![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
no subject
"Ah, you tell this all so beautifully." And then Ellis starts turning up in her dreams.
I like H.D.'s recording of her dreams, because while she interprets them according to Freud's principles and her own mysticism, she tells them with all the loose ends and sudden jump cuts and incongruous equations of actual dreams, not narratives shaped to feel dreamlike. People are sometimes themselves and sometimes not and she doesn't tell Freud about all her dreams, which is interestingly candid. I suspect she doesn't tell the reader about all of them, either.
And poor old Freud saying he didn't think anything would happen to him because the Viennese were so kind, when they were holding parades with swastika-shaped confetti.
The few occasions where she directly describes the atmosphere of Vienna are strange and chilling to me, partly because what she sees is the lowering tension, not the atrocities that prey on her mind when she reads about them.
Then there were rifles. They were stacked neatly. They stood in bivouac formations at the street corners. It must have been a week-end; I don't remember . . . They were not German guns—but perhaps they were; anyway, these were Austrian soldiers. The stacks of rifles gave the streets a neat, finished effect, as of an 1860 print. They seemed old-fashioned, the soldiers seemed old-fashioned; I was no doubt reminded of familiar pictures of the American Civil War. This was some sort of civil war. No one would explain it to me. The hall porter, usually so talkative, was embarrassed when I questioned him. Well, I must not involve him in any discussion or dangerous statement of opinion. I went out anyway. There were some people about and the soldiers were out of a picture or a film of a reconstructed Civil War period. They did not seem very formidable. I had meant to go to the opera—it was late afternoon or early evening—so I might as well go to the opera, if there was an opera, as mope in my room or loiter about the hotel, wondering and watching. When challenged on one of the main thoroughfares, I said simply, in my sketchy German, that I was a visitor in Vienna; they called me the English lady at the hotel, so I said I was from England, which in fact I was. What was I doing? Where was I going? I said I was going to the opera, if I was not disturbing them or getting in their way. There was a little whispering and shuffling and I was embarrassed to find that I had attracted the attention of the officers and had almost a guard of honor to the steps of the opera house, where there were more guns and soldiers, seated on the steps and standing at attention on the pavemen. It seemed that nothing, at any rate, could stop the opera. I stayed for part of the performance of—I don't remember what it was—and had no trouble finding my way back.
If she saw anything nastier, she doesn't write about it here; but the rifles tell their own story in ellipsis.
I used to own Captain January, by Laura E. Richards -- my edition was in a double with The Little Colonel by Annie Fellows Johnston, with Shirley Temple movie illos on the covers.
All right; one for references I didn't recognize!