My poem "Idle Thoughts While Watching a Faun" has placed second in the 2010 Strange Horizons Readers' Poll. Was not expecting that. I am also glad to see Theodora Goss' "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" at the top of the fiction list, since that story by its very existence makes me happy.
Yesterday Spooky and I line-edited a 103,791-word novel and did not bleed out from the eyes, so today we attempt to repeat the trick with the much huger manuscript for Two Worlds and In Between. Wish us luck. Otherwise, we recuperated last night with Palestinian takeout, a lot of staring vaguely into space, and I showed Caitlín Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), which I continue to love better than almost any Shakespeare I've seen filmed, and a short film from the same DVD, The Art of Mirrors (1973), which I feel should be better-known than it is. (It's a ritual done with light, reflection, procession, and audience gaze; the first time I saw it, it reminded me of the brief, enigmatic films encountered by some of Caitlín's characters. I believe it was later incorporated into In the Shadow of the Sun (1974), with music by Throbbing Gristle. It was originally titled A Summoning of Angels.) Tonight, assuming we survive that long, we are going to watch the director's cut of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998).
For my money, the really transgressive love scene in Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907) is not actually the famous one between Manke and Rivkele in the second act (though it is beautifully written, complete with allusions to the Song of Songs, as if there were any doubt that their union is sweeter and more sanctified than any of the heterosexual commerce taking place around them, Rivkele's still-in-the-brokering marriage included), but their first scene together at the end of the second act. Rivkele's mother—offstage, in the next room—is talking up a fantasy of the bridegroom, handsome, well-off, scholarly, whom she imagines her daughter longs for. And Rivkele is feeding her all the right questions ("Is he good-looking, Mama? Where is going to live, Mama? Will he love me, Mama?"), but she's in Manke's arms all the while, kissing between call-outs, answering the questions for herself. I'd love to see that staged.
Okay. Line-edits. Do I owe my soul to the platypus now?
Yesterday Spooky and I line-edited a 103,791-word novel and did not bleed out from the eyes, so today we attempt to repeat the trick with the much huger manuscript for Two Worlds and In Between. Wish us luck. Otherwise, we recuperated last night with Palestinian takeout, a lot of staring vaguely into space, and I showed Caitlín Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), which I continue to love better than almost any Shakespeare I've seen filmed, and a short film from the same DVD, The Art of Mirrors (1973), which I feel should be better-known than it is. (It's a ritual done with light, reflection, procession, and audience gaze; the first time I saw it, it reminded me of the brief, enigmatic films encountered by some of Caitlín's characters. I believe it was later incorporated into In the Shadow of the Sun (1974), with music by Throbbing Gristle. It was originally titled A Summoning of Angels.) Tonight, assuming we survive that long, we are going to watch the director's cut of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998).
For my money, the really transgressive love scene in Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907) is not actually the famous one between Manke and Rivkele in the second act (though it is beautifully written, complete with allusions to the Song of Songs, as if there were any doubt that their union is sweeter and more sanctified than any of the heterosexual commerce taking place around them, Rivkele's still-in-the-brokering marriage included), but their first scene together at the end of the second act. Rivkele's mother—offstage, in the next room—is talking up a fantasy of the bridegroom, handsome, well-off, scholarly, whom she imagines her daughter longs for. And Rivkele is feeding her all the right questions ("Is he good-looking, Mama? Where is going to live, Mama? Will he love me, Mama?"), but she's in Manke's arms all the while, kissing between call-outs, answering the questions for herself. I'd love to see that staged.
Okay. Line-edits. Do I owe my soul to the platypus now?
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