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In every cabin, I flamed amazement
My poem "Idle Thoughts While Watching a Faun" has placed second in the 2010 Strange Horizons Readers' Poll. Was not expecting that. I am also glad to see Theodora Goss' "The Mad Scientist's Daughter" at the top of the fiction list, since that story by its very existence makes me happy.
Yesterday Spooky and I line-edited a 103,791-word novel and did not bleed out from the eyes, so today we attempt to repeat the trick with the much huger manuscript for Two Worlds and In Between. Wish us luck. Otherwise, we recuperated last night with Palestinian takeout, a lot of staring vaguely into space, and I showed Caitlín Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), which I continue to love better than almost any Shakespeare I've seen filmed, and a short film from the same DVD, The Art of Mirrors (1973), which I feel should be better-known than it is. (It's a ritual done with light, reflection, procession, and audience gaze; the first time I saw it, it reminded me of the brief, enigmatic films encountered by some of Caitlín's characters. I believe it was later incorporated into In the Shadow of the Sun (1974), with music by Throbbing Gristle. It was originally titled A Summoning of Angels.) Tonight, assuming we survive that long, we are going to watch the director's cut of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998).
For my money, the really transgressive love scene in Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907) is not actually the famous one between Manke and Rivkele in the second act (though it is beautifully written, complete with allusions to the Song of Songs, as if there were any doubt that their union is sweeter and more sanctified than any of the heterosexual commerce taking place around them, Rivkele's still-in-the-brokering marriage included), but their first scene together at the end of the second act. Rivkele's mother—offstage, in the next room—is talking up a fantasy of the bridegroom, handsome, well-off, scholarly, whom she imagines her daughter longs for. And Rivkele is feeding her all the right questions ("Is he good-looking, Mama? Where is going to live, Mama? Will he love me, Mama?"), but she's in Manke's arms all the while, kissing between call-outs, answering the questions for herself. I'd love to see that staged.
Okay. Line-edits. Do I owe my soul to the platypus now?
Yesterday Spooky and I line-edited a 103,791-word novel and did not bleed out from the eyes, so today we attempt to repeat the trick with the much huger manuscript for Two Worlds and In Between. Wish us luck. Otherwise, we recuperated last night with Palestinian takeout, a lot of staring vaguely into space, and I showed Caitlín Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979), which I continue to love better than almost any Shakespeare I've seen filmed, and a short film from the same DVD, The Art of Mirrors (1973), which I feel should be better-known than it is. (It's a ritual done with light, reflection, procession, and audience gaze; the first time I saw it, it reminded me of the brief, enigmatic films encountered by some of Caitlín's characters. I believe it was later incorporated into In the Shadow of the Sun (1974), with music by Throbbing Gristle. It was originally titled A Summoning of Angels.) Tonight, assuming we survive that long, we are going to watch the director's cut of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998).
For my money, the really transgressive love scene in Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907) is not actually the famous one between Manke and Rivkele in the second act (though it is beautifully written, complete with allusions to the Song of Songs, as if there were any doubt that their union is sweeter and more sanctified than any of the heterosexual commerce taking place around them, Rivkele's still-in-the-brokering marriage included), but their first scene together at the end of the second act. Rivkele's mother—offstage, in the next room—is talking up a fantasy of the bridegroom, handsome, well-off, scholarly, whom she imagines her daughter longs for. And Rivkele is feeding her all the right questions ("Is he good-looking, Mama? Where is going to live, Mama? Will he love me, Mama?"), but she's in Manke's arms all the while, kissing between call-outs, answering the questions for herself. I'd love to see that staged.
Okay. Line-edits. Do I owe my soul to the platypus now?
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*PONK.*
Your soul may in fact only be leased by Platypus Holdings, Inc., I didn't check; but it just sent me to ponk you.
I wish so much we could get a cast together for this. And find a translation and maybe even some music that balances the shtetlik, the modern, the sacred, the profane, the quite-how-daring-it-was with the quite-how-daring-it-would-still-be. It still has too much domestic violence and too many lesbians to get decent traction, I fear.
*sigh*
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Your presence is appreciated. I think the platypus says hi. The cats certainly do, when they're not preoccupied with their own feline perversities and ignoring me.
I wish so much we could get a cast together for this. And find a translation and maybe even some music that balances the shtetlik, the modern, the sacred, the profane, the quite-how-daring-it-was with the quite-how-daring-it-would-still-be.
We have Neugroschel for the translation, and we can tweak him if we like; it sounds as though you have access to the original text. I don't see why it should be impossible to assemble a cast that can at least read half-convincingly. The music, we're probably stuck with CDs and whoever can sing. It would be wonderful, though, to be able to commission—or write—the Asch-equivalent of the Klezmatics' Possessed.
It still has too much domestic violence and too many lesbians to get decent traction, I fear.
Dude, if fistfights and lesbians don't bring in the cheap seats, what is the theater coming to?
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*steeples fingers unsubtly*
*looks about unsubtly*
But yes, something original would be amazing if only we knew composers with free time. Or we could go the Baz Luhrmann route and give it a contemporary soundtrack, but that's awfully fraught.
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We should at the very least repurpose the Klezmatics' "Honikzaft," changing the genders as appropriate.
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into In the Shadow of the Sun (1974), with music by Throbbing Gristle.
Oh! You didn't tell me that!
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I've never seen In the Shadow of the Sun! I'd have shown it to you if I did!
(Do you have the music?)
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Thank you! And you're welcome, though I cannot take any other credit for it.
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Thank you!
We're still in deathmarch territory, I'm afraid . . .
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Great good fortune to the novel. I hear it's fabulous.
I need to see the Jarman Tempest on disc. The Netflix streaming version is so irresolutely low-res that I missed three-quarters of its glories. I loved the feral Miranda and the way that the chalk in Prospero's fingers rhymes with Ariel's white boiler suit: they are one and the same, what he works with.
Could we at least do a half-staged reading of the Asch?
Nine
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Thanks!
Great good fortune to the novel. I hear it's fabulous.
It is.
I need to see the Jarman Tempest on disc. The Netflix streaming version is so irresolutely low-res that I missed three-quarters of its glories.
I'd check Hollywood Express or Harvard's library. It is worth being able to read the signs and equations chalked all over Prospero's walls.
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Nine
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You're a pretty awesome clairvoyant.
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