![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away
Of course, the posts I spend the most time on are the ones that attract the fewest comments. I should just accept this is how the internet works, but I keep wanting to talk about things anyway.
1. Anthony Lane on John le Carré. I can't reconstruct the remainder of this paragraph, which was killed by a computer crash. He's reading both the television and film versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy against the original novel, with support from the other Smiley novels. He should write about books more often; he's good with them.
2. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28: smiling Victorians. I love how goofy so many of these photographs are, especially the third and the last. I don't know if the first is really a bunch of students boating at Oxford, but existentially they feel as though they should be; most of them are successfully making eye contact with the camera, but one of them has glanced down at the wrong moment and another has been smiling just that fraction of a second too long not to look frozen. It's not an extraordinary picture; it's exactly as sweet and bad as most candid group photos, just more sepia. The second is simply a couple in a photo booth, strobe-flickering from sober-faced and formally seated, the kind of portrait that stares from the mantelpiece for decades, to completely adorable, dissolving in laughter and trying to hide from the camera. Also the wedding party where someone has snuck a kitten into the frame, because these things happen. The past is not more real when it's unguarded, but I still love these glimpses.
3. Andrew Swensen, "A Tale of Two Kreutzer Sonatas." The author was a professor of mine at Brandeis; he had a tremendous influence on the ways I think about film, literature, and the fantastic. The rest of the magazine is worth your attention, too.
4. It is not one of the great losses of cinema that Claude Rains did not get the part of Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), because Ernest Thesiger was a gift from the mad science gods, and likewise Dr. Gogol in Mad Love (1935), because of Peter Lorre, but I hadn't quite realized how close he came to being typed as a horror star. And probably would never have played most of the roles I love him for, but he would have been great. I just watched him as John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), which handles the source material's sudden stop partway through by reinventing it as a horror story from the beginning, very much in the style of other gaslight thrillers. Rains is younger than I've ever seen him onscreen, with a white, fevery face under his heavy black hair, so that he looks as symbolic as the split planes of his existence: a sweet-voiced cathedral choirmaster who twice a week Bunburys off to London to feed his opium habit. The Production Code must not have cared so long as no one said the word out loud, because the film opens in the Victorian equivalent of a crackhouse, inside one of Jasper's tormenting dreams, a clamoring delirium of spires and wedding bells and faces we don't yet recognize that crossfades nicely to his cleaned-up, daylight self proceeding down the aisle of a Sunday, his well-groomed boy sopranos falling into line behind him. He is the bad guardian of so many a melodrama, perving on one of his music students, sickeningly jealous of his nephew who's engaged to her, suffocating in the respectability of his position: "No wretched monk who ever groaned his life away in that gloomy cathedral could have been more tired of it. He could take to carving demons for relief—and did. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?" Of course, being played by Rains, he's not wholly unsympathetic; he's stricken by the realization that he's committed unnecessary murder and his subsequent attempts to make love to Rosa Bud slip badly from commanding seducer to tongue-tied crush as she recoils from him (note to self: the Anathea gambit never works); he ends badly and dramatically, the prey of guilt, dope, and genre convention. I still think the line "You can't go round strangling people without paying for it!" is funny.
5. The next thing I want to see via National Theatre Live: Travelling Light. I don't know the playwright, but I like Antony Sher, early cinema, and Jewish history; the combination looks worth the price of a ticket to me.
1. Anthony Lane on John le Carré. I can't reconstruct the remainder of this paragraph, which was killed by a computer crash. He's reading both the television and film versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy against the original novel, with support from the other Smiley novels. He should write about books more often; he's good with them.
2. Courtesy of
fleurdelis28: smiling Victorians. I love how goofy so many of these photographs are, especially the third and the last. I don't know if the first is really a bunch of students boating at Oxford, but existentially they feel as though they should be; most of them are successfully making eye contact with the camera, but one of them has glanced down at the wrong moment and another has been smiling just that fraction of a second too long not to look frozen. It's not an extraordinary picture; it's exactly as sweet and bad as most candid group photos, just more sepia. The second is simply a couple in a photo booth, strobe-flickering from sober-faced and formally seated, the kind of portrait that stares from the mantelpiece for decades, to completely adorable, dissolving in laughter and trying to hide from the camera. Also the wedding party where someone has snuck a kitten into the frame, because these things happen. The past is not more real when it's unguarded, but I still love these glimpses. 3. Andrew Swensen, "A Tale of Two Kreutzer Sonatas." The author was a professor of mine at Brandeis; he had a tremendous influence on the ways I think about film, literature, and the fantastic. The rest of the magazine is worth your attention, too.
4. It is not one of the great losses of cinema that Claude Rains did not get the part of Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein (1935), because Ernest Thesiger was a gift from the mad science gods, and likewise Dr. Gogol in Mad Love (1935), because of Peter Lorre, but I hadn't quite realized how close he came to being typed as a horror star. And probably would never have played most of the roles I love him for, but he would have been great. I just watched him as John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), which handles the source material's sudden stop partway through by reinventing it as a horror story from the beginning, very much in the style of other gaslight thrillers. Rains is younger than I've ever seen him onscreen, with a white, fevery face under his heavy black hair, so that he looks as symbolic as the split planes of his existence: a sweet-voiced cathedral choirmaster who twice a week Bunburys off to London to feed his opium habit. The Production Code must not have cared so long as no one said the word out loud, because the film opens in the Victorian equivalent of a crackhouse, inside one of Jasper's tormenting dreams, a clamoring delirium of spires and wedding bells and faces we don't yet recognize that crossfades nicely to his cleaned-up, daylight self proceeding down the aisle of a Sunday, his well-groomed boy sopranos falling into line behind him. He is the bad guardian of so many a melodrama, perving on one of his music students, sickeningly jealous of his nephew who's engaged to her, suffocating in the respectability of his position: "No wretched monk who ever groaned his life away in that gloomy cathedral could have been more tired of it. He could take to carving demons for relief—and did. What shall I do? Must I take to carving them out of my heart?" Of course, being played by Rains, he's not wholly unsympathetic; he's stricken by the realization that he's committed unnecessary murder and his subsequent attempts to make love to Rosa Bud slip badly from commanding seducer to tongue-tied crush as she recoils from him (note to self: the Anathea gambit never works); he ends badly and dramatically, the prey of guilt, dope, and genre convention. I still think the line "You can't go round strangling people without paying for it!" is funny.
5. The next thing I want to see via National Theatre Live: Travelling Light. I don't know the playwright, but I like Antony Sher, early cinema, and Jewish history; the combination looks worth the price of a ticket to me.
no subject
I recommend him very highly. Start with either The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), which are his most famous novels for a reason; you'll be able to tell from them whether you like his style, in which case you should go back to Call for the Dead (1961) and at least read up through Smiley's People (1979). There was a period after that when he became scattershot, although I like A Perfect Spy (1986) and The Secret Pilgrim (1990), and I was surprisingly fond of his most recent novel, Our Kind of Traitor (2010). The film of The Tailor of Panama (1996) is more of a satire than the book, but both might still be worth your time.
no subject
I have this strange feeling that one of his, maybe Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was on a shelf in the basement when I was eight or ten, and that I read part of it, as one does at that age, with the painsome feeling that, although one knows all the words, there's some adult secret involved in actually finding meaning in them, a secret which one hasn't learnt and one can't see how to learn. And nothing of the dull schoolday round of spelling and geography and the Northwest Ordinance and French stories about children pushing the same wheel round, except their wheel has mostly French on it and is in Lyons or Trois-Rivières, would seem to offer one any hope that ever one will learn it.
Or at least that's how it was for me.