Notes toward posts that never coalesced. I got sick of having them strewn around my desktop—
Whoever and whatever the statue may be (and I note that just at the point where I had accepted him as something like extra-diegetic music, one of the other characters interacted quite brusquely with him), he, too, is part of the myth of Persephone. He is identified when Neville sets the conditions for the sixth drawing—"the lower lawn of the garden by the statue of Hermes"—the messenger between worlds, the one who brokers the terms of descent and return. I cannot tell precisely how this information is meant to be interpreted within the brutal formalities of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), but it cannot be throwaway; this did not strike me as a profligate film. By the same token, I wonder whether Mrs. Herbert is past the age to conceive. Say that Mrs. Talmann is a little younger than I am; her mother could be in her early forties. It would make a nice symmetry, sowing both Demeter and Persephone: except it is the draughtsman who ends up in the underworld, like Mr. Herbert before him. There is hungry earth under all the mathematically clipped lawns.
I do not know why Anthony Lane considers David Lean's films to be without desire. If the wanting in Lawrence of Arabia were directed toward a lover, it wouldn't have been screened in 1962 without an X certificate. It just happens that what Lawrence is in love with is the sun, the desert, a myth of himself—Sherif Ali, his Horus-shadow. The real love story in Doctor Zhivago is probably between two people and a cycle of poems. I do not mean that Lara's only importance is to inspire Zhivago's work; I mean that Zhivago himself is less important than what he writes. His name means life. The balalaika motif called "Lara's Theme" is first heard at his mother's graveside, as he watches birch leaves blow yellow across the paling steppe sky—he connects it to the woman he loves, but it is the chord that catches in his poet's heart, the world that he turns into words for love of them. That is not repression, sublimation, disinterest. That's passion for more than people alone. There's a difference.
One unanticipated side effect of watching Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) while Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is in stores: now I keep seeing Colonel Brandon as a peculiar amalgam of Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, and a squid. This is not as offputting as you might think.
—I don't know why most of these are about films. Possibly because if I posted about everything I read, I'd be typing nonstop.
"But there may be an answer: prove that the lionfish is not in fact a top predator after all, by getting people to eat it."
Whoever and whatever the statue may be (and I note that just at the point where I had accepted him as something like extra-diegetic music, one of the other characters interacted quite brusquely with him), he, too, is part of the myth of Persephone. He is identified when Neville sets the conditions for the sixth drawing—"the lower lawn of the garden by the statue of Hermes"—the messenger between worlds, the one who brokers the terms of descent and return. I cannot tell precisely how this information is meant to be interpreted within the brutal formalities of The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), but it cannot be throwaway; this did not strike me as a profligate film. By the same token, I wonder whether Mrs. Herbert is past the age to conceive. Say that Mrs. Talmann is a little younger than I am; her mother could be in her early forties. It would make a nice symmetry, sowing both Demeter and Persephone: except it is the draughtsman who ends up in the underworld, like Mr. Herbert before him. There is hungry earth under all the mathematically clipped lawns.
I do not know why Anthony Lane considers David Lean's films to be without desire. If the wanting in Lawrence of Arabia were directed toward a lover, it wouldn't have been screened in 1962 without an X certificate. It just happens that what Lawrence is in love with is the sun, the desert, a myth of himself—Sherif Ali, his Horus-shadow. The real love story in Doctor Zhivago is probably between two people and a cycle of poems. I do not mean that Lara's only importance is to inspire Zhivago's work; I mean that Zhivago himself is less important than what he writes. His name means life. The balalaika motif called "Lara's Theme" is first heard at his mother's graveside, as he watches birch leaves blow yellow across the paling steppe sky—he connects it to the woman he loves, but it is the chord that catches in his poet's heart, the world that he turns into words for love of them. That is not repression, sublimation, disinterest. That's passion for more than people alone. There's a difference.
One unanticipated side effect of watching Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) while Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is in stores: now I keep seeing Colonel Brandon as a peculiar amalgam of Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, and a squid. This is not as offputting as you might think.
—I don't know why most of these are about films. Possibly because if I posted about everything I read, I'd be typing nonstop.
"But there may be an answer: prove that the lionfish is not in fact a top predator after all, by getting people to eat it."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}