Oh, George, not the livestock

Most of today was very bad. I slept for twenty minutes last night and it was a nightmare that shook me so badly, I woke derspatchel so that he could hold me. (That was around four o'clock. At nine in the morning, I finally got out of bed to do something useful with my day, i.e., read Strange Horizons slush. If you have submitted a poem during the months of October and November and not yet heard back from me, your work is either still under consideration—in which case you'll hear back from me by the end of tomorrow—or it was eaten by the demons of the internet, in which case you should re-submit it and you'll hear from one of my co-editors in the new year.) I had to run an errand in the afternoon that upset me. I was desperately exhausted, but only managed to nap for another half-hour after I got back.

Two things:

yhlee sent me the third edition of Sidney Lanier's The Marshes of Glynn (1971), illustrated with photographs and an engraving by Mose Daniels. I have never read this particular poem, but Lanier is one of my father's favorite poets. I am looking forward to it.

Despite the snow already piling up against our front steps and windows, Rob and I braved the storm to see a double feature of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) at the Brattle Theatre. I am not sure if it's the best double feature I've seen at that theater—I still need to write about the genius that was Berberian Sound Studio (2013) plus Byzantium (2013), and the HPLHS' The Call of Cthulhu (2005) and The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) hold a fond place in my heart—but it was absolutely the best combination of Coen Brothers films that could have been playing. I'd seen the former on a big screen, but not since the year it came out; I'd seen the latter only on Rob's computer. Both were 35mm prints, full of static pops and crackles we would have expected from films more than twice their age; still worth it. The colors in O Brother are extraordinary: fields and trees of burnt gold dust, hand-tinted towns and the sudden burnished richness of firelight illuminating a curve of sweetness in an unguarded face or washing like hellfire through the reflection of dark glasses; all fades into black-and-white, into legend and time. I adore Tim Blake Nelson as Delmar. This time I noticed that when he's not scaling up into panic ("They loved him up an' turned him into a horny toad!"), his voice is both deeper and gentler than his scrubby frame and rubber face suggest: a true holy fool. The Hudsucker Proxy turns out to be one of those movies that leaps with detail in a theater. The mailroom scenes recall Brazil (1985), but they're also the kind of painstakingly choreographed chaos that went out with silent comedy. Neither of us had ever before noticed that the beatnik bar has a Tom Lehrer LP on the wall. (Anachronistically, I think—it looked like Tom Lehrer Revisited (1960) when the film is set in late 1958 to New Year's 1959; I do not care.) I think what I love most about the scene where Buzz leaves sand-tracks in the shag carpet as he crawls out of Norville's office (aside from the fact that it's a great visual gag) is knowing that somebody had to come through and brush the carpet into perfect place after Tim Robbins and Jim True-Frost had taken their places, just to ensure that untouched dunelike expanse for True-Frost's knees and elbows to plough through. It's not realistic—in a world where the normal laws of gravity and deep pile apply, their footprints would be everywhere already—but you don't notice for a beat, and then it's funnier. Small surrealisms.

And we walked home through snow-devils and buffeting winds and cars moving very slowly down softened, orange-hazed streets. Harvard Station wasn't charging for the T; there was snow and slush down the steps all the way to the outbound platform, where the trains were unsurprisingly running late. At one point we ran hand in hand up Church Street, laughing with the cold; at another we had to wait for the whiteout curtains to die down before we felt like taking a shortcut. I am still awake, but I am about to take a very hot shower. And go to bed.

That was a lot better.

God, he was gorgeous

I am trying to figure out how to write about Peter O'Toole. I saw the news on greygirlbeast's LJ. I responded with immense eloquence, "FUCK."

I can't even remember what I saw him in first. He was one of my earliest favorite living actors, which meant a lot when most of my favorites had died before I was born or aware of them. I remember Lawrence of Arabia (1962): it was at the Brattle Theatre, I was in high school, I knew nothing except that it had to be seen on a big screen and it took my breath away. My father might have shown me Becket (1964) before then. My mother might have shown me My Favorite Year (1982). I cannot remember not knowing Alan Swann or Henry II (Anouilh's version—Goldman's came later), but his dual turn in The Ruling Class (1972) was exactly the corrosive jolt it was meant to be. I can cheerfully ignore the film of John Fowles' The Magus, because Eli Cross in The Stunt Man (1980) is all the godgame I need. I'd watch any movie that turned up with his name in it on TCM.

This was occasionally a mistake. O'Toole made some terrible films. I don't need to watch his entire back catalogue in his honor, because I'm not sure how honored anybody is going to feel by High Spirits (1988), and I hope the Somerville Theatre doesn't feel the need to screen Supergirl (1984) at this year's 'Thon. But I was always happy to see him in a role, even a cameo like the old Lord of Stormhold in Stardust (2007), and I was happy when that small role could steal the heart of a story, like Anton Ego with Ratatouille (2007), and then he would come out with something like Venus (2006) where an Oscar wouldn't have been a lifetime achievement, for Maurice whose life ghosted O'Toole's own it would have been plainly deserved. His Conan Doyle in FairyTale: A True Story (1997) is very good, more dangerous in his kindly, supportive belief in the fairy photographs than the prying reporter who wants to debunk them: Houdini the trickster leaves the girls their illusion, but Conan Doyle only wants the truth, and so he steals the story away. I still maintain it was unconscionable he was cast, as a non-singer, in the film of Man of La Mancha (1972), because for a straight version I can't think of a better tilter at windmills: a knight-errant steadfast and astray.

He was beautiful. He was so beautiful. The second time I saw Lawrence of Arabia, I couldn't stop writing about him: off-key, unearthly, whimsical, doomed. (Washed-up Alan Swann's eyes were still that haunted, salt-burning blue.) His characters never seemed to have enough between themselves and the world, not clothes, drink, words, or skin. When I wanted to praise Tom Hiddleston's Loki, I likened him to O'Toole. Something drops out of the world when that kind of fever is no longer in it.