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Image, object, and illusion go down to the corner
In contrast to Monday and the weekend, about two-thirds of yesterday was a complete meltdown. (At least the remainder involved tabletop tinkering with circuitry and rubber bands.) I liked the previous trend better. In any case, this is a sort of compilation post; various reactions, mostly to books and movies, I meant to inflict on the internet and then failed as sleep or other interferences caught up with me. Topics range from Michael Palin to Patricia McKillip, axolotls to Henrik Ibsen, Amanda Palmer to Powell and Pressburger. The usual?
I have no idea for how much longer, the original television play of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (1976, as opposed to the 1982 film adaptation) is available on YouTube, and it should be seen while it can. I discovered it early in September and fell in love; I will caution that it's not to everyone's tastes. The BBC Director of Programmes responsible for banning the play until 1987 described it as "brilliantly written and made, but nauseating." I think the last adjective is an overstatement, but certainly it has something to put off everyone. For starters, it's about two-thirds kitchen sink and one-third WTF?—only the audience can perceive the non-naturalistic fashion in which the protagonist, unambiguously coded as supernatural within the first two minutes, behaves; to the rest of the characters (who are all human and directed as such) he appears ordinary, sympathetic, and attractive; a little forward and flamboyant, maybe, but a young man, not a demon peeping through a pasteboard mask. I would not be surprised if the majority of viewers took it as bad acting, not playing with registers. But it works so effectively, it's as good as Brechtian asides or sardonic narration from the page. The merry, red-scarfed Martin (Michael Kitchen) lets us see how little work he actually has to do, that human minds fill in all the blanks for him; and then we, complicit in his viewpoint, may be all the more appalled by the acts he commits. It's a subtle and crafty play. And occasionally a broad and embarrassing one. Its dualism is smeared, like Faust's Mephistopheles written backwards across a mirror; its laughter is uncomfortable. But it earns its use of "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi," which almost nothing that isn't the full Carmina Burana does, and somehow I want to work it into a course with The Usual Suspects and "Malice in Saffron." Who do I have to sell my soul to to get it on Region 1 DVD?
Despite John Cleese's recent judgment that Michael is no longer the funniest Palin,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving and I did succeed last month in holding our Palinathon, for which we watched Ripping Yarns (1976—1979), A Private Function (1984), and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and it is no contest that even the zaniest of these endeavors displayed far more wit and cultural awareness than the Governor of Alaska. ("The London Underground is not a political movement!")
I have Crispin to thank for the straight-faced Boy's Own absurdities of Ripping Yarns—he screened "Tomkinson's Schooldays" and "Escape from Stalag Luft 112B" for me andhans_the_bold at Yale, claiming they reminded him of his halcyon days in Australian boarding school. They should have been illustrated by Ronald Searle, is all I'm saying. Of the rest of the series, I'm particularly enamored of "The Testing of Eric Olthwaite," in which fame and fortune in Depression-era Denley Moor are achieved by a rainfall enthusiast and his shovel-fancying soulmate in boringness (Kenneth Colley, out of Imperial uniform) when they meet during a bank robbery, and of one Englishman's historic attempt to go "Across the Andes by Frog," however thwarted by volcanoes, bureaucracy (nothing says colonial decay like Denholm Elliott perpetually en dishabille), and the 1927 Cup Final.
A Private Function, by contrast, is one of the more savage comedies I have seen, all the more so because its mise-en-scène is so pointedly mannered: Palin's favorite Third World, Yorkshire, in 1947, when rationing is still in full force and black market meat is on everyone's mind (if not plate), and the accidental discovery of an off-brand pig becomes the engine of social climbing as practiced by Maggie Smith, Our Lady Macbeth of Afternoon Tea; haplessly abetted by her husband whose RSPCA sympathies will not be rewarded by the kind of story he's in. I wouldn't have guessed that withering social dissection could coexist onscreen with a noisily diarrhetic pig, but I have Alan Bennett to thank for teaching me otherwise.
And by contrast again, A Fish Called Wanda still surprises me, not in the follow-through of its blackly tinged screwball crime, but because of its ending.rushthatspeaks has referred to the practical cruelty that inhabits the Python universe, and for much of A Fish Called Wanda's runtime, its likely recipient looks like John Cleese's Archie Leach, the respectable barrister whom Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) seduces as part of a double-cross. He's the Dottore of this commedia, coaxed out of his stuffed shirt and foolishly into love; look at him clipping his toenails in his Y-fronts and undershirt, a bed away from his bored wife as Wanda and Otto make gasping, passionate, (pseudo)Italian-inflected love: sad, but not for our sympathy, until he says awkwardly to Wanda, "Sorry if I seem—pompous," and all of a sudden he's real and really in danger of being hurt, as tends to happen to the honest or vulnerable in comedies. I cringed preemptively. And then a spring snaps somewhere in the conventions of screwball; Archie Leach with his reputation in tatters and his marriage right in his bottom says crisply, "Fuck off, pigs," and within minutes turns out to be a far more imaginative criminal than any of the gang who have topsy-turvied his life: as though all he needed was an opportunity to have nothing left to lose, and thereby to win the girl, the goods, and something like a happy ending. Most impressively, this is not a slip in tone. It's just the reasonable last resort of the straight man. ("Winners? Like North Vietnam?")
It would have been nice if the Minuteman Library Network had had a DVD of The Missionary (1982) that wasn't permanently out from Waltham. Nevertheless, I declare the experiment a success; long live Michael Palin, who is still pretty damn funny. Anything else with him that we missed and should have seen?
Everyone thinks Criterion distributes rare and classic movies; really what they sell is crack on a screen. My latest fix, The Small Back Room (1949), made me very happy. It is not major Powell and Pressburger; coming as it did on the heels of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948), I suspect audiences were more than a little confused by this black-and-white, noir-styled, at points outrightly expressionist character study of a bomb-disposal research scientist with a tin foot, a frustrated girlfriend, and a drinking problem, not necessarily in that order. But it is, among other things, a film about the boys in the back room, made at one of those rare points when it was possible to present scientists who were neither mad, evil, nor comic relief. Gather ye rosebuds etc., because 1950's B-movies are just around the corner.
Sammy Rice (David Farrar) wears an academic's threadbare tweeds and smokes a pipe, but he's no abstracted dreamer; he is not so much introverted as deeply wound in on himself, and if he were prone to the unworldly dissociation the term "boffin" implies, he would probably be much less unhappy. Atypically for a film in which emotional and physical damage take center stage, we are never told how Sammy lost his foot, when he started drinking; all we know is that he is in almost constant pain, which he manages badly with pills and pints of beer, and the bottle of whisky he keeps supposedly for V-Day, prominently displayed in the little apartment he shares with Susan (Kathleen Byron, much saner than their last pairing onscreen), looks a lot more like a penitent's hair shirt. She is always asking if he wants a whisky, so that he can refuse. Her picture sits beside the bottle, her cat observes as they make unsatisfactory love, interrupted by the telephone. Once a week, they go out to hear a jazz band; they do not dance. The world is Sammy's small back room. Scenes are eclipsed, light framed in receding layers or blacked out completely; the sets and their shadows crowd in on him, so that nowhere is there respite or elbow room, even at the pub. There are politics being played at Park Lane House with a piece of anti-tank ordnance now in development and a potential shift in the Ministry, a broadminded Army captain (Michael Gough, who has a lovely strange face; at first his straight-up confidence in Sammy seems gormless, before it becomes apparent that he is also gallant and smart) wants his advice on a new kind of unexploded bomb—none of which Sammy wants to get involved in, no matter how patiently or furiously Susan tells him he'll have to choose. He's more organized than Professor Mair, he's more experienced than Captain Stuart, and he is terrified. Of change, of responsibility. Of anything blowing up—literally, figuratively, pick a register—in his face again.
How many Archers films are about these moments of catalysis, when things must change or collapse? Colpeper, who keeps trying the wrong way to pour knowledge like glue; Vicky, whose life is an untenable suspension between her lover and her art; Clive Wynne-Candy, when the floods finally come. And there is no guarantee that Sammy will recover himself, because it's difficult to see how that might be managed, so many aspects of his life are dysfunctional in so many ways. The Small Back Room, Eric said afterward, was the first film he'd seen in which it was impossible to predict the outcome of a bomb-defusing scene based on narrative appropriateness, because both life and death carried their own and valid complications. Cue Chesil Bank, pebbles pale in the March sunlight, and proof that a documentary approach can be more nerve-tightening than all the cropped angles and sudden violins (should I mention here that the film contains almost no extra-diegetic sound? Incidental music appears when the expressionism does, and vanishes likewise) in Hollywood. Not to mention classic Powell and Pressburger juxtapositions, like an artillery test on Salisbury Plain, old and new technologies marking out the same quarter of the sky. The Small Back Room is not going to unseat A Canterbury Tale (1943) or even The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) as my favorite, but it's higher up there than some. Maybe Criterion will come out with One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) next. I saw 49th Parallel (1941) last February; I want the other half of the pair already.
It is probably simplest if I refer to my sister who lives in Hawaii, although she is related to me neither genetically nor legally; we met the day before seventh grade started, and she is family. Currently she is studying toward chemistry and epidemiology; she has also the full complement of visual art skills, drawing, painting, collages, photography, and writes poetry that I wish were more widely available. She always has cats. The latest just presented her with three or four kittens. And as I found out when we spoke last week, she now has a pair of axolotls. Wildtype, named for their speckles and splashes; gender at the moment indeterminate, although she is hoping for a mating pair. I didn't even know they could be kept as pets. Salamanders are beautiful, neotenic* ones no less. Attention should be paid. She has promised to send me pictures.
* As opposed to neoteric, which would be another kind of awesome altogether.
I have been listening to Who Killed Amanda Palmer (2008) steadily since my birthday, with a break for Pere Ubu, Pylon, and Pretty Balanced in the last few days. (No, I am not going through my iTunes alphabetically. I listened to some Bellowhead too.) There should be more story songs. I think the genre has almost been lost since the popularity of confessional music, but one of the traits I like so much about both the Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer solo is that not all her narrators are, or are meant to be mistaken for, herself. "Runs in the Family" may be of a piece with "Half Jack" (and it still pleases me that her father can be heard on "Have to Drive," along with the snerkworthily titled Via Interficere Choir of Nashville), but the pregnant, pop-obsessed teen of "Oasis" or the chthonic demon lover of "The Gardener"? Cheerfully performing back-alley abortions in "Mandy Goes to Med School," dismissing the Holocaust in "Mrs. O"? I have no idea whether originals of Blake, Delilah, and Ultima Esperanza exist, but I doubt it would change my feelings about the songs if I found out either way. The first person is a slippery voice. Autobiography can refract into it; inventions can precipitate out. Four-verse character sketches, catchy tragedies and thumbnail manifestos. Tickets remaining and the creek don't rise, Eric and I are going to hear her at the Paradise in November.
The dayrushthatspeaks and I went to the MFA, I finished Patricia McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head (2008) and I had very mixed feelings. Ultimately, I think, it annoys me, because it is almost something very different from the typical recent McKillip, and then the fatal gravity of knights and word-spells and hidden worlds collapses it in on itself when I would much rather have followed the social comedy that at first looks like the main plot of the novel. The setting is promising: a mid-nineteenth century, later than she usually places her stories, in a small fishing town on the west coast of Rurex, which sounds like the love child of Ruritania and Hardy's Wessex (or maybe a prescription expectorant) and resembles both Dorset and New England. The characters would not be all that out of place in Austen, the innkeeper who reads and the merchant's daughter who writes, the well-dressed, bookish stranger who dazzles the locals until the real society set arrive in town, and the brother-sister pair from the small gentry whose easily-fixed affections are to be avoided like a particularly soppy plague. There is a mystery about centuries-old Aislinn House, whose dying mistress has summoned her great-niece back from the whirl and glitter of city life; all of a sudden the town is full of strangers, some of whom are not as they claim and some of whom may be the same person. More than magic, marriage is the spectator sport of choice—and then it is magic, after all, that turns out to govern the plot. It is not even sea-magic, when from the title I expected selkies at least. (By the same token, if one of the town's oldest families are the Cauleys, it should be mentioned somewhere that they are difficult to drown.) The wry entanglements and escapes of the book's first half vanish and are replaced by the kind of otherworldly dreaming that McKillip has done before and better: see Winter Rose (1996), Ombria in Shadow (2002), Something Rich and Strange (1994). Even details that should chill, like the tempest of crows that is always circling the tower of the other Aislinn House, the book whose blank pages are never turned by the wind, are too much the simple substitution to retain their mystery when explained. There is a villain who I think would have benefited from being written by Diana Wynne Jones. There are high fantasy archetypes that fall out of the woodwork. There is an ironic lack of depth, in short, to any sequence in the otherworld, so that when the book reverts in its last few pages to the gently satirical, mostly realist roundelay of courtships and obsessions both romantic and literary that so intrigued me at the start, I felt that I had simply missed the body of the story, rather than sojourned on its other side. And there should have been more sea. The closest the reader comes is Gwyneth's latest story, inventing Sealey Head a folkloric past in order to account for the titular, mysterious bell; and as her twin beta-readers do not hesitate to point out, it doesn't even have pirates.
I did not expect to love A Doll's House (Patrick Garland, 1973). I like strange; Ibsen is canonical. He's one of the founders of modernism; I am all for pre-, post-, and -sideways. I read no idea whose translations of A Doll's House (1879) and The Wild Duck (1884) in high school and for years had some of his titles confused with Eugene O'Neill, I saw an excellent but frustrating production of Hedda Gabler (1890) at the Huntington Theatre in 2000; I was aware of his reputation, but not how thoroughly he deserved it. Imagine my delight to discover a character piece in which no one is easily labeled and the social scathing would do George Bernard Shaw proud, whose action has both the precise inevitability of a classical tragedy and the human messiness of a late-night fight, with rising and falling symmetries; it reminded me of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (1993), which I suppose is a compliment to Stoppard, and it comes even more structurally unglued than A Fish Called Wanda in the last act. The direction doesn't get in the way of the language. The cast alone is to watch for—Anthony Hopkins, Claire Bloom, Denholm Elliott, Anna Massey, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans. And it's been almost two weeks now, and I'm still thinking about the story. (It may deserve its own post. Be warned.) I wonder if this means I have to give Strindberg another chance, too.
Oh, and I liked James Clavell's King Rat (1962).
I have no idea for how much longer, the original television play of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (1976, as opposed to the 1982 film adaptation) is available on YouTube, and it should be seen while it can. I discovered it early in September and fell in love; I will caution that it's not to everyone's tastes. The BBC Director of Programmes responsible for banning the play until 1987 described it as "brilliantly written and made, but nauseating." I think the last adjective is an overstatement, but certainly it has something to put off everyone. For starters, it's about two-thirds kitchen sink and one-third WTF?—only the audience can perceive the non-naturalistic fashion in which the protagonist, unambiguously coded as supernatural within the first two minutes, behaves; to the rest of the characters (who are all human and directed as such) he appears ordinary, sympathetic, and attractive; a little forward and flamboyant, maybe, but a young man, not a demon peeping through a pasteboard mask. I would not be surprised if the majority of viewers took it as bad acting, not playing with registers. But it works so effectively, it's as good as Brechtian asides or sardonic narration from the page. The merry, red-scarfed Martin (Michael Kitchen) lets us see how little work he actually has to do, that human minds fill in all the blanks for him; and then we, complicit in his viewpoint, may be all the more appalled by the acts he commits. It's a subtle and crafty play. And occasionally a broad and embarrassing one. Its dualism is smeared, like Faust's Mephistopheles written backwards across a mirror; its laughter is uncomfortable. But it earns its use of "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi," which almost nothing that isn't the full Carmina Burana does, and somehow I want to work it into a course with The Usual Suspects and "Malice in Saffron." Who do I have to sell my soul to to get it on Region 1 DVD?
Despite John Cleese's recent judgment that Michael is no longer the funniest Palin,
nineweaving and I did succeed last month in holding our Palinathon, for which we watched Ripping Yarns (1976—1979), A Private Function (1984), and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and it is no contest that even the zaniest of these endeavors displayed far more wit and cultural awareness than the Governor of Alaska. ("The London Underground is not a political movement!")I have Crispin to thank for the straight-faced Boy's Own absurdities of Ripping Yarns—he screened "Tomkinson's Schooldays" and "Escape from Stalag Luft 112B" for me and
hans_the_bold at Yale, claiming they reminded him of his halcyon days in Australian boarding school. They should have been illustrated by Ronald Searle, is all I'm saying. Of the rest of the series, I'm particularly enamored of "The Testing of Eric Olthwaite," in which fame and fortune in Depression-era Denley Moor are achieved by a rainfall enthusiast and his shovel-fancying soulmate in boringness (Kenneth Colley, out of Imperial uniform) when they meet during a bank robbery, and of one Englishman's historic attempt to go "Across the Andes by Frog," however thwarted by volcanoes, bureaucracy (nothing says colonial decay like Denholm Elliott perpetually en dishabille), and the 1927 Cup Final.A Private Function, by contrast, is one of the more savage comedies I have seen, all the more so because its mise-en-scène is so pointedly mannered: Palin's favorite Third World, Yorkshire, in 1947, when rationing is still in full force and black market meat is on everyone's mind (if not plate), and the accidental discovery of an off-brand pig becomes the engine of social climbing as practiced by Maggie Smith, Our Lady Macbeth of Afternoon Tea; haplessly abetted by her husband whose RSPCA sympathies will not be rewarded by the kind of story he's in. I wouldn't have guessed that withering social dissection could coexist onscreen with a noisily diarrhetic pig, but I have Alan Bennett to thank for teaching me otherwise.
And by contrast again, A Fish Called Wanda still surprises me, not in the follow-through of its blackly tinged screwball crime, but because of its ending.
rushthatspeaks has referred to the practical cruelty that inhabits the Python universe, and for much of A Fish Called Wanda's runtime, its likely recipient looks like John Cleese's Archie Leach, the respectable barrister whom Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) seduces as part of a double-cross. He's the Dottore of this commedia, coaxed out of his stuffed shirt and foolishly into love; look at him clipping his toenails in his Y-fronts and undershirt, a bed away from his bored wife as Wanda and Otto make gasping, passionate, (pseudo)Italian-inflected love: sad, but not for our sympathy, until he says awkwardly to Wanda, "Sorry if I seem—pompous," and all of a sudden he's real and really in danger of being hurt, as tends to happen to the honest or vulnerable in comedies. I cringed preemptively. And then a spring snaps somewhere in the conventions of screwball; Archie Leach with his reputation in tatters and his marriage right in his bottom says crisply, "Fuck off, pigs," and within minutes turns out to be a far more imaginative criminal than any of the gang who have topsy-turvied his life: as though all he needed was an opportunity to have nothing left to lose, and thereby to win the girl, the goods, and something like a happy ending. Most impressively, this is not a slip in tone. It's just the reasonable last resort of the straight man. ("Winners? Like North Vietnam?")It would have been nice if the Minuteman Library Network had had a DVD of The Missionary (1982) that wasn't permanently out from Waltham. Nevertheless, I declare the experiment a success; long live Michael Palin, who is still pretty damn funny. Anything else with him that we missed and should have seen?
Everyone thinks Criterion distributes rare and classic movies; really what they sell is crack on a screen. My latest fix, The Small Back Room (1949), made me very happy. It is not major Powell and Pressburger; coming as it did on the heels of A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948), I suspect audiences were more than a little confused by this black-and-white, noir-styled, at points outrightly expressionist character study of a bomb-disposal research scientist with a tin foot, a frustrated girlfriend, and a drinking problem, not necessarily in that order. But it is, among other things, a film about the boys in the back room, made at one of those rare points when it was possible to present scientists who were neither mad, evil, nor comic relief. Gather ye rosebuds etc., because 1950's B-movies are just around the corner.
Sammy Rice (David Farrar) wears an academic's threadbare tweeds and smokes a pipe, but he's no abstracted dreamer; he is not so much introverted as deeply wound in on himself, and if he were prone to the unworldly dissociation the term "boffin" implies, he would probably be much less unhappy. Atypically for a film in which emotional and physical damage take center stage, we are never told how Sammy lost his foot, when he started drinking; all we know is that he is in almost constant pain, which he manages badly with pills and pints of beer, and the bottle of whisky he keeps supposedly for V-Day, prominently displayed in the little apartment he shares with Susan (Kathleen Byron, much saner than their last pairing onscreen), looks a lot more like a penitent's hair shirt. She is always asking if he wants a whisky, so that he can refuse. Her picture sits beside the bottle, her cat observes as they make unsatisfactory love, interrupted by the telephone. Once a week, they go out to hear a jazz band; they do not dance. The world is Sammy's small back room. Scenes are eclipsed, light framed in receding layers or blacked out completely; the sets and their shadows crowd in on him, so that nowhere is there respite or elbow room, even at the pub. There are politics being played at Park Lane House with a piece of anti-tank ordnance now in development and a potential shift in the Ministry, a broadminded Army captain (Michael Gough, who has a lovely strange face; at first his straight-up confidence in Sammy seems gormless, before it becomes apparent that he is also gallant and smart) wants his advice on a new kind of unexploded bomb—none of which Sammy wants to get involved in, no matter how patiently or furiously Susan tells him he'll have to choose. He's more organized than Professor Mair, he's more experienced than Captain Stuart, and he is terrified. Of change, of responsibility. Of anything blowing up—literally, figuratively, pick a register—in his face again.
How many Archers films are about these moments of catalysis, when things must change or collapse? Colpeper, who keeps trying the wrong way to pour knowledge like glue; Vicky, whose life is an untenable suspension between her lover and her art; Clive Wynne-Candy, when the floods finally come. And there is no guarantee that Sammy will recover himself, because it's difficult to see how that might be managed, so many aspects of his life are dysfunctional in so many ways. The Small Back Room, Eric said afterward, was the first film he'd seen in which it was impossible to predict the outcome of a bomb-defusing scene based on narrative appropriateness, because both life and death carried their own and valid complications. Cue Chesil Bank, pebbles pale in the March sunlight, and proof that a documentary approach can be more nerve-tightening than all the cropped angles and sudden violins (should I mention here that the film contains almost no extra-diegetic sound? Incidental music appears when the expressionism does, and vanishes likewise) in Hollywood. Not to mention classic Powell and Pressburger juxtapositions, like an artillery test on Salisbury Plain, old and new technologies marking out the same quarter of the sky. The Small Back Room is not going to unseat A Canterbury Tale (1943) or even The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) as my favorite, but it's higher up there than some. Maybe Criterion will come out with One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) next. I saw 49th Parallel (1941) last February; I want the other half of the pair already.
It is probably simplest if I refer to my sister who lives in Hawaii, although she is related to me neither genetically nor legally; we met the day before seventh grade started, and she is family. Currently she is studying toward chemistry and epidemiology; she has also the full complement of visual art skills, drawing, painting, collages, photography, and writes poetry that I wish were more widely available. She always has cats. The latest just presented her with three or four kittens. And as I found out when we spoke last week, she now has a pair of axolotls. Wildtype, named for their speckles and splashes; gender at the moment indeterminate, although she is hoping for a mating pair. I didn't even know they could be kept as pets. Salamanders are beautiful, neotenic* ones no less. Attention should be paid. She has promised to send me pictures.
* As opposed to neoteric, which would be another kind of awesome altogether.
I have been listening to Who Killed Amanda Palmer (2008) steadily since my birthday, with a break for Pere Ubu, Pylon, and Pretty Balanced in the last few days. (No, I am not going through my iTunes alphabetically. I listened to some Bellowhead too.) There should be more story songs. I think the genre has almost been lost since the popularity of confessional music, but one of the traits I like so much about both the Dresden Dolls and Amanda Palmer solo is that not all her narrators are, or are meant to be mistaken for, herself. "Runs in the Family" may be of a piece with "Half Jack" (and it still pleases me that her father can be heard on "Have to Drive," along with the snerkworthily titled Via Interficere Choir of Nashville), but the pregnant, pop-obsessed teen of "Oasis" or the chthonic demon lover of "The Gardener"? Cheerfully performing back-alley abortions in "Mandy Goes to Med School," dismissing the Holocaust in "Mrs. O"? I have no idea whether originals of Blake, Delilah, and Ultima Esperanza exist, but I doubt it would change my feelings about the songs if I found out either way. The first person is a slippery voice. Autobiography can refract into it; inventions can precipitate out. Four-verse character sketches, catchy tragedies and thumbnail manifestos. Tickets remaining and the creek don't rise, Eric and I are going to hear her at the Paradise in November.
The day
rushthatspeaks and I went to the MFA, I finished Patricia McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head (2008) and I had very mixed feelings. Ultimately, I think, it annoys me, because it is almost something very different from the typical recent McKillip, and then the fatal gravity of knights and word-spells and hidden worlds collapses it in on itself when I would much rather have followed the social comedy that at first looks like the main plot of the novel. The setting is promising: a mid-nineteenth century, later than she usually places her stories, in a small fishing town on the west coast of Rurex, which sounds like the love child of Ruritania and Hardy's Wessex (or maybe a prescription expectorant) and resembles both Dorset and New England. The characters would not be all that out of place in Austen, the innkeeper who reads and the merchant's daughter who writes, the well-dressed, bookish stranger who dazzles the locals until the real society set arrive in town, and the brother-sister pair from the small gentry whose easily-fixed affections are to be avoided like a particularly soppy plague. There is a mystery about centuries-old Aislinn House, whose dying mistress has summoned her great-niece back from the whirl and glitter of city life; all of a sudden the town is full of strangers, some of whom are not as they claim and some of whom may be the same person. More than magic, marriage is the spectator sport of choice—and then it is magic, after all, that turns out to govern the plot. It is not even sea-magic, when from the title I expected selkies at least. (By the same token, if one of the town's oldest families are the Cauleys, it should be mentioned somewhere that they are difficult to drown.) The wry entanglements and escapes of the book's first half vanish and are replaced by the kind of otherworldly dreaming that McKillip has done before and better: see Winter Rose (1996), Ombria in Shadow (2002), Something Rich and Strange (1994). Even details that should chill, like the tempest of crows that is always circling the tower of the other Aislinn House, the book whose blank pages are never turned by the wind, are too much the simple substitution to retain their mystery when explained. There is a villain who I think would have benefited from being written by Diana Wynne Jones. There are high fantasy archetypes that fall out of the woodwork. There is an ironic lack of depth, in short, to any sequence in the otherworld, so that when the book reverts in its last few pages to the gently satirical, mostly realist roundelay of courtships and obsessions both romantic and literary that so intrigued me at the start, I felt that I had simply missed the body of the story, rather than sojourned on its other side. And there should have been more sea. The closest the reader comes is Gwyneth's latest story, inventing Sealey Head a folkloric past in order to account for the titular, mysterious bell; and as her twin beta-readers do not hesitate to point out, it doesn't even have pirates. I did not expect to love A Doll's House (Patrick Garland, 1973). I like strange; Ibsen is canonical. He's one of the founders of modernism; I am all for pre-, post-, and -sideways. I read no idea whose translations of A Doll's House (1879) and The Wild Duck (1884) in high school and for years had some of his titles confused with Eugene O'Neill, I saw an excellent but frustrating production of Hedda Gabler (1890) at the Huntington Theatre in 2000; I was aware of his reputation, but not how thoroughly he deserved it. Imagine my delight to discover a character piece in which no one is easily labeled and the social scathing would do George Bernard Shaw proud, whose action has both the precise inevitability of a classical tragedy and the human messiness of a late-night fight, with rising and falling symmetries; it reminded me of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (1993), which I suppose is a compliment to Stoppard, and it comes even more structurally unglued than A Fish Called Wanda in the last act. The direction doesn't get in the way of the language. The cast alone is to watch for—Anthony Hopkins, Claire Bloom, Denholm Elliott, Anna Massey, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans. And it's been almost two weeks now, and I'm still thinking about the story. (It may deserve its own post. Be warned.) I wonder if this means I have to give Strindberg another chance, too.
Oh, and I liked James Clavell's King Rat (1962).