I'm going to get myself 'cross the river

Things on the schedule for today: orthodontist's appointment at eyebleed o'clock. Get soft-serve ice cream afterward. Prepare to live off soup for at least a week.

Things not on the schedule for today: take the commuter rail to Salem. Run across two favorite movies at the Peabody Essex Museum. See half an open-air youth production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a state park. Get rained on. See a rainbow. Fall asleep on a bench waiting for the train home.

Things that occurred today: all of the above.

(I could have done without the transit snafu that got us back to Boston after nine o'clock and home around midnight with dinner in between; it was not fatal, but it's why I'm not asleep already.)

It is overstating the case to say that the PEM's exhibit on Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood was expressly designed for me, but considering it contains both artwork related to The Long Voyage Home (1940) and a brief clip from Stand-In (1937), it came a lot closer than I was expecting from not even recognizing the artist's name. He turns out to be one of the mid-century American artists whose work I have seen here and there over the years without ever attaching a name to it; there was a hardcover edition of Tom Sawyer on display, for example, whose illustrations looked instantly familiar to both derspatchel and me. I didn't recognize any of his murals in specific, but I've been seeing his vividly colored, sculptural, WPA style since I started paying attention to the '30's. As indicated by the title, the exhibit focuses on Benton's work in Hollywood—not on movies themselves for the most part, but documenting the backstage world of stage hands and set designers, cutters and composers, extras and publicists, as well as the mythos of the whole thing. Most notably to me, he had a working relationship with John Ford: he did a series of lithographs to advertise The Grapes of Wrath (1940) that eventually became the foundation of a two-volume limited edition of the novel, and in the same year he was one of nine artists invited onto the set of The Long Voyage Home to create paintings of the film. I'd read about the project. Some painted group scenes, others portraits of the characters; eleven paintings resulted, all of which appear to be currently whereabouts unknown. Benton's was entitled "No More Sea for Us"; it depicts a confrontation near the end of the film, although, in Benton's words, "not . . . as it will appear in the screen drama because I worked at an angle different from that employed by the camera. I worked from behind the set."¹ He didn't have anything to do with Stand-In (1937), but it turned up in a selection of backstage scenes accompanying Benton's sketches of same and I was just so glad to see Leslie Howard blinking awkwardly and adjusting his glasses while covered in fake snow that I didn't care. I kind of want to talk to whoever curated the film side of the exhibit. That's not a movie I expect to see anywhere unless I show it to people. James Cagney also made an appearance in a bootlegging montage from The Roaring Twenties (1939), which was appropriate to the paintings around it.²

We had run out of time to see anything else in the museum (I made a quick visit to the figurehead in Maritime Art and History, because she is so much of the sea), so we decided to walk to Winter Island and check out things like the remains of Fort Pickering and the Winter Island Light. There had been a scatter of rain while we were looking at Thomas Hart Benton, but Rob had the apotropaic umbrella in his backpack and we figured it would be worth rain to spend time by the ocean.³ Which it was, entirely, but we didn't realize we would be spending most of that time sitting atop the grass-overgrown remains of a nineteenth-century bunker like a fairy fort while a cast of kids aged what looked like about six to sixteen played out Shakespeare's wood within this wood. When we entered the parking lot, there was a boy with a sign for Rebel Shakespeare pointing downhill, toward the water; we had never heard of the company, which turns out to be a kind of summer theater camp, but the show was starting in fifteen minutes and the sun was still strong under the rolling clouds and what is the point of not watching outdoor theater when you run across it without warning? I put my jacket down to sit on and we shared the last of a bottle of orange juice, which undoubtedly looked a lot more louche than it was. We got a great tiny angry Egeus, next-to-youngest of the company in his red coat and his top hat, pigeon-puffing out his chest at to you your father should be as a god and shaking his fist at fellow-players twice his height; a great Mustardseed, almost certainly youngest of the company, sticking her tongue out at Oberon behind Titania's back; a very good Bottom, straw-hatted and quick-talking—he doubled as the emcee before the start of the play, calling for the audience to be silent as the cast assumed their opening tableau—with Snout the tinker as his fan club of one, excitedly applauding his Ercles and his lion and waving his hand to be picked for the part of Thisbe as soon as Bottom is cast as Pyramus; a fine aggravated Peter Quince, really trying to stage some serious art here; and a Hermia who started out all right, but warmed up to be very fierce indeed. Puck wore glasses and peered at the sleeping Athenians through them, dashed the love-juice into Lysander's eyes with an extra handful of petals to make it stick. We had to bail after the first act: we were desperately sorry to miss their mechanicals' play, but the sky was darkening and we were hearing thunder every five minutes and everyone else had cars in the parking lot, but we were walking back to the train. We got rained on. We had an umbrella. There was a rainbow, arcing partly over the power station and then later more fully over Essex Street. And we got the sea itself, just for a few moments before we bolted: the white-painted lighthouse and a curve of stony beach, the storm-slaty sky rayed at the horizon like a symbolic effect. Rebel Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream has two casts, on alternating nights; their opening was last night, so tonight was the other opening. I hope the rain did not prevent them. They were a delight.

Then we waited an hour for the train, which was not so fantastic, but I dozed through at least half an hour of it. At least I got dinner before all my teeth started to hate me in chorus. And I should try to get to bed before it's dawn. It has not escaped my notice that I really wake up mentally on days which I do not spend entirely working, which is not helpful at all.

1. I can't find out if a color image of the painting exists: the museum has a black-and-white reproduction, quite possibly of the same photograph I linked. What does seem to have survived is the clay maquette he made of the composition before painting it. The PEM has a 3D-printed replica of another such model, the original now being too fragile to travel.

2. The part of the exhibit that was not in any way designed for me was the gallery of Benton's propaganda art from World War II. When a German, a Japanese, and an Italian soldier are all joining forces with a strafing Axis plane to re-crucify Christ, I get that subtlety is not really the point, but it doesn't work for me as either horror or surrealism: it's just weird and terrible, and not in the admiring way I usually mean those words. There's your standard invasion scenario where an idyllic American farmhouse is overrun by faceless enemy soldiers who slaughter the men and prepare to rape the women; there's an allegorical composition in which American soldiers eviscerate a Japanese-eyed demon whose entrails are chains while a Hitler caricature urges it on with a whip of fire in one hand and a swastika in the other. Like, seven feet high. You just kind of stare at it. I was much more affected by Benton's "Negro Soldier," a cool, rangy, determined figure advancing into battle: he's as sinuously stylized as anyone else in Benton's catalogue, but he's not a racist cartoon. skygiants! Portions of Frank Capra's The Negro Soldier (1944) are also on display in this gallery! Just avoid whatever the hell that other stuff is.

3. On our way, we passed a sign reading "Aquaculture at Cat Cove," which gave me an immediate vision of a feline paradise where fish are bred specifically for the play and feeding of a lucky shoreful of cats. Alas, no cats were to be seen, but there were clouds and herons reflecting in the clear overcast water; it was low tide and at first I thought the circles constantly spreading and breaking were the footprints of water insects. They were tiny fish, leaping out of the water after the insects. I have no idea what kind: sandy, silvery, fingerling. The water was swarming with them. Oh, happy cats who hunt this cove off-hours where the tourists can't see!

On the floor of an old house with cameras on the walls

As I left the house for a job this afternoon, I saw a package in our mailbox; I took it with me to open on the train. Actually I opened it while I was walking down the street, and then I immediately called derspatchel.

Inside were two copies of Viktor Koen's Bestiary: Bizarre Myths and Chimerical Fancies, edited by Ellen Datlow. This is the catalogue which accompanies Koen's exhibition of the same name, collecting the short prose and poetry of twenty-four authors each commissioned to write about one of the fabulous monsters of the bestiary. Contributors include Maria Dahvana Headley writing about Empousa, Theodora Goss on Medusa, Nathan Ballingrud on the Kraken, Anna Tambour on Satyrs, Michael Cisco on Erigone, Alisa Kwitney on Teiresias; it's the kind of table of contents I'm honored just to be part of. I'd never read any of the other pieces. I hadn't seen most of the prints. They're all really, really good.

I wrote about Argos Panoptes, described by Jack Ketchum in the Introduction as "the 'all-seeing eye,' his head a single mass of cameras, lenses, flashes, strobes. A jumbled, confused machine of modern sight." You can see him here if you click through to "Prints."

I have a signed print of him now, carefully included in the envelope. I will buy a frame tomorrow and hang him on my wall. He can watch from under glass as people look at him. It only seems fair.

Today has been a good day.