Be safe, be seen, be anyone you like

While looking for something else, I found a page of notes I made to myself last summer, it looks like on the way to/during NecronomiCon. The first one reads as though it might have been shaping up to be a post, but I have (appropriately) no idea where it was going:

There are ways in which traveling by myself, especially at night, feels better than going anywhere else any other way. This strikes me as dangerous and also in some way irresponsible: one of the classic noir fantasies is to walk right out of your life and into someone else's and in most of these stories someone forgets to mind the gap. Taking the night train is itself like traveling into a dream. Outside of the safe confines of routine, you might be anyone. Might even surprise yourself. Pleasantly or unpleasantly, the journey doesn't care. Like Dionysos. When the walls fall down, it's just you against the sky, and you'd better be strong enough to stand on your own. So many characters in these dream plays find out they aren't.

In other news, I just read my own dream record dating back to 1999 (some years nothing written down, some years it's like I was never even awake) and I think I have some kind of reflective hangover. What I wish I had was the breathing room to write fiction. I feel terribly as though I am forgetting, or have already forgotten, how.

[edit] I took a hot shower and reminded myself that I am underslept and still sick to the point that I may bail on tomorrow's chorus rehearsal and that tonight's Hanukkah party was a success but also intensely full of people: in other words, not in good condition for accurate self-evaluation. I suspect it did not help to transcribe a bunch of half-finished introspection. I am going to read some more Raymond Durgnat, who delighted me almost on page one by suggesting that one could read Psycho (1960) as a werewolf story, as I do, and see what I can do about the sleep end of this problem.

Looking forward to the past here

I am in favor of guillotines this evening.

I woke up sicker than when I went to bed. My plans for today reduced to visit pharmacy, otherwise try not to move. Visiting the pharmacy turned out to entail having to catch a taxi, thanks to the present inadequacies of the MBTA. I arrived at the pharmacy to discover that the medication I was hoping to start tonight was not covered by my insurance, which no one from the pharmacy had mentioned when calling this afternoon to tell me it was ready to pick up. Out of pocket, it's unaffordable. I would not have left the house if I had known. I would have stayed literally in bed. I would not have waited in the cold or burnt equally unaffordable money on a taxi. I left the pharmacy without my medication and caught the first bus home. I feel much worse than when I went out and I don't have the medication I was hoping to take in order to feel better.

I think it would be fun to live in a society that doesn't treat me, both general and specific, as so carelessly disposable. Under the circumstances, I've got links and a fever and that's basically it.

1. I read this article on Egon Schiele back-to-back with this article on Hilma af Klint. The past isn't dead, etc. I might as well add this article on Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Kasimir Malevich.

I hadn't known, and can't believe I didn't know, that Chagall was involved in An-sky's ethnographic work in the Pale of Settlement. It makes sense in the way that feels like secret history: what else for an artist so strongly identified with that vanished world of The Dybbuk and Fiddler on the Roof? It made me think of the last gesture of the NYTF's Fidler afn dakh, how the eponymous fiddler plays Tevye's family out of town until the very last jaunty sob of the strings, when Tevye gives a nod and the fiddler with his cap and his long coat and his violin tucked under his arm runs to follow them offstage. He's the tradition. Of course he travels with them. (Thank God, there is going to be a cast album. I can't wait.)

That in turn reminds me that the one thing we didn't do at the Hanukkah party was watch Lights (1984), the short animated TV special that starred the voices of Judd Hirsch and Leonard Nimoy and formed my first ideas of the holiday. Judaism there, Jewish culture, is represented as fire-flickering letters of the Hebrew abjad which drift like sparks from the pages of books and the wicks of candles and the music of a flute, shimmering steadily in the seven branches of the menorah. Hellenic culture is gold letters of the Greek alphabet that chime and gleam when shared freely in the time of Alexander but clank dully when thrown to replace the snuffed-out lights in the time of his successors. It's a small, simple, strong-colored version of the story with almost no names, not even the Maccabees, just the lights and the Greeks and the people of Jerusalem. A brother and sister and their family, an old scholar, a shepherd, an impressionable young man who lets himself become complicit in the eradication of his culture until the moment before the darkened menorah when he's made to choose between a Greek sword and the red-gold little aleph that bats anxiously about his shoulders like a heartbeat; he catches the light in his hands to keep it safe and runs. It is the same living light that will make a sealed flask shine from within when all the rest have poured out dead cold Greek-gold letters. "So, every year, about the time when all these things happened, there's a festival of lights." It holds the important points of the story for me.

2. I feel weirdly vindicated by this exhaustively researched article on the awful object at the heart of Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949). Among other things, it confirms that there was a deliberate pattern of obsession and identity and doubling present in the original script; most of it was stripped out in successive drafts, resulting the metaphorically fractured movie I watched last month. It interests me that although the word golem did not survive the rewrites, the sense of the thing itself did. I may agree with the authors that even though the dummy-comes-to-life scene would have made a hell of a lot more sense in its original context, it's a more effective example of the uncanny without it.

While I am thinking about noir: I wouldn't have been able to make any of the screenings, but I'm glad Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) has finally gotten its well-deserved restoration, even if it wasn't by the Film Noir Foundation. I am still inclined to feel that the cheaply beat-up print I saw at the Brattle in 2016 was existentially the right way to see it.

3. Because Tumblr has not yet turned out its nipples lights, I fell down a brief rabbit hole in the course of which I ran into an excerpt from a letter by Vera Brittain to her brother Edward in 1917. I understand I may be blowing past the point of the post, but I couldn't help being arrested by the line "But where you and I are concerned, sex by itself doesn't interest us unless it is united with brains and personality; in fact we tend to think of the latter first and the person's sex afterwards." Please tell me some biographer has unpacked this. It may or may not have turned out to be true of Brittain's brother, but I assume she would know when speaking of herself. It is the kind of statement I am inclined to believe, anyway. I just usually don't see people making it outside the internet or my family.

4. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: this photoset from CBS' Beauty and the Beast (1987–90) does in fact look like an anime I would watch. Should I try to watch the episode instead?

5. I am not sure how I missed an article about a Russian fishing village being slowly swallowed by sand.

P.S. Tom Cruise vs. motion smoothing.

I wish my ideas for the evening were not so thoroughly, after the guillotines, go back to bed.