather was part of the labyrinthine cast.) In any case, since I watched it for the young Arthur Shields, I feel I should have seen coming that he plays a middle-aged, sympathetic but feckless drunk.
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (book asylum)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2021-05-03 11:25 am (UTC)(link)
It is an adaptation of the 1879 novel ... he plays a middle-aged, sympathetic but feckless drunk.

Does he act like Hunter S. Thompson on ether? https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/691113-this-is-the-main-advantage-of-ether-it-makes-you
cmcmck: (Default)

[personal profile] cmcmck 2021-05-03 05:11 pm (UTC)(link)
I have read some of the later Gurney work- unpublished but out there if you knew where to look.

Sadly, much of it is shot through with paranoid delusion, making it very hard work, but there are gems. He clearly had mental issues before he went to war and should probably not have been serving.

I don't know where people get the idea that he was discouraged from writing. It simply is not true.

He never went away for some of us, like Rosenberg.

oracne: Siegfried Sassoon (sassoon)

[personal profile] oracne 2021-05-04 11:16 am (UTC)(link)
I am extremely excited for the Gurney songs, too. [wrong poet in the icon, I know!]