Myth Happens

Mailing our census form back to the city turned out to be slightly more of a Shackletonian trek than I had prepared for, not because I had failed to notice the maze of sidewalks and driveways tunneled out of the snow-walls on our street or the thick-flocked snowfall that had restarted around sunset, but because I had expected some neighbor to have snowblown or at least shoveled the block with the post box on it. It stood amid magnificent, inviolate drifts. I waded. At 18 °F and wind chill, my hands effectively quit on me within five minutes, but even between their numbness and my camera's increasing preference not to, I did manage to take a couple of pictures I liked.

( Laughter doesn't always mean. )

JSTOR showcased Laura Secord with the result that I had to listen, thanks these aeons ago to ladymondegreen, to Tanglefoot.

It is a sign of how badly the last three years in particular have accordioned into one another that my reaction to discovering last year's new album from Brivele was the pleased surprise that it followed so soon on their latest EP. I am intrigued that they cover the Young'uns' "Cable Street" (2017), which has for obvious reasons been on my mind.

I can find no further details on the secretary from the North Midlands who appears in the second half of this clip from This Week: Lesbians (1965), but if there was any justice in the universe the studio should have been besieged with letters from interested women, because in explaining the problems of dating, she's a complete delight. "Well, that's the difficulty. In a way, it means that I have to keep making friends with people because I can't find out unless I make friends with them and then if they are lesbian, there's hope for me, but even then there isn't hope unless they happen to take to me!"

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

( These sisters waiting to wear their own clothes. )

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.

In an all-time record for my minimal presence in fandom, I am now participating in my third year of threesentenceficathon. I have written four fills to date and taken the rare step of transferring all of them to AO3. Once again all selections are obviously me.

Tonight after my second and last panel of the convention, I was told by one audience member that they would listen to me read the phone book because even under those circumstances they would learn something interesting and Tiny Wittgenstein was definitely confused.

The panels went chaotically well. "Cursed Literature" lived up to its name by losing two panelists before the con even started, but in practice it turned into a freewheeling discussion less of literature in particular than the concepts of hazardous information, the spellmaking of language, and narratives as contagion, which gave me an excuse to boost Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966), An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Program of 1912–14, and Aramaic incantation bowls plus the inevitable M. R. James. "SFF on Stage" had a supersaturation of panelists mostly from the performing arts and could have gone an extra hour at least as we started with the inherently liminal nature of theater and bounced around through all the ways that the speculative can be invoked on stage through conceits, stagecraft, scoring, nothing but the contract that reality changes because the actor says it does. I went all in on twentieth-century opera and weird technically realist plays and discovered that there has actually not been another production of Jewelle Gomez's Bones & Ash: A Gilda Story since the one I saw with my grandparents in 1996. As always, members of the audience asked such good questions that they should have been on the panels to start.

I have been asked multiple times if I will be around for the last day of Arisia and since I have no further programming the odds are unfortunately good that I will be flat in bed, but at the moment I regret nothing. I saw a genarti! I saw a skygiants! I failed to write down the names of a pair of extraordinarily well-dressed attendees who wanted to talk about Jewish folk magic and were thrilled that I recognized their Babylon 5 tie-in novels! nineweaving and I shared a panel for the first time since virtual 2021! I did not make it back to the dealer's room before it closed and instead sort of keeled over in the disused cosplay repair area with choco_frosh and presently a friend of his who is unlikely to be on DW, since this time around people were giving me their contact information on Instagram and I felt as though I should have business cards printed on papyrus scraps. I had genuinely not been sure how this experiment in professional interaction would go. It is snowing as busily as a real winter in New England and without begrudging a second of this vanishing season, I am looking forward to Readercon.

Alexander Knox was born on this date a hundred and nineteen years ago and without him I might never have discovered that the fan magazines of classical Hollywood could get as specifically thirsty as the modern internet.

Come to that, you would have been pretty tasty in the pulpit, too, Alex. You look, except for that glint in your eyes and that dimple in your cheek, like a minister's son. You look serious, even studious. You dress quietly, in grays and blacks and browns. Your interests are in bookish things. You live in a furnished apartment on the Strip in Hollywood, and have few possessions. You like to "travel light," you said so. You like to move about a lot, always have and always will. You've lived in a trunk for so many years you are, you explained, used to it. Of course, you've been married twice, which rather confuses the issue. But perhaps two can travel as lightly as one, if they put their minds to it. But you do have books. You have libraries in three places. At home, in Canada. At the farm in Connecticut, of which you are part owner, and in the apartment where you and your bride Doris Nolan still live. You write, which would come in handy with sermons. You're dreamy when you play the piano. For the most part it isn't, let's face it, church music you play. But you could convert.

—Gladys Hall, "Memo to Alex Knox" (Screenland, August 1945)

My schedule for Arisia this year is minute, but a fairly big deal for me since the state of my health last allowed me to participate in programming in 2021. I mean, at the moment the state of my health is failed, but I'm still looking forward.

Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3 pm, Amesbury AB
Marc Abrahams et al.

Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents, presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented—answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.

Cursed Literature
Sunday 4:15 pm, Central Square
Mark Millman (m), Alastor, Kristina Spinney, Sonya Taaffe

Some literature describes haunted houses; other books seem like they are haunted, as though the act of reading the book is inviting something vaguely unclean into the reader's life. Whether considering the dire typographical labyrinths of The House of Leaves, or the slowly expanding void at the heart of Kathe Koja's Cypher, some works leave a mark. Panelists will explore books that by reputation or their own experience, produce a lingering unsettled feeling far beyond the events and characters of the story.

SFF on Stage
Sunday 5:30 pm, Porter Square B
Raven Stern (m), Andrea Hairston, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Stephen R. Wilk

Science fiction and fantasy have long been mainstays of live theater; William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595. Peter Pan introduced one of the 20th century's best known characters in 1904. In 1920, R.U.R. gave us the word "robot." Universal Studios' famous version of Dracula was adapted not from the novel, but the wildly successful Broadway play. That's not even getting into modern musicals like Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors. What does it take for genre to work in a live setting, and where have we seen it succeed (or fail)?

Anyone else I can expect to see this weekend? The ziggurat awaits.

The best thing about a photo I found tonight of John Vickery in 1981 is not that it headcanoned itself instantly as an image of the younger Neroon, it's that I had just been watching him in an American Theatre Wing seminar from that same year and been struck by how little of his older self in or out of character was immediately traceable in his thin collegiate face and especially his light Californian voice and so when looking out of mildly feverish curiosity for his notices that summer as Prince Hal I was really not expecting to find through nothing but chiaroscuro and expression his future Minbari bones.



Offstage, he had reminded me more of Kyle MacLachlan and barely looked old enough to have the bachelor's in mathematics which was part of his origin story. He tells it again in another seminar in 1998 and still has a nervous gesture of touching one of his eyes as if tired or distracted slightly; he's a great fidgeter in front of an off-the-cuff audience. I had gone looking originally for his voice, which turns out not even to be that mid-Atlantic when he's using it for himself. Three decades plus I had to notice this actor with my brain on perpetual standby for B5 and now it has an opinion.

To keep on the theme of theater, I had no idea until her obituary that Tina Packer started her career in the three-quarters burninated 1966 BBC David Copperfield with Ian McKellen and then the much more successfully recovered 1968 Doctor Who: The Web of Fear before she discovered she cared much less for acting than directing or producing, whence Shakespeare & Company. The last time I saw Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code was in 2011 at Central Square Theater and they are reviving it this spring with the actor I last saw as Gaveston in the ASP's Edward II in 2017, whom I expect to be a superb Turing and me to leave the theater muttering about Joan Clarke as usual. In lieu of a teleporter, I have to hope for a transfer of this High Noon.

Now that we are back in the swing of the year, my days are marked by doctors' appointments. I preferred being outside the calendar. I did dream briefly and unexpectedly of Alexander Knox, playing one of those harrowed, abrasive, obdurate figures on the other side of some internment or imprisonment that made me think he would have been anachronistically great as E. T. C. Werner. Have some link-like things.

1. John Heffernan falls into the category of actors of whom I have somehow become very fond without actually seeing all that much of them, which normally happens with character faces in the '40's. I am unlikely even to see his latest project, the freshly announced Amazon TV version of Tomb Raider, but since his character is described in the promotional dramatis personae as "an exhausted government official who finds himself tangled up in Lara's unusual world," it's nice to know I would almost certainly develop a disproportionate attachment to him if I had the chance. You can tell I am otherwise a solid generation of actors behind the times since I was impressed by the casting all in the same place of Jason Isaacs, Bill Paterson, Celia Imrie, Paterson Joseph, and Sigourney Weaver.

2. This song transfixed me a few nights ago on WHRB: Barbez, "Strange" (2005).

3. I meant once again to praise the Malden Public Library for ordering me a sun-bleached, peach-orange, jacketless first edition of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), about whose selected nonfiction I have been intensely curious since discovering its existence in 2008, but the problem with reading some of the broadcasts he made for J. B. Priestley's Britain Speaks in 1940 is that one runs into passages like:

Democracy today, to survive at all, must be as militant as autocracy, and what the world is desperately in need of now is not the gentle, philosophic democracy of Jefferson, but the outspoken, militant and ringing democracy of Roosevelt, representing the righteous anger of the free people of the world aroused against the cynical arrogance of the totalitarian feudalists.

After a full week without water in the kitchen, the plumber cameth on half an hour's notice from the property manager and was horrified to hear about it, but he was swift and competent and we have a new and working faucet, which was all the problem turned out to be. Hestia made herself invisible in the bedroom throughout the proceedings. I washed a fork without first boiling water and it felt like a big deal.

I just finished reading David Hare's A Map of the World (1983), whose device of examining an interpersonal-political knot through the successive filters of the roman à clef, the screen version, and the memories of the participants reminded me obviously of similar exercises in metafiction and retrospect by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, double-cast for an effect at the end approaching timeslip such as works almost strictly on stage. I did not expect to find some fragments preserved in an episode of The South Bank Show, but there were some of the scenes with Roshan Seth, John Matshikiza, Bill Nighy, Diana Quick. I wish I thought it meant there were a complete broadcast I could watch, but I'm not even finding it got the BBC Radio 3 treatment. More immediately, it reminded me of how many of the stories I read early were about stories, their propagation and mutation, their conventions, their shifting distances from the facts. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

The problem with the denaturing of language is that when I say to spatch that the political situation is insane, I don't mean it's a little far-fetched, I mean it is driven by wants and processes that are not rational and it is exhausting to be trapped inside someone else's illness.