Bring the dead man's shoes down to the seashore, child

It feels somehow redundant to take a shower in the middle of a thunderstorm so sudden and extreme that our street flooded and bore a beer can before it like Ophelia along the brook, but I understand the neighbors might complain if I just stepped outside with some soap.

I still want to write about queer film for the oh God week of June remaining, but at some future date I would like to return my attention to Andre DeToth's Pitfall (1948), which I watched tonight on TCM. It begins as a semi-satirical sketch of midlife crisis that veers first into poshlost and then into film noir, actually darker than I had expected; it ends with enormous ambivalence about its allotment of justice and never loses sight of the fact that Lizabeth Scott is not the femme fatale but the sole character onscreen trying to behave decently, triangulated between three men who treat her badly in their different ways. Her fiancé got himself incarcerated embezzling funds to buy her rich gifts she didn't ask for and would never have traded for him. The private investigator who followed the money all the way to her engagement ring has begun stalking her with scarily complacent sleaze. And the insurance agent who so unexpectedly charmed her in the wake of the disaster with her fiancé—a grey flannel drone who became much more personable after she embarrassed him into buying her a drink mid-repossession of her jewelry—just didn't bother to mention his wife. It's clever to cast Scott with her cut-glass cheekbones and her unimpressed voice and her eyes that she hardly lets anyone see into in this role of romantic loser, rather than a softer, more obviously vulnerable actress; it encourages the audience into the the illusion shared by the male characters, that she must be the active agent in this thickening web of adultery and beatings and blackmail, and then jerks us up short against the reality, that she's a handsome kid who loves messing about in boats and can't even refuse to model clothes for her stalker without losing her job. As in The Blue Gardenia (1953), rape culture is accurately described long before it was scientifically named. If anyone's decoyed and doomed by love in this story, it's not the men. Scott tells us as much at the outset: "If you were a nice guy, you'd cry a little bit with me and feel sorry for a girl whose first engagement ring was given to her by a man stupid enough to embezzle—and stupid enough to get caught." It is not every Code-era movie where the DA agrees at the end.

spatch sourced me a photo of the Playland Café, which at the time of its demise in 1998 was Boston's oldest surviving gay bar. I wish I'd known. Note to self: look into Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland.

Look to the mountains and I'ma take you to the sea

Every half-decent day we get lately makes me think that I should be at the sea. Today is cool and light-filled, breezy and brushstroked with cloud at the horizon. Last night after the rain there was a smell of salt that came in with the morning, like a seagull's cries. I hurt too much and slept too little. I feel landlocked.

I had to run an errand this afternoon, which took me past the post office in Winter Hill. Like a surprising number of buildings in our immediate vicinity, it used to be a movie theater. So did the ex-Star Market and the now-Cambridge Health Alliance. All closed—1918, 1923, 1963—before I was born. I couldn't buy a ticket for any of them without a time machine, or without being a ghost. And I thought suddenly that all I am doing when I study the lost cities of film noir is a kind of hauntology, but then I think most things I do are a kind of hauntology. I don't say it in criticism. I don't want to make myself nostalgic for nothing but not now and I don't want to subscribe to a perpetual year zero. I want to know what's under me.

1. Shofar has posted a submission call for their next special issue: What's Jewish About Death? They are looking for creative work as well as academic articles.

2. Courtesy of larryhammer: Rupert Brooke, "Sonnet Reversed." I had no idea when he died on his way to Gallipoli that he was in danger of growing up to be Edwin Arlington Robinson.

3. Whatever else you are doing today, take a few minutes for Margaret Noodin's "Miidash miinawaa zaka'iyan sa: And you have set me on fire." The rest of the article's title is "Translating Sappho into Anishinaabemowin."

Imprecision upsets me. I don't like misrepresenting and I don't like being misunderstood. I don't like discovering that I have conveyed wrong or incomplete information, not just because I feel like an idiot, but because I feel I have contributed materially to the overall inaccuracy of the universe. I had to make peace years ago with the fact that in order to have any commerce with other human beings I had to feel as though I was lying slightly about something all the time, but I still don't enjoy it. I really don't enjoy this administration.