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Midwives have burned the prisons to the ground
My poem "Narcissus in London" has been accepted by Not One of Us. Despite the title, it is not a Dorian Gray poem; it is a Jekyll and Hyde poem with an appropriately dissociated history in that I wrote it in 2006, shortly after rewatching The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), and then forgot all about it until its rediscovery in 2020. Prosaically, I suspect I lost track of it in the chaos and trauma of the move from New Haven, but the net effect was the unprecedented emergence of a poem by a different me. (Right around this time of year, fifteen years ago, my academic career was over and I didn't know it yet. I still thought I would recover over the summer from the complications of a four-month sinus infection, not that it had left me with permanent damage including neuropathy in the front of my face to this day. I had just gone on medical leave. I was trying to work out how to handle my qualifying exams in the fall. I never returned.) The title comes from the film's gimmick of reflections, how Jason Flemyng's Jekyll always sees Hyde instead of himself and vice versa. I regretfully deleted the original epigraph from Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951): "It was not the face itself that attracted her, but the way she had suddenly become two people."
Through slightly piratical means, I finally watched Count Three and Pray (1955) in its proper aspect ratio and there's nothing to be done about the score or the pasted-on conventions, but it was very good to see Van Heflin and Joanne Woodward not pan-and-scanned. Otherwise this week has been, frankly, enervating beyond belief. Have a couple of links.
1. Of all the people I might have expected to turn up in the original 1971 London cast of Godspell, Jeremy Irons was not one. He does terrific Judas-patter on "All for the Best."
2. I want to make a marmalade cake. It looks like a spiritual cousin of my family's lemon cake, which began life as Maida Heatter's East 62nd Street Lemon Cake. Also it looks delicious.
3. Courtesy of a friend who is not on DW: a classicist and a cat.
My own cat has been spending much of his time between the front window and my lap. Earlier today he was chattering at birds; his lime-green eyes were huge with sun and his little pink-tongued mouth emitted the characteristic ack-ack of a cat on the wrong side of the screen from something pounceable. Since we are in favor of him not launching himself into space, however, I fed him his afternoon meal with medications instead. He is very dear.
Through slightly piratical means, I finally watched Count Three and Pray (1955) in its proper aspect ratio and there's nothing to be done about the score or the pasted-on conventions, but it was very good to see Van Heflin and Joanne Woodward not pan-and-scanned. Otherwise this week has been, frankly, enervating beyond belief. Have a couple of links.
1. Of all the people I might have expected to turn up in the original 1971 London cast of Godspell, Jeremy Irons was not one. He does terrific Judas-patter on "All for the Best."
2. I want to make a marmalade cake. It looks like a spiritual cousin of my family's lemon cake, which began life as Maida Heatter's East 62nd Street Lemon Cake. Also it looks delicious.
3. Courtesy of a friend who is not on DW: a classicist and a cat.
My own cat has been spending much of his time between the front window and my lap. Earlier today he was chattering at birds; his lime-green eyes were huge with sun and his little pink-tongued mouth emitted the characteristic ack-ack of a cat on the wrong side of the screen from something pounceable. Since we are in favor of him not launching himself into space, however, I fed him his afternoon meal with medications instead. He is very dear.
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For quite some time my daughter was obsessed with Jeremy Irons singing Be Prepared in the Lion King and I still have difficulty imagining him in any other role...
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Thank you! We like him flourishing.
For quite some time my daughter was obsessed with Jeremy Irons singing Be Prepared in the Lion King and I still have difficulty imagining him in any other role...
That film was almost certainly my first experience of him, so I understand how that happened!
(Speaking of Disney and big cats, every now and then I remember that my first experience of George Sanders was almost certainly Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (1967)—unless it was the foreign minister who romances Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam (1953)—and that's just how things are.)