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What fabulous weather—oy vey, what a day
In which I should have posted much earlier in the day, but I spent most of it reading slush for Strange Horizons and then I think I cleaned things. A cake happened. This is undoubtedly going to be one of those posts where I put so many things into it, no one reads any of them.
1. My essay "It's Not, Quite Frankly, a Wholesome Situation: Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" is now online at Weird Fiction Review. They gave it illustrations from the film! Trust me, they won't explain anything!
2. Yesterday was spent with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28, muchabstracted, and Judith who if she has a livejournal hasn't told me about it, tramping the grounds of Maudslay State Park. The official website is not very descriptive. It's an early twentieth century estate that seems to have been deliberately let run to seed after its family died out in the '50's; it's one of the uncanniest places I've been in years. The houses themselves were torn down, but the bridges, the spinneys, the fields and the outbuildings remain. You wander through the trails of overgrown groves, different zones of forest all switchbacked together. There is a formal garden in ruins: dry rose-trees, hollow cold frames, a half-walled courtyard and the clipped hedges of the maze blurred, but still knee-height, lashed up the walls with crackling vines. A sundial stands in the center, in the January-grey overcast pointing to no time at all. There are Greco-Roman figures moving around the base, weather-softened, still a dance of nymphs and heroes. It would have given once onto a pleached alley of pines and you can still see the branches entangling, but wildly, unwoven, throwing roots above your head. There is a lawn with old grape-arbors and what must have been the poles of fruit-trees; they stand now like the numerals on a clock. I have dreamed places like this. I have read of them, sometimes in children's books, sometimes in nightmares. Judith and Erica poked at the rainwater cat-ice in the fountain that hadn't run in fifty years and I kept glancing around, because it felt like stopped time. The roses were dead, but Fleur-de-Lis said no more than when she and Judith were there in late summer.
There was also the Inexplicable Thing, which turned out to be the most impressive bottle tree I've ever seen in my life, or maybe it was a ceilingful of do-it-yourself witch balls. It is right near the small stone grave-makers of what must have been family dogs; at least, the names sound wrong for horses. Barney. Akela. Tinker. Tsampo. The dates are all from the '30's and '40's. The bottle tree is inside a sort of tumulus storage vault, with nothing on the plaque over the doors but "1929." I mean, I also took off my boots and jacket and climbed an excellent tree right after we had hiked across the first field, but that was around two-thirty when there was still the clear water-gilded sky of some winter afternoons and the air smelled unseasonably like summer and haying. (Sometimes I thought of Robert Holdstock, especially Lavondyss (1988). Other times, Peter Greenaway.) By four o'clock, the temperature had dropped to a fog-raw freeze, the sun was gone, and we were watching ice-floes run past on the Merrimack River, crunching up a tidal shore like an Andy Goldsworthy installation, circling a house boarded up at all the windows and falling into stucco, faded turquoise-green paint and lath.
3. Reproduced from comments on a post ofpoliphilo's, where he's thinking about anti-Semitism:
I was going to link you to a November New York Review of Books review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) because of the reviewer's footnote about the dismaying "old British literary habit" he finds Hollinghurst recapitulating by naming those characters who serve as markers of foreign wealth and/or crass modern decline things like "Sharon Feingold" and "Jerry Goldblatt," and in the process I found a December letter to the editors and just this week a response from the author: so, no. The debate doesn't even stop with Eliot and Beaton.
(For what it's worth, I'm with Daniel Mendelsohn. His original point is clear and brief, faulting what he sees as a correctable susceptibility to literary conventions rather than a Pound-like pathology; his responses in both cases are detailed, nuanced, and generous with the assumptions of others, although he indicates it annoys him that interpretation of his footnote has come to dominate discussion of Hollinghurst's book. Both Galen Strawson and Hollinghurst go for an ad hominem suspicion of Mendelsohn's motives and ability as a critic that does not leave me convinced of their abilities to have the discussion without digging themselves in deeper at the least.)
Casual literary anti-Semitism is something I have never quite gotten used to running into. It seems to happen a lot in Golden Age mysteries, probably because the stereotype provides a handy dash of throwaway seediness—there's the protagonist pursuing a line of inquiry and all of a sudden there's someone dark-complected and a bit shifty, or flashy and trying too hard, or perhaps a little too sleek and ingratiating, with bonus points if they are delicately described as "Levantine" or "Oriental," and seriously, what's with the lisping? Man, this should have been a post of its own and then I'd be depressed.
One of the many, many reasonsstrange_selkie should finish her Secret Regency Thing already: she quite deliberately includes a red-haired jeweler named Mendelssohn and he's awesome.
4. A few nights ago, I caught the Kordas' The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM. I know I should not be, especially considering how many of them are my favorites, but I am still sometimes surprised at the subtlety of older films. The plot kicks off with Lieutenant Harry Faversham (John Clements) resigning his commission from the North Surrey Regiment. He only took it in the first place under pressure from his father and the impossible weight of family tradition, all those straight-backed, stiff-lipped, soldiering Favershams who stared down from their portraits on a terrified poetry-reading boy, fifteen years old and still flinching from shadows; he says that with his father's death that obligation ended and he never believed they should be fighting with Kitchener in the Sudan anyway. His commanding officer is appalled, but cannot actually refuse; he says cuttingly as he accepts the letter, "I never thought I should live to see a Faversham play the coward." And Clements, who till then had looked rather conventionally handsome, brooding in the slightly solid way of many actors who trained in early film, did nothing but tighten his jaw and not quite meet the officer's eye and he was all of a sudden that boy at his birthday dinner ten years gone, pale-faced in his black suit and a little too delicate around the mouth, clutching his despised book of Shelley under the table while his father tells horror stories of the Crimea to toughen him up—soldiers who funked their duty and blew their brains out, soldiers who charged gallantly ahead and got their brains blown out anyway, all the pride of the family brought to bear on Harry's shame. Just for a second, a sudden flicker across the actor's face, but he was entirely someone else and it had nothing to do with the usual expressions of the time. And mostly for that, I kept watching. Even if John Laurie was playing the Khalifa.
What really interested me was that the film knows there's something absurd in this scene—not Harry, whose only real weakness is his hammered-in willingness to believe the worst of himself, but General Faversham and his old fellow-campaigners, a long tableful of gargoyles of Empire congratulating themselves on blind obedience and freak luck. One of them is always telling the story of the Battle of Balaclava, representing the Russian guns with a handful of walnuts and himself with a pineapple. Who would want to grow up to be like them? They are the old men who send the young to die. Maybe this is what happens when a story of never-sunset Britain is made by a triplicate of Hungarian Jewish brothers: Zoltan directing, Alexander as producer, art direction by Vincent. There's still casual racism aplenty in the script, fuzzy-wuzzies and savage bloodlust and all the prominent Arab roles being played by British actors in brownface (although a shocking number of extras with lines actually seemed to be North African). But the film doesn't think Harry is a coward, even when he's convinced himself of it, and the way he becomes a recognizable hero has nothing to do with the codes and traditions of imperial Britain as he's been hectored to obey them. He doesn't set his teeth and charge hopelessly into the mouth of hell for queen and country. He disguises himself as romantically as anything out of Shelley and becomes a sort of one-man intelligence operation, passing for the most despised caste of Sudanese native (mirroring his own branding as a British coward) in order to rescue all three of his one-time friends and return their white feathers to them in secret, a slippery, back-handed, identity-twisting sort of redemption that is as equally mad in its own way as Ralph Richardson's Captain Durrance refusing to tell his men on the eve of battle that he's been blinded by sunstroke and couldn't lead them out of a paper bag. The combined effect makes the film much less rah-rah-Empire than it could have been—Harry's heroism isn't a joke, but the fact that his world demands it of him in such glaring terms might be. His last act of bravery is tongue-in-cheek, but telling. In order to redeem the fourth feather from his fiancée, he has to stand up to her calcified Blimp of a father the next time he launches into his interminable story about Balaclava with the walnuts and the pineapple—himself rallying the troops forward to their glorious mostly doom—and politely but firmly contradict the old man: "But nobody ever said, 'The 68th will move forward!'"
(Because I haven't read the book, I have no idea what is supposed to happen to Harry after the end of the film, but I kind of hope that having impressed the fuck out of everyone, he goes on to become a totally effective civilian; he has clearly better things to do with his life than kill the people he meets in interesting places.)
5. Having missed the entire first season of Downton Abbey, I seem to have arrived in time for World War I in Season Two. There are several characters I'm interested in already; I'm sure this means all sorts of awful things will happen to them, but it's nice to have something to pay attention to on a weekly basis.
I will post my Arisia schedule tomorrow.
1. My essay "It's Not, Quite Frankly, a Wholesome Situation: Dr. Seuss' The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T" is now online at Weird Fiction Review. They gave it illustrations from the film! Trust me, they won't explain anything!
2. Yesterday was spent with
fleurdelis28, muchabstracted, and Judith who if she has a livejournal hasn't told me about it, tramping the grounds of Maudslay State Park. The official website is not very descriptive. It's an early twentieth century estate that seems to have been deliberately let run to seed after its family died out in the '50's; it's one of the uncanniest places I've been in years. The houses themselves were torn down, but the bridges, the spinneys, the fields and the outbuildings remain. You wander through the trails of overgrown groves, different zones of forest all switchbacked together. There is a formal garden in ruins: dry rose-trees, hollow cold frames, a half-walled courtyard and the clipped hedges of the maze blurred, but still knee-height, lashed up the walls with crackling vines. A sundial stands in the center, in the January-grey overcast pointing to no time at all. There are Greco-Roman figures moving around the base, weather-softened, still a dance of nymphs and heroes. It would have given once onto a pleached alley of pines and you can still see the branches entangling, but wildly, unwoven, throwing roots above your head. There is a lawn with old grape-arbors and what must have been the poles of fruit-trees; they stand now like the numerals on a clock. I have dreamed places like this. I have read of them, sometimes in children's books, sometimes in nightmares. Judith and Erica poked at the rainwater cat-ice in the fountain that hadn't run in fifty years and I kept glancing around, because it felt like stopped time. The roses were dead, but Fleur-de-Lis said no more than when she and Judith were there in late summer.There was also the Inexplicable Thing, which turned out to be the most impressive bottle tree I've ever seen in my life, or maybe it was a ceilingful of do-it-yourself witch balls. It is right near the small stone grave-makers of what must have been family dogs; at least, the names sound wrong for horses. Barney. Akela. Tinker. Tsampo. The dates are all from the '30's and '40's. The bottle tree is inside a sort of tumulus storage vault, with nothing on the plaque over the doors but "1929." I mean, I also took off my boots and jacket and climbed an excellent tree right after we had hiked across the first field, but that was around two-thirty when there was still the clear water-gilded sky of some winter afternoons and the air smelled unseasonably like summer and haying. (Sometimes I thought of Robert Holdstock, especially Lavondyss (1988). Other times, Peter Greenaway.) By four o'clock, the temperature had dropped to a fog-raw freeze, the sun was gone, and we were watching ice-floes run past on the Merrimack River, crunching up a tidal shore like an Andy Goldsworthy installation, circling a house boarded up at all the windows and falling into stucco, faded turquoise-green paint and lath.
3. Reproduced from comments on a post of
poliphilo's, where he's thinking about anti-Semitism: I was going to link you to a November New York Review of Books review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child (2011) because of the reviewer's footnote about the dismaying "old British literary habit" he finds Hollinghurst recapitulating by naming those characters who serve as markers of foreign wealth and/or crass modern decline things like "Sharon Feingold" and "Jerry Goldblatt," and in the process I found a December letter to the editors and just this week a response from the author: so, no. The debate doesn't even stop with Eliot and Beaton.
(For what it's worth, I'm with Daniel Mendelsohn. His original point is clear and brief, faulting what he sees as a correctable susceptibility to literary conventions rather than a Pound-like pathology; his responses in both cases are detailed, nuanced, and generous with the assumptions of others, although he indicates it annoys him that interpretation of his footnote has come to dominate discussion of Hollinghurst's book. Both Galen Strawson and Hollinghurst go for an ad hominem suspicion of Mendelsohn's motives and ability as a critic that does not leave me convinced of their abilities to have the discussion without digging themselves in deeper at the least.)
Casual literary anti-Semitism is something I have never quite gotten used to running into. It seems to happen a lot in Golden Age mysteries, probably because the stereotype provides a handy dash of throwaway seediness—there's the protagonist pursuing a line of inquiry and all of a sudden there's someone dark-complected and a bit shifty, or flashy and trying too hard, or perhaps a little too sleek and ingratiating, with bonus points if they are delicately described as "Levantine" or "Oriental," and seriously, what's with the lisping? Man, this should have been a post of its own and then I'd be depressed.
One of the many, many reasons
strange_selkie should finish her Secret Regency Thing already: she quite deliberately includes a red-haired jeweler named Mendelssohn and he's awesome.4. A few nights ago, I caught the Kordas' The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM. I know I should not be, especially considering how many of them are my favorites, but I am still sometimes surprised at the subtlety of older films. The plot kicks off with Lieutenant Harry Faversham (John Clements) resigning his commission from the North Surrey Regiment. He only took it in the first place under pressure from his father and the impossible weight of family tradition, all those straight-backed, stiff-lipped, soldiering Favershams who stared down from their portraits on a terrified poetry-reading boy, fifteen years old and still flinching from shadows; he says that with his father's death that obligation ended and he never believed they should be fighting with Kitchener in the Sudan anyway. His commanding officer is appalled, but cannot actually refuse; he says cuttingly as he accepts the letter, "I never thought I should live to see a Faversham play the coward." And Clements, who till then had looked rather conventionally handsome, brooding in the slightly solid way of many actors who trained in early film, did nothing but tighten his jaw and not quite meet the officer's eye and he was all of a sudden that boy at his birthday dinner ten years gone, pale-faced in his black suit and a little too delicate around the mouth, clutching his despised book of Shelley under the table while his father tells horror stories of the Crimea to toughen him up—soldiers who funked their duty and blew their brains out, soldiers who charged gallantly ahead and got their brains blown out anyway, all the pride of the family brought to bear on Harry's shame. Just for a second, a sudden flicker across the actor's face, but he was entirely someone else and it had nothing to do with the usual expressions of the time. And mostly for that, I kept watching. Even if John Laurie was playing the Khalifa.
What really interested me was that the film knows there's something absurd in this scene—not Harry, whose only real weakness is his hammered-in willingness to believe the worst of himself, but General Faversham and his old fellow-campaigners, a long tableful of gargoyles of Empire congratulating themselves on blind obedience and freak luck. One of them is always telling the story of the Battle of Balaclava, representing the Russian guns with a handful of walnuts and himself with a pineapple. Who would want to grow up to be like them? They are the old men who send the young to die. Maybe this is what happens when a story of never-sunset Britain is made by a triplicate of Hungarian Jewish brothers: Zoltan directing, Alexander as producer, art direction by Vincent. There's still casual racism aplenty in the script, fuzzy-wuzzies and savage bloodlust and all the prominent Arab roles being played by British actors in brownface (although a shocking number of extras with lines actually seemed to be North African). But the film doesn't think Harry is a coward, even when he's convinced himself of it, and the way he becomes a recognizable hero has nothing to do with the codes and traditions of imperial Britain as he's been hectored to obey them. He doesn't set his teeth and charge hopelessly into the mouth of hell for queen and country. He disguises himself as romantically as anything out of Shelley and becomes a sort of one-man intelligence operation, passing for the most despised caste of Sudanese native (mirroring his own branding as a British coward) in order to rescue all three of his one-time friends and return their white feathers to them in secret, a slippery, back-handed, identity-twisting sort of redemption that is as equally mad in its own way as Ralph Richardson's Captain Durrance refusing to tell his men on the eve of battle that he's been blinded by sunstroke and couldn't lead them out of a paper bag. The combined effect makes the film much less rah-rah-Empire than it could have been—Harry's heroism isn't a joke, but the fact that his world demands it of him in such glaring terms might be. His last act of bravery is tongue-in-cheek, but telling. In order to redeem the fourth feather from his fiancée, he has to stand up to her calcified Blimp of a father the next time he launches into his interminable story about Balaclava with the walnuts and the pineapple—himself rallying the troops forward to their glorious mostly doom—and politely but firmly contradict the old man: "But nobody ever said, 'The 68th will move forward!'"
(Because I haven't read the book, I have no idea what is supposed to happen to Harry after the end of the film, but I kind of hope that having impressed the fuck out of everyone, he goes on to become a totally effective civilian; he has clearly better things to do with his life than kill the people he meets in interesting places.)
5. Having missed the entire first season of Downton Abbey, I seem to have arrived in time for World War I in Season Two. There are several characters I'm interested in already; I'm sure this means all sorts of awful things will happen to them, but it's nice to have something to pay attention to on a weekly basis.
I will post my Arisia schedule tomorrow.
no subject
I hope it rewards your waiting.
Thanks for sharing!
You're very welcome. I take it I should read The Little Stranger?
(My sole experience of Sarah Waters is The Night Watch. I assume she doesn't usually write her novels backward.)
Re: your comment on Downton Abbey; are you often drawn to characters who meet bad ends, then?
At one point in my college friend group, it became a running joke. Part of it is my tendency to imprint on secondary characters, who are more vulnerable to being killed off or at least substantially damaged in protagonist-prohibited ways; part of it is almost certainly that the character traits that interest me most tend to cluster in directions where bad things can happen; part of it just seems to be slightly silly luck. Hello, you're an interesting addition to the supporting cast. Wait, you turned out to be evil and/or dead. Sorry about that. I'm trying now to think of a definitive example—John Frobisher from Torchwood: Children of Earth might be sufficiently high-profile for purposes of this discussion. Now that I've become fond of The Dresden Files's Butters, I'm just praying Jim Butcher doesn't decide to knock him off to make some kind of point about the unpredictability of it all. (I think he may have died technically in the most recent book, or at least he was temporarily evicted from his own body, but the local medium stuck him back together.) I mean, in ninth grade we were assigned Romeo and Juliet. I thought Mercutio was awesome. Look where that got me.
As regards Downton Abbey itself—for example, I suspect we are supposed to dislike Thomas. He got himself sent home from the Somme with a self-inflicted "Blighty" when all around him equally terrified men were staying and dying; the high-handed, insinuating tone he takes with the other domestics doesn't seem to have made him many friends during his previous tenure at Downton; he has a history of being ambitious in underhanded ways. He's also incredibly good with the gas-blinded young lieutenant at the hospital he's seconded to—he can't save the boy (you never can save anyone), but he's far more effective as a kind of improvised nurse's orderly than he ever was as a panic-frozen stretcher-bearer. That's the sort of complexity that gets my attention: now I'm waiting to see whether the series will be able to keep it up or whether it will collapse him back into a more familiar type. (Also I'm fairly certain he's gay. Waiting to see how that's handled, too.)
I'm also interested by the valet with shell-shock, which means—he's fragile—I do expect something awful to happen to him, and historically it's worse than even odds on the solicitor heir in the trenches. I feel as though I was meant to like the previous valet, Bates, but as he spent most of the episode being self-sacrificing in the ways that annoy me most, I just wanted to shake him sharply, several times. The youngest of the Crawley sisters, Sybil, who is volunteering as a nurse, will probably come through all right.
no subject
Mr. Bates was as annoyingly self-sacrificing in the first season, but it built gradually, and you also saw him trying to overcome a handicap and prove himself, so he was more likable (imo).
no subject
There's a character in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun (1993—1996) about whom I would feel very differently if I had read the books in their proper order.
One thing I **don't* like is how his nastiness and ambition seem, in the writers' eyes, to be tied up with his sexual identity.
Since he's the only visibly gay character in the cast so far, it would be a problem if he were also the most conniving and least trustworthy, yes. To Courtenay, he mostly talks about what it's like to be marginalized: "All my life they've pushed me around just because I'm different . . . You're not a victim. Don't let them make you into one." (And that all ends as happily as most characters that interest me . . .)
But maybe it's a blessing in disguise.
I think you need to unpack that statement for me.
Mr. Bates was as annoyingly self-sacrificing in the first season, but it built gradually, and you also saw him trying to overcome a handicap and prove himself, so he was more likable (imo).
The first season is worth going back for, then?
no subject
I think you need to unpack that statement for me.
Yeah, sorry about that! I had a longer paragraph, basically arguing with myself, and that's all that remained of it by the time I got done editing and reediting myself. Basically, although I really enjoy the show, I think (fear/suspect?) the writers have a problem making characters that are mixed (that have both likable and unlikable traits)--they seem to be able to make all-around pleasant characters or conniving nasty ones, but nothing in between. Mary's maybe the only exception in the first season: she's selfish and vindictive, but also miserable and trapped, and you can see how the former arises from the latter. Plus, she grows up a bit. Other characters, like Anna or Sybil, are straight-up nice, or, like Ms. O'Brian in the first season, just TERRIBLE. (She's a bit of a penitent right now too, though still a schemer.) And Thomas was just over on the negative side of the equation, and I thought, huh, a scheming gay guy; now that's not predictable ... but then, when I think of the alternative--an angel-of-light gay guy--and when I think of the writers' apparent penchant for martyrdom (Mr. Bates!), then I come to the conclusion that if they'd made him a good guy, they'd have made him a martyr to his gayness, and a huge victim. This way at least he has agency and drive, and *maybe* room to be redeemed by love or something. So that's what led me to say that maybe it's a blessing in disguise. /long-winded.
no subject
Hm. I may not be able to watch it, then, unless they improve—I don't do well with straight-split light-or-dark characterizations. My favorite characters are always mixed even when they wind up inexplicably on the positive side. If Thomas being complicated is out of character, I don't know.
but then, when I think of the alternative--an angel-of-light gay guy--and when I think of the writers' apparent penchant for martyrdom (Mr. Bates!), then I come to the conclusion that if they'd made him a good guy, they'd have made him a martyr to his gayness, and a huge victim.
True. At least when you're being a bastard, you're doing something.
no subject
In fact, I'm sure of it. Maggie Smith's character and Matthew Crawley's mother are fun characters who are extremely likable but with real-life flaws, and same with Lady Grantham and Matthew Crawley.
So maybe this is it: their likable characters have realistic enough foibles, but the dark characters don't seem to have much to redeem them, which doesn't seem balanced.
*That*, I think, isn't overstating the case. You might still not end up interested in it, but give season one a try anyway. Some of the scenes are very fun--funny even. I really enjoyed it.
no subject
All right: I trust you.