weirdquark

I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.

The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.

Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

When I heard tonight about Robert Redford, I did not think first of the immortal freeze-frame of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) or the righteous paranoia of All the President's Men (1976) or even the perfectly anachronistic jazz of The Sting (1973) where I almost certainly first saw him, effortlessly beautiful even before he shines up from street-level short cons to the spectacular wire of the title grift. I thought of The Hot Rock (1972), a freewheelingly dumb-assed caper film of which I am deeply fond in no small part because of Redford. Specifically, his casting makes it look at first like the inevitable Hollywood misrepresentation of its 1970 Donald E. Westlake source novel, a cool jazz glow-up of the canonically, lankily nondescript Dortmunder whose heists always look completely reasonable on paper and in practice like a Rube Goldberg machine whose springs just sprang off. Only as the setbacks of the plot mount past aggravation into absurdity approaching Dada, of which the attempt to sneak into a precinct house via helicopter must rate highly even before the crew land on the wrong roof and the siege-minded lieutenant mistakes their break-in for the revolution, does the audience realize that this Dortmunder has the face of a screen idol and the flop sweat of a shlimazl, a man whose charisma is not an asset when it makes people think he knows what he's doing. "I've got no choice," he says doggedly of the eponymous diamond which he did at least once successfully steal, whence all their troubles began. "I'm not superstitious and I don't believe in jinxes, but that stone's jinxed me and it won't let go. I've been damn near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed, and worse is going to happen before it's done. So I'm taking my stand. I'm going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me." When he acquires an incipient ulcer at the top of the second act, who's surprised? He glumly chews antacids as one of his meticulously premeditated schemes trips over its own shoelaces yet again. It may be the only time Redford played so far against his stardom, but he makes such a gorgeous loser with that tousle of coin-gold hair and an ever more disbelieving look in the matinée blue of his eyes, the Zeppo of his quartet of thieves who only looks like the normal one and no slouch in a stack of character actors from Moses Gunn and Zero Mostel through Lee Wallace and even a bit-part Christopher Guest, not to mention George Segal by whom he is characteristically almost run into a chain-link fence, trying to collect him from his latest stint upstate in a hot car with too many accessories. "Not that you're not the best, but a layman might wonder why you're all the time in jail." Harry Bellaver figured in so many noirs of the '40's and '50's, why should he not have retired to run a dive bar on Amsterdam Avenue patronized by exactly the kind of never-the-luck lowlifes he might once have played? The photography by Ed Brown goes on the list of great snapshots of New York, the screenplay by William Goldman is motor-mouthed quotable, the score by Quincy Jones never sounds cooler than when the characters it accompanies are failing their wisdom checks at land speed. Watching it as part of a Peter Yates crime trilogy between Bullitt (1968) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) may induce whiplash. It may not be major Redford, but it is beloved Redford of mine, and worthwhile weirdness to watch in his memory. This stand brought to you by my jinxed backers at Patreon.

I had not thought there were any meteor showers of consequence this month, but it seems that the swift pale streak between the telephone wires southwest of Cassiopeia belonged to the September Epsilon Perseids, so named despite their radiant in β Persei, the demon-star of Algol. I can hope it was not wildfire drift that accounted for the candle-tint of the half-moon, which was doing its autumnal trick of hanging like a lantern in the not yet leafless trees. The last of this summer's monarchs flew just before sunset, the twenty-second of her name.

I am glad to read that a classicist on Tumblr whom I do not know feels validated by a poem I wrote a dozen years ago, because she's right in turn about the linkage of ideas that led to its writing: the evocatio of Juno from Veii in 396 BCE, the evocatio of Tanit from Carthage in 146 BCE, the assimilation of Tanit to Juno Caelestis rather than Ištar-starred Venus, the self-fulfilling loop of enmity that a double-thefted goddess makes of the Aeneid and under it all the irony that Vergil even in his Renaissance aspect as magician could not foresee, that Carthage-haunted Rome was itself built on the needfire of the most famously sacked city of the ancient world, Troy whose gods Aeneas salvaged from the night of its destruction and now we remember Rome as the epitome of decadence, the eternally, contagiously falling city.

Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.