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

[sovay]

Fancy an Archbishop of Canterbury producing something as good as that!

He wrote some good poems, too! I discovered him with this one (I suggest reading it before the introductory analysis).

Graves was an enthusiastic homophobe and a very silly man- the very epitome of a wise fool- but he wrote some cracking poems.

My mind was slightly blown when I realized sometime in college that he was responsible for the lines from "Song of Amergin" I had memorized as a child reading Susan Cooper's Silver on the Tree (1977).

I, Claudius was one of the formative books of my adolescence. I started Latin as soon as I could, which was in ninth grade in the Lexington school system; a year and a half later I picked my mother's red-spined Modern Library edition of I, Claudius off a shelf in the living room because I read everything that wasn't nailed down and I hadn't heard of the BBC miniseries, I didn't know from Derek Jacobi, I fell in love. (I did recognize, in the acknowledgements, the "Aircraftman T. E. Shaw" who argued with Graves over the use of "assegai" rather than "javelin" for framea. I'm with Lawrence.) I carried that copy around like a talisman for a year. I am lukewarm to indifferent toward Claudius the God, but you take I, Claudius from me over the bodies of the Praetorian Guard.

Fortunately, I don't need to agree unanimously with Graves in order to cherish it. His Greek Myths alone would have posed a problem there.

I like the picture at the head of the TLS article. It's a reminder of just how young most of the soldiers of the Great War were.

Yes.

Incidentally, I live just outside Tonbridge where the picture was taken.

What is the record (imprint? memory?) of the war where you live?

If Cuthbertson is right about Owen's (lack of) sexual experience it follows that all the best known poets of the War- with the exception of Brooke- went into it- and exited it- as virgins.

I didn't know that about the rest of them. That is terribly appropriate somehow.

[poliphilo]

Rublev is a good poem. I find it a little odd that Rumens goes through her whole spiel about it without mentioning Andrei Tarkovsky.

I knew Graves as a poet before I read I, Claudius. He is a good poet who at his peak touches greatness. I'm sure he has influenced my own writing. When I passed athwart the neo-pagan scene in the 90s he was one of my guides. His confused, pseudo-scholarly and slightly mad book The White Goddess is or was a key text for Wiccans, Goddess worshippers, and other pagans.

The Great War still haunts us here- and by "here" I mean not just our corner of the country but the whole nation. Every town, village and hamlet has its War memorial, great numbers of people- including children on school trips- tour the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France, everyone has read Wilfred Owen and these centenary years have been peppered with memorial services and TV documentaries. England as she is today was moulded by the two World Wars- the first a tragic and the second a triumphant experience.

As it happens we live in Sassoon's home village- and go past his huge unfriendly-looking Victorian mansion every time we drive to the shops. He used to ride with the local hunt and play cricket on our very pretty village green.

[sovay]

I find it a little odd that Rumens goes through her whole spiel about it without mentioning Andrei Tarkovsky.

Seriously. Maybe she hasn't seen him.

His confused, pseudo-scholarly and slightly mad book The White Goddess is or was a key text for Wiccans, Goddess worshippers, and other pagans.

As of the time I was in college (fifteen-ish years ago), it was still in common discourse; I bounced off it through a combination of Graves' back catalogue and comparative mythology. nineweaving drew an entire world from it, although hers is much better about women.

England as she is today was moulded by the two World Wars- the first a tragic and the second a triumphant experience.

That I am actually aware of: it is perceptible from contact with literature, film, or in the last couple of years the news. I was asking about just outside Tonbridge and I am sorry if I was not clear.

He used to ride with the local hunt and play cricket on our very pretty village green.

That counts as an imprint by me.

[poliphilo]

Rowan Williams is the same age as me- 6 months older to be precise. I'd be very surprised if his interest in Rublev wasn't fired- as mine was- by Tarkovsky's extraordinary Soviet era epic.

I thought you probably meant the Tonbridge era, but my point is that the two wars drew the country together. Therefore what's true of the country as a whole is also true of our corner. If you're looking for palpable local reminders then the second war left more markers than the first. There are 1940s airfields dotted around West Kent and lots of those funny little concrete gun emplacements known as pill boxes. As we discovered when we had detectorists go over our land the earth is full of shrapnel from the Battle of Britain.