Livejournal: still borked! Have a post I have assembled on the hope that it will someday un-bork itself, because I'm certainly not moving all this stuff over to Facebook.
1. Michael Cacoyannis. I was in my first year at Brandeis when I discovered, through some black-and-white stills from Elektra (1962), Mihalis Kakogiannis under his more familiar Anglicized name. Over a decade later, I have still not managed to see any of his classical tragedies—although it strikes me now that I should look for them on Netflix—but I found his translation of the Bacchae some years ago and I wish I'd seen it onstage. I think my mother fell in love with Alan Bates because of Zorba the Greek (1964). I took away that I needed to see more of Irene Papas.
2. Glenn Close in drag. Apparently romancing Mia Wasikowska, if pre-production plot summaries can be believed. I am faintly surprised that I hadn't heard of this film before yesterday, but seriously: I'd watch that.
3. In Hazard (1938). Rudyard Kipling is underrated as a writer of the sea. Judging by this reprint and the introduction by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
crowleycrow, Richard Hughes is not, but they have much the same intensely, offhandedly technical approach to the mechanics of the tramp trade, weather and engineering, cargo and the currents of the world—both oceanographic and human—in ways that do not preclude an unspoken, elemental sense of the sea as something that can be described in words, not explained by them; which is precisely what you want for a book about a merchant steamer caught in a hurricane, itself as much of a character as the captain, the chief engineer, the watch officer, the firemen. Also like Kipling it has some problematic representations of the Chinese crew, although a late chapter entirely from the perspective of a young Chinese communist goes some way toward reframing the narrative's previous characterizations as filtered through the bigotry of the British sailors. And it has the narrator who speaks directly, conversationally to the reader, who probably is the hangover of a literary device, but in his ubiquity and his insistence on the first person feels like something faintly supernatural, the Platonic ghost of the stranger at the bar who turns suddenly and tells you a story he cannot possibly have been there for, like Herodotos. (He did not turn out to be a posthumous narrator, but I was wondering.) Possibly I should have given this book its own entry, but instead I am just going to quote from Hughes' afterword, addressing the question of whether he wrote the novel as deliberate allegory or just got lucky with global politics and his subconscious:
For where some tension in the writer's mind has eased itself in symbol, then that symbol may couple itself to a like tension in the reader or even (for that is the ambiguous nature of symbol) to some wholly different one. Indeed, perhaps the real reason we like reading is to have our therapeutic dreaming supplied us, thus, from outside.
It follows that at times of exceptionally deliberate self-deception people tend to shun all poetry and fiction; indeed it is symptomatic of a fear of the naked truth to prefer nonfiction.
4. My brother has just returned from his first blacksmithing class at the Prospect Hill Forge. He has not burnt off all his arm hair, although he claims this is because he was grilling earlier in the week; he is talking about building his own forge. "It is exactly like traditional blacksmithing, except there's a hair dryer instead of a bellows." I think this is awesome.
5. I like this poem.
. . . And as I finish up this post, my mother has just presented me with a long-folded, very frayed, faintly greenish document in Fraktur, with some lines filled out in black ink and four stamps, two red, one purple, one blue. It's a contract for passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Linie (in steerage: Zwischendecksbeförderung-Vertrag) and the signature on it appears to be my great-grandfather's—my grandmother's father, my brother's namesake—under yet another variant of his name, sailing to New York on the Pretoria in December 1913. Unfortunately, I cannot make out his handwriting in the column for previous residence; it seems to start with P, which doesn't help. He gives his age as three years older than family legend said.
Well, now we know when he came over.
Enough with wrestling the internet; I'm going to bed.
1. Michael Cacoyannis. I was in my first year at Brandeis when I discovered, through some black-and-white stills from Elektra (1962), Mihalis Kakogiannis under his more familiar Anglicized name. Over a decade later, I have still not managed to see any of his classical tragedies—although it strikes me now that I should look for them on Netflix—but I found his translation of the Bacchae some years ago and I wish I'd seen it onstage. I think my mother fell in love with Alan Bates because of Zorba the Greek (1964). I took away that I needed to see more of Irene Papas.
2. Glenn Close in drag. Apparently romancing Mia Wasikowska, if pre-production plot summaries can be believed. I am faintly surprised that I hadn't heard of this film before yesterday, but seriously: I'd watch that.
3. In Hazard (1938). Rudyard Kipling is underrated as a writer of the sea. Judging by this reprint and the introduction by
crowleycrow, Richard Hughes is not, but they have much the same intensely, offhandedly technical approach to the mechanics of the tramp trade, weather and engineering, cargo and the currents of the world—both oceanographic and human—in ways that do not preclude an unspoken, elemental sense of the sea as something that can be described in words, not explained by them; which is precisely what you want for a book about a merchant steamer caught in a hurricane, itself as much of a character as the captain, the chief engineer, the watch officer, the firemen. Also like Kipling it has some problematic representations of the Chinese crew, although a late chapter entirely from the perspective of a young Chinese communist goes some way toward reframing the narrative's previous characterizations as filtered through the bigotry of the British sailors. And it has the narrator who speaks directly, conversationally to the reader, who probably is the hangover of a literary device, but in his ubiquity and his insistence on the first person feels like something faintly supernatural, the Platonic ghost of the stranger at the bar who turns suddenly and tells you a story he cannot possibly have been there for, like Herodotos. (He did not turn out to be a posthumous narrator, but I was wondering.) Possibly I should have given this book its own entry, but instead I am just going to quote from Hughes' afterword, addressing the question of whether he wrote the novel as deliberate allegory or just got lucky with global politics and his subconscious:For where some tension in the writer's mind has eased itself in symbol, then that symbol may couple itself to a like tension in the reader or even (for that is the ambiguous nature of symbol) to some wholly different one. Indeed, perhaps the real reason we like reading is to have our therapeutic dreaming supplied us, thus, from outside.
It follows that at times of exceptionally deliberate self-deception people tend to shun all poetry and fiction; indeed it is symptomatic of a fear of the naked truth to prefer nonfiction.
4. My brother has just returned from his first blacksmithing class at the Prospect Hill Forge. He has not burnt off all his arm hair, although he claims this is because he was grilling earlier in the week; he is talking about building his own forge. "It is exactly like traditional blacksmithing, except there's a hair dryer instead of a bellows." I think this is awesome.
5. I like this poem.
. . . And as I finish up this post, my mother has just presented me with a long-folded, very frayed, faintly greenish document in Fraktur, with some lines filled out in black ink and four stamps, two red, one purple, one blue. It's a contract for passage on the Hamburg-Amerika Linie (in steerage: Zwischendecksbeförderung-Vertrag) and the signature on it appears to be my great-grandfather's—my grandmother's father, my brother's namesake—under yet another variant of his name, sailing to New York on the Pretoria in December 1913. Unfortunately, I cannot make out his handwriting in the column for previous residence; it seems to start with P, which doesn't help. He gives his age as three years older than family legend said.
Well, now we know when he came over.
Enough with wrestling the internet; I'm going to bed.
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