I left out the last eight verses

[sovay]

Seriously, there should be an emoticon for not actually dead—I'm not, even if this inbox full of unanswered e-mail says otherwise. I got a cold. I dropped off the map. Mostly I've been self-medicating with various books and Flanders and Swann,¹ although last week Eric and I watched Norwegian Insomnia (1997) and this Wednesday Viking Zen showed me The Secret of Kells (2009).

In any case, the mail just brought me two awesome things: Louise Brooks' Lulu in Hollywood (1982), which I suspect of being a birthday present from my best cousins ever,² and my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #44, in which can be found my poem "In the Earth in Those Days." It is about Biblical selkies; asakiyume introduced me to the folklore. Appropriately, it appears in the same issue as Jeannelle Ferreira's "The Seal Wife," also Loren Rhoads' "Catalyst," Patricia Russo's "With the Blue Heart People," and other fine pieces of autumn and change. Go forth and pick up a copy of your own. I am going to read Louise Brooks until I have to leave for a rehearsal. Wish me luck.

1. Probably to no one's surprise but my own, I find that I consider Donald Swann awesome: I am already inclined to respect an ostensible straight man who goes off with Greek tongue-twisters and can sing about hippopotami in Russian even before he decides that going mainstream from light comedy means setting Tolkien to music and writing an opera of Perelandra. I don't suppose anyone has his recording of Sydney Carter's "Lord of the Dance"?

2. Edit: Confirmed. Best cousins ever.

Comments

[sovay]

I must go to my mailbox! My subscriber's copy should be waiting for me!

Enjoy!

How was The Secret of Kells.

Visually extraordinary, one of the most unusually beautiful animated films I have ever seen: it does not look like anything else except ninth-century Irish illuminated manuscripts, including when the characters are in motion; it refuses perspective in historically intricate, elegant ways and the last shimmer of the Chi-Rho page of the Book is alive. The otherworldly characters are not and could never be mistaken for human or mortal. There's a hilarious bit with Saint Colum Cille. There is a white cat named Pangur Bán. The narrative has problems. Some of the ways in which it deliberately leaves its loose ends untied are both admirable and successful, but in places they cause the film to feel like two or three stories awkwardly joined—or two or three different takes on the same material that somehow wound up in the same draft—and there's one major instance where they fixed an emotional tension that I had found incredibly powerful when unresolved; it's a Disney-level misstep in a film that otherwise has very little to do with conventional animation and I have no idea what happened. The other serious problem, which is both artistic and narrative, is the representation of the Vikings as black-and-red horned monsters; they come across as aliens or Orcs that have somehow nipped over from Peter Jackson's Middle-Earth and it doesn't work, because the film is otherwise very shaded about people's lives and motivations-even the pre-Christian sacrifice-god that Brendan winds up confronting¹ is not portrayed as hellish, only very old, a bloodstained dark place, and still hungry. And given the manuscript look of Kells, honestly, I'd have expected the Vikings to be animated in one of the traditional Norse styles. Instead they're from some other planet and the disjoint doesn't ruin the film, but it did interfere for me. I would still recommend you see it. I'd certainly like to see what its creators do next.

1. In one of the film's showpieces—who knew it was possible to be reminded simultaneously of Beowulf and Harold and the Purple Crayon, but it's gorgeous.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh, I definitely will, then. Thanks!