Don't you ever stop and give me time to breathe in?

[sovay]

I am spending much less time outside than I would like, but I am spending much less time sleeping than I would like, and much more time working than either. I did get a walk with spatch while there was still decent flower-showcasing sunlight.



I loved the textures as well as the colors of the iris up close.



Up the side of the Knights of Malta Hall. It was built in 1895; I was informed this afternoon that it's threatened by the development of the Green Line Extension. Especially after the loss of the Reid & Murdock Warehouse, I would prefer nothing happen to it. It's full of green bronze and businesses like East Cambridge Piano and the Boston Billiard Emporium.



The poppies are blooming again, which always makes me feel that the gates of the underworld are open.



Azaleas!



Rob took this picture of me at the end of our walk. Tired or not, I liked it.

Have some links.

1. Courtesy of selkie: "The Queer Art of Sitting." Once I got past the mortifying ordeal of being known, I was reminded of how I wrote about Jeff Hartnett in Johnny Eager (1942), "the kind of loose-limbed, spatially careless character whose movements are best described by terms like 'sprawl,' 'slouch,' and 'drift.'" And, of course, Jeremy Brett.

2. Courtesy of same and ranking among the best eulogies I have read recently: "With Charles Grodin's Death, Hollywood's Greatest Romance Comes to an End."

3. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: any photo of Peter Cushing and his hobbies is a good photo.

4. I wish there were any information at all on this candid of Leslie Howard at a party, but it's reasonably terrible and I love it.

5. I heard from my mother that a ceasefire was agreed in Gaza. I am glad of it. I hope the U.S. sends humanitarian aid; it is somewhere around literally the least this country can do, especially after its foot-dragging weekend. I still found this thread courtesy of reconditarmonia depressingly worth reading. "Governments do not have heartstrings, they have interests."

I am really not over having furnished a stranger with a phrase meaningful enough to make a tag. It makes me feel unironically like Le Guin.

Comments

[sovay]

“queer people” and “neurodivergent people” (and also Leslie Howard, going by that photo from the party).

Leslie Howard had an idiosyncratic and highly recognizable relationship with sitting on things. I always attributed it to him being part cat. (Cf. his well-documented on-set naps.) He didn't use it in all of his roles, but it's something I associate strongly with characters like Henry Higgins, Atterbury Dodd, Horatio Smith—his nerds, his boffins, his more than usual weirdos.

I wrote in 2017, "Almost all of Howard's best roles play with this quality, the slight distance from social norms that can shade from unworldly into otherworldly with nothing more than a faint smile or a deepening of the voice . . . It's such a consistent feature of Howard's characters, in fact, that it's tempting to regard it as a reflection of his own personality." Going by the heap of articles I fell down the other night, it was a direct transfer. "Vintage Portraits: 1930": "Autumn shades are his favorites. Every tie he owns is brown or red. Every suit is a gray flannel or a brown tweed. When he buys a new suit it looks exactly like the one he has discarded." "A Nervous Wreck!": "He hates to eat in restaurants, always shaves himself, and laments the fact that he's got a reputation for being a big high-hat and up-stage. He insists he's merely timid." (Or at least an introvert; other profiles and interviews confirm he could be absolutely dead-ahead unstoppable about anything in which he was really interested. The bit about his war service in that one is publicity—in reality he enlisted in 1914, was commissioned in 1915, and was discharged in 1916 with neurasthenia—but I believe much of the rest.) "Explaining Leslie Howard, Who Needs Explaining!": "His father changes hobbies rapidly. Only photography has endured for any time with Leslie . . . 'You weren't fit last night when I had to send for a doctor,' his wife overrules. 'He told you not to exercise—when you stopped discussing wet-plate photography long enough for him to examine you.'" "Listing a Few of Leslie Howard's Peculiarities": "A secret about Leslie Howard which one hesitates to impart for fear of destroying his reputation for sophistication is the fact that although he plays inebriated gentlemen to a fare-thee-well, he finds it extremely difficult to down anything more potent than beer. Questioned concerning the reason for this, he explains somewhat naively, and with a shame-faced grin, that 'it burns my throat.'" "Is Leslie Giving Us the Run-Around?": "As for dancing, he'd rather not. He's not a good dancer at all, doesn't have any aspiration to be, and thinks it's much more comfortable to stay seated at the table and let somebody else do it." "Leslie Howard's One-Man Show": "A friend, stopping at the Leslie Howard house in Hollywood, had occasion to look for a handkerchief in one of his host's bureau drawers. Instead of handkerchiefs, the drawer fairly bulged with prints of camera pictures. He sought in the rest of the drawers, but there discovered more piles of prints, more spirals of films, more strips of not-yet-enlarged Leica shots. 'But, what do you do with your shirts and ties?' he demanded, mystified, when the actor had come to his rescue with the needed linen. 'Oh, Mrs. Howard sees to that, I don't know. I need this space for my pictures!' returned Mr. Howard." (Eliza, where the devil . . .) And so on and so on. An interview where he's a complete anorak about his photography. A family story about the time he went to the bank and had such a nice conversation with the teller that he forgot to draw the money after all. Late articles about his filmmaking and his radio work and his war efforts and his dedication to detail in all of these arenas that goes to hell everywhere else in his life he doesn't care about it. I also wrote in 2017, "There is a tangential question here which I am not sure I am qualified to engage with: the degree to which it is possible or useful to read Howard's intellectual heroes as neuroatypical as opposed to merely very smart, knowing there's a significant Venn diagram of the two in popular representations of intelligence." I still don't feel qualified to engage with it and I get twitchy about diagnosing the past, but the ways in which Howard seems to have thought and existed feel very normal to me, which increases the chances of their not being normal for a majority of people.

Anyway, selkie can confirm that's basically how I sit on couches, which I assume is the other reason the photo appealed to me.

[gwynnega]

This is all delightful information.

[sovay]

This is all delightful information.

It truly delighted me. Also, I know Howard could act, and I know he could act well, but the more I read, the more I feel that except for the part about being a jerk, in order to play Henry Higgins he basically just showed up on set.

(I have to say, I had gathered some years ago that his face was not the fashion of the time, but I didn't expect quite so many profiles to keep mentioning it.)