Rusty? I'll give you rusty

1. I don't want to oversell Cats Don't Dance (1997), but I don't want to sell it short, either: I can think of very few children's movies that contain equal parts homage to Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), especially animated ones starring a primarily anthropomorphic animal cast. It has torch songs and tin pan jams, choreography by Gene Kelly (the last project of his life) and an equally, gloriously overqualified voice cast, sight gags straight out of Frank Tashlin (and caricatures worthy of Hirschfeld), and a visual style that Vincente Minnelli wouldn't have been ashamed of. It's fast without being feverish and funny without resorting to pop-culture snark, unless it's pop-culture snark from 1939. You could double-feature it with either of the classics named above, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), or even Leslie Howard's Stand-In (1937)—again, that's not easily said of most mid-'90's animation. derspatchel screened it for me off YouTube last night and discusses it more extensively here. It's the perfect comfort movie for anyone who grew up on MGM musicals. Liking cats is just a bonus.

2. I've been reading H.D.'s Tribute to Freud (1956), which I picked up in the Harvard Book Store a few nights ago. I like Norman Holmes Pearson a little less every time I read one of his forewords: he is right to champion her as a great poet of the twentieth century, but I wish he could do it without erasing whole swathes of her life. "Stephen Haden-Guest was a more casual friend. Arthur Waley was at best an acquaintance. Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher's husband, was much closer." Well, yes, if by that you mean that Macpherson was H.D.'s lover before (and while) he was Bryher's husband, the adoptive father of H.D.'s daughter Perdita, and the biological father of the pregnancy she chose not to keep, while Haden-Guest was a shorter-term lover whose wife was not very impressed with his ability to handle poly, then I suppose it's a fair assessment. Waley, as far as I can tell from the actual Tribute, was a one-off affair during World War I. It's rushthatspeaks' complaint about the Western Canon in action. Pearson can talk just fine about H.D.'s blessedly called-off engagement to Ezra Pound and her marriage and divorce from Richard Aldington—who, for the record, H.D. met through a mutual girlfriend; he barely acknowledges Bryher. Or Frances Josepha Gregg. Or Brigit Patmore, the aforementioned mutual girlfriend. Or Renée Athené, who played Spiritualism games with H.D. in school. He is also prone to statements like "Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H.D. was womanly," which I don't even know what that means. Contrast H.D.'s quiet refutation of heternormativity, describing a trip to Corfu with Bryher in 1920: "Travel was difficult, the country itself in a state of political upheaval; chance hotel acquaintances expressed surprise that two women alone had been allowed to come at all at that time. We were always 'two women alone' or 'two ladies alone,' but we were not alone." Norman Holmes Pearson, I know you're dead, but I bet it wouldn't have killed you to read what your poet wrote.

(What the poet wrote is really interesting. The book is composed of two parts, the journal H.D. kept during her first session with Freud in the spring of 1933, under the title "Advent," and "Writing on the Wall," a memoir written in the fall of 1944, because the work she had done with him in '33 and '34 was part of what was helping her survive this second world war she had known for decades, with a nightmare certainty that was diagnosed as paranoia, was coming. It's stream-of-consciousness, like much of her poetry, flowing in and out of symbols and associations, recurring chains of images and then out of nowhere a line-by-line exegesis of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land" as a metaphor for psychoanalysis or a chill clear snapshot of Vienna with the Nazis rising: There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down Berggasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led to the Professor's door—maybe, they passed on down another street to another door but I did not look any further. No one brushed these swastikas out. It is not so easy to scrub death-head chalk-marks from a pavement. It is not so easy and it is more conspicuous than sweeping tinsel paper into a gutter. And this was a little later. She's less interested in evaluating Freud's methods than in describing the stages of their relationship and reengaging with the material of their time together, which was much of her early life and interpretation of dreams. She identifies him with a number of mythological figures, including some of her own devising: "This old Janus, this beloved lighthouse-keeper, old Captain January . . " She can also state plainly when she thought he was wrong or when he said things in analysis that left her hurt or confused, which is refreshing in a tribute. I think it may be the first nonfiction of hers I've read. HERmione is a roman à clef.)

3. Waiting for me in the mail when I got home tonight: the paperback of Stephen Volk's Whitstable, which came so highly recommended by handful_ofdust in June that I ordered it transatlantically on the spot. When it's not three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow, I will read it. I am looking forward.

(It's three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow. Goodnight.)

Am I thinkable in the USSR?

My poem "A Bulgakov Headache" has been accepted by Stone Telling. It was inspired by and partly written during a migraine I had in February—I'd heard rose_lemberg refer to them once as "Bulgakov headaches," which only made sense. I class it among the ghost poems, of which I really need to write a final one so I can send the collection somewhere. I need to sleep enough first. Also, irony, stop having this headache.

Current music courtesy of Bogi Takács, who also provides a translation.

My brother was twenty-eight today. My parents now have a fire pit in their back yard. We set up chairs after dinner and watched bats flutter like barnstormers against the water-blue sky.