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And the ghost of Descartes screams again in the dark
1) My poem "Fjöturlundr (Saturnian)" is now online at Lone Star Stories. It is not formally dedicated to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28, but she asked the question that began it, so lay any blame at her door, please. While you're there, I particularly recommend Patricia Russo's "People, Unnoticed," which may cause you to think differently about spiders, short hair, and street corners, and Amal El-Mohtar and Nicole Kornher-Stace's beautiful tarot dance of demon lovers, "The Maiden to the Fox Did Say."
2) Though if it is demon lovers you're after, then you should have a subscription to Caitlín R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest and this month's whisper in the dark, "A Canvas for Incoherent Arts." As a rather strange bedfellow, my sea-story "Till Human Voices Wake Us" (originally of Not One of Us #28) is also reprinted therein.
3) Future issues of Sirenia will contain my poems "The Coast Guard" and "Αὐδήεσσα" (forhandful_ofdust), speaking of mermaids singing.
4) John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) is a very strange film.
fleurdelis28, but she asked the question that began it, so lay any blame at her door, please. While you're there, I particularly recommend Patricia Russo's "People, Unnoticed," which may cause you to think differently about spiders, short hair, and street corners, and Amal El-Mohtar and Nicole Kornher-Stace's beautiful tarot dance of demon lovers, "The Maiden to the Fox Did Say."2) Though if it is demon lovers you're after, then you should have a subscription to Caitlín R. Kiernan's Sirenia Digest and this month's whisper in the dark, "A Canvas for Incoherent Arts." As a rather strange bedfellow, my sea-story "Till Human Voices Wake Us" (originally of Not One of Us #28) is also reprinted therein.
3) Future issues of Sirenia will contain my poems "The Coast Guard" and "Αὐδήεσσα" (for
handful_ofdust), speaking of mermaids singing. 4) John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952) is a very strange film.
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{shivers ecstatically}
Nine
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Yay for a new issue of Lone Star Stories!
Now I have to find out the plot of The Quiet Man (off to Wikipedia).
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Re: The Quiet Man--how so? Is it about Mary Kate's obsession with her own dowry? Or her brother's obsession with it?
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Thank you!
Re: The Quiet Man--how so? Is it about Mary Kate's obsession with her own dowry? Or her brother's obsession with it?
Neither. The dowry is explained very well: "Ever since I was a little girl, I dreamed of having my own things about me . . . Until I've got my dowry safe about me, I'm no married woman. I'm the servant I've always been, without anything of my own!" It is not a matter of money; it is a matter of identity, which Sean fails to understand. (He really should, because he bought his ancestral cottage White o' Morning for the same reasons, a piece of tangible past like Mary Kate's fortune that was her mother's and her mother's mother's before her. And eventually he does, or there would be no happy ending. But it takes a little time.) It's the way the film starts as a fairly straight romance-drama crossbred with ensemble comedy—but the two central issues, Mary Kate's dowry, Sean Thornton's past, are quite serious—and then suddenly the realism snaps and it's all ludic carnival in the final stretch, complete with broken fourth wall. It's like the ritual subtext turns into text. And somehow it doesn't break the film.
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Thank you.
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as wind and axes, the waiting leap of fire,
the silver mask left rotting in the peat,
I really don't know how you do it. I really don't know when I'll stop being stunned. Love the cold woods at the start and all the movement to this closing.
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Thank you.
Now I have to find out the plot of The Quiet Man (off to Wikipedia).
See my reply to
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Thank you. I don't know if it's quite an April Fool's poem, but I am glad you approve.
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I've always thought The Quiet Man was creepy, but I suppose that's sort of instinct, like the way that I find Bing Crosby to be a disturbance in the Force.
Never managed to watch it through, which I suppose I should do, sometime. If I could make myself read a John Norman novel...
Sorry I amn't more coherent. There's a cold-or-somesuch on me now, but I'm in the library cos it's not enough to justify skipping uni.
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Thank you! Do not apologize: sleep is always more important.
I've always thought The Quiet Man was creepy, but I suppose that's sort of instinct, like the way that I find Bing Crosby to be a disturbance in the Force.
That's because Bing Crosby in real life was kind of a bastard. I recommend sticking with Gene Kelly.
I did not find The Quiet Man creepy. Nor would I compare it to a Gor novel, first because if nothing else John Ford can make a film and John Norman cannot write his own ass with a map and a guidebook, and secondly because what jarred me about the film was not the gender relations—it is clear from the characters and the finale that we are not watching some kind of County Sligo Taming of the Shrew; the plot turns, in fact, on whether Sean can adapt to Mary Kate—but the sudden change in registers. Most of the film, allowing for the inevitable stage-Irishry of the period,1 runs on a decent level of realism for something made in 1952. The last fifteen, twenty minutes do not. They are outsize and theatrical and feel a lot like ritual: I used the word carnival above because there is some of the same sense of chaos and play, violence that is safe. No one's going to get hurt because the fighting is so improbable, combatants losing one another in haystacks and being knocked through pub doors. The townspeople gathering around Sean as he walks Mary Kate the five miles back to her brother's house look like a wedding procession, a shivaree. And possibly it works because despite the seriousness of the issues that lead up to this break, we are not meant to take this Innisfree for a real place. If you have seen Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (2008), the characters are always remarking that Bruges is like somewhere in a fairytale: so, too, the story does not play strictly by the rules of realism. Early on, Sean Thornton recalls how his mother used to tell him about the village where he was born: "Innisfree has become another word for Heaven to me." And it's not Heaven, but it may not be quite here, either. I still consider it a very strange film. But I am not sorry I saw it. Lovely cinematography, if nothing else, too.
1. Charges of stereotype are perhaps mitigated by the number of supporting cast who came straight out of the Abbey Theatre, like Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields,2 and Jack MacGowran, but it should also be noted that John Ford was born John Martin Feeney in Portland, ME: The Quiet Man is light-years preferable to drinking green beer for Saint Patrick's Day, but it is also a case of nostalgia for a country its director never grew up in.
2. Who fought in the Easter Rising. Blink.
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Most welcome! Sleep isn't something I'm very good at, but I'm trying to be better about it.
That's because Bing Crosby in real life was kind of a bastard. I recommend sticking with Gene Kelly.
I'll hold that in mind. Glad to know that there's some reason for my feelings about Bing Crosby.
Nor would I compare it to a Gor novel, first because if nothing else John Ford can make a film and John Norman cannot write his own ass with a map and a guidebook
Well, that's sort of what I meant. If I could make myself read a Gor novel, surely I could make myself watch something that was made by somebody who could actually make films*.
I'm sure I'm missing something by not having seen it. One of these days I'll probably manage to do it. It's just... there are things from Irish-American culture that bother me in a completely irrational fashion. Perhaps if I remind myself to concentrate on the cinematography.
*That said, I'm not good at watching films, really--I suppose it's because with a book I can put it down and do something else, read more quickly or slowly, turn back to read a passage again, or even skip ahead to see what happens. Not that I've done that last very often since I was a child, but having the option there seems to somehow be important to me still.
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Oh, God, yes. Which one did you read? Are you better now?
It's just... there are things from Irish-American culture that bother me in a completely irrational fashion.
Understood. You should also know that if you do watch the film, I want your diagnosis on the accents.
Not that I've done that last very often since I was a child, but having the option there seems to somehow be important to me still.
The linearity of movies does sometimes bewilder me. I never used to watch many movies; I could read two or three books in the time it took to watch one. If forced to choose, I still favor the printed word over the moving image. But there are some lovely things on film.
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The one with the... pseudo-Vikings? And the big nasty bear-wolf-alien guys? Marauders of Gor, or something like that, I think.
I was maybe in middle school or the first couple of years of high school, and the (municipal) library had a number of Gor novels in the semi-sorted paperback racks, along with quite a goodly number of other 70s SF and fantasy novels. I picked one up because it looked like a sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche. Decided I was going to have to read one through, if I were to be able to say authoritatively that they were bad--picked the pseudo-Vikings one because somehow it looked like the least awful of the ones they had. (They hadn't any of the first five or whatever it is, the ones that were supposedly published before he got big enough that he didn't get edited.)
Better now...? Well, I'm not sure. I hope so. I think there's something particularly unpleasant about first encountering ideas that come near-ish to some of one's particular kinks in a form that's highly anerotic, but I don't reckon it's impossible to recover.
Understood. You should also know that if you do watch the film, I want your diagnosis on the accents.
Sure thing, an I do. I'm not as good at the accents from the places where I've not spent much time, Sligo being one of them (I'm assuming the Innisfree in TQM is Yeats' Innisfree?), but I'll keep my ear on them.
The linearity of movies does sometimes bewilder me. I never used to watch many movies; I could read two or three books in the time it took to watch one. If forced to choose, I still favor the printed word over the moving image. But there are some lovely things on film.
That there are. I think part of my problem is that movie-watching is, at least for me, an essentially social experience. I haven't got a lot of people in my physical vicinity to watch them with*, so I'm less likely to see them.
*I'm most likely to see movies with my parents, but there are some that they're just not interested in seeing.