Well, it is the little things, for instance

(Not all of the ideas below are contiguous, or necessarily memorable. I simply wanted them collected somewhere. At least three of them, however, I would like to expand.)

What I do not forget when I tell people that I think Leslie Howard would have made a better Peter Wimsey (pace Edward Petherbridge) than any other actor currently alive or dead, but which I do often forget to mention, is that Howard's flawless upper-class Englishness was itself—like Wimsey's silly-ass piffling or Percy Blakeney's foppish inanity: the characters are on a direct continuum—a kind of impersonation. His parents were Jewish, at least one a Hungarian immigrant. His birth name was Steiner. He was a clerk before he enlisted in World War I; was badly shell-shocked and took up acting as therapy; became, after the outbreak of World War II, the on- and off-screen embodiment of all that was quintessentially English, slightly fey with unexpected reserves of passion and steel; and was shot down in 1943 while on a lecture tour of Spain and Portugal with intelligence-gathering on the side, not unlike his most famous character. I would want to write him into a secret history, if film criticism hadn't already beaten me to it: "This final scene [of Pimpernel Smith (1941)] achieves a near-supernatural quality, with Smith vanishing almost impossibly into the night, his whispering voice somehow remaining behind him. Coming to this extraordinary sequence today we cannot help but bring to it echoes of Howard's own death at the hands of just these enemies, making it not only every bit as stirring as Howard intended, but also genuinely poignant." And so I know that actors differ from their roles, but I still wonder if he gravitated toward those interplays of face and mask, person and persona; he lived one. And he seems to have made it real.

This is for schreibergasse: I imagine it will not come as a surprise to most people if I mention that in high school I sang with the chorus (and later the Madrigal Singers), that I took Latin and Spanish until my junior year when I dropped Spanish (in order to have room for Madrigal Singers), or that my first afterschool job was in the now-defunct science fiction and fantasy bookstore Enchantments in Lexington Center (which had nothing to do with the Madrigal Singers at all, except that friends of mine were involved in both), but I have no idea how many of my current acquaintances know that for two years in high school, I ran cross-country. I was not good at it. Unlike archery and singing, which I found both physically exhilarating and good for my emotional and mental health, I did not enjoy the experience of running for half an hour or whatever at a stretch; I can walk a mile in easily under fifteen minutes, but I clocked under seven minutes running exactly twice. I am long-legged, I have good lungs, it didn't matter. I was not a cheetah. I felt more like a jackal: in races at home, I would run alongside girls from the other team, occasionally at a conversational pace, and then sprint flat-out once the finish line was in sight, which meant that I almost always came in ahead of them. (They were also sprinting flat-out, because that's how races end, but it still always felt like a cheat.) I don't remember that I formed friendships on the team, either. All I liked was knowing that I had the ability to run for five miles straight, even if I hated how each step felt. And then in the spring of my sophomore year, I caught whooping cough and that put the kibosh on running whether I liked it or not—that fall, I auditioned successfully into the school musical. Occasionally I think that I should pick up that stamina again, on the possibility that someday I might have to run for more than the honor of Lexington High School. I can't tell if that's prudent or paranoid.

Perhaps this is my first objection to the classification of speculative poetry: that some of my earliest exposures to formal poetry contained as many gods and myths as fit in a handful of hendecasyllables, and no one speaks of Catullus or Ovid (or Kallimachos or Sappho) as speculative. I do not buy the argument that mimetic fiction is a weird secondary spinoff of the fantastic—among other reasons, because the taxonomy assumed by that statement is anachronistic—but I might argue about poetry. Which has similar issues of historical applicability, not to mention where does it leave politics and personal feelings, the whole epic/lyric binary that annoys me almost as much as the mimetic/mythic, but it is not profitable to argue that non-realist elements are something sui generis.

"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him . . . They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It it simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art."
—T.S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth" (1923)

There is a paper to be written on George Mackay Brown's "John Barleycorn" as a literary hymn.