Say goodbye to the mad dogs of summer and all the things that you know
It is pouring and the street is plastered with dead wet leaves like an earlier phase of this season, but we can use our front door again and are now receiving deliveries to it, which after eight years of not being reliably able to use our own address as a mailstop is luxurious. Have some links.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nineweaving: Robert Macfarlane on The Dark Is Rising. He writes, unsurprisingly, beautifully about it and its influence on him and and about the upcoming adaptation, but I get to feel smug because he is in agreement with a question I was just asking: "Though it's structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper's novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early Le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean." I don't want to write that book about the shifting shapes of war in fantasy literature over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I just want to read it. (It should include David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937).)
2. While I have been cheerfully enjoying process shots all over my recent viewing from the '40's and '50's, I had not realized that Industrial Light & Magic had reinvented rear projection. This article compares it to matte paintings, but it's a combination of actors moving on a soundstage in the foreground and action moving on a screen in the background: since the images are coming off the screen behind them, it's not even front projection. I get that it's more flexible and interactive than a traditional pre-filmed panorama slightly fuzzed out beyond the windows of the car which the actors on set are not actually driving, but it still means your physical depth of field stops when you hit the screen and if you're going for the total illusion of a space, there's only so far that blocking and cinematography will camouflage the limits, which sounds as though it is already becoming visible in the shows that use this process: "The Volume inevitably encourages a certain kind of scene: A cluster of people in front of either a wide-open space or a setting that doesn't involve much physical exploration of the landscape. For instance, Obi-Wan crossing a wide street with a cityscape in the background." I should be clear that I am not yelling at the general principle of this technology, so long as it doesn't produce narratives that are all staged and shot the same way. I just saw an extremely effective rear projection cattle stampede last night in Blood on the Moon (1948), not to mention all manner of alternation between location and studio shots. Sometimes you shoot in the Rockies, sometimes you cover your cast with potato flakes. I had just heard vaguely about the revolutionary filming of The Mandalorian (2019–) at the time and no one mentioned it was much more like a digital revision of a one-time staple in-camera technique, which on its own is interesting to me.
3. Speaking of teething technologies, I had somehow never heard of the travails of Technicolor 1, not limited to eyestrain and the 3-D glasses problem of an additive color system. "There was no getting around the difficulties created by the special projector required to show the film. It was temperamental and had to be brought into each theater in a portable fireproof booth. Kalmus despaired that it required an operator who was 'a cross between a college professor and an acrobat.'" I still wish its one example in the wild survived. If someone could put the time and effort into restoring the long-lost-and-given-up-on Cinerama of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), I bet we'd have found a way to view The Gulf Between (1917).
4. It's a stained glass hermit crab suncatcher and I just like it very much.
5. I adore everything about this review. "Do not even start on who the Englishman played by the Australian is meant to be."
It is not quite true that I haven't seen myself in a mirror since we took the door off the bathroom cabinet, since we just propped it carefully against a wall and it regularly reflects my ankles, but it was the only mirror in the house and therefore in the last few days I have seen far more of my own reflection in the shadowy way of the glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room and the sloping windows of cars I pass on the street and at that resolution I am starting to think I might as well invest in some Etruscan bronze.
1. Courtesy of
nineweaving: Robert Macfarlane on The Dark Is Rising. He writes, unsurprisingly, beautifully about it and its influence on him and and about the upcoming adaptation, but I get to feel smug because he is in agreement with a question I was just asking: "Though it's structured around a Manichean opposition of Light and Dark, Cooper's novel refuses to cleave into neat binaries. I think of it, in fact, as a cold war novel, first published in 1973 and kindred in its moral complexities to early Le Carré; describing a conflict fought in the shadows, in which no one is clean." I don't want to write that book about the shifting shapes of war in fantasy literature over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I just want to read it. (It should include David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937).)2. While I have been cheerfully enjoying process shots all over my recent viewing from the '40's and '50's, I had not realized that Industrial Light & Magic had reinvented rear projection. This article compares it to matte paintings, but it's a combination of actors moving on a soundstage in the foreground and action moving on a screen in the background: since the images are coming off the screen behind them, it's not even front projection. I get that it's more flexible and interactive than a traditional pre-filmed panorama slightly fuzzed out beyond the windows of the car which the actors on set are not actually driving, but it still means your physical depth of field stops when you hit the screen and if you're going for the total illusion of a space, there's only so far that blocking and cinematography will camouflage the limits, which sounds as though it is already becoming visible in the shows that use this process: "The Volume inevitably encourages a certain kind of scene: A cluster of people in front of either a wide-open space or a setting that doesn't involve much physical exploration of the landscape. For instance, Obi-Wan crossing a wide street with a cityscape in the background." I should be clear that I am not yelling at the general principle of this technology, so long as it doesn't produce narratives that are all staged and shot the same way. I just saw an extremely effective rear projection cattle stampede last night in Blood on the Moon (1948), not to mention all manner of alternation between location and studio shots. Sometimes you shoot in the Rockies, sometimes you cover your cast with potato flakes. I had just heard vaguely about the revolutionary filming of The Mandalorian (2019–) at the time and no one mentioned it was much more like a digital revision of a one-time staple in-camera technique, which on its own is interesting to me.
3. Speaking of teething technologies, I had somehow never heard of the travails of Technicolor 1, not limited to eyestrain and the 3-D glasses problem of an additive color system. "There was no getting around the difficulties created by the special projector required to show the film. It was temperamental and had to be brought into each theater in a portable fireproof booth. Kalmus despaired that it required an operator who was 'a cross between a college professor and an acrobat.'" I still wish its one example in the wild survived. If someone could put the time and effort into restoring the long-lost-and-given-up-on Cinerama of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), I bet we'd have found a way to view The Gulf Between (1917).
4. It's a stained glass hermit crab suncatcher and I just like it very much.
5. I adore everything about this review. "Do not even start on who the Englishman played by the Australian is meant to be."
It is not quite true that I haven't seen myself in a mirror since we took the door off the bathroom cabinet, since we just propped it carefully against a wall and it regularly reflects my ankles, but it was the only mirror in the house and therefore in the last few days I have seen far more of my own reflection in the shadowy way of the glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room and the sloping windows of cars I pass on the street and at that resolution I am starting to think I might as well invest in some Etruscan bronze.
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That is indeed a delightful review!
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"The adverts just say it's 'the UK's freshest streaming service'! What does that even mean!"
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I like this idea very much.
I would quite like this embroidered on a sampler.
I have an unread copy of this about someplace in my archives, if I didn't cull it. Somehow I've remembered "war" and lost "fantasy" in reference to it, and now that you've lit my interest I'm worried that I don't have it any more.
The other week I tried and spectacularly failed to draw a hermit crab for my students, in illustration of the essay form.
Cor, that's great: "everyone keeps offering each other tea in a way that seems too deliberately innocuous to be anything other than a ruse."
What *did* people think about how they looked before they had reliable evidence of how they looked?
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Thank you!
I like this idea very much.
If you have not read Robert Macfarlane and I have not already recommended him to you, I do so strongly. I started with The Old Ways (2013), which always reminded me of Cooper and which it now seems was supposed to. Also if you have not read Susan Cooper, ditto. She was touchstone-formative for me and I still return to her, as recently as a few weeks ago, although along with everyone else I know, I argue with an element of the ending.
I would quite like this embroidered on a sampler.
*hugs*
I have an unread copy of this about someplace in my archives, if I didn't cull it. Somehow I've remembered "war" and lost "fantasy" in reference to it, and now that you've lit my interest I'm worried that I don't have it any more.
It is not a fantasy in the same sense as Tolkien; it's an epic poem that interprets the First World War, specifically the Somme, through the shattering battles of Welsh epic, specifically Y Gododdin and Preiddeu Annwfn; but it lines up for me in its use of myth, created as well as inherited, to make sense of the modern incomprehensible and there is an ironic, immortal figure at its center, the eternal soldier Dai Greatcoat who addresses the reader:
"You ought to ask: Why,
what is this,
what's the meaning of this?
Because you don't ask,
although the spear-shaft
drips,
there's neither steading—not a roof-tree."
The other week I tried and spectacularly failed to draw a hermit crab for my students, in illustration of the essay form.
That's marvelous. How is a hermit crab like an essay?
What *did* people think about how they looked before they had reliable evidence of how they looked?
I don't know! I only know attempts to imagine it.
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Right? And it doesn't exist—I went looking as soon as it occurred to me. The closest I could find was this book of essays, which is far more scattershot than the project I am envisioning and starts from science fiction, which interests me less than the fact that the generally agreed foundational text of fantasy literature in the twentieth century can be read without strain as war literature of the First World War. I am pretty sure I have read criticism actually doing so. But I want someone to look at how Arthur Machen's "The Bowmen" (1914) turned into the Angels of Mons—later to inspire Margaret Ronald's "The Welsh Squadron" (2006), which I adore and which may be relevant to the later chapter we are fictitiously discussing—and I am aware of far more science fiction than fantasy written in acknowledged reaction to the Vietnam War and I have literally never seen anyone who isn't me discuss the post-apocalyptic aspects of McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79) and how differently its returning threat and rediscovery of power feel from Tolkien's Sauron rising again in the East. "The war is not finished, only silenced for the regathering." The work of wizardry in Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard (1983) as holding the line against entropy, but also giving the absolute, archetypal darkness of the Lone Power the chance of change. Good Omens is explicitly a Cold War fantasy; it is even lampshaded with the joke about the ducks in St James' Park, if you hadn't noticed that its two superpowers are trying to bring about Armageddon and our weird compromised heroes are betraying their own sides to stop it. And then we have the twenty-first century and that's been a wild ride. I don't have the ability to research and write this book, I just really want it to exist.
Ideally it would have a whole chapter about The Once and Future King and To the Chapel Perilous as ways of grappling with War in Arthuriana.
This book would have to take Arthuriana into account. You could probably do an entire version of this book on Arthuriana, honestly, which would include Susan Cooper, but would also leave out some really interesting stuff.
I also would tremendously like some explicitly Le Carré-style Dark is Rising fic, while we're making wishes.
. . .
genarti and I ended up doing a dramatic reading of that review at our friend's house last night; thank you again for sending it to me!
You're welcome! I am delighted to hear this.
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LOL *thinks fondly of so many old TV episodes* XD (Sorry, was there a point?? heh.)
ut we can use our front door again and are now receiving deliveries to it
Yay! Being able to use things again is a always a good.
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See? Photorealism is not necessary for emotional investment!
Yay! Being able to use things again is a always a good.
It still has kind of a thrill just to open the door and run down the steps into the street.
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Folk-rock cantata!