Decoding the branches to a conspiracy of girls

[sovay]

There is not a lot of joy in my life right now. This is a fact. Almost everything about my life is very stressful and the future is very uncertain. I have things that make me happy, but they are mostly contingent or transient; the general instability is very bad.

I just spent a day in an academic environment and met a friend for dinner. It was really nice.

The conference went really well. I was running slides for the paper presented by Nicole Jordan, concerning the German use of poison gas on the Eastern Front and the transformations of the Battle of Bolimów in André Malraux's Les Noyers de l'Altenburg (1948); other presentations especially of interest to me were by Heidi Tvorek and Santanu Das. I heard about the Australian capture of the wireless station at Bita Paka and the travel writing of British nurses in Serbia and the songs of Indian sepoys in German POW camps. I had never been inside Busch Hall before yesterday, so I had never seen the murals painted by Lewis Rubenstein in 1936—Hitler-moustached Alberich, Norse gods fighting Ragnarök with flamethrowers and canisters of chlorine-green gas. A member of the audience was a veteran of World War II who vividly remembered drilling with gas-masks. I was asked what university I was from and it was frustrating, but not devastating to have to answer none at present. I did not have to explain David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937) to anyone. I don't know if I can make the companion conference tomorrow at Brandeis, but I keep thinking about it.

I was (reasonably) not invited to the dinner afterward, so I walked around Harvard for a hungry five minutes and then called schreibergasse and met him for dinner near South Station. He had never had Malaysian food before, so I was pleased to introduce him to Penang. I continue to value the presence of a restaurant in my life that will serve me a durian shake, no questions asked. I came home and the cats trailed me hopefully around the house because I smelled like delicious ginger duck noodles.

There is a lacuna in the original post here, because derspatchel came home and we watched George Washington Slept Here (1942), a pastoral comedy of home renovation starring Ann Sheridan as an impulsive buyer of antiques who falls in love with a tumbledown Colonial farmhouse in Pennsylvania and Jack Benny as her husband who is firmly in love with New York City, thank you very much. Percy Kilbride as the laconic handyman who comes with the property steals most of his scenes by mentioning each new and dire issue—tree blight, the rising price of gravel, a cavalcade of insects from termites to seventeen-year locusts—without cracking so much as an absence of expression. Meanwhile the relations have descended in the form of hellraiser nephew Douglas Croft and world's most stultifying uncle Charles Coburn, kid sister Joyce Reynolds has transferred her latest affections to an actor in nearby summer stock, and Hattie McDaniel quite reasonably objects to cooking in a kitchen which also contains a peripatetic horse. Charles Dingle doesn't have enough of a mustache to twirl as the overbearing neighbor, smugly asserting his rights to what feels like ever more of our heroes' property, but he'd almost certainly take up the practice if he grew it out a bit. The part of the decrepit farmhouse is played, at least in the interiors, by the set of Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace—I recognized it by the staircase up which John Alexander's Teddy charged so many times in my childhood. (I was delighted. Actors, I get to recognize from part to part; I've never had the experience with a fictitious house before. I remain proud of the spontaneously uttered phrase ". . . and dilapidated the crap out of it.") The role of Sheridan's destructive yet adorable terrier is performed, uncredited, by Terry of "Toto" fame.

I don't know how closely the script follows the original stage play except in one crucial respect: it's genderswapped. As written originally by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the wife is the skeptic and the husband the cracked history buff. Switching the roles around gives the film the opportunity to run on Benny's slow burn and Sheridan's resolute wilting optimism as the true state of the house makes itself inexorably clear, from disintegrating doorknobs to a distinct lack of plumbing to a surprise vertical route from the back bedroom to the kitchen. (Benny is unbelievably unsurprised to hear that local legend has it wrong—it wasn't George Washington who slept there, it was Benedict Arnold.) It's generally a smiling comedy rather than the bruise-your-ribs-laughing kind, but it has its moments, and there is a nice vein of surrealism running throughout, best exemplified by Kilbride's periodic reports on the digging of the new well: "We just struck cemetery" pales before the eventual "We just struck quicklime." If it's not the sheer brilliance of Benny's other starring role from 1942, I don't hold it against any film for not being Ernst Lubitsch. I don't even hold it against Mel Brooks. George Washington Slept Here is more than worth your time if it turns up on a TCM or a library shelf near you. This review sponsored by my generous backers at Patreon.

So that was also pleasant. I should round out this day by sleeping. Ideally without nightmares. I'd still like some more joy.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Oh good. I thought that conference would Venn rather nicely with your interests. To whom were you talking about David Jones?

Those murals are terrifying, in a good way.



Ginger duck noodles and a durian shake with schreibergasse sounds exceedingly pleasant.

As described, that movie reminds me of S. J. Perelman's pieces on his own moneysink farm in Pennsylvania.

". . . and dilapidated the crap out of it."

is splendid.

Wishing you joy.

Nine

[sovay]

To whom were you talking about David Jones?

The room in general; Nicole's paper discussed Malraux "perceiving a mythic quality in the German poison gas war," so in comments afterward I wanted to mention Jones' preface to In Parenthesis, where he talks about the unknown ways in which the technological advances of the war will have to become symbols of a new mythology. I said, "David Jones, Welsh war poet, In Parenthesis, 1937," and everyone around me started nodding. It was great.

As described, that movie reminds me of S. J. Perelman's pieces on his own moneysink farm in Pennsylvania.

derspatchel was reminded of Walter and Jean Kerr.