Stand by, no way, stop

[sovay]

So my family made the decision not to hold a seder tomorrow night because my mother is still coughing (I will break matzah, pour wine, and open the door to the stranger, because that is the most important thing) and I think it was just as well because I appear to have come down sick. I was invited out to a movie tonight, but instead I fell over sideways and have alternated the last few hours between staring vaguely into the middle distance while feeling nauseated and sort of sleeping, minus rest and plus whiting out when I tried to stand up. I am not thrilled.

1. Erin Horáková seriously analyzes the popular reception of Captain James T. Kirk in context of the simplifying and not apolitical rewriting of the past: "Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift." (I feel some of this same process may explain my feelings toward neo-noir vs. noir, especially where the supposed ubiquity of the femme fatale is concerned. Somebody please remind me to write about the Wachowskis' Bound (1996); I loved that movie and it's been more than half a year.) The statement below flashed out at me:

Heterosexuality has been through the fucking ringer in cultural productions in the last decades due to backlashes against feminism and queer visibility that have transformed portrayals and interpretations alike into dumbshows—crude pantomimes, as before the play. These frantic defenses have done more to render the proposition of men and women loving one another a piece of one-note unsustainable ridiculousness than women's lib and LGBTQ rights ever could.

Boyd McDonald was making much the same frustrated point in the 1980's. I am not pleased that the problem has worsened again since. Also I had not actually realized that not everyone thinks of William Shatner as Jewish.

2. These poems were not published back-to-back, but I read them that way and they resonate interestingly: Robert Peake's "Homesickness" and Dante Di Stefano's "National Poetry Month."

3. I was just trying to run down a reference using Google Books. I ran into a biography of Wilfred Owen. Oh, hey, I thought to myself, I should read one of those sometime. Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) doesn't count. I began flicking through the randomly available pages and then—

Robert Graves: "Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were homosexuals; though Sassoon tried to think he wasn't. To them, seeing men killed was as horrible as if you or I had to see fields of corpses of women."

JESUS H. MAGDALENE GRAVES.

Seriously, every time I try to parse that, it just gets worse. I feel sufficiently lousy that I would be going to bed right now no matter what, but really, Robert Graves, you're not helping! [edit] The former Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with me! Goodnight.

Comments

[asakiyume]

... back again, having looked at the Kirk essay. It's too long for me to read in its entirety in one sitting (obligations press round), but this (alas, somewhat un-Kirk-related) remark jumped out at me:

It’s always thus: we did away with rookeries in London and established council housing. We then sold off the council housing and brought back rookeries. And each individual thing is small potatoes, except it isn’t, because everything’s small potatoes.

Especially the last part: each individual thing is small potatoes, except it isn't, because everything's small potatoes. I feel lik that's an important observation, and like Kay holding a shard of ice, I want to find the right thing to do with it.

[sovay]

I feel like that's an important observation, and like Kay holding a shard of ice, I want to find the right thing to do with it.

You should post this somewhere more widely read than comments in my journal, because it's very well said and important.

[asakiyume]

I laughed when I read your comment because actually I suspect that posting in the comments of your journal is a rather better way to gain an audience than not. However! I'll consider posting it in my own as well ... though the next thing I'm going to post may be a ghost story (not one I made up; one that was told to me)