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Time jumps like some magic rebound
I am not sleeping at all. I can't think. I am very tired of it.
1. I was in the middle of a work crunch last week when I read that Helen Dunmore had died. Once again, I hadn't even known she had cancer. I'm not even sure I knew she was a poet as well as a novelist. (The poem quoted at the end of the obituary is excellent.) I had discovered her a few years ago with The Greatcoat (2012), a breathtaking ghost story set in the echoes of World War II; she followed it with the post-WWI The Lie (2014), a messier, equally haunting novel about a young veteran whose shell-shocked eidetic memory matches the way time seems to have crazed and jumbled in the wake of the war, like the mud-caked apparition he keeps seeing of his oldest friend and first love and commanding officer who died on the Western Front. "Things ought to stop once they're finished, but this won't stop. They say the war's over, but they're wrong. It went too deep for that. It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. Once you fall into it you can't get out again." I was reminded of Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk's The Awakening (2011). I am not at all surprised to see from her bibliography that one of her early novels was titled Talking to the Dead (1996). I had just been coveting the paperback of what I thought was her latest novel, Exposure (2016); it didn't look supernatural, but it might surprise me. She has one last novel and one last poetry collection. I'm sure I'll track them down. I just didn't want a last anything from her for a long time to come.
2. In the wake of Delta and Bank of America pulling their sponsorship from Shakespeare in the Park's Trump-inflected Julius Caesar, I hope everyone remembers that five years ago the Acting Company staged an Obama-inflected Julius Caesar which nobody seems to have boycotted for proxy-assassinating the President of the United States and the lesson here—aside from double standards as usual—is the multivalence of the play, which is why people keep performing and reperforming it against all kinds of different political backdrops and I trust it will outlast most of them, especially the current administration.
3. How did it take me until tonight to learn that the Ronald Reagan impression on the 12" mix of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" was performed by Chris Barrie? (The civil defense broadcast is Patrick Allen doing an impression of himself.) He also imitates Mike Read as well as Reagan on the 12" mix of "The Power of Love," but that was less weird for me. It wasn't already on my iTunes.
1. I was in the middle of a work crunch last week when I read that Helen Dunmore had died. Once again, I hadn't even known she had cancer. I'm not even sure I knew she was a poet as well as a novelist. (The poem quoted at the end of the obituary is excellent.) I had discovered her a few years ago with The Greatcoat (2012), a breathtaking ghost story set in the echoes of World War II; she followed it with the post-WWI The Lie (2014), a messier, equally haunting novel about a young veteran whose shell-shocked eidetic memory matches the way time seems to have crazed and jumbled in the wake of the war, like the mud-caked apparition he keeps seeing of his oldest friend and first love and commanding officer who died on the Western Front. "Things ought to stop once they're finished, but this won't stop. They say the war's over, but they're wrong. It went too deep for that. It opened up a crack in time, a crater maybe. Once you fall into it you can't get out again." I was reminded of Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk's The Awakening (2011). I am not at all surprised to see from her bibliography that one of her early novels was titled Talking to the Dead (1996). I had just been coveting the paperback of what I thought was her latest novel, Exposure (2016); it didn't look supernatural, but it might surprise me. She has one last novel and one last poetry collection. I'm sure I'll track them down. I just didn't want a last anything from her for a long time to come.
2. In the wake of Delta and Bank of America pulling their sponsorship from Shakespeare in the Park's Trump-inflected Julius Caesar, I hope everyone remembers that five years ago the Acting Company staged an Obama-inflected Julius Caesar which nobody seems to have boycotted for proxy-assassinating the President of the United States and the lesson here—aside from double standards as usual—is the multivalence of the play, which is why people keep performing and reperforming it against all kinds of different political backdrops and I trust it will outlast most of them, especially the current administration.
3. How did it take me until tonight to learn that the Ronald Reagan impression on the 12" mix of Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes" was performed by Chris Barrie? (The civil defense broadcast is Patrick Allen doing an impression of himself.) He also imitates Mike Read as well as Reagan on the 12" mix of "The Power of Love," but that was less weird for me. It wasn't already on my iTunes.
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Not yet. I'd only heard about it sometime after watching B7 (which was, er, around 2008-9, I think) and I haven't been able to read properly since 2010 - this year is the first time it's more tentatively normalising. It's been v frustrating. (Hence me and old TV and David Collings; back in 2011, I really couldn't do anything else and it was truly awful. I desperately re-read the Chalet School series slowly, hoping reading would come back in the end and - s l o w l y - it has. I trust. It's still all a bit tentative, as I said.) I'd like to read it, though, when I have brain!
For whatever it's worth, I don't generally find it tiresome to read people enthusing about things they love.
Heh, indeed. I joke, but, yes, it's one of the joys of Fandom/journalling - to hear people going on about the things they love, even if they don't sound like your kind of thing. And, of course, sometimes they are, which is even better. (Although when I'm talking about cardboard telly, I do wonder...)
Is this a situation where word of God would help or is God either dead or been hiding from this question for years?
Oh, no, wherever Ben Steed is, he needs to stay there! 0_o The parody people are few in number and merely faintly optimistic. We all know what the truth is. My friend Liadt watched his Crown Court episodes, and they're pretty much as bad. One of the terrifying things is that IMBD claims he also wrote a children's series. Luckily, I haven't ever found anyone who's watched it. It's just that B7 is comparatively progressive for its era, so THAT in the middle of it is just the most unbelievable thing. But, anyway, if you watch B7 you'll have the joys of analysing Mr Steed's psyche to come for yourself. It defies description. I've watched a lot of British 60s and 70s TV, and there has been plenty of sexism of different kinds here and there, but nothing on Ben Steed levels but Ben Steed. His episodes are so bad you have to keep watching them because you can't believe they really were that bad. But, yep, THEY WERE. Every time.
As I said, it's a fun fandom bonding experience with quotable lines and competitions as to which BS ep is actually the worst. (A subject of actually quite fierce debate, unlike the faint 'maybe it's a parody' one, which really only applies to Harvest of Kairos, which does sort of answer that one in itself. Once may be a parody, three times... :lol:)
Sorry, talking of going on about things (and of all the things to go on about)! But, yeah. Ben Steed. He was a thing. And I hope he's seen somebody about his issues since and is a now a better person and maybe just writes calming poems about gardens or something, if he isn't already dead and they just buried him quietly somewhere.
One of the most interesting books of film criticism I have ever read was Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015) because it was more like internet fandom than any criticism
Oh, that does sound interesting and unusual! Most film critics like to be dispassionate, except we all know they're not really, because human beings. :-)