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Nine tailors make a man
1. My novelette "The Dybbuk in Love" will be reprinted in People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Sean Wallace and Rachel Swirsky. The table of contents should be fantastic.
2. "The Miller of Dee" is the same tune as "Rolling Down to Old Maui." The fact that I realized this only a few days ago may be a testament to the power of Benjamin Britten.
3. The name did not ring any bells, but I think the article I was trying to remember in my post on the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) must have been a chapter from Gregory Woods' A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), here quoted in Colm Tóibín's "Roaming the Greenwood": "[W]henever I read Nineteen Eighty-Four I cannot help imagining, between its lines, the spectral presence of another novel, a gay novel called 'Nineteen Forty-Eight', in which two young Londoners called Winston and Julian fall in love with each other and struggle to sustain their relationship under the continuous threat of blackmail, exposure and arrest . . . What read as a futuristic nightmare to the heterosexual reader must have seemed to the homosexual reader somewhat paranoid and ignorant, because so close to the reality of homosexual life in England at the time—but showing no sign that Orwell was aware of this fact." I bet this means I should read the rest of the book.
4. Currently running at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum is an exhibit called "Curve Appeal." I thought from the title maybe it would feature C3 Corvettes, but the machines actually on display were even better; it is an entire collection of sleek, opulent, streamlined cars from the 1930's and early '40's, when aerodynamics met art deco. They are beautiful pieces of engineering. Like Tolkien to a reader of present-day fantasy, the Chrysler Airflow now looks utterly unremarkable, even a little obvious, but in 1934 its rounded-off, backswept lines were so avant-garde, the car was a notorious commercial failure. (Two years later, the Lincoln-Zephyr would take the same low-drag, high-concept principles and sell like hotcakes.) The 1935 Stout Scarab, a kind of aluminum-hulled, swivel-seated minivan designed by an aviation engineer, still looks futuristic. The 1938 Delahaye Type 135 and the Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupe, by contrast, are so intensely and elegantly of their time that you walk away with a sort of primal desire for martinis and perhaps a monocle. ("Bunter, launch the Lagonda!") The walls are hung with automotive concept art by Theodore W. Pietsch II, whose sense of movement reminded me oddly of the Vorticists. There is big-band jazz playing over the sound system, Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" and Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing." The exhibit was curated by Sheldon Steele and it's as much art history as it is science and technology—I'd recommend it even to people who are bored and/or horrified by cars.
5. I am confused as to how Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009) can be on Viking Zen's Roku one week and playing at the Kendall Square Cinema the next, but now I really have no excuse not to write up a post for it. It is a film about the sea and secrets and the reasons people tell themselves stories; it is neither Splash (1984) nor The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) and I liked it immensely. It has become clear to me that I couldn't have found a worse introduction to Colin Farrell than Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) if I'd studied how to do it.
6. I did not like The End of the Affair (1955), but its supporting cast consisted of Peter Cushing, John Mills, and Michael Goodliffe, so any time they were onscreen I can count as not a waste.
7. I believe emphatically that there are some things which never need to be remade, but Kelly Link's take on Bringing Up Baby (1938) would in fact result in the best remake ever. By a similar token, I find myself weirdly disappointed that Angela Carter never ran with this line from A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which I remember being struck by in tenth grade and then forgot about until yesterday: "Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:—looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just coming on."
8. I have received my preliminary schedule for Readercon. I will post it as soon as it becomes final.
9. Why did I not know that Hans Conried starred in the legendary "Chicken Heart" episode of Lights Out? Why am I not surprised?
postscript: I need to figure out who I can get to tape me The Shout (1978) off TCM at a quarter to four in the morning. John Hurt, Alan Bates, Susannah York; directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, story by Robert Graves. Alternatively, it's not like I sleep anyway.
2. "The Miller of Dee" is the same tune as "Rolling Down to Old Maui." The fact that I realized this only a few days ago may be a testament to the power of Benjamin Britten.
3. The name did not ring any bells, but I think the article I was trying to remember in my post on the BBC's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) must have been a chapter from Gregory Woods' A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), here quoted in Colm Tóibín's "Roaming the Greenwood": "[W]henever I read Nineteen Eighty-Four I cannot help imagining, between its lines, the spectral presence of another novel, a gay novel called 'Nineteen Forty-Eight', in which two young Londoners called Winston and Julian fall in love with each other and struggle to sustain their relationship under the continuous threat of blackmail, exposure and arrest . . . What read as a futuristic nightmare to the heterosexual reader must have seemed to the homosexual reader somewhat paranoid and ignorant, because so close to the reality of homosexual life in England at the time—but showing no sign that Orwell was aware of this fact." I bet this means I should read the rest of the book.
4. Currently running at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum is an exhibit called "Curve Appeal." I thought from the title maybe it would feature C3 Corvettes, but the machines actually on display were even better; it is an entire collection of sleek, opulent, streamlined cars from the 1930's and early '40's, when aerodynamics met art deco. They are beautiful pieces of engineering. Like Tolkien to a reader of present-day fantasy, the Chrysler Airflow now looks utterly unremarkable, even a little obvious, but in 1934 its rounded-off, backswept lines were so avant-garde, the car was a notorious commercial failure. (Two years later, the Lincoln-Zephyr would take the same low-drag, high-concept principles and sell like hotcakes.) The 1935 Stout Scarab, a kind of aluminum-hulled, swivel-seated minivan designed by an aviation engineer, still looks futuristic. The 1938 Delahaye Type 135 and the Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupe, by contrast, are so intensely and elegantly of their time that you walk away with a sort of primal desire for martinis and perhaps a monocle. ("Bunter, launch the Lagonda!") The walls are hung with automotive concept art by Theodore W. Pietsch II, whose sense of movement reminded me oddly of the Vorticists. There is big-band jazz playing over the sound system, Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" and Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing." The exhibit was curated by Sheldon Steele and it's as much art history as it is science and technology—I'd recommend it even to people who are bored and/or horrified by cars.
5. I am confused as to how Neil Jordan's Ondine (2009) can be on Viking Zen's Roku one week and playing at the Kendall Square Cinema the next, but now I really have no excuse not to write up a post for it. It is a film about the sea and secrets and the reasons people tell themselves stories; it is neither Splash (1984) nor The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) and I liked it immensely. It has become clear to me that I couldn't have found a worse introduction to Colin Farrell than Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) if I'd studied how to do it.
6. I did not like The End of the Affair (1955), but its supporting cast consisted of Peter Cushing, John Mills, and Michael Goodliffe, so any time they were onscreen I can count as not a waste.
7. I believe emphatically that there are some things which never need to be remade, but Kelly Link's take on Bringing Up Baby (1938) would in fact result in the best remake ever. By a similar token, I find myself weirdly disappointed that Angela Carter never ran with this line from A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which I remember being struck by in tenth grade and then forgot about until yesterday: "Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:—looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just coming on."
8. I have received my preliminary schedule for Readercon. I will post it as soon as it becomes final.
9. Why did I not know that Hans Conried starred in the legendary "Chicken Heart" episode of Lights Out? Why am I not surprised?
postscript: I need to figure out who I can get to tape me The Shout (1978) off TCM at a quarter to four in the morning. John Hurt, Alan Bates, Susannah York; directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, story by Robert Graves. Alternatively, it's not like I sleep anyway.
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(And congratulations on the story! This anthology will be great. I read
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I think I was so firmly not its target audience, the last third of the film increasingly did not compute for me. I had no trouble with the supernatural aspects. After the bomb goes off, when a bruised and bewildered Bendrix stumbles upstairs to find Sarah on her knees in a state of shock at seeing him alive, it was immediately clear to me that he had been dead, that Sarah's prayer had brought him back, and that she was likely to pay for his life with hers, that being one of the oldest forms of exchange.1 I didn't even have a problem with the idea of keeping promises to someone you don't believe in, not because of Pascal's wager, but because suddenly it turns out to be important to you. I have great trouble with the concept of a God that would use a destructive relationship as the mechanism to bring back to faith a woman who never before needed any kind of god in her life merely because as a small child she was baptized Catholic to spite her non-religious father. And Bendrix is destructive; I have to assume that Van Johnson did a good job with the character because he set off so many of my interpersonal alarms with his possessiveness, his jealousy, his double standards, and his absolute refusal to treat her as a human being with independent thoughts and wishes, not just some object of obsessive desire. She ends their relationship, he stalks her as soon as he gets the chance. She tells him to leave her alone, he harries her out of her house. When a feverish, weeping woman tells you she hasn't got the strength to run away from you, that doesn't mean she can no longer resist her own long-repressed passions, that is right there the reason for the concept of enthusiastic consent. And that Sarah dies to get away from him—from the untenable Hobson's choice he has forced her life into, twisting her arm to get her away from the husband she doesn't love but has promised not to leave—but thereby finds God is a happy ending? If the film was intended as a horror story, maybe. But we are meant to see Sarah's late-found faith as the one true thing in her life, the thing that saves her. Thank you, I am formally creeped out now.
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Meanwhile the supporting cast is very fine. Not being listed on the back of the DVD box, Peter Cushing was a lovely surprise. He plays Henry Miles; in his reserve and his routine and the puzzled politeness where his sense of humor should be, it is immediately evident why he is a bad match for Deborah Kerr's Sarah and it is equally clear that he loves her deeply, more than he cares about himself, and he is not at all as Bendrix construes him—the complacent civil servant whose pride will be hurt if his wife leaves him. For me, he became the emotional center of the film. (And theologically the most reasonable character in it: when asked by Sarah what he believes in, really believes about heaven and hell and sin and salvation and all the rest of the things they teach you in Sunday school, he is at first nonplussed and a little embarrassed, then makes himself think about the question, and finally replies, "It's all quite simple . . . One does one's best." I couldn't tell if we were meant to find this an unsatisfactory answer, but it seemed quite sensible to me.) John Mills makes a sweet, tragicomic Albert Parkis, the private detective who has plainly stumbled in from the next universe over where he's muddling around the edges of a screwball romance, not a dysfunctional film noir with surprise God; he treats the dishonesties of his profession with scrupulous care—he'll steal Sarah's diary for Bendrix and explain with shy pride how he did it, but he won't even think of reading the contents—and names his son after a Grail knight, even if with characteristic good intentions he's mixed up which one actually found the Grail. And Michael Goodliffe is Richard Smythe, the proselytizing atheist whose rage at God is the most fervent expression of belief in the whole film. I don't share the character's need to have someone to blame for the whole shoddy world, but the film makes more eloquent use of his fine coin-clean profile and the birthmark splotched all across its left side than Smythe does of his own arguments. I would rather have spent more time with all three of these characters than all the rest of the runtime stuck inside Bendrix's head.2
1. The script reserves the possibility that Sarah only mistook him for dead when she tried to check his pulse and couldn't shift any of the rubble off him, but the evidence is against this interpretation. He has the vague, receding memory of great space and a long journey, a kind of hangover sense of not quite belonging to the world that he attributes to delayed shock. The doctors are stunned that not every bone in his body was smashed flat.
2. We are at least allowed Sarah's perspective for the extended flashback of her diary, but her lover still doesn't learn from it. I disliked, too, the implication that her death may be his avenue to God. Loving someone after they've gone is too easy; they can be anyone you remember. The real trick is when they're alive and imperfect and can hurt you. Otherwise you never learn how to love what's real.
And congratulations on the story!
Thank you!
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a dysfunctional film noir with surprise God I laughed. Yeah, that sums it up.
I have great trouble with the concept of a God that would use a destructive relationship as the mechanism to bring back to faith a woman who never before needed any kind of god in her life merely because as a small child she was baptized Catholic to spite her non-religious father. --Yes. I really have no interest at all in a dungeonmaster God who designs horrors for his PCs' moral edification and eventual glory. Not interested in that game, thanks.
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And I have a wide range for sympathetic characters! Some of my favorite people in fiction are fools, traitors, fuck-ups, liars, killers, at least one sociopath, and an assortment of other traits generally considered askance by polite society. But there is something about Bendrix's particular brand of romantic pathology that does not cause me to find him interesting; it causes me to be glad he's fictional, because there are enough people like that already in the world and they do not make it a better place. Just for starters, love is not defined by the extent of jealousy it inspires. Worst premise for a relationship ever.
The fact that I read it recently (within the past five years) and yet can't really remember the details of it also leads me to believe that I forgot it because it dissatisfied me.
So noted. I had been planning to read the novel for comparison; I may still, because it would take me about an hour and that's less time than I lost to its film, but this inclines me to believe the one is not a huge improvement on the other, at least as far as Bendrix is concerned.
Yeah, that sums it up.
Seriously, I was not expecting the God!
I really have no interest at all in a dungeonmaster God who designs horrors for his PCs' moral edification and eventual glory. Not interested in that game, thanks.
Back at you: that is a great metaphor.