They'll never know if déjà vu already happened to you
It has been snowing on and off since last night, first featherily, now grainily, all day the colorless mirror-light I associate with winter; it requires snow, making it rarer and rarer in these dry green years. I was in too much pain to sleep all night or even this morning and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch had to take Hestia to the vet this afternoon, whence she has returned with an antibiotic shot and painkillers and is napping on the bed. She let me hold her against my shoulder for fully half a minute, purring. Have some links-ish.
1. I was not familiar with Jack Lueders-Booth as a photographer, but if he did a project about Boston's Orange Line, I will have to look more of his work up. "What was feared did come to pass. Most of the homeless shelters went and now there are very high-end shops, fine restaurants and high-rise apartment blocks. By law, some are allotted to those on low incomes but the sky is the limit for the rest and rents are very high."
2. I was sorry to read Bret Devereaux's "What's the Problem with Antigone?” He is talking about the online journal, not the play; I had never interacted much with it, but I had vaguely considered it as a way of trying to get over the block I have about publishing anything that could be construed as academic as opposed to merely nonfiction. It looks as though I will have to try the experiment elsewhere. The scathing review by Shadi Bartsch mentioned therein, however, is pretty great.
3. I am much happier to have read Herbert Farjeon's review of the 1927 Little Theatre production of Hamilton Deane’s Dracula, shared elsenet by Ian McDowell. It’s great horror criticism:
Perhaps the desire to be frightened, which is common to most civilized human beings, is most satisfactorily appeased by the infusion of an element of incredibility into the bogy-man. If Count Dracula were presented as a blood-sucker pure and simple, a mere pervert unadorned by any supernatural attribute, most of us would find his stage appearances altogether insupportable. But the way he vanishes into smoke—the way the pictures fall down from the wall without provocation—the way the doors have of opening of their own accord—all these things reassure us, even in the act of thrilling, that this is only a very bad dream.
All this hocus-pocus about blood-suckers has fulfilled a useful purpose in the past. Just as humour has come to our assistance to render tragedy bearable, so superstition has helped to render bearable the existence of the most disturbing abnormalities. In the past we have called blood-suckers were-wolves, and have endowed them with magical powers of the most fantastical nature because we cannot bear to think that human beings so nearly like ourselves should be as nearly like ourselves as they are. We have therefore sought to remove them as far as possible by bestowing on them a vestiture of other-worldliness. Observe the make-up of Mr. Raymond Huntley, who plays the part of Count Dracula at the Little Theatre with such admirable horrific power. The moment you set eyes on him, you are appalled by his semi-satanic, semi-vulpine appearance. And yet how comforting that semi-satanic, semi-vulpine appearance is! When evil stalks abroad in such a self-proclaiming uniform, our hearts may palpitate, but at least we can take to our heels. The true terror would be to encounter on the stage a Count Dracula who looked no more surprising than the man sitting next to us in the stalls, and who, apart from his blood-sucking proclivities, was the most ordinary fellow in the world.
I now consider it an active tragedy that Farjeon, who died in 1945, never had the chance to be given a copy of Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood (1961).
spatch had to take Hestia to the vet this afternoon, whence she has returned with an antibiotic shot and painkillers and is napping on the bed. She let me hold her against my shoulder for fully half a minute, purring. Have some links-ish.1. I was not familiar with Jack Lueders-Booth as a photographer, but if he did a project about Boston's Orange Line, I will have to look more of his work up. "What was feared did come to pass. Most of the homeless shelters went and now there are very high-end shops, fine restaurants and high-rise apartment blocks. By law, some are allotted to those on low incomes but the sky is the limit for the rest and rents are very high."
2. I was sorry to read Bret Devereaux's "What's the Problem with Antigone?” He is talking about the online journal, not the play; I had never interacted much with it, but I had vaguely considered it as a way of trying to get over the block I have about publishing anything that could be construed as academic as opposed to merely nonfiction. It looks as though I will have to try the experiment elsewhere. The scathing review by Shadi Bartsch mentioned therein, however, is pretty great.
3. I am much happier to have read Herbert Farjeon's review of the 1927 Little Theatre production of Hamilton Deane’s Dracula, shared elsenet by Ian McDowell. It’s great horror criticism:
Perhaps the desire to be frightened, which is common to most civilized human beings, is most satisfactorily appeased by the infusion of an element of incredibility into the bogy-man. If Count Dracula were presented as a blood-sucker pure and simple, a mere pervert unadorned by any supernatural attribute, most of us would find his stage appearances altogether insupportable. But the way he vanishes into smoke—the way the pictures fall down from the wall without provocation—the way the doors have of opening of their own accord—all these things reassure us, even in the act of thrilling, that this is only a very bad dream.
All this hocus-pocus about blood-suckers has fulfilled a useful purpose in the past. Just as humour has come to our assistance to render tragedy bearable, so superstition has helped to render bearable the existence of the most disturbing abnormalities. In the past we have called blood-suckers were-wolves, and have endowed them with magical powers of the most fantastical nature because we cannot bear to think that human beings so nearly like ourselves should be as nearly like ourselves as they are. We have therefore sought to remove them as far as possible by bestowing on them a vestiture of other-worldliness. Observe the make-up of Mr. Raymond Huntley, who plays the part of Count Dracula at the Little Theatre with such admirable horrific power. The moment you set eyes on him, you are appalled by his semi-satanic, semi-vulpine appearance. And yet how comforting that semi-satanic, semi-vulpine appearance is! When evil stalks abroad in such a self-proclaiming uniform, our hearts may palpitate, but at least we can take to our heels. The true terror would be to encounter on the stage a Count Dracula who looked no more surprising than the man sitting next to us in the stalls, and who, apart from his blood-sucking proclivities, was the most ordinary fellow in the world.
I now consider it an active tragedy that Farjeon, who died in 1945, never had the chance to be given a copy of Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood (1961).
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I saw the prefatory note about the plethora of anonymous comments from burner accounts and honestly didn't even dip into the comments section in expectation of bobcat. I appreciated being sent the essay, though. Aside from the problem with Antigone, I had heard a little about Katz, but nothing about the Singer Ass.
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I'm utterly out of touch with anything happening in classics (given it's an extremely casual interest mostly used for fanfic research), so it was all very informative.
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I am far from tuned in. I heard about Katz in context of a professor-student relationship of which I had been aware at Yale (which is fucked up to begin with); the couple bounced up in the news recently and grad school friends of mine who had also dealt with the couple were processing their undimmed feelings of WTF and NOPE.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_McBryde_Johnson for links to some of her writing, including "Unspeakable Conversations," about debating her humanity with Eugenics Guy.
I hope you get some respite soon. I hope Hestia is recovering well too.
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You may already have found this post via Devereaux, but in case not: "Even beyond this, though, Singer's take on The Golden Ass is so extraordinarily bad that, even if he didn't have a long history of advocating infanticide, no classics journal should have published it."
It's not right or good that Harriet McBryde Johnson is gone but that creep is still alive and blathering.
No. The injustice of who stays alive has been feeling particularly acute for some time now.
(I remember "Unspeakable Conversations." I have not read all of Johnson's writing, though, so that's a very helpful collection of links.)
I hope you get some respite soon. I hope Hestia is recovering well too.
Thank you.
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Unfortunately, English literature scholars have been stubbornly and ignorantly insisting for over a hundred years that the first novel is Robinson Crusoe purely out of British cultural chauvinism.
This needs shouting from the house-tops. I can really use the encouragement to stop accepting "English literature is the first category where these stories started counting as novels, because reasons" which I often fall into without thinking about it. I haven't read any of the ancient novels apart from Apuleius's, and I need to fix that.
You don’t need to give this man who supports literally murdering infants your money just so you can read a bowdlerized version of a work that is in the public domain that has already been translated into English in its entirety dozens of times.
SHE'S RIGHT AND SHE SHOULD SAY IT
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You're welcome!
I haven't read any of the ancient novels apart from Apuleius's, and I need to fix that.
Lucian's True Story is bonkers and highly recommended; it begins with a disclaimer that everything you are about to read is a lie before launching into the proto-Baron Munchausen adventures of its supposed author who visits the moon and is swallowed by a whale and self-inserts into the Odyssey and travels to the underworld where Herodotos suffers eternal torments for writing such a pack of bullshit as his Histories. I do not know who to recommend for a good translation, but I am confident that one exists if only because it is not the sort of project that anyone would undertake out of duty. Daphnis and Chloe is the other ancient Greek novel I've read in the original; it is officially impossible for me to take it seriously because so many of its plot elements were poached for later romances and farces—there's kidnapping by pirates—but I used to own a rather nice translation with illustrations by Chagall and it is a good example of a classical romance in the sense that we would categorize a romance novel.
SHE'S RIGHT AND SHE SHOULD SAY IT
Amen. For what it's worth, I also enjoyed the Jack Lindsay translation.
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Whatever else one might think about the origin of PS's infanticide plans, I just don't see how the father of three children could think that even a newborn baby doesn't have opinions (and therefore, by his judgment, the right to continued existence?). Didn't he meet his children before they could talk?
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Look, I don't understand how the child of Holocaust refugees with classic tattooed camp survivors in his family and community grows up to argue in favor of eugenics, but the man is evidence that it happens.
(I have met babies. I agree with you. Every one I have spent any time with has had a surprising force of personality considering how much it looked like a cabbage rose in a blanket.)
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Thank you!
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And he discovered Joyce Grenfell and wrote "I've danced with a man, who's danced with a girl, who's danced with the Prince of Wales." Oh yes, and he married Siegfried Sassoon's cousin.
All the Farjeons were like that. I'm very fond of the whole family.
Nine
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Eleanor and Joseph Jefferson are the two I know the most about, but I have never actually learned anything about any of them that made me sorry, except insofar as occasionally I don't like some of their art.
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That happens.
Eleanor and Harry shared an intense, fascinating, cross-gendered role-playing game from early childhood until they had to give it up or it would eat them.
Nine
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This is great, and very astute.
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It made me want to read more of Farjeon's criticism.
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I like the review, too. Since it came up, I found a picture of Raymond Huntley as Dracula.
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Thank you! I slept almost eight hours last night! At this point the very prospect of catching up on my sleep deficit is an occasion for sad hollow laughter, but it was still nice.
And thank you for introducing me to this whole debate around Antigone, which I found very interesting.
You're welcome. It does not sound to me like the kind of problem that is going to improve without a total editorial overhaul, which I have seen magazines and conventions manage in the speculative world, but I have also seen them not.
I like the review, too. Since it came up, I found a picture of Raymond Huntley as Dracula.
Thank you! That's wonderful. I hadn't realized that some of the classic gestures of Dracula formed as far back as the original stage production.
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... I'll go read the essay (I hadn't clicked through because I'm not familiar with Antigone-the-website)
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I encountered him first in his capacity as advocate for the right to infanticide, which rather burned me on any other ideas he might have contributed to my consciousness; finding out that he has perpetrated a really terrible version of The Golden Ass is not improving his chances.
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"Ironically, the full range of the ass's hearing and his capacity for judgment are diminished by the omission of the stories he heard and repeated for us, providing a sense in which Singer is metaphorically disabling the donkey even as he claims to render him a poster-ass for our times. Here's one risk of appropriating literature to serve your ends: you never know what weird side effects will resonate from your new hybrid, how this work might turn on you and generate metaphors for something quite different, in the hands of, um, editors and interpreters."
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"What was feared did come to pass." --I feel like this has been true of so much in the last while. Reminds me of the lyrics of the Tori Amos song "Bells for Her": "Can't stop what's coming / Can't stop what's on its way" and then at the end, "And I see it coming / And it's on its way"
Why does that seem to happen only with bad things?
In the past we have called blood-suckers were-wolves, and have endowed them with magical powers of the most fantastical nature because we cannot bear to think that human beings so nearly like ourselves should be as nearly like ourselves as they are. ---Agreed: that is an astute observation! Well said.
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Thank you! So far this weekend, knock wood, she seems to be doing well.
Why does that seem to happen only with bad things?
I don't know, but I hate it. I am having a lot of trouble with what people are working so hard to subtract from the world, and what they have alrady succeeded at.
---Agreed: that is an astute observation! Well said.
I have still not managed to track down more of Farjeon's theater criticism, but I still mean to.