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Them windward girls are hard to beat
Oh, sleep deprivation, how I've missed you. Is that sentence ever a lie.
I would have been surprised if Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008) had left me cold, I loved Rois et reine (Kings and Queen, 2004) so much; I am still pleased to report I loved this one also. It is legitimately comparable with Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982), the original five-hour version—a family epic compressed into the few days around Christmas, but reaching back more than forty years, layered with loose-ended detail and private mythology, both the kind that accumulates around anecdotes and traditions and secrets and feuds and the kind that half-catches off names like Junon, Faunia, Paul Dédalus. The language is full of quotation, from Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Seamus Heaney, A Midsummer Night's Dream at the opposite pole of the year. There is a ghost in the ordinary sense and an imaginary wolf that we can quite clearly see. Random bursts of Irish folk and avant-garde jazz spike into the soundtrack, the camera is not invisible. Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Catherine Deneuve; I had never before seen Chiara Mastroianni and she is extraordinary. And while the film is of a piece with its predecessor, narratively and thematically, it is not a retread, so I may hope someday to own both of them. I wish I wrote with half the texture Desplechin films.
Meanwhile, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #19, an absolute damnfine issue with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tithenai's Damascus and blue_vervain's mouse-god and nineweaving's shivering man in the moon just to start with—selkies, bird shamans, murdered rivers, Inanna; gas-masks and lunar ash and Marilyn Monroe at world's end. Three of the poems, "Cartomachy," "The Devourer," and "The Plague Hill," are mine. Look, pick up a copy already. time_shark knows his stuff.
I made barbecued ribs for dinner. Way too much of this house needs to be cleaned before my brother and his fiancée arrive tomorrow. A late evening spent with Viking Zen and her husband, drinking ginger tea and watching an episode of The Storyteller and then Unbreakable (2000), was still totally worth it.
I'll remember the other thing in the morning.
I would have been surprised if Arnaud Desplechin's Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008) had left me cold, I loved Rois et reine (Kings and Queen, 2004) so much; I am still pleased to report I loved this one also. It is legitimately comparable with Bergman's Fanny och Alexander (1982), the original five-hour version—a family epic compressed into the few days around Christmas, but reaching back more than forty years, layered with loose-ended detail and private mythology, both the kind that accumulates around anecdotes and traditions and secrets and feuds and the kind that half-catches off names like Junon, Faunia, Paul Dédalus. The language is full of quotation, from Nietzsche to Georges Bataille to Seamus Heaney, A Midsummer Night's Dream at the opposite pole of the year. There is a ghost in the ordinary sense and an imaginary wolf that we can quite clearly see. Random bursts of Irish folk and avant-garde jazz spike into the soundtrack, the camera is not invisible. Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Catherine Deneuve; I had never before seen Chiara Mastroianni and she is extraordinary. And while the film is of a piece with its predecessor, narratively and thematically, it is not a retread, so I may hope someday to own both of them. I wish I wrote with half the texture Desplechin films.
Meanwhile, the mail brought my contributor's copy of Mythic Delirium #19, an absolute damnfine issue with
tithenai's Damascus and blue_vervain's mouse-god and nineweaving's shivering man in the moon just to start with—selkies, bird shamans, murdered rivers, Inanna; gas-masks and lunar ash and Marilyn Monroe at world's end. Three of the poems, "Cartomachy," "The Devourer," and "The Plague Hill," are mine. Look, pick up a copy already. time_shark knows his stuff.I made barbecued ribs for dinner. Way too much of this house needs to be cleaned before my brother and his fiancée arrive tomorrow. A late evening spent with Viking Zen and her husband, drinking ginger tea and watching an episode of The Storyteller and then Unbreakable (2000), was still totally worth it.
I'll remember the other thing in the morning.
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It's not mine. It's too familiar to be a drug.
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I was realizing after I posted that it's not something you enjoy--wasn't meaning to sound smug! I'm blessed in not suffering from insomnia, so when I don't get enough sleep, it's entirely my own doing.
Anyway, I wish that sleep might come to you when you desire it.
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Thank you. Or at least I need its cellphone number. (Now I have this image of a Hypnos-and-Thanatos booty call. I think that's a sign I should go to bed.)
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Good God. You win.
which seems to me to be a good jump-off for a post, or perhaps a story.
Songs you have heard, or songs your brain writes on the edge of sleep?
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I was thinking songs I've heard. That said, there are songs that I have composed (poems, too) in dreams - of them, the only one I remember well enough to hum is a Cocteau Twins song that does not exist outside of my head, but it is very pretty. I think that one was easier because Elizabeth Frazier used to use her own made-up language when singing. On that note, I suspect I will one day have a Sigur Ros song invade my dreams. Suspect or hope.
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I dream of songs—like books—by artists I like, which of course do not exist when I wake up. These are at least less maddening than the dreams in which songs by me do not exist when I wake up.
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Sometimes I don't mind sleep deprivation. Now is not one of those times.
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It is a better issue than usual, and usual is extraordinarily good!
Now is not one of those times.
I am so sorry. What's on your schedule for today?
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My e-mail address changed at the end of October; I've since found that some of my notifications never got through to their targets. Done.
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Glad you enjoyed the film, and for your new contributor's copy.
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So far, no luck, but at least I was doing worthwhile things with my time. I carried a candle for my brother in a darkened room so he could photograph slow spirals of fire against the Christmas tree.
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I'm sorry to hear. I hope you've had luck since.
I carried a candle for my brother in a darkened room so he could photograph slow spirals of fire against the Christmas tree.
Excellent. Any chance you might post some of the pictures at some point?
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All right; done. Pace Gian Carlo Menotti—
Amal and the Night Visitors
Their song comes in before them.
To catch up, they tread the road broad as winter,
starker than the snow: the stars in tinsel,
the hart-horned sun, the moon distrait;
between ragtree ribbons and freezing rain,
his fool's face shines in shyly at your open door.
The wind sounds like a whetstone, scything,
a candle is sinking shadowplay on the sill.
Mistletoe underfoot like a sowing of nebulae,
the light-fingered prints they leave on the cold;
holly-jags and wild cucumber curl stickleback
up the posts where the sun whirled flaring at bay,
oak-leaves scarlet in the burning frost.
The berried ivy and the masks of straw
ring to the same rime as their steps.
Do you hear? Did you follow? Will you share
in the morningstar sleeting, the flight of fire?
Call them counselors or chancers,
they are rapping on your panes for an answer
before daybreak: will you change with the moon,
the stars, the sun, another year to sing in
to the dance at the dark road's end?
It came out less closely tied to the source material (spin a story that begins with a woman singing and ends with the man in the moon) than I had intended, but it is yours nonetheless. The title can be changed, if you desire. Merry Christmas.
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You are very, very welcome. Happy New Year. Thank you for the spark of it.
(Would you like it for Goblin Fruit? As a gift; I know you have two pieces of mine in backlog already, and I do not want to overcrowd.)
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It's yours!
And please, never, ever worry about inundating us with too many of your poems. We wantssss more we does!
Oh, be careful what you wish for . . .
Thank you very much!
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I wish I'd known there was one—I'd have haunted with you!
What other movies do you like?
Oh, yikes. Do you want a list of films or directors or whatever pops into my head? Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1967) are two of my highest favorites; some others are Aleksandr Rogozhkin's The Cuckoo (2002), Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (1976), Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion (1938), and Ron Howard's Splash (1984), if that helps. I don't know. In theaters this year, Let the Right One In and The Fall blew me away; most of the actors I watch for, presently or past, are the character kind. Until I got to college, most of the movies I had seen were from the 1930's and '40's. I like character work, I like myth and folklore, and I like weird. And by this logic, I totally need to see more by Desplechin.
Hello!