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I'm an engineer, not a magician
I am still recovering from Readercon! Have some stuff that's been occupying me since then.
1. My poem "Lyric Fragment" is now online at Goblin Fruit. It was written in the fall of 2010 for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks and incorporates one of my favorite pieces of Greek lyric (Anakreon fr. 398). I don't think it counts as a ghost poem, even if the poet has a look in. I never did write about him and Marlowe.
2. Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds (2010) is as good ashandful_ofdust promised when she threw it at me and avoids the Stross problem entirely: while the text neither erases nor elides the Holocaust (it is not a focus, but references to the camps exist), it leaves genocide an entirely human atrocity; it has nothing to do with the blood prices paid by the warlocks of Britain to the terrible, Enochian-speaking Eidolons in order to ward the island against Nazi invasion or the torturous, high-attrition methods used by Doctor von Westarp of the Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials to stimulate and accelerate fringe-science superpowers in his "children." If the novel has a historical fault for me, it's that it seems to reduce World War II to a conflict between England and Germany with only a little of Russia brought in near the end to be the unpredictable third factor that both preternaturally-enhanced sides have overlooked—I'll buy the case for isolationist America, but I really feel Italy or Japan should at least have gotten a name-check. Given the novel's tight focus on one British warlock, one agent for the SOE-like Milkweed, and the most conventionally sympathetic member of von Westarp's Götterelektrongruppe, however, I'm willing to wait for the sequel and see whether this was a function of viewpoint rather than simplification. I believe the author is American, which is interesting. In any case, the book is probably not an easy read by most people's standards, dealing as it does with all sorts of supernatural and emotional atrocities, but I was impressed. Next, please.
3. I'd wanted to see Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943) ever since I became aware that there were movies produced under the banner of the Archers outside of the famous collaborations of Powell and Pressburger. (It didn't hurt that Sewell was the very first character introduced in Michael Powell's 200,000 Feet on Foula (1938): "We were nosing blind through a tangle of mudbanks and fretful shipping; he had been on his feet for thirty-six hours and had the prospect of a sleepless night before him; his ship was a shambles, his cabin had two people asleep in it, but I knew, because I know Vernon, that he was struggling not to giggle out loud with the pure joy of his first steam command. Kipling would have appreciated Vernon: he has described him many times.") The film came out on DVD last October. I couldn't find it anywhere. It came up again on Monday when I was discussing Ralph Richardson withnineweaving. Thank God for YouTube.
The Silver Fleet is not brilliant as films by the Archers themselves are brilliant, but it is an above-average propaganda story of the quietly heroic kind: with its themes of collaboration and resistance, it makes a good companion piece to Powell and Pressburger's own One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) or even Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine from the same year. Richardson is Jaap van Leyden, part-owner of a shipyard in (fictional) Schipsdam that's been in his family for five generations and its chief engineer. The outbreak of war stalled production on a pair of submarines commissioned by the Royal Netherlands Navy, but following the Nazi occupation he's asked to complete the project for the Kriegsmarine. He gets an afternoon to think about it. He agrees. The yard reopens three days later under German supervision; a tallish, pleasant-faced, not terribly remarkable man in a double-breasted suit, Jaap goes to work. Under the name of Piet Hein—the folk hero who defeated the Spanish Armada and about whom songs are sung even today by schoolchildren in the Netherlands, as his son was singing that afternoon Jaap arrived early to pick him up from school and overheard the story of the Silver Fleet—he begins to organize a resistance at the shipyard, coordinating what might otherwise be scattershot acts of sabotage, plotting the disposal of both submarines in ways that won't do a thing for the Reich and might even give its enemies a hand. The catch is that he is doing so secretly, not only from the Nazis but from the men who work for him, and in the meantime his public face is that of a collaborator. His wife Helene (Googie Withers) finds herself shunned, sneered at—the grocer refuses her ration cards, telling her to go to her friends the Nazis if she wants coffee or eggs. Their son Willem comes home daily with new scrapes and bruises from fighting off boys who call his father a quisling. It is left to the viewer to fill in the graffiti the housekeeper has to keep washing off the front door. "'Piet Hein' is getting more and more popular each day," Jaap's diary dryly notes—"I and my family are getting more unpopular."
(Helene is thank fuck not written as a stupid wife, nor Jaap as a mistrustful husband. He's terrified of what will happen if there's the slightest link between his family and Piet Hein, especially given the increasingly active interest of the local Gestapo; she relies on her knowledge of the man she married to reassure her that his secret is something patriotic, not something even sketchier than inviting those same Nazi officers over for dinner parties. He won't tell her anything straight out, but he won't lie to her face, either. A portrait of Queen Wilhelmina, put away from its place of pride on the wall, becomes the way they do not speak about what he's doing: "Look in the drawer every day and see whether it's still there. And trust me, my darling." But it's still a strain, and the film doesn't pretend that Helene is failing her husband somehow by wondering whether he's really become the thing he performs—if the audience didn't have access to his private thoughts, we'd wonder, too. A different film might have played with that tension; this one is more interested in exploring the performance's effects.)
I had written to Nine, "I caught twenty minutes out of the middle of The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM and it struck me that Ralph Richardson had a dramatic actor's career with a clown's face: that round, bemused moon-look and the way his hair rumpled up if he didn't do anything actively about it. It's part of what makes him so heartbreakingly effective as Baines in The Fallen Idol (1949); he looks like he should belong to one of those other, safer stories that the film is not." It's a similar asset to his performance as Jaap van Leyden, because the shipwright needs to appear utterly harmless to the Germans. He doesn't play an opportunistic sort, like the grocer's nephew who hopes to get his uncle's shop in exchange for the names of his resistance contacts, but if he's not bribable, then he's simply taking the route of least resistance. He's getting to keep his great-great-grandfather's shipyard, isn't he? And so van Leyden is always smiling, always a little conciliatory—never embarrassing himself, but the most he allows himself to disagree with his handlers is a safely theatrical kind of testiness, as when he protests the trouble his collaboration is causing his business: "My dear von Schiffer, could you run your special police without men? How in heaven's name do you expect me to operate a shipyard without hands?" A visiting officer interjects with reminding amusement, "Not in heaven's name, but possibly in Himmler's," to which Jaap retorts, eyebrows peaked, "Has Himmler helped to stoke my boilers?" It's a fool's license, light comedy they can afford. That mild smile can be ironic, that whimsical little chuckle of a man who admits his own cowardice. The Germans are encouraged to respect his intelligence as an engineer and dismiss him otherwise with a kind of tolerant scorn: a clever fellow who knows when he's beaten, not like the rest of these crazy stiff-necked Dutch. None of the plans he's made as Piet Hein will work unless they trust him. So he plays one secret identity off against the other, balancing the faith of the workers who wait for the next coded message from their hero against the latitude the Germans extend to a willing traitor, hoping all the while none of his patriots will try an independent act of sabotage or the man who works the crane won't just drop a side of steel plate onto his despised quisling of a boss or his wife won't finally lose heart, seeing her husband ring up the Gestapo chief the night a bombing is threatened in the yard. It all ends in that heroic-tragic vein that describes so many real-life stories of resistance, though much more subtly than I was expecting. The pages of Jaap's diary have been our guide, turned by Helene. We read his last entry with her; the rest we must put together for ourselves from the enigmatic opening scenes: a sunken submarine, a slow pan across motionless faces we do not recognize, sailors tumbled together like ragdolls and a man in civilian clothes with his eyes closed as if only sleeping, except that seawater is trickling in. The music kind of hammers away at the point, but that was an occupational hazard of film scores of the time. Allan Gray did much better work on A Canterbury Tale (1944). It would have been a quirkier film if the Archers had directed it. It's still one I'm quite glad to have seen.
4. I have discovered the original Broadway cast recording of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with Blitzstein himself on piano and narration. Because I'd never actually heard him when he wasn't being played by Hank Azaria, I wasn't sure it was the right version until I skipped ahead to "Leaflets" and "The Cradle Will Rock," the two numbers sung by Larry Foreman—Howard Da Silva originated the part. I'm more used to him in his later, lugubrious bari-sax mode ("Then I say you should write it, Franklin—yes, you!"—"Hell, no!"), but the timbre sounds right and some of the almost chuckling spoken register when Larry is being sarcastic about his umpteenth arrest for union organizing. I still need to listen to the entire score. It's never been claimed as one of the great American musicals, but it's historic agitprop and I like Blitzstein and I'm curious. I hadn't even known there was a recording until last night.
5. Scanning down a page a few days ago, I misread "Valentine's" as "Vesuvius." There has got to be something I can do with that.
1. My poem "Lyric Fragment" is now online at Goblin Fruit. It was written in the fall of 2010 for
rushthatspeaks and incorporates one of my favorite pieces of Greek lyric (Anakreon fr. 398). I don't think it counts as a ghost poem, even if the poet has a look in. I never did write about him and Marlowe.2. Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds (2010) is as good as
handful_ofdust promised when she threw it at me and avoids the Stross problem entirely: while the text neither erases nor elides the Holocaust (it is not a focus, but references to the camps exist), it leaves genocide an entirely human atrocity; it has nothing to do with the blood prices paid by the warlocks of Britain to the terrible, Enochian-speaking Eidolons in order to ward the island against Nazi invasion or the torturous, high-attrition methods used by Doctor von Westarp of the Reichsbehörde für die Erweiterung germanischen Potenzials to stimulate and accelerate fringe-science superpowers in his "children." If the novel has a historical fault for me, it's that it seems to reduce World War II to a conflict between England and Germany with only a little of Russia brought in near the end to be the unpredictable third factor that both preternaturally-enhanced sides have overlooked—I'll buy the case for isolationist America, but I really feel Italy or Japan should at least have gotten a name-check. Given the novel's tight focus on one British warlock, one agent for the SOE-like Milkweed, and the most conventionally sympathetic member of von Westarp's Götterelektrongruppe, however, I'm willing to wait for the sequel and see whether this was a function of viewpoint rather than simplification. I believe the author is American, which is interesting. In any case, the book is probably not an easy read by most people's standards, dealing as it does with all sorts of supernatural and emotional atrocities, but I was impressed. Next, please.3. I'd wanted to see Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943) ever since I became aware that there were movies produced under the banner of the Archers outside of the famous collaborations of Powell and Pressburger. (It didn't hurt that Sewell was the very first character introduced in Michael Powell's 200,000 Feet on Foula (1938): "We were nosing blind through a tangle of mudbanks and fretful shipping; he had been on his feet for thirty-six hours and had the prospect of a sleepless night before him; his ship was a shambles, his cabin had two people asleep in it, but I knew, because I know Vernon, that he was struggling not to giggle out loud with the pure joy of his first steam command. Kipling would have appreciated Vernon: he has described him many times.") The film came out on DVD last October. I couldn't find it anywhere. It came up again on Monday when I was discussing Ralph Richardson with
nineweaving. Thank God for YouTube.The Silver Fleet is not brilliant as films by the Archers themselves are brilliant, but it is an above-average propaganda story of the quietly heroic kind: with its themes of collaboration and resistance, it makes a good companion piece to Powell and Pressburger's own One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) or even Jean Renoir's This Land Is Mine from the same year. Richardson is Jaap van Leyden, part-owner of a shipyard in (fictional) Schipsdam that's been in his family for five generations and its chief engineer. The outbreak of war stalled production on a pair of submarines commissioned by the Royal Netherlands Navy, but following the Nazi occupation he's asked to complete the project for the Kriegsmarine. He gets an afternoon to think about it. He agrees. The yard reopens three days later under German supervision; a tallish, pleasant-faced, not terribly remarkable man in a double-breasted suit, Jaap goes to work. Under the name of Piet Hein—the folk hero who defeated the Spanish Armada and about whom songs are sung even today by schoolchildren in the Netherlands, as his son was singing that afternoon Jaap arrived early to pick him up from school and overheard the story of the Silver Fleet—he begins to organize a resistance at the shipyard, coordinating what might otherwise be scattershot acts of sabotage, plotting the disposal of both submarines in ways that won't do a thing for the Reich and might even give its enemies a hand. The catch is that he is doing so secretly, not only from the Nazis but from the men who work for him, and in the meantime his public face is that of a collaborator. His wife Helene (Googie Withers) finds herself shunned, sneered at—the grocer refuses her ration cards, telling her to go to her friends the Nazis if she wants coffee or eggs. Their son Willem comes home daily with new scrapes and bruises from fighting off boys who call his father a quisling. It is left to the viewer to fill in the graffiti the housekeeper has to keep washing off the front door. "'Piet Hein' is getting more and more popular each day," Jaap's diary dryly notes—"I and my family are getting more unpopular."
(Helene is thank fuck not written as a stupid wife, nor Jaap as a mistrustful husband. He's terrified of what will happen if there's the slightest link between his family and Piet Hein, especially given the increasingly active interest of the local Gestapo; she relies on her knowledge of the man she married to reassure her that his secret is something patriotic, not something even sketchier than inviting those same Nazi officers over for dinner parties. He won't tell her anything straight out, but he won't lie to her face, either. A portrait of Queen Wilhelmina, put away from its place of pride on the wall, becomes the way they do not speak about what he's doing: "Look in the drawer every day and see whether it's still there. And trust me, my darling." But it's still a strain, and the film doesn't pretend that Helene is failing her husband somehow by wondering whether he's really become the thing he performs—if the audience didn't have access to his private thoughts, we'd wonder, too. A different film might have played with that tension; this one is more interested in exploring the performance's effects.)
I had written to Nine, "I caught twenty minutes out of the middle of The Four Feathers (1939) on TCM and it struck me that Ralph Richardson had a dramatic actor's career with a clown's face: that round, bemused moon-look and the way his hair rumpled up if he didn't do anything actively about it. It's part of what makes him so heartbreakingly effective as Baines in The Fallen Idol (1949); he looks like he should belong to one of those other, safer stories that the film is not." It's a similar asset to his performance as Jaap van Leyden, because the shipwright needs to appear utterly harmless to the Germans. He doesn't play an opportunistic sort, like the grocer's nephew who hopes to get his uncle's shop in exchange for the names of his resistance contacts, but if he's not bribable, then he's simply taking the route of least resistance. He's getting to keep his great-great-grandfather's shipyard, isn't he? And so van Leyden is always smiling, always a little conciliatory—never embarrassing himself, but the most he allows himself to disagree with his handlers is a safely theatrical kind of testiness, as when he protests the trouble his collaboration is causing his business: "My dear von Schiffer, could you run your special police without men? How in heaven's name do you expect me to operate a shipyard without hands?" A visiting officer interjects with reminding amusement, "Not in heaven's name, but possibly in Himmler's," to which Jaap retorts, eyebrows peaked, "Has Himmler helped to stoke my boilers?" It's a fool's license, light comedy they can afford. That mild smile can be ironic, that whimsical little chuckle of a man who admits his own cowardice. The Germans are encouraged to respect his intelligence as an engineer and dismiss him otherwise with a kind of tolerant scorn: a clever fellow who knows when he's beaten, not like the rest of these crazy stiff-necked Dutch. None of the plans he's made as Piet Hein will work unless they trust him. So he plays one secret identity off against the other, balancing the faith of the workers who wait for the next coded message from their hero against the latitude the Germans extend to a willing traitor, hoping all the while none of his patriots will try an independent act of sabotage or the man who works the crane won't just drop a side of steel plate onto his despised quisling of a boss or his wife won't finally lose heart, seeing her husband ring up the Gestapo chief the night a bombing is threatened in the yard. It all ends in that heroic-tragic vein that describes so many real-life stories of resistance, though much more subtly than I was expecting. The pages of Jaap's diary have been our guide, turned by Helene. We read his last entry with her; the rest we must put together for ourselves from the enigmatic opening scenes: a sunken submarine, a slow pan across motionless faces we do not recognize, sailors tumbled together like ragdolls and a man in civilian clothes with his eyes closed as if only sleeping, except that seawater is trickling in. The music kind of hammers away at the point, but that was an occupational hazard of film scores of the time. Allan Gray did much better work on A Canterbury Tale (1944). It would have been a quirkier film if the Archers had directed it. It's still one I'm quite glad to have seen.
4. I have discovered the original Broadway cast recording of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with Blitzstein himself on piano and narration. Because I'd never actually heard him when he wasn't being played by Hank Azaria, I wasn't sure it was the right version until I skipped ahead to "Leaflets" and "The Cradle Will Rock," the two numbers sung by Larry Foreman—Howard Da Silva originated the part. I'm more used to him in his later, lugubrious bari-sax mode ("Then I say you should write it, Franklin—yes, you!"—"Hell, no!"), but the timbre sounds right and some of the almost chuckling spoken register when Larry is being sarcastic about his umpteenth arrest for union organizing. I still need to listen to the entire score. It's never been claimed as one of the great American musicals, but it's historic agitprop and I like Blitzstein and I'm curious. I hadn't even known there was a recording until last night.
5. Scanning down a page a few days ago, I misread "Valentine's" as "Vesuvius." There has got to be something I can do with that.
no subject
(Well, someone had to say it)
no subject
Maybe I should write a ghost poem about Pliny.