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But a light on each quarter low down by the water
For the first time in more than a year, I visited Broad Canal. Next time I will remember to take my camera, but my phone served for the purpose this afternoon. The canoe and kayak rentals were doing brisk business. The sodium light still burns over the loading dock. No one was smoking there, but after last winter there really shouldn't be. I hadn't seen the tarp before.
Have some links.
1. Last night I fell down a heap of articles about Leslie Howard, all of which have been worth reading so far—and even allowing for the inevitable filter of publicity, it is nice to have confirmation that the weirdness I find so resonant in so many of his characters was authentically come by—but I was fascinated by the interview from just a few months after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, straightforwardly titled "Leslie Howard Talks about Sex Films." It's so reasonable, it hurts. He doesn't think "this purity campaign . . . the present drive against sex plays" can or should last. I'm skeptical of his explanation for the flowering of American film during the Depression, but he is right that one happened—and the Code cracked down on it. And he can't have been the first person to comment on the divergence of Hollywood's attitudes toward sex and violence, but he's the earliest articulation of the painfully familiar sentiment that I've seen:
Personally, I think there is a lot of ballyhoo being written and talked about this much vexed question of sex. As a father who is devoted to the welfare of his children, I would rather let my children see a clever sex play than an objectionable, ugly, or vulgar gangster film.
There is so much ugliness – which is so repellent to me – in many of these gangster pictures.
An attractive sex picture will do a lot less harm than an unattractive, vulgar and ugly gangster picture, as far as the mind of a child is concerned.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is everything wrong with gangsterdom.
And almost ninety years later, the MPA rating system continues to feel otherwise. Damn it, Joseph Breen.
2. Continuing the Wimsey theme, I ran into a podcast with Edward Petherbridge recorded last November. Just after the five-and-a-half minute mark, you can hear Paul Hunter ask Petherbridge if he ever regretted losing his Bradford accent and Petherbridge's Bradford accent answering right back. I was glad to hear this excerpt from November Day (1963), too.
3. David Schraub has written a kind of secular litany for Israel/Palestine; like so much of Judaism, it is also an argument. Whether you feel you are the target audience or not, its call and response is worth reading. It matters how you can answer.
We do feel it is past time for those who wish to talk confidently about Jews know something about Jews, and commit to learning about Jews as we know ourselves, rather than through the distorted histories and narratives others have proliferated about us.
Do we refrain from talking confidently about Palestinians or Arabs unless we truly do know about them, not just the distorted histories and narratives promulgated by others but the histories and narratives they would recognize as their own?
4. On those lines: for those who missed the Palestinian special issue of Strange Horizons.
5. I don't know who doesn't need Big Mycenaean Mermaids, really.
Inevitably, because I have been thinking about the casting of Peter Wimsey: Albert Campion is more difficult for me to cast. Wimsey admits to a silly face, but Campion's is canonically a vague and forgettable one, effaced helpfully further by his horn-rimmed glasses; it is a nice side effect of the series running in real time that as he moves through middle age Campion finds himself acquiring, counterproductively to his profession, lines of character and experience that make him much less easy to overlook and underestimate than in his youth. I enjoyed Peter Davison very much in the 1989 BBC TV series, but I don't know that he was my definitive image. On the other hand, the entire concept of a definitive image of Campion is, as alluded, tricky.
Have some links.
1. Last night I fell down a heap of articles about Leslie Howard, all of which have been worth reading so far—and even allowing for the inevitable filter of publicity, it is nice to have confirmation that the weirdness I find so resonant in so many of his characters was authentically come by—but I was fascinated by the interview from just a few months after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, straightforwardly titled "Leslie Howard Talks about Sex Films." It's so reasonable, it hurts. He doesn't think "this purity campaign . . . the present drive against sex plays" can or should last. I'm skeptical of his explanation for the flowering of American film during the Depression, but he is right that one happened—and the Code cracked down on it. And he can't have been the first person to comment on the divergence of Hollywood's attitudes toward sex and violence, but he's the earliest articulation of the painfully familiar sentiment that I've seen:
Personally, I think there is a lot of ballyhoo being written and talked about this much vexed question of sex. As a father who is devoted to the welfare of his children, I would rather let my children see a clever sex play than an objectionable, ugly, or vulgar gangster film.
There is so much ugliness – which is so repellent to me – in many of these gangster pictures.
An attractive sex picture will do a lot less harm than an unattractive, vulgar and ugly gangster picture, as far as the mind of a child is concerned.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is everything wrong with gangsterdom.
And almost ninety years later, the MPA rating system continues to feel otherwise. Damn it, Joseph Breen.
2. Continuing the Wimsey theme, I ran into a podcast with Edward Petherbridge recorded last November. Just after the five-and-a-half minute mark, you can hear Paul Hunter ask Petherbridge if he ever regretted losing his Bradford accent and Petherbridge's Bradford accent answering right back. I was glad to hear this excerpt from November Day (1963), too.
3. David Schraub has written a kind of secular litany for Israel/Palestine; like so much of Judaism, it is also an argument. Whether you feel you are the target audience or not, its call and response is worth reading. It matters how you can answer.
We do feel it is past time for those who wish to talk confidently about Jews know something about Jews, and commit to learning about Jews as we know ourselves, rather than through the distorted histories and narratives others have proliferated about us.
Do we refrain from talking confidently about Palestinians or Arabs unless we truly do know about them, not just the distorted histories and narratives promulgated by others but the histories and narratives they would recognize as their own?
4. On those lines: for those who missed the Palestinian special issue of Strange Horizons.
5. I don't know who doesn't need Big Mycenaean Mermaids, really.
Inevitably, because I have been thinking about the casting of Peter Wimsey: Albert Campion is more difficult for me to cast. Wimsey admits to a silly face, but Campion's is canonically a vague and forgettable one, effaced helpfully further by his horn-rimmed glasses; it is a nice side effect of the series running in real time that as he moves through middle age Campion finds himself acquiring, counterproductively to his profession, lines of character and experience that make him much less easy to overlook and underestimate than in his youth. I enjoyed Peter Davison very much in the 1989 BBC TV series, but I don't know that he was my definitive image. On the other hand, the entire concept of a definitive image of Campion is, as alluded, tricky.
no subject
Yes! I love when people grow into their faces. I know I have other examples that aren't coming to mind at the minute, but Jared Harris did that, too.