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Rusty? I'll give you rusty
1. I don't want to oversell Cats Don't Dance (1997), but I don't want to sell it short, either: I can think of very few children's movies that contain equal parts homage to Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Singin' in the Rain (1952), especially animated ones starring a primarily anthropomorphic animal cast. It has torch songs and tin pan jams, choreography by Gene Kelly (the last project of his life) and an equally, gloriously overqualified voice cast, sight gags straight out of Frank Tashlin (and caricatures worthy of Hirschfeld), and a visual style that Vincente Minnelli wouldn't have been ashamed of. It's fast without being feverish and funny without resorting to pop-culture snark, unless it's pop-culture snark from 1939. You could double-feature it with either of the classics named above, or Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), or even Leslie Howard's Stand-In (1937)—again, that's not easily said of most mid-'90's animation. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel screened it for me off YouTube last night and discusses it more extensively here. It's the perfect comfort movie for anyone who grew up on MGM musicals. Liking cats is just a bonus.
2. I've been reading H.D.'s Tribute to Freud (1956), which I picked up in the Harvard Book Store a few nights ago. I like Norman Holmes Pearson a little less every time I read one of his forewords: he is right to champion her as a great poet of the twentieth century, but I wish he could do it without erasing whole swathes of her life. "Stephen Haden-Guest was a more casual friend. Arthur Waley was at best an acquaintance. Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher's husband, was much closer." Well, yes, if by that you mean that Macpherson was H.D.'s lover before (and while) he was Bryher's husband, the adoptive father of H.D.'s daughter Perdita, and the biological father of the pregnancy she chose not to keep, while Haden-Guest was a shorter-term lover whose wife was not very impressed with his ability to handle poly, then I suppose it's a fair assessment. Waley, as far as I can tell from the actual Tribute, was a one-off affair during World War I. It'srushthatspeaks' complaint about the Western Canon in action. Pearson can talk just fine about H.D.'s blessedly called-off engagement to Ezra Pound and her marriage and divorce from Richard Aldington—who, for the record, H.D. met through a mutual girlfriend; he barely acknowledges Bryher. Or Frances Josepha Gregg. Or Brigit Patmore, the aforementioned mutual girlfriend. Or Renée Athené, who played Spiritualism games with H.D. in school. He is also prone to statements like "Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H.D. was womanly," which I don't even know what that means. Contrast H.D.'s quiet refutation of heternormativity, describing a trip to Corfu with Bryher in 1920: "Travel was difficult, the country itself in a state of political upheaval; chance hotel acquaintances expressed surprise that two women alone had been allowed to come at all at that time. We were always 'two women alone' or 'two ladies alone,' but we were not alone." Norman Holmes Pearson, I know you're dead, but I bet it wouldn't have killed you to read what your poet wrote.
(What the poet wrote is really interesting. The book is composed of two parts, the journal H.D. kept during her first session with Freud in the spring of 1933, under the title "Advent," and "Writing on the Wall," a memoir written in the fall of 1944, because the work she had done with him in '33 and '34 was part of what was helping her survive this second world war she had known for decades, with a nightmare certainty that was diagnosed as paranoia, was coming. It's stream-of-consciousness, like much of her poetry, flowing in and out of symbols and associations, recurring chains of images and then out of nowhere a line-by-line exegesis of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land" as a metaphor for psychoanalysis or a chill clear snapshot of Vienna with the Nazis rising: There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down Berggasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led to the Professor's door—maybe, they passed on down another street to another door but I did not look any further. No one brushed these swastikas out. It is not so easy to scrub death-head chalk-marks from a pavement. It is not so easy and it is more conspicuous than sweeping tinsel paper into a gutter. And this was a little later. She's less interested in evaluating Freud's methods than in describing the stages of their relationship and reengaging with the material of their time together, which was much of her early life and interpretation of dreams. She identifies him with a number of mythological figures, including some of her own devising: "This old Janus, this beloved lighthouse-keeper, old Captain January . . " She can also state plainly when she thought he was wrong or when he said things in analysis that left her hurt or confused, which is refreshing in a tribute. I think it may be the first nonfiction of hers I've read. HERmione is a roman à clef.)
3. Waiting for me in the mail when I got home tonight: the paperback of Stephen Volk's Whitstable, which came so highly recommended byhandful_ofdust in June that I ordered it transatlantically on the spot. When it's not three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow, I will read it. I am looking forward.
(It's three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow. Goodnight.)
derspatchel screened it for me off YouTube last night and discusses it more extensively here. It's the perfect comfort movie for anyone who grew up on MGM musicals. Liking cats is just a bonus.2. I've been reading H.D.'s Tribute to Freud (1956), which I picked up in the Harvard Book Store a few nights ago. I like Norman Holmes Pearson a little less every time I read one of his forewords: he is right to champion her as a great poet of the twentieth century, but I wish he could do it without erasing whole swathes of her life. "Stephen Haden-Guest was a more casual friend. Arthur Waley was at best an acquaintance. Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher's husband, was much closer." Well, yes, if by that you mean that Macpherson was H.D.'s lover before (and while) he was Bryher's husband, the adoptive father of H.D.'s daughter Perdita, and the biological father of the pregnancy she chose not to keep, while Haden-Guest was a shorter-term lover whose wife was not very impressed with his ability to handle poly, then I suppose it's a fair assessment. Waley, as far as I can tell from the actual Tribute, was a one-off affair during World War I. It's
rushthatspeaks' complaint about the Western Canon in action. Pearson can talk just fine about H.D.'s blessedly called-off engagement to Ezra Pound and her marriage and divorce from Richard Aldington—who, for the record, H.D. met through a mutual girlfriend; he barely acknowledges Bryher. Or Frances Josepha Gregg. Or Brigit Patmore, the aforementioned mutual girlfriend. Or Renée Athené, who played Spiritualism games with H.D. in school. He is also prone to statements like "Emily Dickinson was wonderfully feminine; H.D. was womanly," which I don't even know what that means. Contrast H.D.'s quiet refutation of heternormativity, describing a trip to Corfu with Bryher in 1920: "Travel was difficult, the country itself in a state of political upheaval; chance hotel acquaintances expressed surprise that two women alone had been allowed to come at all at that time. We were always 'two women alone' or 'two ladies alone,' but we were not alone." Norman Holmes Pearson, I know you're dead, but I bet it wouldn't have killed you to read what your poet wrote.(What the poet wrote is really interesting. The book is composed of two parts, the journal H.D. kept during her first session with Freud in the spring of 1933, under the title "Advent," and "Writing on the Wall," a memoir written in the fall of 1944, because the work she had done with him in '33 and '34 was part of what was helping her survive this second world war she had known for decades, with a nightmare certainty that was diagnosed as paranoia, was coming. It's stream-of-consciousness, like much of her poetry, flowing in and out of symbols and associations, recurring chains of images and then out of nowhere a line-by-line exegesis of Goethe's "Kennst du das Land" as a metaphor for psychoanalysis or a chill clear snapshot of Vienna with the Nazis rising: There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down Berggasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led to the Professor's door—maybe, they passed on down another street to another door but I did not look any further. No one brushed these swastikas out. It is not so easy to scrub death-head chalk-marks from a pavement. It is not so easy and it is more conspicuous than sweeping tinsel paper into a gutter. And this was a little later. She's less interested in evaluating Freud's methods than in describing the stages of their relationship and reengaging with the material of their time together, which was much of her early life and interpretation of dreams. She identifies him with a number of mythological figures, including some of her own devising: "This old Janus, this beloved lighthouse-keeper, old Captain January . . " She can also state plainly when she thought he was wrong or when he said things in analysis that left her hurt or confused, which is refreshing in a tribute. I think it may be the first nonfiction of hers I've read. HERmione is a roman à clef.)
3. Waiting for me in the mail when I got home tonight: the paperback of Stephen Volk's Whitstable, which came so highly recommended by
handful_ofdust in June that I ordered it transatlantically on the spot. When it's not three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow, I will read it. I am looking forward.(It's three in the morning with a dentist's appointment waiting for me tomorrow. Goodnight.)
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It amuses me that you also thought of Millay while reading this. I don't love her quite as hard, now, as I did when younger. But she and H.D. have always been sorted together in my head as the underrated female poets of roughly the same era. H.D. was the one I could never quite *find* things by, or afford things by when I could find them. It's new to me that she was a queer little thing as well, but far from surprising.
::bumps Helen in Egypt higher on The List::
edited to add:
Though! I have always wondered about Millay's sister's role in over-normalizing her legacy - by all accounts Norma Millay Ellis was very "protective" of Millay's papers &c, and I really wish that there were scholarship unpacking that dynamic. (Or, if said scholarship does exist, that I knew where to look for it.)
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Although to be honest I had a really hard time reading that bio, and only did so in parts. Not just due to the erasure of Millay's queerness, but also because it was dry. We get these details of her agonizing letters to her mother about submitting "Interim" to a poetry contest, but what I really wanted to know--as somebody who is so affected by that poem that it makes my chest hurt--what made someone so young capable of writing a poem of such exquisite sadness and loss.
I mean, maybe that stuff is hard to come by, but as a lover of poetry, that's what I'm looking for in a poet's biography, and this just didn't deliver.
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It's very good. My favorites are Trilogy (1946) and her earlier, strongly Greek-lyric-influenced poetry: Sea Garden (1916) and Hymen (1921) especially. She has an excellent claim to being the twentieth-century inheritor of Sappho, which most poets only want to have said of them.
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Bah. I didn't realize this about Millay scholarship, although I'm not actually surprised. Thanks for the heads-up.
H.D. is one of my favorite poets of the twentieth or any other century and Pearson's elisions are absolutely consistent with most of the literature on her work and life until very, very recently, but I think it's getting less possible for me to gloss past them when we run into each other. (I've kind of been ranting about it for years on the internet. Comments to the review I linked contain my disappointment with even the BFI for their writeup of Borderline (1930), which foregrounds Kenneth Macpherson both artistically and emotionally—although without acknowledging that his primary sexual partners were men—and relegates H.D. and Bryher's forty-three-year, unbreakable, non-monogamous relationship to the status of an unconfirmable rumor. They haven't changed it since, either.) Possibly I should just find some recent scholarship, but I don't have any leads. I suspect I'm tending toward tracking down H.D.'s own letters.