The piano is firewood, Times Square is a dream

[sovay]

Well, I have run out of further Benjamin January to read until the library gets me a copy of Drinking Gourd (2016). I am having such fun with this series. I maintain that a television adaptation would be Dionysos' gift to actors of color and their audience.

Tonight I saw Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) at the Brattle with skygiants. It's staccato and stylized and twisty and features the most deludedly self-disclaiming protagonist this side of Double Indemnity (1944); I'd like to write about it. My brain has felt like a blank wall since Readercon. The combination of catch-up work and heat wave utterly destroyed both my spare time and my sleep. I slept about nine hours last night, but that was under extenuating circumstances. I'd like to say that I'll see what I can get done on the train tomorrow, but in all probability I'll just sleep until Penn Station. I used to wake up at New Haven no matter where I was going. I suppose it's a good sign that I no longer always do.

I discovered this poet's first collection at a time when I could not afford to buy it, but I recommend this poem and all his other work you can find: Dan Taulapapa McMullin, "The Doors of the Sea."

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I used to wake up at New Haven no matter where I was going.

--Heh, a human homing device. I'm imagining you on a train from, oh, Los Angeles to San Francisco, but somehow ending up in New Haven. I'm imagining New Haven locked behind a spacetime anomaly, and you the only person who can penetrate it--and only if you're riding on a train, and only if you fall asleep.

I would love to see a movie version of any of the Benjamin January stories.

"The Doors of the Sea" is beautiful. I like it all, but especially the title drop portion

(my brother, knocking down the doors of the see
the tall, and the wild waves coming, crashing
under the keel of my brother's name)--especially that, the keel of my brother's name

and the antepenultimate and penultimate lines:

her cloak the wild wood pigeons turning
her crown the lone plover's crying

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I thought from the title that Criss Cross must be a predecessor to Strangers on a Train , but evidently not.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I've been re-reading the Benjamin January series from the beginning, so I can creep up on the joy of having new ones to read, and thinking about them as a tv show and I don't know. I think it would be very hard, particularly in the current climate, to see the treatment that he and other black characters would have to endure from white characters. I couldn't watch Mad Men for its sexism, even though it was on some level interested in presenting it in order to critique it (or was it?) and I fear I would have the same problem with these stories. Somehow words on the page/scenes in my head are different from watching it on screen.