Hestia this morning broke at one stroke six of the slats in our already battered Venetian blinds, swarming up the window to get a better vantage on Bird Theater. I have spent this entire week so fatigued that I didn't even mention when our dishwasher re-flooded and the gas company came to check for leaks on the same evening. I seem fragmentarily able to watch movies and would really like the wherewithal to be writing about them. Have some links and things.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selenak: the trailer for The Return (2024). I had no idea there was a film coming out this year of any part of the Odyssey, directed by a different Pasolini than the one I always associate with classical retellings. If it comes within range of the Somerville, I might actually try to see it.
2. I had never seen footage of Sydney Carter, either. The clip is a compilation of four of his appearances on Hullabaloo (1963–64) where he performs none of his famous spiritual songs and does instead a quartet of audience-approved satires, two of which I had never heard sung by anybody except Donald Swann. "This is a big industrial ballad about work conditions in the London sewer. Not actually collected in the sewer, but it's based on material collected in the sewer." The third would fit right in with Anna Russell. The fourth is political, with shout-outs to That Was the Week That Was and Honor Blackman. Actually the weirdest thing is that he looks like Eric Portman.
3. I had occasion to recommend Bryher's Visa for Avalon (1965), which I love more than any other of her novels and hate that it re-reads so differently from when I discovered it in 2010. In an allegorically nameless, recognizably contemporary UK, the totalitarian flashover of the "Movement" has engulfed the government so completely that the borders are closing almost before anyone knows who's closing them. "That's the trouble. People are apathetic until it becomes too late." The matter-of-factly clock-ticking plot follows a small group of characters over the course of a week as they make the risky decision to try to emigrate, not to New Zealand or America, but to Avalon. None of them has any idea what the journey really entails. "The sailors used to talk about it when I came here as a boy. There was a story that nobody who landed there ever returned." – "If I were younger there are other places I might go but as it is, I had better try Avalon. They are not so fussy there about age." Avalon existing in the novel as it does in our reality, we understand the ambivalence: Geoffrey of Monmouth sent his once and future king there to be healed, but in Malory he died among its apple trees. At the same time, Avalon employs a consulate that is just as drab and stressful as the most quotidian bureaucracies of the British civil service, appalling one intended refugee with its forms in triplicate and the chocolate-colored linoleum on its floor: "It was stupid of him, but he had expected the Avalon procedure to be different." Is it supposed to be? Was it once? On learning that their office cannot provide visas for all who need them, a member of the consular staff speculates bitterly that "perhaps Avalon itself is obsolete." The sentence is like a record scratch through the novel's metaphysics. Shouldn't a fantasy be something that everyone can escape into? What does it mean that Avalon is closing down its consulate in London? Diplomatic self-protection in the face of nascent chaos, such as might be practiced by any sovereign nation? The magic going out of Britain, Arthur never to return? Earlier the same character was heard to muse, "Perhaps things have to end or we should not love them," like a true expat of the Summer Country—himself in some disgrace with his service and uncertain of his prospects at home, which we are obliquely, eerily reminded requires more adjustment than ordinary culture shock. Bryher wrote the novel out of her own experiences aiding refugees in World War II and I can think of few fantasies even in the British New Wave that deal so much with roadblocks and passports and checkpoints and queues on the way to the country of the fantastic, granting the reader only the most ambiguous glimpse of what might be heaven-haven or the land of the dead or who knows? They have airstrips and filing cabinets and quotas, it seems. It should be relentlessly unnuminous and on one level it is, but on the other it's haunting beyond belief, one of the most slant and strangest Arthurian novels I have read. It would pair more naturally with Hope Mirrlees than even M. John Harrison. "But I want to go to Avalon more than I have wanted anything in my life."
4. It is tempting to describe Simon Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959) as a queer novel not only because it concerns the regimentally disastrous fallout of an affair between an officer and an enlisted man stationed somewheres Ruritanianly east of Suez—the place is actually named Pepromene—but because it is written far more as in fuck you than in the spirit of the Wolfenden report. Without directly depicting the sexual details of its central relationship, although it certainly discusses them freely enough to underscore the no-homo hypocrisy of its intensely homosocial environment, it is so abrasively frank about the physicality of men's bodies that when we get confirmation of the offstage couplings of Lieutenant Alastair Lynch and Drummer Malcolm Harley, it is impossible to picture them with Vaseline on the lens as opposed to the spit and sweat and shit of which we have been made almost Delany-level aware and which the novel takes as read to coexist with genuine attraction and affection as opposed to mere situational convenience, albeit in a fashion which must have taken some effort on everyone's part not even to allude to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Neither of its lovers nor their dark horse of a third wheel clears much of a bar for constructive representation, which their raffishly out author was on the record as not giving a hang about. The closest the book gets to a plea for tolerance is the recognition of the part played in the tragedy by homophobia, though notably less in the threat of external consequences than in the knock-on effects of self-closeted ignorance. The class-based post-mortem is the one part of the book which seems to hiccup, not because of any implausibility that a well-bred, self-aware young officer of great charm and funds could afford to be sophisticatedly careless about his tastes, but because the countervailing assertion that same-sex relations would be "unthinkable" for working-class private soldiers who would instead sublimate even passionate attachments into safely platonic mateyness runs directly against, er, history. The novel is filtered through a third-party narrator who is not himself an entirely unprejudiced lens, but it's not textually obvious how much of his casually consistent snobbery the reader is meant to take as word of God and how much with a facepalm of salt. Either way, it makes for sufficiently confrontational reading that it doesn't feel at all like a sad gay novel despite its conclusive body count and a valuable, uncomfortable addition to the catalogue of pre-decriminalization queer literature beyond Mary Renault. The incidence of characters in this era who just don't feel bad about their sexuality continues to interest me, especially because so far I haven't found them organized around a pattern. Not all of them would get along, either, which seems realistic.
5. Courtesy ofselkie: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande" (2015). I don't know about you, but my afternoon needed a Québécois folk-rock banger suggesting delightfully in both theme and tone that Jacques Brel and the Pogues had a baby and then an acrimonious breakup.
P.S. Likespatch, I had no idea armadillos were so adorably playful.
I was asked for purposes of survey to name off the top of my head ten really great science fiction novels of the twentieth century and it looks like the first candidates to come to mind were Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960), Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–87), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918), Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun (1976), and M. John Harrison's The Pastel City (1971). Had I been allowed to include collections, this list would look fairly different.
1. Courtesy of
selenak: the trailer for The Return (2024). I had no idea there was a film coming out this year of any part of the Odyssey, directed by a different Pasolini than the one I always associate with classical retellings. If it comes within range of the Somerville, I might actually try to see it.2. I had never seen footage of Sydney Carter, either. The clip is a compilation of four of his appearances on Hullabaloo (1963–64) where he performs none of his famous spiritual songs and does instead a quartet of audience-approved satires, two of which I had never heard sung by anybody except Donald Swann. "This is a big industrial ballad about work conditions in the London sewer. Not actually collected in the sewer, but it's based on material collected in the sewer." The third would fit right in with Anna Russell. The fourth is political, with shout-outs to That Was the Week That Was and Honor Blackman. Actually the weirdest thing is that he looks like Eric Portman.
3. I had occasion to recommend Bryher's Visa for Avalon (1965), which I love more than any other of her novels and hate that it re-reads so differently from when I discovered it in 2010. In an allegorically nameless, recognizably contemporary UK, the totalitarian flashover of the "Movement" has engulfed the government so completely that the borders are closing almost before anyone knows who's closing them. "That's the trouble. People are apathetic until it becomes too late." The matter-of-factly clock-ticking plot follows a small group of characters over the course of a week as they make the risky decision to try to emigrate, not to New Zealand or America, but to Avalon. None of them has any idea what the journey really entails. "The sailors used to talk about it when I came here as a boy. There was a story that nobody who landed there ever returned." – "If I were younger there are other places I might go but as it is, I had better try Avalon. They are not so fussy there about age." Avalon existing in the novel as it does in our reality, we understand the ambivalence: Geoffrey of Monmouth sent his once and future king there to be healed, but in Malory he died among its apple trees. At the same time, Avalon employs a consulate that is just as drab and stressful as the most quotidian bureaucracies of the British civil service, appalling one intended refugee with its forms in triplicate and the chocolate-colored linoleum on its floor: "It was stupid of him, but he had expected the Avalon procedure to be different." Is it supposed to be? Was it once? On learning that their office cannot provide visas for all who need them, a member of the consular staff speculates bitterly that "perhaps Avalon itself is obsolete." The sentence is like a record scratch through the novel's metaphysics. Shouldn't a fantasy be something that everyone can escape into? What does it mean that Avalon is closing down its consulate in London? Diplomatic self-protection in the face of nascent chaos, such as might be practiced by any sovereign nation? The magic going out of Britain, Arthur never to return? Earlier the same character was heard to muse, "Perhaps things have to end or we should not love them," like a true expat of the Summer Country—himself in some disgrace with his service and uncertain of his prospects at home, which we are obliquely, eerily reminded requires more adjustment than ordinary culture shock. Bryher wrote the novel out of her own experiences aiding refugees in World War II and I can think of few fantasies even in the British New Wave that deal so much with roadblocks and passports and checkpoints and queues on the way to the country of the fantastic, granting the reader only the most ambiguous glimpse of what might be heaven-haven or the land of the dead or who knows? They have airstrips and filing cabinets and quotas, it seems. It should be relentlessly unnuminous and on one level it is, but on the other it's haunting beyond belief, one of the most slant and strangest Arthurian novels I have read. It would pair more naturally with Hope Mirrlees than even M. John Harrison. "But I want to go to Avalon more than I have wanted anything in my life."
4. It is tempting to describe Simon Raven's The Feathers of Death (1959) as a queer novel not only because it concerns the regimentally disastrous fallout of an affair between an officer and an enlisted man stationed somewheres Ruritanianly east of Suez—the place is actually named Pepromene—but because it is written far more as in fuck you than in the spirit of the Wolfenden report. Without directly depicting the sexual details of its central relationship, although it certainly discusses them freely enough to underscore the no-homo hypocrisy of its intensely homosocial environment, it is so abrasively frank about the physicality of men's bodies that when we get confirmation of the offstage couplings of Lieutenant Alastair Lynch and Drummer Malcolm Harley, it is impossible to picture them with Vaseline on the lens as opposed to the spit and sweat and shit of which we have been made almost Delany-level aware and which the novel takes as read to coexist with genuine attraction and affection as opposed to mere situational convenience, albeit in a fashion which must have taken some effort on everyone's part not even to allude to "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Neither of its lovers nor their dark horse of a third wheel clears much of a bar for constructive representation, which their raffishly out author was on the record as not giving a hang about. The closest the book gets to a plea for tolerance is the recognition of the part played in the tragedy by homophobia, though notably less in the threat of external consequences than in the knock-on effects of self-closeted ignorance. The class-based post-mortem is the one part of the book which seems to hiccup, not because of any implausibility that a well-bred, self-aware young officer of great charm and funds could afford to be sophisticatedly careless about his tastes, but because the countervailing assertion that same-sex relations would be "unthinkable" for working-class private soldiers who would instead sublimate even passionate attachments into safely platonic mateyness runs directly against, er, history. The novel is filtered through a third-party narrator who is not himself an entirely unprejudiced lens, but it's not textually obvious how much of his casually consistent snobbery the reader is meant to take as word of God and how much with a facepalm of salt. Either way, it makes for sufficiently confrontational reading that it doesn't feel at all like a sad gay novel despite its conclusive body count and a valuable, uncomfortable addition to the catalogue of pre-decriminalization queer literature beyond Mary Renault. The incidence of characters in this era who just don't feel bad about their sexuality continues to interest me, especially because so far I haven't found them organized around a pattern. Not all of them would get along, either, which seems realistic.
5. Courtesy of
selkie: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande" (2015). I don't know about you, but my afternoon needed a Québécois folk-rock banger suggesting delightfully in both theme and tone that Jacques Brel and the Pogues had a baby and then an acrimonious breakup.P.S. Like
spatch, I had no idea armadillos were so adorably playful.I was asked for purposes of survey to name off the top of my head ten really great science fiction novels of the twentieth century and it looks like the first candidates to come to mind were Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960), Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia (1975), Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000), Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (1980–87), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Rose Macaulay's What Not (1918), Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun (1976), and M. John Harrison's The Pastel City (1971). Had I been allowed to include collections, this list would look fairly different.
