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Stand by, no way, stop
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.
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.
no subject
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.
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.
no subject
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.