I have spent the literal entirety of my legally adult life watching the country I was born into try to fait accompli its way into Armageddon and I have to say that it was not an enticing novelty a quarter of a century ago, either.
I was supposed to spend the afternoon with my husband and instead I am about to spend it at the doctor's. The one is obviously much preferable to the other. Have a photo I took yesterday when I was out and walking and thought I had a decent chance of doing something human with the end of my week.
I hope Rob Grant would take it in the intended spirit that when I heard the news of his sudden death, all I could think was "All most of us get is 'Mind that bus!' 'What bus?' Splat!" The first six and a half series of original flavor Red Dwarf (1988–99) were a social staple of my sophomore year of college, watched primarily in my case from the top half of a bunk bed occupied by a structurally unwise number of students who would shortly branch out into whatever British television comedy we could get hold of the tapes for. It became an immediate and ineradicable part of our language. Decades later, the number of quotations from especially the first three series that have worked themselves into my present household lingo would be difficult to estimate without a rewatch. In storage with the rest of my library, I still have some of the tie-in novels, including at least one of the separately authored parallel continuations, which unfortunately for this memoriam may have been Doug Naylor's. I cannot find that I ever saw another project of Grant's except for the first series of The 10%ers (1993–96) and I am still stricken to lose yet another artist while Kissinger's heirs don't even seem to be in this machine. Not everybody has to be dead, Dave.
Stepping out of the house for a short walk around the neighborhood, I discovered that a friend had sent me a surprise gift in the mail and that between their post office and my doorstep it had been stolen. I received a gutted envelope slit down the side containing brown paper from which the gift had been shaken out. The stiff paper of the accompanying note had wedged hard enough into the envelope that after some stricken searching it was still in there; the handmade buttons and the picture were not. I assume the thief was looking for checks or more conventionally defined valuables, but it seems unspeakably cruel to let the envelope continue on its way and arrive to tell me what kindness I had been robbed of. I still have the note. The kindness itself did travel the distance. But I still want the thief to fall in front of a freight express.
In the wake of the blizzard, the temperature rose a degree above freezing in the blue-and-white brilliance of sun and the local topography of snow-walls to shoulder-height compressed and calved like ice shelves. I had the impulse to visit the Robbins Cemetery on Mass. Ave. while out running errands and was prevented by absolutely nobody having shoveled within a block of the gates. I took a picture of a leftover slam-dunk of snow instead.
Tickets have hiked considerably in price since the last production of theirs I attended, but I am intrigued that the Apollinaire Theatre Company is currently doing Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge—I assume it was proposed last season because of the topical-political of the undocumented immigrant angle which has only gone Mach 10 in relevance since. I have never seen the play; I read it in 2016 because Van Heflin originated the role of Eddie Carbone in the original 1955 one-act version. I am wondering how I convince their box office that I am actively pursuing a professional arts career.
Tickets have hiked considerably in price since the last production of theirs I attended, but I am intrigued that the Apollinaire Theatre Company is currently doing Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge—I assume it was proposed last season because of the topical-political of the undocumented immigrant angle which has only gone Mach 10 in relevance since. I have never seen the play; I read it in 2016 because Van Heflin originated the role of Eddie Carbone in the original 1955 one-act version. I am wondering how I convince their box office that I am actively pursuing a professional arts career.
The snow has plastered our windows like blinds. This morning it scudded so thickly down our street that the air itself couldn't have been any clearer: it made walls instead of veils of the late streetlight. The yew trees look like calcified humps of stalagmite. It's still blowing around out there, bending the whippier evergreens of the neighbors' yard like a wind sock. I can hear a commuter train whistling dimly from over Route 16. I am informed we have broken the previous state record for snowfall in a day set by the 1997 April Fool's Day Blizzard which had itself surpassed the Blizzard of '78. Our porch is drifted ankle-deep.
I spent much of yesterday running pre-blizzard errands, but the local state of the parking spots is the truest gauge of the meteorology about to go down.
I have not yet managed to get hold of her memoir, but I deeply appreciate being notified of the existence of E. M. Barraud, who identified herself with chalk-cut hill figures, candidly described her relationship status as "technically single, but 'married' in a permanent homosexual relationship with another woman," published under her assigned initials and was known in Little Eversden where she worked for the Women's Land Army as John. She gave her wartime responses for Mass-Observation as both a man and a woman: "People are people, not specifics of a gender." I had never even encountered her poetry.
I have not yet managed to get hold of her memoir, but I deeply appreciate being notified of the existence of E. M. Barraud, who identified herself with chalk-cut hill figures, candidly described her relationship status as "technically single, but 'married' in a permanent homosexual relationship with another woman," published under her assigned initials and was known in Little Eversden where she worked for the Women's Land Army as John. She gave her wartime responses for Mass-Observation as both a man and a woman: "People are people, not specifics of a gender." I had never even encountered her poetry.
I am operating at about sixteen percent of a person thanks to medical needlessness and it puts me at something of a disadvantage in reacting to the ending of Susan Cooper's J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970) with anything more critically incisive than profanity.
To rewind a hot semi-linear second, I had just meant to complain that it feels almost superfluous for Cooper's The Grey King (1975) and Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) to be geographically as well as mythologically neighbors. Given their mutual setting in the valleys of North Wales, it finally occurred to me to check when a location in one novel turned up in the production history of the television version of the other. As anyone from the area could have told me, Tal-y-llyn and Llanymawddwy are about half an hour's drive from one another. As I noticed a couple of years ago, The Grey King is the only one of its sequence whose mortal and mythical layers are rigorously double-tracked instead of sewn back and forth through the great doors of Time: thanks to the machinations of the Light and the woman who hinges them as if fixed within a pattern of her own, the royal and terrible truth of Bran's parentage cannot be uncovered without simultaneously drawing out the tragedy of the previous generation in the present day, a sadder, messier, only locally legendary triangle whose fallout has nonetheless marked the valley as indelibly as the Arthurian stamp of Cader Idris. "I wanted to keep you free of it. It was over, it was gone, I wanted to keep you away from the past. Ah, we never should have stayed here. I should have moved away from the valley at the beginning." But the past is an event horizon, there's no escaping it in three days or fifteen centuries or eleven years, and when the power of the Brenin Llwyd has been broken and a human mind with it and the milgwn have all drowned themselves in a headlong rush of ghosts—when the Dark has given up the valley—the haunting of its human grief and loss remains. "Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away." You see how dangerously a narrative imprints itself on a landscape. I discover that a person can go up the Dysynni Valley and stay in an Airbnb called the Shepherd's Hut and my first thought is that I don't care how nice a view it has of Craig yr Aderyn, I am not interested in tripping over a warestone while glamping.
Cooper's nonfiction came into it when I was thinking about the centrality of time to her work and Garner's, specifically the tradition of ancient and simultaneous ages in the land. It had made dawn-over-Marblehead sense when I finally learned that the "J. B." and "Jacquetta" to whom she dedicated The Grey King were Priestley and Hawkes. I had never gotten around to reading her biography of the former and was immediately distracted by it. As a portrait, it is analytical and awed by turns; she calls its subject a "Time-haunted man" and supports her argument with reference to his novels, plays, and nonfiction as well as the ghost-history that she differentiates from nostalgia for some idealized pre-WWI Eden overlapping the end of his adolescence, identifying it instead as a bitterly vivid awareness of all the possibilities smashed by the war onto the rails of the twentieth century we actually got. He sounds more than slightly Viktor Frankl about it, which I am guessing accounts for the parallel evolution with Emeric Pressburger. I was never able to figure out if it was plausible for the nine-year-old Cooper to have seen A Canterbury Tale (1944), but she wouldn't have needed to if she had the vector of Priestley. "And because there was enchantment in the life it offered, the hideous transformation scene that took place when the enchantment vanished in a cloud of black smoke, and came out grimed and different on the other side, was enough to leave a young man of the time very vulnerable to visions of a lost Atlantis—especially a young man who was to become gradually more and more involved, as he grew older, in theories of a continuum of Time in which nothing is really past, but everything which has ever been is still there . . . If there is, in effect, a fifth dimension from which one can observe not only the present moment but also everything which runs before it and behind—then things which seem lost have never really been lost at all." By the time she got around to writing the Lost Land of Silver on the Tree (1977), she would be able to explain it more poetically: "For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." In terms of lineage, I can also get mildly feral when she discusses his wartime broadcasts which relied again, not on the wistfulness for an unmarred past, but the determination to build something stronger on the scars. Describing one in which he imagined himself explicitly choosing the second, harder work when offered the choice by the thought experiment of a great magician, the assertion that "the thing which is pure Priestley is the implication of an almost Arthurian destiny . . . and the vision it offers is one not of a misty Avalon but of a better Camelot" naturally makes me think "For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you." I keep finding reasons to argue with the last decision of The Dark Is Rising Sequence and yet another would be that it is demonstrably difficult to build a workable future on a past that's been erased. In fairness, she would get the balance right in Seaward (1983). I didn't react to the final pages of Cooper's biography of Priestley, however, because of any dot-to-dots I could draw from them to her own prose. They make a book-ending "picture" of the Omnibus programme which aired in 1969 as a tribute to Priestley on his seventy-fifth birthday, wrapping up what Cooper had until then considered a pretty marginal viewing experience with:
a condensed version of the last act of Johnson Over Jordan; and again there was an awkwardness, for this more than any of his plays translates badly to the medium of television, needing the depths of a craftily-lit stage to suggest the immensities of spaceless time in which it takes place.
But then, like the moment Priestley once celebrated 'when suddenly and softly the orchestra creeps in to accompany the piano', the magic that one had been hoping for all along suddenly came filtering through this television programme; for the part of Robert Johnson was being played here by the man for whom it had been written some thirty years before, Ralph Richardson, and Richardson and Priestley between them, actor and dramatist, magicians both, wrought a spell that produced, despite all handicaps, the real thing. Time had made one of those curious spiralling turns, for Richardson had grown older to meet the play, and fitted easily now into the role for which he had once had to draw in an extra couple of decades on his face; he played it without a false move or a marred inflection, and by the time he turned to walk into infinity, Everyman in a bowler hat, leaving one dimension for another unknown, I had forgotten the deficiencies of the small screen and could indeed hardly perceive its outlines at all. I had never seen Johnson Over Jordan in the theatre, but it had always moved me even as a written play, and I had never expected to have the chance of seeing Richardson act the part which had been so subtly tailored to his talent and voice. Now, however inferior his surroundings, I had. I blew my nose rather hard, and glanced across at Priestley.
I don't know what I expected him to offer us: a non-committal snort, perhaps; a rumble of technical criticism; at the most, a bit of knowledgeable praise for Richardson. But Priestley sat silent for a moment, gazing into space, looking unusually small in a very large armchair; and then he rubbed his eyes. 'I shed tears,' he said, rather gruff and low, 'not for what I have seen, but for what I have been remembering.' Then he hoisted himself up, and was his proper height again.
For a moment, he had been caught by a spell himself; caught by Time, by his own magic, and by that of his friend, and transported on to that other dimension where still there is playing the first production and every production of Johnson Over Jordan—and of As You Like It and The Cherry Orchard and Arms and the Man and all the rest—and where a younger Richardson is turning to walk not into the shadow of a cramped television studio but into the glitter of stars and the blue-dark cosmic depths that Basil Dean had created on a great stage, while Benjamin Britten's triumphant finale sounded out over the audience. Priestley wasn't really remembering, not really looking back; he was looking outward, into the level of Time where there is no forward or backward, no youth or age, no beginning or end. Like all the great enchanters, he has always seen it plainer than the rest of us yet can.
Obviously, I assumed at once that Richardson's televised performance survived only in the residually haunted sense that the space-time continuum never forgets a face, even one whose owner once unfavorably compared it to a hot cross bun; it would have been ironically on theme and characteristic of the BBC. To my surprise, the programme does seem to exist in some archivally inaccessible fashion and I could theoretically experience its time travel through the ordinary machinery of a telerecording, which would make a change from just about everything else Richardson was stage-famous for. I wouldn't be sitting next to Susan Cooper or J. B. Priestley, but the thing about art its that its audience is not bound by time any more than its maker. The author's bio for J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author identifies Cooper as the writer of Mandrake (1964), Behind the Golden Curtain (1965), and "two novels for children," which by publication dates must be Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Dawn of Fear (1970). She has not yet begun work on The Dark Is Rising (1973). She is not yet known herself as a magician of time. By my childhood she was firmly established as one and I checked out this book because I was interested in her stratigraphy as much as its subject and was so struck to find her interpreting him in the same language which I would use to discuss her, which Priestley had died before anyone coined as hauntology, although I am not sure from this portrait that he would concede that a future which had failed to materialize was existentially lost. By that logic, the profanity being all inside my head may or may not prevent it from reaching the genizah of time.
To rewind a hot semi-linear second, I had just meant to complain that it feels almost superfluous for Cooper's The Grey King (1975) and Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) to be geographically as well as mythologically neighbors. Given their mutual setting in the valleys of North Wales, it finally occurred to me to check when a location in one novel turned up in the production history of the television version of the other. As anyone from the area could have told me, Tal-y-llyn and Llanymawddwy are about half an hour's drive from one another. As I noticed a couple of years ago, The Grey King is the only one of its sequence whose mortal and mythical layers are rigorously double-tracked instead of sewn back and forth through the great doors of Time: thanks to the machinations of the Light and the woman who hinges them as if fixed within a pattern of her own, the royal and terrible truth of Bran's parentage cannot be uncovered without simultaneously drawing out the tragedy of the previous generation in the present day, a sadder, messier, only locally legendary triangle whose fallout has nonetheless marked the valley as indelibly as the Arthurian stamp of Cader Idris. "I wanted to keep you free of it. It was over, it was gone, I wanted to keep you away from the past. Ah, we never should have stayed here. I should have moved away from the valley at the beginning." But the past is an event horizon, there's no escaping it in three days or fifteen centuries or eleven years, and when the power of the Brenin Llwyd has been broken and a human mind with it and the milgwn have all drowned themselves in a headlong rush of ghosts—when the Dark has given up the valley—the haunting of its human grief and loss remains. "Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away." You see how dangerously a narrative imprints itself on a landscape. I discover that a person can go up the Dysynni Valley and stay in an Airbnb called the Shepherd's Hut and my first thought is that I don't care how nice a view it has of Craig yr Aderyn, I am not interested in tripping over a warestone while glamping.
Cooper's nonfiction came into it when I was thinking about the centrality of time to her work and Garner's, specifically the tradition of ancient and simultaneous ages in the land. It had made dawn-over-Marblehead sense when I finally learned that the "J. B." and "Jacquetta" to whom she dedicated The Grey King were Priestley and Hawkes. I had never gotten around to reading her biography of the former and was immediately distracted by it. As a portrait, it is analytical and awed by turns; she calls its subject a "Time-haunted man" and supports her argument with reference to his novels, plays, and nonfiction as well as the ghost-history that she differentiates from nostalgia for some idealized pre-WWI Eden overlapping the end of his adolescence, identifying it instead as a bitterly vivid awareness of all the possibilities smashed by the war onto the rails of the twentieth century we actually got. He sounds more than slightly Viktor Frankl about it, which I am guessing accounts for the parallel evolution with Emeric Pressburger. I was never able to figure out if it was plausible for the nine-year-old Cooper to have seen A Canterbury Tale (1944), but she wouldn't have needed to if she had the vector of Priestley. "And because there was enchantment in the life it offered, the hideous transformation scene that took place when the enchantment vanished in a cloud of black smoke, and came out grimed and different on the other side, was enough to leave a young man of the time very vulnerable to visions of a lost Atlantis—especially a young man who was to become gradually more and more involved, as he grew older, in theories of a continuum of Time in which nothing is really past, but everything which has ever been is still there . . . If there is, in effect, a fifth dimension from which one can observe not only the present moment but also everything which runs before it and behind—then things which seem lost have never really been lost at all." By the time she got around to writing the Lost Land of Silver on the Tree (1977), she would be able to explain it more poetically: "For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." In terms of lineage, I can also get mildly feral when she discusses his wartime broadcasts which relied again, not on the wistfulness for an unmarred past, but the determination to build something stronger on the scars. Describing one in which he imagined himself explicitly choosing the second, harder work when offered the choice by the thought experiment of a great magician, the assertion that "the thing which is pure Priestley is the implication of an almost Arthurian destiny . . . and the vision it offers is one not of a misty Avalon but of a better Camelot" naturally makes me think "For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you." I keep finding reasons to argue with the last decision of The Dark Is Rising Sequence and yet another would be that it is demonstrably difficult to build a workable future on a past that's been erased. In fairness, she would get the balance right in Seaward (1983). I didn't react to the final pages of Cooper's biography of Priestley, however, because of any dot-to-dots I could draw from them to her own prose. They make a book-ending "picture" of the Omnibus programme which aired in 1969 as a tribute to Priestley on his seventy-fifth birthday, wrapping up what Cooper had until then considered a pretty marginal viewing experience with:
a condensed version of the last act of Johnson Over Jordan; and again there was an awkwardness, for this more than any of his plays translates badly to the medium of television, needing the depths of a craftily-lit stage to suggest the immensities of spaceless time in which it takes place.
But then, like the moment Priestley once celebrated 'when suddenly and softly the orchestra creeps in to accompany the piano', the magic that one had been hoping for all along suddenly came filtering through this television programme; for the part of Robert Johnson was being played here by the man for whom it had been written some thirty years before, Ralph Richardson, and Richardson and Priestley between them, actor and dramatist, magicians both, wrought a spell that produced, despite all handicaps, the real thing. Time had made one of those curious spiralling turns, for Richardson had grown older to meet the play, and fitted easily now into the role for which he had once had to draw in an extra couple of decades on his face; he played it without a false move or a marred inflection, and by the time he turned to walk into infinity, Everyman in a bowler hat, leaving one dimension for another unknown, I had forgotten the deficiencies of the small screen and could indeed hardly perceive its outlines at all. I had never seen Johnson Over Jordan in the theatre, but it had always moved me even as a written play, and I had never expected to have the chance of seeing Richardson act the part which had been so subtly tailored to his talent and voice. Now, however inferior his surroundings, I had. I blew my nose rather hard, and glanced across at Priestley.
I don't know what I expected him to offer us: a non-committal snort, perhaps; a rumble of technical criticism; at the most, a bit of knowledgeable praise for Richardson. But Priestley sat silent for a moment, gazing into space, looking unusually small in a very large armchair; and then he rubbed his eyes. 'I shed tears,' he said, rather gruff and low, 'not for what I have seen, but for what I have been remembering.' Then he hoisted himself up, and was his proper height again.
For a moment, he had been caught by a spell himself; caught by Time, by his own magic, and by that of his friend, and transported on to that other dimension where still there is playing the first production and every production of Johnson Over Jordan—and of As You Like It and The Cherry Orchard and Arms and the Man and all the rest—and where a younger Richardson is turning to walk not into the shadow of a cramped television studio but into the glitter of stars and the blue-dark cosmic depths that Basil Dean had created on a great stage, while Benjamin Britten's triumphant finale sounded out over the audience. Priestley wasn't really remembering, not really looking back; he was looking outward, into the level of Time where there is no forward or backward, no youth or age, no beginning or end. Like all the great enchanters, he has always seen it plainer than the rest of us yet can.
Obviously, I assumed at once that Richardson's televised performance survived only in the residually haunted sense that the space-time continuum never forgets a face, even one whose owner once unfavorably compared it to a hot cross bun; it would have been ironically on theme and characteristic of the BBC. To my surprise, the programme does seem to exist in some archivally inaccessible fashion and I could theoretically experience its time travel through the ordinary machinery of a telerecording, which would make a change from just about everything else Richardson was stage-famous for. I wouldn't be sitting next to Susan Cooper or J. B. Priestley, but the thing about art its that its audience is not bound by time any more than its maker. The author's bio for J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author identifies Cooper as the writer of Mandrake (1964), Behind the Golden Curtain (1965), and "two novels for children," which by publication dates must be Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Dawn of Fear (1970). She has not yet begun work on The Dark Is Rising (1973). She is not yet known herself as a magician of time. By my childhood she was firmly established as one and I checked out this book because I was interested in her stratigraphy as much as its subject and was so struck to find her interpreting him in the same language which I would use to discuss her, which Priestley had died before anyone coined as hauntology, although I am not sure from this portrait that he would concede that a future which had failed to materialize was existentially lost. By that logic, the profanity being all inside my head may or may not prevent it from reaching the genizah of time.
The pattern of my days has tended toward craptastic, but ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theseatheseatheopensea has been writing incredible fills for prompts that I left in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
threesentenceficathon, most recently the one I threw out originally for an episode of TNG I hadn't seen since childhood. The latest pebble rushthatspeaks has brought me from the internet is a black cat Tarot whose particular standout is the Hanged Man. fleurdelis41 sent me Jewish dance cards and ashlyme a suite of Stanley Myers' The Martian Chronicles (1980). spatch introduced me to Beans. I have been re-reading Robin Scott Wilson's Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (1973), the anthology in which Le Guin explains how her brain plotted out the characterization of her novelette "Nine Lives" (1969) without bothering to let her know in advance:
Together with this glimpse of the situation, the character of Owen Pugh presented itself, complete and unquestionable, and indeed, at that very point, pretty enigmatic. Having a character really is very like having a baby, sometimes, except that there's a lot less warning, and babies don't arrive full-grown. But one has the same sense of pleased bewilderment. For instance, why was this man short and thin? Why was he honest, disorderly, nervous, and warmhearted? Why on earth was he Welsh? I had no idea at the time. There he was. And his name was Owen Pugh, to be sure. It was up to me to do right by him. All he offered (just like a baby) was his existence. Any assurance that this highly individualized, peculiar, intransigent person really was somehow related to my theme had to be taken on trust. A writer must trust the unconscious, even when it produces unexpected Welshmen.
I don't think anyone has ever made a Morden-and-the-Shadows vid to the Pack a.d.'s "Cardinal Rule" (2011) and it's a crying shame.
theseatheseatheopensea has been writing incredible fills for prompts that I left in threesentenceficathon, most recently the one I threw out originally for an episode of TNG I hadn't seen since childhood. The latest pebble rushthatspeaks has brought me from the internet is a black cat Tarot whose particular standout is the Hanged Man. fleurdelis41 sent me Jewish dance cards and ashlyme a suite of Stanley Myers' The Martian Chronicles (1980). spatch introduced me to Beans. I have been re-reading Robin Scott Wilson's Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (1973), the anthology in which Le Guin explains how her brain plotted out the characterization of her novelette "Nine Lives" (1969) without bothering to let her know in advance:Together with this glimpse of the situation, the character of Owen Pugh presented itself, complete and unquestionable, and indeed, at that very point, pretty enigmatic. Having a character really is very like having a baby, sometimes, except that there's a lot less warning, and babies don't arrive full-grown. But one has the same sense of pleased bewilderment. For instance, why was this man short and thin? Why was he honest, disorderly, nervous, and warmhearted? Why on earth was he Welsh? I had no idea at the time. There he was. And his name was Owen Pugh, to be sure. It was up to me to do right by him. All he offered (just like a baby) was his existence. Any assurance that this highly individualized, peculiar, intransigent person really was somehow related to my theme had to be taken on trust. A writer must trust the unconscious, even when it produces unexpected Welshmen.
I don't think anyone has ever made a Morden-and-the-Shadows vid to the Pack a.d.'s "Cardinal Rule" (2011) and it's a crying shame.
I did not end up accompanying rushthatspeaks and his child to the zoo this morning because I crashed so hard last night that I slept ten to eleven hours and am having difficulty remembering the day of the week, but he just dropped by with a nineweaving in the car and brought me my Christmas present of a sweater in the pattern of the Minoan octopus flask from Palaikastro and the cup with the scale motif from Archanes: it's spectacular. I was able to give him the collected cartoons and comics and poems of Le Guin's Book of Cats (2025). I got to see photographs of Artic and fennec foxes, flamingos and peccaries, sloth and snow leopard, porcupine and poison dart frog. Having spent the prior portion of my afternoon in the excitement of calling doctors and paying bills, my evening's plans involve couch and books.
rushthatspeaks and his child to the zoo this morning because I crashed so hard last night that I slept ten to eleven hours and am having difficulty remembering the day of the week, but he just dropped by with a nineweaving in the car and brought me my Christmas present of a sweater in the pattern of the Minoan octopus flask from Palaikastro and the cup with the scale motif from Archanes: it's spectacular. I was able to give him the collected cartoons and comics and poems of Le Guin's Book of Cats (2025). I got to see photographs of Artic and fennec foxes, flamingos and peccaries, sloth and snow leopard, porcupine and poison dart frog. Having spent the prior portion of my afternoon in the excitement of calling doctors and paying bills, my evening's plans involve couch and books.I have not slept in two nights as opposed to brief random hours elsewhere on the clock, but the sunlight this afternoon was gorgeous.
( I'm a little hungover and I may have to steal your soul. )
Like just about the rest of this weekend, any plans I had to attend even part of this year's sci-fi marathon at the Somerville did not survive contact with my stamina. Hestia has now broken four slats out of my blinds for a better view on Bird Theater and having tired herself out chattering at their delicious players sleeps innocently against my mermaid lamp, softly and a little snufflily breathing out a purr.
( I'm a little hungover and I may have to steal your soul. )
Like just about the rest of this weekend, any plans I had to attend even part of this year's sci-fi marathon at the Somerville did not survive contact with my stamina. Hestia has now broken four slats out of my blinds for a better view on Bird Theater and having tired herself out chattering at their delicious players sleeps innocently against my mermaid lamp, softly and a little snufflily breathing out a purr.
I spent the first half of Valentine's Day unromantically fulfilling some medical errands and then trying to sleep off a migraine, but in the evening I made keyn-ahora plans with rushthatspeaks and spatch and I ordered an accidentally four-person quantity of dinner from Chivo and watched Tales of the Tinkerdee (1962), an early fractured fairy tale of a Muppet curio whose relentlessly older-than-vaudeville gags we frequently missed from still laughing at a line about three jokes earlier. "A solid ruby gold-panning inlaid electric-fried antique!" After that I fell asleep on the couch.
rushthatspeaks and spatch and I ordered an accidentally four-person quantity of dinner from Chivo and watched Tales of the Tinkerdee (1962), an early fractured fairy tale of a Muppet curio whose relentlessly older-than-vaudeville gags we frequently missed from still laughing at a line about three jokes earlier. "A solid ruby gold-panning inlaid electric-fried antique!" After that I fell asleep on the couch.My poem "The Principle of the Thing" has been accepted by Weird Fiction Quarterly. It is the ghost poem I wrote last spring for Werner Heisenberg: 2025 finally called it out. 2026 hasn't yet rendered it démodé.
Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:
If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."
it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.
The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.
Branching off The Perceptual Form of the City (1954–59), I am still tracking down the publications of György Kepes whose debt to Gestalt psychology my mother pegged instantly from his interdisciplinary interests in perception, but my local library system furnished me with Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) and What Time Is This Place? (1972) and even more than urban planning, they make me think of psychogeography. An entire chapter in the latter is entitled "Boston Time" and illustrates itself with layers of photographs of a walk down Washington Street in the present of the book's composition and its past, singling out not only buildings and former buildings but weathered milestones and ghost signs, commemorative plaques and graffiti, dates established, construction stamps, spray paint, initials in concrete. "The trees are seasonal clocks, very precise in spring and fall." "The street name refers to the edge of the ancient peninsula. (If you look closely at the ground, you can trace the outline of the former shore.)" "The railroad, which in its day was cut ruthlessly through the close-packed docks and sailing ships, is now buried in its turn." Five and a half decades behind me, the book itself is a slice of history, a snapshot in the middle of the urban renewal that Lynch evocatively and not inaccurately describes as "steamrolling." I recognize the image of the city formed by the eponymously accumulated interviews in the older book and it is a city of Theseus. Scollay Square disappeared between the two publications. Lynch's Charles River Dam isn't mine. Blankly industrial spaces on his map have gentrified in over my lifetime. Don't even ask about wayfinding by the landmarks of the skyline. I do think he would have liked the harborwalk, since it reinforces one of Boston's edges as sea. And whether I agree entirely or at all with his assertion:
If we examine the feelings that accompany daily life, we find that historic monuments occupy a small place. Our strongest emotions concern our own lives and the lives of our family or friends because we have known them personally. The crucial reminders of the past are therefore those connected with our own childhood, or with our parents' or perhaps our grandparents' lives. Remarkable things are directly associated with memorable events in those lives: births, deaths, marriages, partings, graduations. To live in the same surroundings that one recalls from earliest memories is a satisfaction denied to most Americans today. The continuity of kin lacks a corresponding continuity of place. We are interested in a street on which our father may have lived as a boy; it helps to explain him to us and strengthens our own sense of identity, But our grandfather or great-grandfather, whom we never knew, is already in the remote past; his house is "historical."
it is impossible for me not to read it and hear "Isn't the house you were born in the most interesting house in the world to you? Don't you want to know how your father lived, and his father? Well, there are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors." None of mine came from this city I walk.
The rest of my day has been a landfill on fire.
Today's excitements included a more complicated dentist's appointment than originally envisioned and having to stop very suddenly short on I-93, but I did technically find my way to Scollay Square.
I am feeling non-stop terrible. I took a couple of pictures in the snow-fallen sunshine this afternoon.
( And be the roots that make the tree. )
spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.
( And be the roots that make the tree. )
spatch sent me a 1957 study of walking directions to Scollay Square. Researcher's notes can be unnecessarily period-typical, but the respondents themselves are wonderful. "You're a regular question-box, aren't you?" It turns out to be part of the basis for a seminal work of urban planning and perception. I like the first draft of the public image of Boston, including its conclusion that it is a deficit to the city not to be thought of as defined by the harbor as much as the river.It has been snowing lightly and steadily since I woke this morning. Those five hours of sleep were the most I have gotten in a seven-day week. At the moment a sort of bleach-silvered effect has started around the overcast sun: it seems to make the west-facing windows across the street reflect mercury-green. There were sunshowers in the snowfall, but not while I was out walking.
( I caught the stone that you threw. )
I can tell that my ability to think in media is reviving because in twenty-six years it had never occurred to me to fancast Stefan Fabbre and all of a sudden I thought that, fair-haired, dry-voiced, the moody, unsteady one in the family, in 1976 he would have been in Clive Francis' wheelhouse.gwynnega has suggested that Millard Lampell deserves his own Library of America volume and I'd order it in a hot second.
( I caught the stone that you threw. )
I can tell that my ability to think in media is reviving because in twenty-six years it had never occurred to me to fancast Stefan Fabbre and all of a sudden I thought that, fair-haired, dry-voiced, the moody, unsteady one in the family, in 1976 he would have been in Clive Francis' wheelhouse.
gwynnega has suggested that Millard Lampell deserves his own Library of America volume and I'd order it in a hot second.Saturday's Hero (1951) was already failing to survive contact with the Production Code when the Red Scare stepped in. To give the censors their back-handed due, the results can be mistaken for an ambitiously scabrous exposé of the commercialization of college football whose diffusion into platitudes beyond its immediate social message may be understood as the inevitable Hollywood guardrail against taking its cynicism too thoughtfully to heart. It just happens that any comparison with its source material reveals its intermittently focused anger as a more than routine casualty of that white picket filter: it is an object lesson in the futility of trying to compromise with a moral panic.
Optioned by Columbia before it was even published, Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) was a mythbuster of a debut novel from an author whose anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-union bona fides went back to his undergraduate days and whose activism had already been artistically front and center in his protest songs for the Almanac Singers and his ballad opera with Earl Robinson. The material was personal, recognizably developed from the combined radicalization of his high school stardom in the silk city of Paterson and his short-lived varsity career at West Virginia University. Structurally, it's as neat and sharp as one of his anti-war lyrics or labor anthems, sighting on the eternally shifting goalposts of the American dream through the sacred pigskin of its gridiron game. Like a campus novel pulled inside out, it does not chronicle the acclaim and acceptance found by a sensitive, impressionable recruit once he's played the game like a Jackson man for his alma mater's honor and the pure love of football, it leaves him out in the cold with a shattered shoulder and ideals, assimilating the hard, crude fact that all the brotherly valorization of this most patriotic, democratic sport was a gimmick to get him to beat his brains out for the prestige and profit of silver-spooned WASPs who would always look down on him as "a Polack from a mill town" even as he advertised the product of their school in the hallowed jersey of their last doomed youth of an All-American. Beneath its heady veneer of laurels and fustian, football itself comes across as a grisly, consuming ritual—Lampell may not have known about CTE, but the novel's most significant games are marked by dirty plays and their gladiatorial weight in stretchers. It goes without saying that team spirit outweighs such selfish considerations as permanent disability. The more jaded or desperate players just try to get out with their payoffs intact. "I was only doing a job out there. I got a wife and kid, I was in the Marines three years. I needed the dough, the one-fifty they offered for getting you out of there." None of these costs and abuses had escaped earlier critiques of amateur athletics, but Lampell explicitly politicized them, anchoring his thesis to the title that can be read satirically, seriously, sadder and more wisely, the secret lesson that marginalized rubes like Steve Novak are never supposed to learn:
"Of all the nations on earth, it seems to me that America is peculiarly a country fed on myths. Work and Win. You Too Can Be President. Bootblack to Banker. The Spirit of the Old School. We've developed a whole culture designed to send young men chasing after a thousand glistening and empty goals. You too, Novak. You believe the legend . . . You've distilled him out of a thousand movies and magazine stories, second-rate novels and photographs in the advertisements. The Hero. The tall, lean, manly, modest, clean-cut, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon All-American Boy, athletic and confident in his perfectly cut tweeds, with his passport from Yale or Princeton or Jackson . . . To be accepted and secure; to be free of the humiliations of adolescence, the embarrassment of being Polish or poor, or Italian, or Jewish, or the son of a weary, bewildered father, a mother who is nervous and shouts, a grandfather who came over from the old country . . . You have to learn to recognize the myth, Novak. You have to learn what is the illusion, and what is the reality. That is when you will cease being hurt, baffled, disillusioned by a place like this. You won't learn it from me. You won't learn it from a lecture, or a conversation over teacups. But you'll have to learn."
Almost none of this mercilessly articulated disenchantment can be found in the finished film. Co-adapted by Lampell with writer-producer Sidney Buchman and chronically criticized by the PCA, Saturday's Hero sticks with melodramatic fidelity to the letter of the novel's action while its spirit is diverted from a devastating indictment of the American bill of goods to the smaller venalities of corruption in sports, the predatory scouts, the parasitic agents, the indifferent greed of presciently corporatized institutions and the self-serving back-slapping of alumni who parade their sacrificially anointed mascots to further their own political goals. It's acrid as far as it goes, but it loses so much of the novel's prickle as well as its bite. Onscreen, old-moneyed, ivy-bricked, athletically unscrupulous Jackson is a Southern university, mostly, it seems, to heighten the culture shock with the Northeastern conurbation that spawned Steve's White Falls. In the novel, its geography is razor-relevant—it decides his choice of college. Academically and financially, he has better offers for his grades and his talent, but its Virginian mystique, aristocratically redolent of Thomas Jefferson and Jeb Stuart, feels so much more authentically American than the immigrant industry of his hardscrabble New Jersey that he clutches for it like a fool's gold ring. The 2026 reader may feel their hackles raise even more than the reader of 1949. The viewer of 1951 would have had to read in the interrogation of what makes a real American for themselves. The question was a sealed record in the McCarthy era; it was un-American even to ask. It was downright Communist to wonder whether what made a real hero was a gentleman's handshake or the guts to hold on like Steve's Poppa with his accent as thick as chleb żytni, who went to jail with a broken head in the 1913 silk strike and never crossed a picket line in his life. For Lampell, the exploitativeness of football could not be separated from the equally stacked decks of race and economics that drove students to seek out their own commodification. "It is a profound social comment that there are so many Polish, Italian, Jewish and Negro athletes. Because athletics offers one of the few ways out of the tenements and the company houses." The Production Code was a past master of compartmentalization, married couples placed decorously in separate beds. The football scenes in Saturday's Hero are shot with bone-crunching adrenaline by God-tier DP Lee Garmes as if he'd tacked an Arriflex to the running back and if the picture had been ideologically that head-on, it might have lived up to the accusations of subversive propaganda which the presence of class consciousness seemed to panic out of the censors. It feels instead so circumscribed in its outrage that it is faintly amazing that it manages the novel's anti-establishment, not anti-intellectual ending in which Steve, proto-New Wave, walks away from the gilded snare of Jackson determined to complete his education on his own terms even if it means putting himself through night school in White Falls or New York. As his Pacific veteran of a brother gently recognizes, in a way that has nothing to do with diplomas, "My little brother is an educated man." It's a hard-won, self-made optimism, surely as all-American as any forward pass. With the vitriolic encouragement of such right-wing organizations and publications as The American Legion Magazine (1919–), its even more expressly anti-Communist spinoff The Firing Line (1952–55), and the anti-union astroturf of the Wage Earners Committee, the movie after all its memos, rewrites, and cuts was picketed and charges of card-carrying Communism levied against writer Lampell, producer Buchman, and supporting player Alexander Knox.
Why pick on him? The blacklist had already done its job. For his prolifically left-wing contributions to the Committee for the First Amendment, Progressive Citizens of America, the Actors' Lab, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Russian Institute, Knox had been named in Myron C. Fagan's Documentations of the Reds and Fellow-Travelers in Hollywood and TV (1950). By the end of that year, he had taken his Canadian passport and his half-American family to the UK and returned to the U.S. only for the production dates required to burn off the remainder of his contract with Columbia. Since witch-hunts have by definition little to do with facts and everything to do with fear, the picketers didn't have to care so long as they could seize on his Red-bait reputation—The Firing Line would cherish a hate-on for him as late as 1954—but it remains absurdly true that at the time when Saturday's Hero premiered, he was living in London. His name had been insinuated before HUAC as far back as the original hearings in 1947. Harry Cohn might as well have rolled his own with those memos and let Knox give that broadside denunciation of the great American myth.
Fortunately, even a truncated version of Professor Megroth of the English Department of Jackson University is an ornament to his picture, no matter how irritably he would wave it off. Plotwise, the character is strictly from cliché, the only adult on campus to bother with an athlete's mind instead of his rushing average and return yards, but Knox makes him believable and even difficult, the kind of burnt-out instructor who makes sour little asides about the tedium of his own courses and plays his disdain for sportsball to the cheap seats of his tonier students as a prelude to putting the blue-collar naïf he resents having been assigned to advise on the spot. Can I find a hint that Knox ever played Andrew Crocker-Harris in his post-American stage career? Can I hell and I'd like to see the manager about it. Like the subtly stratified fraternity houses and dorms, he looks like just another manifestation of the university's double standards until Steve goes for the Romantic broke of quoting all forty-two Spenserian stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the professor is ironically too good a sport not to concede the backfire with unimpeachable pedantry. "You don't understand, Novak. You're supposed to stand there like a dumb ox while I make a fool out of you." His mentorship of Steve is mordant, impatient, a little shy of his own enthusiasm, as if he's been recalled to his responsibilities as a teacher by the novelty of a pupil who goes straight off the syllabus of English 1 into Whitman and Balzac and Dostoyevsky as fast as Megroth can pull their titles off the shelves, making time outside his office hours—in a rare note of realism for Hollywood academia, he can be seen grading papers through lunch—in unemphasized alternative to the relentless demands of the team and especially its publicity machine that eat ever further into its star player's studies and, more fragilely, his sense of self. "You know, if you continue in this rather curious manner, I may be forced to give you quite a decent mark. Be a terrible blow to me, wouldn't it?" That it doesn't work is no criticism of Megroth, who is obviously a more than competent advisor once he gets his head out of his own classism. As he would not be permitted to point out on film, it is hideously difficult to deprogram a national freight of false idols, especially after eighteen years of absorbing them as unconsciously as the chemical waste of the dye shops or the ash and asbestos fallout of the silk mills. He can talk about truth, he can talk about self-knowledge; he can watch horrified and impotent from the stands of a brutal debacle as it breaks his student across its bottom line. He would have played beautifully the quiet, clear-eyed conversation that the PCA rejected as "anti-American." Barely a line remains, cut to shreds, perhaps reshot: "The dream, the dream to be accepted and secure . . . Once you know it's a dream, it can't hurt." Professor Megroth says it like the only thing he has left to teach the still-raw Steve, whom even a joke about industrial insurance can't persuade to stay a second longer at Jackson than it takes him to pack. Alex Knox would not revisit the U.S. for thirty years and then briefly. He would act in American pictures again if they were internationally shot.
"One way that fascism comes," Millard Lampell wrote as a senior at WVU in 1940, "is by an almost imperceptible system of limitations on public liberty, an accumulation of suppressions. The attack on civil liberties is one invasion the United States army can't stop. The only safeguard of democracy at the polls is the determination of the people to make it work." Boy, would he have had a lousy 2024. He didn't have such a good 1950, when he was named in the notorious Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and in short order vanished from American screens until the 1960's. Sidney Buchman followed much the same trajectory, starting with his refusal to name names before HUAC the same month that Saturday's Hero opened. Since he was encouraged to write one of those confessional letters clearing himself of all Communist sympathies, I am pleased to report that Alexander Knox completely blew it by digressing to castigate the House Un-American Activities Committee for exactly the kind of lawless groupthink it claimed to have formed to root out, which he was unsurprisingly right damaged far more of America's image on the world stage than a couple of socially progressive pictures. Is there an echo in here? The blacklist passed over the majority of the remaining cast and crew—veteran direction by David Miller, a journeyman score by Elmer Bernstein, and effective to exact performances from John Derek, Donna Reed, Sidney Blackmer, Sandro Giglio, Aldo Ray, and no relation Mickey Knox—but even the topical boost of a series of college athletics scandals couldn't save the film at the box office. It was Red and dead.
"Athletics! No interest whatsoever in football, basketball, tennis, beanbag, darts, or spin-the-bottle." I have about as much feeling for most sports as Professor Megroth, but I learned the rules of American football because my grandfather always watched it, always rooting for the Sooners long after he had retired from the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. I would have loved to ask him about this movie, the sport, the politics; I would have loved to catch it on TCM, for that matter, but instead I had to make do with very blurrily TCM-ripped YouTube. The novel itself took an interlibrary loan to get hold of, never having been reprinted since its abridged and pulp-styled paperback from the Popular Library in 1950. It's such a snapshot, except the more I discovered about it, the less historical it felt. "I console myself," the novel's professor says, unconsoled, as he shakes hands for the last time with Steve, "with the thought that even if I had said all this, you would not have believed me. You would have had to find out." And then, just once, could we remember? This education brought to you by my curious backers at Patreon.
Optioned by Columbia before it was even published, Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) was a mythbuster of a debut novel from an author whose anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-union bona fides went back to his undergraduate days and whose activism had already been artistically front and center in his protest songs for the Almanac Singers and his ballad opera with Earl Robinson. The material was personal, recognizably developed from the combined radicalization of his high school stardom in the silk city of Paterson and his short-lived varsity career at West Virginia University. Structurally, it's as neat and sharp as one of his anti-war lyrics or labor anthems, sighting on the eternally shifting goalposts of the American dream through the sacred pigskin of its gridiron game. Like a campus novel pulled inside out, it does not chronicle the acclaim and acceptance found by a sensitive, impressionable recruit once he's played the game like a Jackson man for his alma mater's honor and the pure love of football, it leaves him out in the cold with a shattered shoulder and ideals, assimilating the hard, crude fact that all the brotherly valorization of this most patriotic, democratic sport was a gimmick to get him to beat his brains out for the prestige and profit of silver-spooned WASPs who would always look down on him as "a Polack from a mill town" even as he advertised the product of their school in the hallowed jersey of their last doomed youth of an All-American. Beneath its heady veneer of laurels and fustian, football itself comes across as a grisly, consuming ritual—Lampell may not have known about CTE, but the novel's most significant games are marked by dirty plays and their gladiatorial weight in stretchers. It goes without saying that team spirit outweighs such selfish considerations as permanent disability. The more jaded or desperate players just try to get out with their payoffs intact. "I was only doing a job out there. I got a wife and kid, I was in the Marines three years. I needed the dough, the one-fifty they offered for getting you out of there." None of these costs and abuses had escaped earlier critiques of amateur athletics, but Lampell explicitly politicized them, anchoring his thesis to the title that can be read satirically, seriously, sadder and more wisely, the secret lesson that marginalized rubes like Steve Novak are never supposed to learn:
"Of all the nations on earth, it seems to me that America is peculiarly a country fed on myths. Work and Win. You Too Can Be President. Bootblack to Banker. The Spirit of the Old School. We've developed a whole culture designed to send young men chasing after a thousand glistening and empty goals. You too, Novak. You believe the legend . . . You've distilled him out of a thousand movies and magazine stories, second-rate novels and photographs in the advertisements. The Hero. The tall, lean, manly, modest, clean-cut, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon All-American Boy, athletic and confident in his perfectly cut tweeds, with his passport from Yale or Princeton or Jackson . . . To be accepted and secure; to be free of the humiliations of adolescence, the embarrassment of being Polish or poor, or Italian, or Jewish, or the son of a weary, bewildered father, a mother who is nervous and shouts, a grandfather who came over from the old country . . . You have to learn to recognize the myth, Novak. You have to learn what is the illusion, and what is the reality. That is when you will cease being hurt, baffled, disillusioned by a place like this. You won't learn it from me. You won't learn it from a lecture, or a conversation over teacups. But you'll have to learn."
Almost none of this mercilessly articulated disenchantment can be found in the finished film. Co-adapted by Lampell with writer-producer Sidney Buchman and chronically criticized by the PCA, Saturday's Hero sticks with melodramatic fidelity to the letter of the novel's action while its spirit is diverted from a devastating indictment of the American bill of goods to the smaller venalities of corruption in sports, the predatory scouts, the parasitic agents, the indifferent greed of presciently corporatized institutions and the self-serving back-slapping of alumni who parade their sacrificially anointed mascots to further their own political goals. It's acrid as far as it goes, but it loses so much of the novel's prickle as well as its bite. Onscreen, old-moneyed, ivy-bricked, athletically unscrupulous Jackson is a Southern university, mostly, it seems, to heighten the culture shock with the Northeastern conurbation that spawned Steve's White Falls. In the novel, its geography is razor-relevant—it decides his choice of college. Academically and financially, he has better offers for his grades and his talent, but its Virginian mystique, aristocratically redolent of Thomas Jefferson and Jeb Stuart, feels so much more authentically American than the immigrant industry of his hardscrabble New Jersey that he clutches for it like a fool's gold ring. The 2026 reader may feel their hackles raise even more than the reader of 1949. The viewer of 1951 would have had to read in the interrogation of what makes a real American for themselves. The question was a sealed record in the McCarthy era; it was un-American even to ask. It was downright Communist to wonder whether what made a real hero was a gentleman's handshake or the guts to hold on like Steve's Poppa with his accent as thick as chleb żytni, who went to jail with a broken head in the 1913 silk strike and never crossed a picket line in his life. For Lampell, the exploitativeness of football could not be separated from the equally stacked decks of race and economics that drove students to seek out their own commodification. "It is a profound social comment that there are so many Polish, Italian, Jewish and Negro athletes. Because athletics offers one of the few ways out of the tenements and the company houses." The Production Code was a past master of compartmentalization, married couples placed decorously in separate beds. The football scenes in Saturday's Hero are shot with bone-crunching adrenaline by God-tier DP Lee Garmes as if he'd tacked an Arriflex to the running back and if the picture had been ideologically that head-on, it might have lived up to the accusations of subversive propaganda which the presence of class consciousness seemed to panic out of the censors. It feels instead so circumscribed in its outrage that it is faintly amazing that it manages the novel's anti-establishment, not anti-intellectual ending in which Steve, proto-New Wave, walks away from the gilded snare of Jackson determined to complete his education on his own terms even if it means putting himself through night school in White Falls or New York. As his Pacific veteran of a brother gently recognizes, in a way that has nothing to do with diplomas, "My little brother is an educated man." It's a hard-won, self-made optimism, surely as all-American as any forward pass. With the vitriolic encouragement of such right-wing organizations and publications as The American Legion Magazine (1919–), its even more expressly anti-Communist spinoff The Firing Line (1952–55), and the anti-union astroturf of the Wage Earners Committee, the movie after all its memos, rewrites, and cuts was picketed and charges of card-carrying Communism levied against writer Lampell, producer Buchman, and supporting player Alexander Knox.
Why pick on him? The blacklist had already done its job. For his prolifically left-wing contributions to the Committee for the First Amendment, Progressive Citizens of America, the Actors' Lab, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Russian Institute, Knox had been named in Myron C. Fagan's Documentations of the Reds and Fellow-Travelers in Hollywood and TV (1950). By the end of that year, he had taken his Canadian passport and his half-American family to the UK and returned to the U.S. only for the production dates required to burn off the remainder of his contract with Columbia. Since witch-hunts have by definition little to do with facts and everything to do with fear, the picketers didn't have to care so long as they could seize on his Red-bait reputation—The Firing Line would cherish a hate-on for him as late as 1954—but it remains absurdly true that at the time when Saturday's Hero premiered, he was living in London. His name had been insinuated before HUAC as far back as the original hearings in 1947. Harry Cohn might as well have rolled his own with those memos and let Knox give that broadside denunciation of the great American myth.
Fortunately, even a truncated version of Professor Megroth of the English Department of Jackson University is an ornament to his picture, no matter how irritably he would wave it off. Plotwise, the character is strictly from cliché, the only adult on campus to bother with an athlete's mind instead of his rushing average and return yards, but Knox makes him believable and even difficult, the kind of burnt-out instructor who makes sour little asides about the tedium of his own courses and plays his disdain for sportsball to the cheap seats of his tonier students as a prelude to putting the blue-collar naïf he resents having been assigned to advise on the spot. Can I find a hint that Knox ever played Andrew Crocker-Harris in his post-American stage career? Can I hell and I'd like to see the manager about it. Like the subtly stratified fraternity houses and dorms, he looks like just another manifestation of the university's double standards until Steve goes for the Romantic broke of quoting all forty-two Spenserian stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the professor is ironically too good a sport not to concede the backfire with unimpeachable pedantry. "You don't understand, Novak. You're supposed to stand there like a dumb ox while I make a fool out of you." His mentorship of Steve is mordant, impatient, a little shy of his own enthusiasm, as if he's been recalled to his responsibilities as a teacher by the novelty of a pupil who goes straight off the syllabus of English 1 into Whitman and Balzac and Dostoyevsky as fast as Megroth can pull their titles off the shelves, making time outside his office hours—in a rare note of realism for Hollywood academia, he can be seen grading papers through lunch—in unemphasized alternative to the relentless demands of the team and especially its publicity machine that eat ever further into its star player's studies and, more fragilely, his sense of self. "You know, if you continue in this rather curious manner, I may be forced to give you quite a decent mark. Be a terrible blow to me, wouldn't it?" That it doesn't work is no criticism of Megroth, who is obviously a more than competent advisor once he gets his head out of his own classism. As he would not be permitted to point out on film, it is hideously difficult to deprogram a national freight of false idols, especially after eighteen years of absorbing them as unconsciously as the chemical waste of the dye shops or the ash and asbestos fallout of the silk mills. He can talk about truth, he can talk about self-knowledge; he can watch horrified and impotent from the stands of a brutal debacle as it breaks his student across its bottom line. He would have played beautifully the quiet, clear-eyed conversation that the PCA rejected as "anti-American." Barely a line remains, cut to shreds, perhaps reshot: "The dream, the dream to be accepted and secure . . . Once you know it's a dream, it can't hurt." Professor Megroth says it like the only thing he has left to teach the still-raw Steve, whom even a joke about industrial insurance can't persuade to stay a second longer at Jackson than it takes him to pack. Alex Knox would not revisit the U.S. for thirty years and then briefly. He would act in American pictures again if they were internationally shot.
"One way that fascism comes," Millard Lampell wrote as a senior at WVU in 1940, "is by an almost imperceptible system of limitations on public liberty, an accumulation of suppressions. The attack on civil liberties is one invasion the United States army can't stop. The only safeguard of democracy at the polls is the determination of the people to make it work." Boy, would he have had a lousy 2024. He didn't have such a good 1950, when he was named in the notorious Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and in short order vanished from American screens until the 1960's. Sidney Buchman followed much the same trajectory, starting with his refusal to name names before HUAC the same month that Saturday's Hero opened. Since he was encouraged to write one of those confessional letters clearing himself of all Communist sympathies, I am pleased to report that Alexander Knox completely blew it by digressing to castigate the House Un-American Activities Committee for exactly the kind of lawless groupthink it claimed to have formed to root out, which he was unsurprisingly right damaged far more of America's image on the world stage than a couple of socially progressive pictures. Is there an echo in here? The blacklist passed over the majority of the remaining cast and crew—veteran direction by David Miller, a journeyman score by Elmer Bernstein, and effective to exact performances from John Derek, Donna Reed, Sidney Blackmer, Sandro Giglio, Aldo Ray, and no relation Mickey Knox—but even the topical boost of a series of college athletics scandals couldn't save the film at the box office. It was Red and dead.
"Athletics! No interest whatsoever in football, basketball, tennis, beanbag, darts, or spin-the-bottle." I have about as much feeling for most sports as Professor Megroth, but I learned the rules of American football because my grandfather always watched it, always rooting for the Sooners long after he had retired from the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. I would have loved to ask him about this movie, the sport, the politics; I would have loved to catch it on TCM, for that matter, but instead I had to make do with very blurrily TCM-ripped YouTube. The novel itself took an interlibrary loan to get hold of, never having been reprinted since its abridged and pulp-styled paperback from the Popular Library in 1950. It's such a snapshot, except the more I discovered about it, the less historical it felt. "I console myself," the novel's professor says, unconsoled, as he shakes hands for the last time with Steve, "with the thought that even if I had said all this, you would not have believed me. You would have had to find out." And then, just once, could we remember? This education brought to you by my curious backers at Patreon.
In compensation for a day-consuming stat appointment, I got to spend some more time with the Salem Street Burying Ground and found one of those puddled-iron sunsets on the way home. I hadn't brought my camera, but I had my phone.
( So I break every mirror to see myself clearer. )
I seem to have missed Candlemas this year, so have a belated invocation to Brigid: Emma Christian, "Vreeshey, Vreeshey." The temperature rose to just freezing this afternoon and a whole shelf of snow-crust calved off the roof onto the front steps.
( So I break every mirror to see myself clearer. )
I seem to have missed Candlemas this year, so have a belated invocation to Brigid: Emma Christian, "Vreeshey, Vreeshey." The temperature rose to just freezing this afternoon and a whole shelf of snow-crust calved off the roof onto the front steps.
My poem "Reap the Rules" has been accepted by Reckoning. It is my first sale to the journal; it is a particular honor that it was selected for the conflict-themed special issue It Was Paradise. I wrote it last summer after the U.S. strikes on Iran. It is a prayer dedicated in cuneiform to the oldest goddess I know in that region. The title is a mondegreen from Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane's "Coins for the Eyes" (2022) which was about all I listened to while writing. Curse tablets do not seem to be going out of fashion any time soon.
I feel as though I remember to check out Festivids even less reliably than Yuletide, but this year has been a bonanza of which my socks-blown-off favorites look like "There Is No Ship" (Steerswoman), "ASSHOLE" (Looney Tunes), "Queen Bitch Cartagia" (Babylon 5), and "So It Goes" (Foundation). Honorable mentions to "It's a Sin" (Murderbot) even though I can't separate that song from Derek Jarman and "Hard Knock Life" (The Canopener Bridge) for introducing me to its fandom and perfectly illustrating the concept of storrowing.
My sleep has gone extraordinarily off the rails, but the snow in our back yard is criss-crossed with rabbit tracks. Hestia has broken three of the slats in my blinds in order to provide herself with a better view on Bird Theater.
I feel as though I remember to check out Festivids even less reliably than Yuletide, but this year has been a bonanza of which my socks-blown-off favorites look like "There Is No Ship" (Steerswoman), "ASSHOLE" (Looney Tunes), "Queen Bitch Cartagia" (Babylon 5), and "So It Goes" (Foundation). Honorable mentions to "It's a Sin" (Murderbot) even though I can't separate that song from Derek Jarman and "Hard Knock Life" (The Canopener Bridge) for introducing me to its fandom and perfectly illustrating the concept of storrowing.
My sleep has gone extraordinarily off the rails, but the snow in our back yard is criss-crossed with rabbit tracks. Hestia has broken three of the slats in my blinds in order to provide herself with a better view on Bird Theater.
Rabbit, rabbit! January really came apart toward the end, but we are catching just enough of the nor'easter to snow February in and I have just learned of the existence of the cobalt crust fungus, which looks like scales of lapis on dead wood. Hestia has been dealing with the sub-zero wind chill temperatures by means of aggressive basking.
