Last night I dreamed of a three-person crime repeating through time in a Chinese restaurant. The actions differed each time, but the body count was the same. The night before that was a nightmare unpleasantly resembling both a poem I wrote in college and my present relationship with my orthodontics: I had agreed to some kind of experimental procedure which would have given me moss and leaves in my skin and hair for reasons that resembled alien first contact but might have had supernatural overtones, but it had proliferated unexpectedly through my body and my mouth was full of tiny green-and-white seedlings growing from my tongue and the insides of my cheeks; I had to keep tearing them out and it hurt constantly and I was always choking for air and my mouth was always full of blood. I suppose it's good that I'm dreaming on the amount of sleep I get these days, but the subject material could use some work. When I woke this morning, the very first thing I had to do was clean up a glass smashed by a cat in the kitchen. Fortunately, I have this vacuum cleaner. Still.
1. Talking in two different places about the life expectancy of queer characters in fiction reminded me that for about two years I have been wanting to repost a comment I made in conversation with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants:
The Moon-Spinners (1962) is not Mary Stewart's best novel, but I bear it a disproportionate debt of gratitude for the character of Tony Gamble, because he is coded gay about as strongly as Stewart could get away with and nothing bad happens to him, even though he's a jewel thief and one of the novel's antagonists. He's graceful and humorous, he has faintly camp manners and the heroine thinks he moves like a dancer, but he's the jack-of-all-trades at a new hotel in Crete; it's not clear that he has any more scruples than the rest of his gang, especially when it comes to double-crossing them, but he's the one the author allows to get away, facetiously promising to send the heroine "a picture postcard from the Kara Bugaz." Her cousin thinks he never will, but I like to think that someday a postcard from somewhere arrived. I took him for granted as a child and then, as an adult re-reader, was really impressed that he's just a person.
(As an adult re-reader I really want to have seen him played by Roddy McDowall, but only in a universe where Disney did not adapt the novel into a vehicle for Hayley Mills.)
2. I don't know if I'll get to see any of it, but I really hope Moving Day at MIT will be as strange and interesting as the Boston Globe hopes. Oliver Smoot as grand marshal of the parade feels metaphysically right.
3. Speaking of universities and interesting people, Justus Rosenberg was not one of my mother's professors at Bard, but she knew who he was. I always like seeing people get this kind of writeup while they're alive.
4. The Daughter of Dawn (1920) will be available on DVD come this summer. I read about the discovery and restoration of this formerly lost film in 2012, but if it played anywhere in the Boston area, I missed it. I'd still like to see it on a big screen, but I think it's more important that it be available to people regardless of their proximity to arthouse theaters or university archives. A cast of all-Native characters played by all-Native actors, with nary a white lead in sight? "I would say this film proves that Indians have been acting since day one."
5. As a child I thought often about Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street (1944) because it had one of the most evocative titles on its bookshelf. I tried it sometime in adolescence, during my foray into Goudge novels that were not The Valley of Song (1951), and bounced with such ferocity that I can remember absolutely nothing about the plot except a disappointing lack of dolphins. Yesterday I discovered there's a film version from 1947. It co-stars Van Heflin. With Lana Turner. And a title theme that became a jazz standard. It's probably terrible. I can't imagine how Goudge's Christianity would translate to the screen or what any novel of hers would look like without it. I am obviously going to have to undertake some kind of read-watch. Why is this my life?
I am off to meet Dean at the Fogg Museum. I want to write about The Uninvited (1944), which was as weird and complex and full of undercurrents as I would expect a seminal ghost story to be, but I might need to get some real rest first.
1. Talking in two different places about the life expectancy of queer characters in fiction reminded me that for about two years I have been wanting to repost a comment I made in conversation with
skygiants:The Moon-Spinners (1962) is not Mary Stewart's best novel, but I bear it a disproportionate debt of gratitude for the character of Tony Gamble, because he is coded gay about as strongly as Stewart could get away with and nothing bad happens to him, even though he's a jewel thief and one of the novel's antagonists. He's graceful and humorous, he has faintly camp manners and the heroine thinks he moves like a dancer, but he's the jack-of-all-trades at a new hotel in Crete; it's not clear that he has any more scruples than the rest of his gang, especially when it comes to double-crossing them, but he's the one the author allows to get away, facetiously promising to send the heroine "a picture postcard from the Kara Bugaz." Her cousin thinks he never will, but I like to think that someday a postcard from somewhere arrived. I took him for granted as a child and then, as an adult re-reader, was really impressed that he's just a person.
(As an adult re-reader I really want to have seen him played by Roddy McDowall, but only in a universe where Disney did not adapt the novel into a vehicle for Hayley Mills.)
2. I don't know if I'll get to see any of it, but I really hope Moving Day at MIT will be as strange and interesting as the Boston Globe hopes. Oliver Smoot as grand marshal of the parade feels metaphysically right.
3. Speaking of universities and interesting people, Justus Rosenberg was not one of my mother's professors at Bard, but she knew who he was. I always like seeing people get this kind of writeup while they're alive.
4. The Daughter of Dawn (1920) will be available on DVD come this summer. I read about the discovery and restoration of this formerly lost film in 2012, but if it played anywhere in the Boston area, I missed it. I'd still like to see it on a big screen, but I think it's more important that it be available to people regardless of their proximity to arthouse theaters or university archives. A cast of all-Native characters played by all-Native actors, with nary a white lead in sight? "I would say this film proves that Indians have been acting since day one."
5. As a child I thought often about Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street (1944) because it had one of the most evocative titles on its bookshelf. I tried it sometime in adolescence, during my foray into Goudge novels that were not The Valley of Song (1951), and bounced with such ferocity that I can remember absolutely nothing about the plot except a disappointing lack of dolphins. Yesterday I discovered there's a film version from 1947. It co-stars Van Heflin. With Lana Turner. And a title theme that became a jazz standard. It's probably terrible. I can't imagine how Goudge's Christianity would translate to the screen or what any novel of hers would look like without it. I am obviously going to have to undertake some kind of read-watch. Why is this my life?
I am off to meet Dean at the Fogg Museum. I want to write about The Uninvited (1944), which was as weird and complex and full of undercurrents as I would expect a seminal ghost story to be, but I might need to get some real rest first.
