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The universe is chaotic and you make us see it
1. My poem "Gorgoneion" is now available in the latest issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. It's been available for a little while, but my e-mail didn't feel like letting me know. It's a prayer. I wrote it after seeing this statue. This one is also in there.
2. There are less than eighteen hours left on the Kickstarter for Joanne Merriam's How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. My poem "Di Vayse Pave" (Moral Relativism Magazine #3) is reprinted therein, along with amazing work from Zen Cho, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Bogi Takács, Bryan Thao Worra, and many, many others. Please check it out and kick in a few dollars! The stretch goal is a print run rather than Amazon print-on-demand and I am all for it.
3. We couldn't get to the sea last night, so we settled for the sea at one remove: we saw Mr. Turner (2014) at the Kendall. The very short version is that it's a very good film. The cinematography is incredible; Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner deserves all the awards this season can throw at him.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust passed on a review from someone who enjoyed the film, but found it "a bit indulgent or shapeless"—I disagree entirely with the first of these adjectives. I could agree with shapeless, but if so, then deliberately so. Mike Leigh uses none of the usual signposts for time in the movies: title cards, newspapers, easily recognizable historical events. The passage of time is perceptible only by the aging of the characters, the changing fashions in clothes, the progress of technology, and—late in the movie, late enough that it's functionally irrelevant from a narrative point of view; we're near the end of the story no matter when it's happening—a mention of the Crystal Palace, by description only, not by name. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are seen once at an exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. (She is young and hates modern art. It's strangely endearing.) From their presence you may determine the era, if you were uncertain at the start. That's about it. There are actually quite a lot of events in the film, but they will all sound much more conventionally biopic-y if listed: the death of Turner's beloved father, Turner's tacit sexual relationship with his housekeeper Hannah, his visits incognito to Margate, his camaraderie and clashes with the Academy, the straitened fortunes of his colleague Benjamin Haydon, the death of one of Turner's secret, illegitimate daughters, his patronage by various members of the gentry, the beginning of his romance with the widow Mrs. Booth, his worsening heath (exacerbated by the decision to have himself lashed to the mast of a ship in a lightning-and-snowstorm), his fading fortunes as a popular artist, John Ruskin being a prat, Turner's not antagonistic encounters with new technology like railways and daguerreotypes, the breakdown of his double life, eventually—with a hoarse shout of laughter—his death. Very few of these events are underlined as dramatically important, even though many of them obviously are. Many emotional points are understated, several nearly elided.
It is not an analytical biography. It is impossible, for example, to draw any generalizations about Turner's feelings toward women from the depiction of his three major relationships. Sarah Danby is the mother of his daughters, who are nearing adulthood as the film begins: he sends money for their upkeep, but does not otherwise acknowledge them; he tells everyone who asks that he has no children. (When Georgiana dies, her mother berates Turner for not even coming to the funeral; denying his daughter even in the grave. While his shoulders are stoic, his hands knot behind his back, twisting, twisting; he never lets Mrs. Danby see.) Hannah is his housekeeper, a bony, resigned, yearning woman with a skin condition that worsens over the years—some kind of eczema or psoriasis—until her face in late middle age looks as raw as skinned meat. Turner has sex with her, but never addresses the relationship openly or treats her with any more consideration or affection than the nickname of "me damsel." When he fucks her from behind against a bookcase, however, that's the one time we see her smile: open, satisfied. Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey, amazing) he meets in Margate when her husband is still alive, renting a room with a beautiful waterfront view; he comes back over the years, always under the semi-transparent alias of "Mr. Mallard," and as time goes by the quick chemistry of their first meeting (more conversational than sexual, then: Turner is not always a talkative man, but he is never reticent with her) makes way for love. She's twice-widowed, a woman of independent means, does not believe herself beautiful; when Turner finally makes a move, she pulls him by the hand into her bedroom. Presently she proposes to sell the house in Margate and buy another one not too far from London where the two of them can live together. They do. They are blissfully content. He becomes known locally as "Mr. Booth"; she knows quite well who he is and—cares, of course, because his art is the thing that makes him himself, but it's not what she loves him for. They do not marry. Hannah still keeps his house in London, visibly hurting from Turner's increasing neglect. Upbraided by a bitter, broke Haydon for not knowing what it is like to lose a child, Turner has to take the accusation full in the face without so much as blinking, with his daughter's death fresh in his memory and the audience's. How do you square these differences? The film doesn't. He's appreciative, engaged, and collegial with Mary Somerville, the natural philosopher, as she attempts an experiment with rainbows and magnetism; he is very drunk at dinner at the Ruskins', but Effie Gray appreciates his kindness. He breaks down in volcanic tears as he sketches a London prostitute, gets his voice under control and continues the session. At the country house of one of his patrons, he shares a moment of rapport with the marginalized accompanist to the brighter, bubblier, much less talented daughters of the house—he sings "When I am laid in earth" very badly indeed, but that's not the point. He can be, when the circumstances require, an immensely empathic, understanding man. It is just never made clear to the audience by what metric he judges the circumstances to require it and when he just grunts and gets on with his painting.
The film does not seem interested in presenting these contradictions as some kind of study in contrasts: the artist as monster, as sacred monster; the breathtaking evocation of nature versus the shabby treatment of humanity; none of that. There are people he's good to and people he treats terribly. His art becomes increasingly less commercial—and less respected, to the point that an evening at the theater closes with a broad satire on Turner's new style—and it hurts him, because he's not indifferent, but he doesn't turn back from his proto-Impressionism; he goes on painting skies, light, cloud, wave, mist, spray, smoke, atmospheres. He's not obsessive, although it would have been easy for the film to depict someone so obstinate, private, and self-focused eccentrically. He's not a conventional outsider, either—he's a barber's son who learned to read and write because his father taught him, he is not a comfortable public speaker and his accent remains coarse-ground Covent Garden to the end of his days, but he's a member of the Royal Academy and he delights, we can see, in the competition of their company, admiring some of his fellows, mentoring some, trolling the fuck out of others. (It was clear to me that if I'd had a better mental catalogue of early nineteenth-century English painters, I would have been able to recognize the Academicians from their introductory scenes, because they look like self-portraits. As it is, I appreciate this making-of. Hello, Tom Edden!) When he falls out of the forefront of British art, it's because he's pursuing what interests him rather than what he knows will sell. Offered the chance to part with his gallery for a hundred thousand pounds, Turner refuses: he wants to leave his work to "the British nation." The prospective buyer, a self-made millionaire, is confused. The audience is left to interpret the decision for themselves: the true foresight of genius? Arrogance? Perversity? Just not wanting to hand his life's work over to a man who made his money in pen nibs? Mr. Turner is not the kind of movie that tells us one way or the other. It's possible to feel secure in a few opinions: Mike Leigh does not condone Turner's treatment of Hannah or Sarah Danby and her daughters, he has a lot of sympathy for unhappily flailing people like Benjamin Haydon, and he thinks John Ruskin was a prat. But that's about as far as it goes. You get to spend a couple of decades, which equals about two and a half hours, with Joseph Mallord William Turner and the world he lives in. You never see it through his eyes. The film is full of beautiful shots of sunsets and sea-cliffs and river valleys and sails on the bay and railway steam and fog drifting in from the coast and they are not Turner's paintings brought to life, they are the world he looked at and turned into paint. Even one last, tantalizing view of what looks very much like Turner's ideal of heaven is not from his point of view: it is the younger artist in silhouette against an extraordinary, flaming sunset, sketching. The inside of his head remains his own.
I was cool with that.
Entertainingly, although the ticket-seller was not lying when he said there were seats left, he was correct only by a technicality: we did indeed see two seats in the otherwise sold-out theater, but they were neither adjacent nor accessible from the aisles once the movie (we were a few minutes late) had started. We put our coats down on the floor at the back of the theater, sat down withderspatchel's backpack between us, and watched. It was worth it. All hundred and fifty minutes. My neck thinks I want at least a chair the next time, though.
2. There are less than eighteen hours left on the Kickstarter for Joanne Merriam's How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. My poem "Di Vayse Pave" (Moral Relativism Magazine #3) is reprinted therein, along with amazing work from Zen Cho, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Bogi Takács, Bryan Thao Worra, and many, many others. Please check it out and kick in a few dollars! The stretch goal is a print run rather than Amazon print-on-demand and I am all for it.
3. We couldn't get to the sea last night, so we settled for the sea at one remove: we saw Mr. Turner (2014) at the Kendall. The very short version is that it's a very good film. The cinematography is incredible; Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner deserves all the awards this season can throw at him.
handful_ofdust passed on a review from someone who enjoyed the film, but found it "a bit indulgent or shapeless"—I disagree entirely with the first of these adjectives. I could agree with shapeless, but if so, then deliberately so. Mike Leigh uses none of the usual signposts for time in the movies: title cards, newspapers, easily recognizable historical events. The passage of time is perceptible only by the aging of the characters, the changing fashions in clothes, the progress of technology, and—late in the movie, late enough that it's functionally irrelevant from a narrative point of view; we're near the end of the story no matter when it's happening—a mention of the Crystal Palace, by description only, not by name. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are seen once at an exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts. (She is young and hates modern art. It's strangely endearing.) From their presence you may determine the era, if you were uncertain at the start. That's about it. There are actually quite a lot of events in the film, but they will all sound much more conventionally biopic-y if listed: the death of Turner's beloved father, Turner's tacit sexual relationship with his housekeeper Hannah, his visits incognito to Margate, his camaraderie and clashes with the Academy, the straitened fortunes of his colleague Benjamin Haydon, the death of one of Turner's secret, illegitimate daughters, his patronage by various members of the gentry, the beginning of his romance with the widow Mrs. Booth, his worsening heath (exacerbated by the decision to have himself lashed to the mast of a ship in a lightning-and-snowstorm), his fading fortunes as a popular artist, John Ruskin being a prat, Turner's not antagonistic encounters with new technology like railways and daguerreotypes, the breakdown of his double life, eventually—with a hoarse shout of laughter—his death. Very few of these events are underlined as dramatically important, even though many of them obviously are. Many emotional points are understated, several nearly elided.It is not an analytical biography. It is impossible, for example, to draw any generalizations about Turner's feelings toward women from the depiction of his three major relationships. Sarah Danby is the mother of his daughters, who are nearing adulthood as the film begins: he sends money for their upkeep, but does not otherwise acknowledge them; he tells everyone who asks that he has no children. (When Georgiana dies, her mother berates Turner for not even coming to the funeral; denying his daughter even in the grave. While his shoulders are stoic, his hands knot behind his back, twisting, twisting; he never lets Mrs. Danby see.) Hannah is his housekeeper, a bony, resigned, yearning woman with a skin condition that worsens over the years—some kind of eczema or psoriasis—until her face in late middle age looks as raw as skinned meat. Turner has sex with her, but never addresses the relationship openly or treats her with any more consideration or affection than the nickname of "me damsel." When he fucks her from behind against a bookcase, however, that's the one time we see her smile: open, satisfied. Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey, amazing) he meets in Margate when her husband is still alive, renting a room with a beautiful waterfront view; he comes back over the years, always under the semi-transparent alias of "Mr. Mallard," and as time goes by the quick chemistry of their first meeting (more conversational than sexual, then: Turner is not always a talkative man, but he is never reticent with her) makes way for love. She's twice-widowed, a woman of independent means, does not believe herself beautiful; when Turner finally makes a move, she pulls him by the hand into her bedroom. Presently she proposes to sell the house in Margate and buy another one not too far from London where the two of them can live together. They do. They are blissfully content. He becomes known locally as "Mr. Booth"; she knows quite well who he is and—cares, of course, because his art is the thing that makes him himself, but it's not what she loves him for. They do not marry. Hannah still keeps his house in London, visibly hurting from Turner's increasing neglect. Upbraided by a bitter, broke Haydon for not knowing what it is like to lose a child, Turner has to take the accusation full in the face without so much as blinking, with his daughter's death fresh in his memory and the audience's. How do you square these differences? The film doesn't. He's appreciative, engaged, and collegial with Mary Somerville, the natural philosopher, as she attempts an experiment with rainbows and magnetism; he is very drunk at dinner at the Ruskins', but Effie Gray appreciates his kindness. He breaks down in volcanic tears as he sketches a London prostitute, gets his voice under control and continues the session. At the country house of one of his patrons, he shares a moment of rapport with the marginalized accompanist to the brighter, bubblier, much less talented daughters of the house—he sings "When I am laid in earth" very badly indeed, but that's not the point. He can be, when the circumstances require, an immensely empathic, understanding man. It is just never made clear to the audience by what metric he judges the circumstances to require it and when he just grunts and gets on with his painting.
The film does not seem interested in presenting these contradictions as some kind of study in contrasts: the artist as monster, as sacred monster; the breathtaking evocation of nature versus the shabby treatment of humanity; none of that. There are people he's good to and people he treats terribly. His art becomes increasingly less commercial—and less respected, to the point that an evening at the theater closes with a broad satire on Turner's new style—and it hurts him, because he's not indifferent, but he doesn't turn back from his proto-Impressionism; he goes on painting skies, light, cloud, wave, mist, spray, smoke, atmospheres. He's not obsessive, although it would have been easy for the film to depict someone so obstinate, private, and self-focused eccentrically. He's not a conventional outsider, either—he's a barber's son who learned to read and write because his father taught him, he is not a comfortable public speaker and his accent remains coarse-ground Covent Garden to the end of his days, but he's a member of the Royal Academy and he delights, we can see, in the competition of their company, admiring some of his fellows, mentoring some, trolling the fuck out of others. (It was clear to me that if I'd had a better mental catalogue of early nineteenth-century English painters, I would have been able to recognize the Academicians from their introductory scenes, because they look like self-portraits. As it is, I appreciate this making-of. Hello, Tom Edden!) When he falls out of the forefront of British art, it's because he's pursuing what interests him rather than what he knows will sell. Offered the chance to part with his gallery for a hundred thousand pounds, Turner refuses: he wants to leave his work to "the British nation." The prospective buyer, a self-made millionaire, is confused. The audience is left to interpret the decision for themselves: the true foresight of genius? Arrogance? Perversity? Just not wanting to hand his life's work over to a man who made his money in pen nibs? Mr. Turner is not the kind of movie that tells us one way or the other. It's possible to feel secure in a few opinions: Mike Leigh does not condone Turner's treatment of Hannah or Sarah Danby and her daughters, he has a lot of sympathy for unhappily flailing people like Benjamin Haydon, and he thinks John Ruskin was a prat. But that's about as far as it goes. You get to spend a couple of decades, which equals about two and a half hours, with Joseph Mallord William Turner and the world he lives in. You never see it through his eyes. The film is full of beautiful shots of sunsets and sea-cliffs and river valleys and sails on the bay and railway steam and fog drifting in from the coast and they are not Turner's paintings brought to life, they are the world he looked at and turned into paint. Even one last, tantalizing view of what looks very much like Turner's ideal of heaven is not from his point of view: it is the younger artist in silhouette against an extraordinary, flaming sunset, sketching. The inside of his head remains his own.
I was cool with that.
Entertainingly, although the ticket-seller was not lying when he said there were seats left, he was correct only by a technicality: we did indeed see two seats in the otherwise sold-out theater, but they were neither adjacent nor accessible from the aisles once the movie (we were a few minutes late) had started. We put our coats down on the floor at the back of the theater, sat down with
derspatchel's backpack between us, and watched. It was worth it. All hundred and fifty minutes. My neck thinks I want at least a chair the next time, though.
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I cannot ever recall seeing Sir John Soane in a film before, nor can I imagine it happening again, so I did some quiet shrilling at that.
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Hence "semi-transparent." I checked the spelling with the press materials.
I cannot ever recall seeing Sir John Soane in a film before, nor can I imagine it happening again, so I did some quiet shrilling at that.
I had not heard of most of the artists at the Academy, but I thought Martin Savage looked excellently like Benjamin Haydon.
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Make sure you have a friend with a big TV. I can't imagine watching it on a computer; its cinematography demands to be seen twenty feet high. It's astonishing. The cinematographer—Dick Pope—is a Mike Leigh regular, but otherwise I don't know him at all.
Yay for poems, too!
Thank you!
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I am so happy whenever anyone gives Timothy Spall a leading role, and he owns this one.
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Very highly recommended. See it in a theater if at all possible. So few biographies are willing to let their subjects be complicated.
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Nine
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Enjoy!
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The film quite often left me bewildered: it took me a while to work out, for example, that the two men were father and son, and both addressed as 'Mr. Billy'. (Maybe I should have known this, but I didn't.) Similarly the scene you describe with the accompanist: but who is she? A governess, a less-favoured daughter? I longed for footnotes. Eventually I relaxed, let the narrative wash over me, and enjoyed it very much.
As for the scene in which Turner refuses to sell his paintings: it is in my mind, but the internet doesn't want to talk about it, that the point of this is simply that Turner did, precisely, leave his paintings to the nation, with the condition that they be displayed for free - and that this was a major point of controversy when entry charges to museums were first introduced.
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I didn't have any trouble with that, for whatever reason. It took me longer to pinpoint Hannah's relationship—I had originally attached her to Turner's father.
Similarly the scene you describe with the accompanist: but who is she? A governess, a less-favoured daughter?
She's called "Miss Coggins." I took her as some kind of secondary female relative—a cousin, perhaps—but I couldn't read her clothing and her comportment well enough to be sure. That's one of the places I feel at a serious disadvantage in historical films. I am not good at taking cues from fashion. I'm not even good at it nowadays, but I feel it really handicaps me in perceiving social nuances of a period.
As for the scene in which Turner refuses to sell his paintings: it is in my mind, but the internet doesn't want to talk about it, that the point of this is simply that Turner did, precisely, leave his paintings to the nation, with the condition that they be displayed for free - and that this was a major point of controversy when entry charges to museums were first introduced.
Thank you; I think I'd known that he had (or had tried to—I have the impression it didn't quite work out), but I hadn't known how his wishes affected the development of museums.
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Um - saying that the Turner bequest "affected the development of museums" is maybe going a bit far, but it was certainly a live political issue at one point - and it's the sort of thing I would expect to hit a nerve with Mike Leigh, so I wasn't surprised that he included a scene illustrating it, and felt that this explained the ambiguity you seemed to be finding that scene.
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From what you describe it sounds full of depth, and like you really get to meet the man as he is. In real life, I suspect my feelings about such a person would depend on the context in which I met them. someone who binds themself to the mast of a ship to understand sea spray and light? Way cool. I would want to know and talk to that person. But if I were a friend of Hannah or Sarah and knew about him through her, I'd hate him with a passion.
I guess what I appreciate from your description is that this shows a person who's a very mixed bag of admirable and deplorable qualities. I think society (and maybe I, myself, too) tends to reduce people to taglines and quick descriptions, and an overall D&D assignment on axes of lawful/chaotic and good/evil, but there's so much more to all of us.
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Nine
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Check. Thanks.
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I'm very glad.
On seeing the experiment with rainbows and magnetism, my friend the polymath muttered, "She's two steps from quantum physics."
Well, she was wrong. But it was her first published paper and it didn't ruin her reputation when she retracted the claim. Have an article from the Royal Observatory about researching and filming the scene.
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I think you might like it very much if you saw it.
Someone who binds themself to the mast of a ship to understand sea spray and light? Way cool. I would want to know and talk to that person. But if I were a friend of Hannah or Sarah and knew about him through her, I'd hate him with a passion.
And the movie introduces you to both. Yes.
I think society (and maybe I, myself, too) tends to reduce people to taglines and quick descriptions, and an overall D&D assignment on axes of lawful/chaotic and good/evil, but there's so much more to all of us.
People are complicated. Untidy, contradictory, full of loose ends. Most movies are not that anti-schematic. I loved very much that this one is.