Reading

Current Music: English Teacher, "This Could Be Texas"

And in the end they might even thank me with a garden in my name

Once again the Malden Public Library comes through with Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998), a capacious, irreproducible oral history of repertory theatre in the UK. Its timeline of personal recollection runs from the 1920's into the decade of publication, documenting a diverse and vivid case for the professional and communal value of regional theatre without rose-glassing its historically shabbier or more exploitative aspects; its survey includes the subspecies of fit-up theatre which flourished primarily outside of England and devotes chapters to stage management, design, and directing as well as acting and the factors of the audience. It's a serious chunk of scholarship from a writer who is herself fourth-generation in the theater, which must have helped with assembling its roster of close to two hundred contributors. It's just impossible to read much of it without cracking up on a page-by-page basis. Despite the caution in the introduction not to view the heyday of rep as a perpetual goes wrong machine, the cumulative effect of thrills and tattiness and especially the relentless deep-end pace of getting a new play up every week writes its own Noises Off:

Howard Attfield was another actor who was caught on the hop. He remembers, 'I was playing an inspector, I forget the name of the murder thriller, and it was a matinée day and very hot and I remember standing in the dressing-room and I was having a shave, and I thought I had all the time in the world because my first entrance wasn't until the ending of the first act. The inspector comes in, says his lines and ends the first act. So I was standing there quite happily in my boxer shorts having a shave when I heard my call, which I could not believe, and I went absolutely wild. My costume was a suit, an inspector's suit, and a sort of a trench coat and a hat. Anyway, I thought I'd best put on something, the least possible, so I put on trousers and I remember putting on shoes without socks, then I put on the trench coat, did it all up as I'm flying out the door, grabbed the hat and went charging down the stairs, saying, "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming," and I made it on to the stage just in time, but as I went on someone in the wings said, "Shaving foam, shaving foam!" and I realized that I'd got halfway through this shave and I hadn't wiped it off. Luckily it was on the upstage side, as I was coming on from stage right. So instead of looking at the audience, I did everything looking from stage right to stage left, and the upstage bit was foam in my ears and right round my face. I delivered the line and the curtains came down and I collapsed on the floor half naked and half shaven.'

Persons in this book set themselves on fire, fall out of their costumes, get flattened by scenery, fuck up lines, props, entrances, exits, sound cues, lighting cues, scene changes, the sprinkler system. The number of actors who began their careers as assistant stage managers appears to have been part of the apprenticeship quality of rep; the number of actors who were abruptly promoted because a lead had flanicked screaming into the night feels more telling. "It wasn't till many years later that I got into the truly creative side of acting. In those days it was a question of learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture." It is a tribute to the book's scope that so many of its names are unfamiliar to me when my experience of older British actors is not zero; it's not just a skim of national treasures. For every Rachel Kempson, Bernard Hepton, or Fiona Shaw, there's an actor like Attfield whose handful of small parts in film and television has barely impinged on me or even one like Jean Byam who was so strictly stage-based that it would never have been possible for me to see her in anything. At the same time, thanks to its compilation from personal histories, I have been left in possession of some truly random facts concerning actors of long or recent acquaintance during their repertory careers, e.g. Alec McCowen corpsed like anything and at one point became convinced that he could telepathically cause a fellow actor to forget their lines. Richard Pasco had such reliable stage fright that the manager of the Birmingham Rep would knock him up five minutes before curtain to check whether he'd been sick yet. Clive Francis had a stammer so bad it made him the bête noire of the prompt corner at Bexhill-on-Sea. (Robin Ellis did not have a stammer, but found it a lifeline during one particularly non-stop season to play a character with one because it gave him the extra time to reach for his next line.) Bernard Cribbins does not name the production for which he was required to transport a goat—an actual goat, from a farm on the moors—by bus to the theatre, leaving unexplained the reasons it had to be a real one. Of course it was medically possible in the '60's, but it is still n-v-t-s to me that Derek Jacobi got smallpox doing panto in Birmingham. That art was produced by this theatrical system as opposed to merely peerless anecdotes absolutely deserves celebration. As a resource for writers as well as theatre historians and actors, the book is a treasure. Details about interwar digs and mid-century tea matinées would not be out of place in Angela Carter. The less farcical side of all the blowups and breakdowns is the assertion by more than one interviewee that rep provided, if not exactly a safe, then at least a survivable space for a growing actor to fail in ways that were essential to their confidence and their craft: "If you didn't become a great actor in weekly rep, at least you learnt to control your nerves. Despite all the throwing up on a Monday, one seemed to be ice cool on stage, because you knew you mustn't give anything away and you mustn't make your fellow actors look bad." But also one night at the David Garrick Theatre in the late '40's Lionel Jeffries lost hold of a lettuce leaf that sailed out into the stalls and splatted itself dressing and all onto a member of the public and that Saturday a packed house came to see if he'd do it again. Opening the book at random is almost guaranteed to yield a story of this nature. Fortunately I was not onstage at the time, and nobody cared how much I laughed.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Forever Christmas, an account of Christmas at Tasha Tudor’s Corgiville Cottage, with absolutely luscious pictures of Tudor making the yearly Advent wreath (hung from the ceiling with crimson satin ribbons from her parents’ wedding!), decorating gingerbread cookies for the tree (cut fresh from the forest and lit with candles), dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh…

Just gorgeous. Two of my life dreams are to ride in a sleigh and see a Christmas tree actually lit with candles.

And I popped back to the archives for Katherine Milhous’s The First Christmas Crib, which is not (as I expected) an account of Jesus’s birth, but rather a recounting of the first Christmas creche, created by Saint Francis of Assisi. Older Christmas picture books tend to be more religious than the newer ones, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does slightly, just because overall the older Newbery books were not particularly religious. Christmas books were the last outpost for a rearguard action, perhaps.

What I’m Reading Now

Ruth Sawyer’s holiday story collection The Long Christmas, illustrated by our friend Valenti Angelo of Newbery fame. The book was first published in 1941, and although Sawyer doesn’t directly reference the war in the introduction, she is very conscious of the need for a light in the darkness, a repetition of the message “peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then the first story is about Satan rising in the fields of Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’s birth, intent on storming the stable and killing the baby messiah, but his evil plan is thwarted when the archangel Michael descends from heaven and vanquishes him in pitched battle.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got my eyes on Ally Carter’s The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year.

Current Music: English Teacher, "Polyawkward"

And how it gets you home safe and then messes the house up

Rabbit belated rabbit! After five days without sleep, I seem to have fallen over at night and woken of my own accord in the morning, which is so peculiar that I am enjoying it. I keep feeling I should make toast or something, except I really don't like breakfast.

As soon as I read that Tom Stoppard had extensively script-doctored Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), I couldn't believe the possibility had never occured to me sheerly from "Does anyone here speak English? Or even ancient Greek?" I found a breakdown of the script differences and indeed, the line is Stoppard's.

The nor'easter has left a thin glitter of snow in the yard and a glaze of ice on the tops of the yew trees. I am listening to the immemorial sound of a neighbor scraping off the windshield of their car.

Current Music: English Teacher, "Mental Maths"

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patreon

Now where did you get that from, John le Carré?

Even for a conspiracy thriller, Defence of the Realm (1985) is an uncomfortable film. Its newsroom seems wrapped in a clingfilm of nicotine, its night scenes suffused with the surreal ultramarine that blurs dusk into dawn, its streets and offices as fox-fired with fluorescence as if faintly decaying throughout. An airbase glows as suddenly out of a darkness of fenland as science fiction. Precisely because no one can be seen in it, a window becomes a threat. It is not a sound or a secure world to inhabit and yet because it is ours, its characters walk on our own plain air of pretense, behaving as if its tips and headlines can be relied on until all at once the missed footing of a microcassette or a photocopy becomes an abyss and the most accustomed institutions nothing to hang on to after all. It came out of a decade whose mistrust of its government was proliferating through public discourse and art and felt neither safely transatlantic nor old-fashioned when I first learned of the film, twenty years ago when top-down lies about weapons of mass destruction were particularly au courant. Forty years after its release, its anxieties over the exercise of unaccountable power within a superficially democratic state haven't aged into a fantasy yet.

As a conspiracy thriller, it is not an especially twisty one, which works for rather than against its escalation from tabloid expediency to an open referendum on the British security state; it has one real feint in the juicy hit of its Profumo-style affair after which it can let itself concentrate on the unnerving, bleak, inevitable revelation of a world whose dangers spring not from the rattled skeletons of the Cold War but the actorly handshakes of the Special Relationship. We hear a bulletin on the bombing of the American embassy in Ankara before we see the titles that set the isolated scene of a car speeding down a night-misted road somewhere in the sedge flats of "Eastern England." Further overlays of current events will come to sound more like the Lincolnshire Poacher than Channel 4, a wallpaper of committee hearings and police reports pinging their transmissions among the paranoid legwork of blow-ups and coil taps. "Clapping eyes on it is one thing. Getting a copy out is another. " The flame of truth in this film is more like one of those old incandescent bulbs that take a second or two to sputter on, dust-burnt and bug-flecked. For a while it seems not just carried but incarnated by Vernon Bayliss, one of the rumpled nonpareils of 1980's Denholm Elliott—nothing but the rigs of the Thatcherite time explains what his old leftie is doing as the veteran hack of a right-wing rag like the Daily Dispatch, but it's a riveting showcase for his voice that crackles with cynicism while the rest of his face looks helplessly hurt, his disorganized air of not even having gotten to the bed he just fell out of, a couple of heel-taps from a permanently half-cut Cassandra of the Street of Shame. "Vodka and Coca-Cola! Détente in a glass." His inability to drink his ethics under the table and accept the gift-wrapped stitch-up of the Markham affair may be a professional embarrassment, but it gives him a harassed dignity that persists through his cagily tape-recorded conversations, his blatantly burgled flat, his obsessive spiraling after something worse than a scoop, the facts. "Oh, well," he snarls with such exasperated contempt that the cliché sounds like another shortwave code, "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." It makes his successor in the threads of the conspiracy even more counterintuitive and compelling, since just the CV of his byline establishes Nick Mullen as the kind of ingeniously shameless journo who never has yet. Gabriel Byrne looks too wolfishly handsome for an ice-cream face, but he has no trouble passing himself off as a plainclothes copper in order to upstage the competition with an extra-spicy soundbite gleaned from an all-night stakeout and a literal foot in the door. His neutrally converted flat looks barely moved into, its mismatched and minimal furnishings dominated by the analog workstation of his deep-drawered desk with its card file and telephone and cork board and typewriter, a capitalist-realist joke of a work-life balance. Whatever he actually believes about the exposé he's penned with everything in it from call girls to CND, it comes an obvious second to drinks with the deputy editor and being let off puff pieces about the bingo—fast-forwarded four decades of slang, Nick might say in line with his corporatized, privatized generation that caring is cringe. "Give me a break. You know how it is. It's a bloody good story!" And yet because he's not too successfully disaffected to show concern when a mordantly ratted Vernon raises a belligerent glass to his shadow from Special Branch, in little more than the time it takes to jimmy open a filing cabinet he will find himself not merely retracing his older colleague's steps but telescoping through them, the real story coming in like a scream of turbines and terrifyingly so much less clandestine than it should have had the decency to be. Le Carré is invoked with debunking condescension, but it is just that chill of his which pervades this film whose obscured, oppressive antagonist is not a foreign power or a rogue agent or even a sinister corporation but the establishment itself, blandly willing to commit any number of atrocities to contain a scandal that goes considerably further than the death of a young offender or the indiscretions of a former chairman of the Defence Select Committee. The old scares still work when Vernon's integrity can be questioned with the reminder of his Communist youth, but the cold isn't coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain: if you can't see your breath in Whitehall, you must not be looking. Hence the warmest character on this scene is its most disposable and its antihero in ever greater danger as he makes not only the tradecraft connections of collated data, but the human ones of outrage, trust, and shame, learning to shiver as he goes, but fast enough? His faith in his own disillusion is touchingly unequal to the pitiless weirdness of the tribunal of nameless civil servants who cross-question him like judges of the underworld in triplicate before turning him loose into a night so vaporous and deserted, its traffic lights blinking robotically in the mercury sheen, it seems that in the ultimate solipsism of conspiracy Nick has become the one real person in all of London. After all, a state need not kill if it can atomize, terminating communication either way. "The only person who knew the answer to that question was Vernon."

Originating as a screenplay by Martin Stellman who already had the anti-establishment cult non-musical Quadrophenia (1979) under his belt and directed by prior documentarian David Drury, Defence of the Realm had grounds for its nervous clamminess even before the photography of Roger Deakins, who gave it a color scheme which tends even in natural light toward the blanched or crepuscular and a camera which monitors its subjects from such surreptitious telephoto angles—when it isn't jostling against them like an umbrella in a crowd—that no closed-circuit, reel-to-reel confirmation is required for it to feel unsafe for them to be captured on film at all. "Age of Technology, eh?" Nick remarks affectionately, rescuing Vernon from the poser of the portable tape recorder. "You haven't even caught up with the Industrial Revolution." Suitable to its techno-thriller aspects, the film is as mixed in its media as parapsychological sci-fi, but whatever pre-digital nostalgia the viewer may feel toward an Olympus Pearlcorder S920 or a Xerox machine should tap out at nuclear-armed F-111s. "R.A.F. Milden Heath, Home of the 14th Tac. Fighter Wing U.S. Air Force" hardly needs the geographical triangulation of Brandon and Thetford to translate it into RAF Lakenheath where two separate near-accidents involving American nukes on British soil really had, in 1956 and 1961, occurred. Only the first had been officially acknowledged at the time of the film's production and release. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was still in full protest, the American nuclear presence a plutonium-hot, red-button issue; it was no stretch to imagine another incident kicked under the irradiated carpet at all costs. The film's more disturbing skepticism is reserved for the trustiness of its hot metal news. Its portrait of the fourth estate is not wholly unaffectionate, especially in cultural details such as the racket of a banging-out ceremony in the composing room, the collage of pin-ups in the stacks of the manila-filed morgue, or even the pained groan with which Bill Paterson's Jack Macleod observes the disposal of a cup of cold coffee: "Aw, Christ, what did that geranium ever do to you?" The Conservative sympathies of the paper, however, are flagged on introduction as its senior staff slam-dunk the character assassination of a prominent opposition MP and it is eventually no surprise to find its owner in more than tacit collusion with the faceless forces of the security services, considering his side hustle in defence contracting. "The man's into the government for millions . . . They build American bases. Can't jeopardize that, old son." It is not just the individual journalists in Defence of the Realm, but the entire concept of a free press that seems fragile, contingent, compromised. For all its triumphal, classical headline montage, the film goes out on a note of thrumming ambiguity, whether the conspiracy will perpetuate itself through its own media channels, whether everything we have seen lost will be worth the sacrifice or merely the valiant humanity of trying. These days I would be much more hostile to the magical thinking of a secret state except for all the authoritarianism. Move over, Vernon, even if both halves of your favorite beverage would try to kill me. "It's a free country. I think."

Denholm Elliott won his third consecutive BAFTA for Defence of the Realm and deserved to, stealing a film so three-dimensionally that his exit leaves the audience less twist-shocked than bereft: what a waste that he and Judi Dench never played siblings or cousins, their cat's faces and wide-set jasper eyes. Ian Bannen appears even more sparingly as Dennis Markham, but he only needs to be remembered as Jim Prideaux to trail that cold world in with him. As his PA, Greta Scacchi's Nina Beckman is self-possessed, unimpressed, and it feels like a mark of the film's maturity that she does not fall into bed with Nick when he's of much more use to her as a partner in counter-conspiracy, meeting on the red-railed Hungerford Bridge where we cannot tell if the reverse-shot pair on the concrete arches of Waterloo Bridge should be taken as tourists, commuters, more of the surveillance apparatus that feels so very little need to disguise itself. It is not faint praise that Gabriel Byrne thinks convincingly onscreen, especially when Nick gives an initial impression of cleverness rather than depth. I can respect the way he lives in the one tweed jacket down to falling asleep in his car in it. After two decades of keeping an eye out, I pounced on this film on Tubi despite its rather disappointingly scrunchy transfer and enjoyed it in much better shape on YouTube. Whatever else has dated of its technologies and mores, I have to say that a distrust of American nuclear capacities sounds healthy to me. This détente brought to you by my industrial backers at Patreon.

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Picture Book Advent Calendar LIFTOFF!

At long last December has arrived, and with it the first day of my picture book advent calendar! Before work I had a cup of tea and a cranberry sauce-almond muffin and Tasha Tudor's Corgiville Christmas, which I realized that I've actually read before, probably around when it came out in 2002, because at the time I was quite disappointed by the sketchy style: the pictures look like rough drafts, not as polished and detailed as in Tudor's other books, like my beloved Corgiville Fair.

I do still find the sketchiness a trifle disappointing, to be honest, but I did enjoy the bucolic image of the Corgiville Christmas: skating parties on the frozen pond, making cornucopias to hang on the tree, painting a new Advent calendar for the year...

The corgis start Advent properly on December 6th, so I have been appropriately chastened for my break with tradition in starting on the first. (But will cheerfully enjoy books 2 through 5 regardless.)

As the Advent books came in at the library, I wrapped them in leftover brown paper so each day's book could be a surprise. Yesterday after I decorated the Christmas tree, it occurred to me that it would look so much more festive with the Advent books heaped underneath - if only the books were wrapped in something a bit more jolly than brown paper. For a brief mad moment I considered re-wrapping them all in proper wrapping paper, but sanity prevailed and I only wrapped my cloth Christmas napkins around the top ten or so, which are after all the ones that show.

The tree DOES look extremely merry with a heap of books wrapped under it, so I'm thinking I may need to make the picture book Advent calendar an annual tradition. Perhaps going forward I will include only a smattering of Christmas books? Mostly they could any book by picture book illustrators I like. A grand way to catch up on all the Barbara Cooney and Patricia Polacco books I've missed.

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

Current Music: English Teacher, "Good Grief"

And me? Well, I'm just the narrator

If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn't be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

—Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993)

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Book Review: The Director

Most of the time when I read book reviews in The Atlantic, I think “Mmmm, glad someone else read this so I don’t have to.” But when I read their review of Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, I was like “I need this in my eyeballs NOW.”

The Director (translated from German by Ross Benjamin) is a novelized biography of G. W. Pabst, one of the most important directors in the post-World War I German film scene, most famous today for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. (Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks is the one floating in my vague “I’d like to see that one day” mental cloud.)

After Hitler rose to power, Pabst left Germany and looked for work in Hollywood. He struggled to find work in America, returned to Europe not long before the outbreak of war, and ended up making films in Nazi Germany.

These are the basic outlines of Pabst’s life, and they’re a matter of historical record. From here on out, I’m going to be referring specifically to the Pabst of the book, who clearly has some points of divergence with the real Pabst. For instance: book!Pabst has a son of military age, who is clearly standing in for the experience of the Average German Youth, while the real Pabst’s baby son was born during the war.

Now clearly the central question of the book is, how do you go from hating a regime so much that you flee to another country to uneasily collaborating with it? Part of the answer being that Pabst, in his own mind, is not collaborating: he’s not making propaganda films, he’s making non-political films! And he just happens to be making them in, okay, Nazi Germany, but does making art under an evil regime necessarily make that art evil?

And, okay, yes, technically his films are funded by the Nazi film ministry because that’s the sole source of funding in Nazi Germany. But what if you’re taking the funds from the Nazi film ministry and making a film like Paracelsus, which has what might be taken as an anti-Nazi message…? The whole sequence where a madman starts dancing, and everyone else starts dancing in time with him……?

But, I mean. Is that an anti-Nazi message, or is that just Pabst fans trying to come up with a justification for why “made films for Nazi Germany” is not quite as bad as it looks?

And then you have Pabst’s next film, his lost Molander, based on a book by a Nazi party hack named Karrasch. (There’s a hilari-terrifying scene where Pabst’s wife finds herself in a book club entirely devoted to Karrasch, who sounds like Nazi Nicholas Sparks). The subject matter is foisted on Pabst, but he digs beneath the surface of the story till he can make the script his own, then heads to Prague to film it.

The city is being continually bombed, and the Soviets are getting closer every day. Pabst’s assistant Franz comments, “Don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse?”

“Times are always strange,” Pabst tells him. “Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that matters.”

They’re supposed to get a battalion of soldiers for extras, but the battalion is called away to the front right before they film. So - Pabst turns to the local concentration camp.

I should say that this is not a spoiler - we learn it in the first chapter - and also that Pabst’s concentration camp extras, specifically, are historical speculation. There really were directors who used concentration camp inmates as extras (famously Leni Riefenstahl), but there’s no evidence if Pabst used them in Molander, as the film really was lost. But that’s what everyone was doing to make up labor shortages. It’s plausible.

And Pabst tells his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.”

Only in the end, the film is lost. So it doesn’t exist, after all.

Current Music: Molly Donnery & The Ciderhouse Rebellion, "The Kilmacthomas Girl"

I'd marry her this minute if she only would agree

I had a small but very successful Thanksgiving with my parents, with both of my husbands, and with

nineweaving. I have been supplied with all the ingredients for a turkey terrific and a whole lot of apple crumble that doesn't need to be reconstructed into anything except me. My mother taped the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I leaned back into

rushthatspeaks while we talked books and movies and theatrical stories. The photo was taken by

spatch for

selkie in condolence for the stressors of her holiday for which she was not the responsible party. The Sallust is from 1886, but I work with what I've got.

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Book Review: I Leap over the Wall

On one of

troisoiseaux’s recent posts about a nun memoir, someone linked an article about a different nun memoir: Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in the Convent.

As Baldwin went into the convent in 1914 and emerged in 1941, I knew instantly that I had to read it. What an absolutely huge period of social and technological change to miss! Baldwin is astonished by modern underwear, the wireless, wartime shortages, and masses and masses of people who have become famous since she went into the convent: Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence… Right up to the end of the war she keeps clanging up against her ignorance of so many things that everyone else takes totally for granted.

However, as interesting as I found all the details about social change, the parts I found most fascinating were Baldwin’s descriptions of life in the convent. I’ve read about early twentieth-century social changes before, although not quite from this angle, but the convent was totally new, in a “I wouldn’t make it five minutes as a novice” kind of way. Bells, bells, bells, ringing at intervals all day and all night, telling you to move from one occupation to another, stopping mid-stitch if that’s when the bell rings, lengthy sung prayers every day, every scrap of behavior governed by the Rule. There’s a correct way to sit, stand, eat, speak, and presumably breathe.

It’s particularly interesting because, although Baldwin left the convent, she still has faith in Catholicism and the concept of monasticism. She’s outside the convent but still “inside,” if you will, the belief system, so she’s particularly good at explaining the ideas behind an enclosed convent: humans were created to adore God and that therefore a life spent in adoring God is profoundly unselfish and also useful, because usefulness doesn’t mean first and foremost serving other people but serving God.

Unfortunately for Baldwin, most of her interlocutors aren’t willing to listen. It’s not just that they disagree (I certainly was going a bit bug-eyed over this order of priorities), but that they’re not even interested in trying to understand. And she’s never the one who brings up the whole nun business! People just tell Baldwin, the ex-nun, their opinion that nuns are selfishly hiding away in convents when they should be getting married or having families or building careers or CONTRIBUTING to the world.

Even if you think that, why would you tell this to an ex-nun unprompted? Were these people born in barns? But maybe they think that Baldwin, having left the convent, will agree.

But Baldwin does not, and she tries to explain the theory of the cloistered nun. Her interlocutors “listen” (read: sit in silence without taking any of it in) and then reiterate their original opinion.

So if Baldwin still believes, why did she leave the convent? Well, she believes in God, and Catholicism, and the concept of vocation, but has realized that she personally does not have a vocation. As she explains it, when she first decided she wanted to be a nun, she didn’t stop to ask herself if she actually had a calling. “I wanted to be a nun; it followed, therefore, as the night the day, that God must have chosen me.” (Some of my students who want to be doctors have the same attitude, insofar as you can have a thoroughly secular version of this belief.)

All through the year of her noviceship, and the five or six years of probation that followed, she continued in this willful confusion between “wanting to be a nun” and “being called to be a nun.” Only after ten years in the convent does she realize she’s made a horrible mistake.

And then she stuck it out for eighteen more years! The same pigheadedness that led her to decide wanting to be a nun meant she must have a vocation also kept her from throwing in the towel for nearly two decades after realizing she didn’t.

The tone of the book is generally pretty sprightly, a sort of quizzical madcap adventure, an Edwardian Rip Van Winkle awakens in World War II. But there is an undercurrent of tragedy, too, which sometimes breaks the surface in a brief lament. If Baldwin had left the nunnery at 31, when she realized she had no vocation, she might still have built a life for herself. But in staying so long, she missed everything: marriage and children, yes, but also the chance to build a career, or even just acquire the job skills that would suit her for any kind of war work.

As it is, she can only bumble from war job to war job. After the war she retires to a cottage in Cornwall, which is certainly a happy ending of a kind. But what a shame she didn’t change direction at once when she realized she was on the wrong path.

Current Music: Lake Street Dive, "Call Off Your Dogs"

This is what I get for being civilized

Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem how it all went wrong in those complicated spaces between them so many years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, the structure of a double-couple farce where the doors all slam with a bleak wince: still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa. A delight! The book inspired Spirited Away, and it very loosely shares the same premise: ordinary girl visits magical town where she has to find work. However, The Village Beyond the Mist is a much lighter take. Our heroine Lina is never in danger of being trapped in the spirit world, and her work is much lighter than Chihiro’s, consisting largely of helping the quirky townsfolk organize their shops: a bookstore, a maritime store, a toy store. (A bit disappointed Lina didn’t get to help out in the sweet shop. I would have loved more descriptions of the treats!)

A lovely bit of light magical fun. Just don’t go into it expecting Haku or yokai, and enjoy it for what it is.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil, which I’m enjoying so far, although given the amount of time that our heroine Rae (isekaid into the body of the villainess Lady Rahela) spends musing about the double standard, I want her to go ahead and bang some of the hot bad boys already. Behave in a way unbefitting of a pure heroine! Get down and dirty with someone who is not your one true love!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided to go FULL CHRISTMAS this December: all Christmas books and nothing but Christmas books until December 25. I’ve often thought this would be an interesting thing to try, and this year I’m going in!

Current Music: Jeff Tweedy, "Enough"

Is your heart hiding from your fire?

I had just been thinking about Jack Shepherd because he was one of the founding members of the Actors' Company which had sparked off in 1972 with Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, whose memoir I was re-reading last night. He'd left the company by the time of their adaptation of R. D. Laing's Knots (1970) and thus does not appear in the 1975 film which seems to have been their only moving picture record, leaving me once again with strictly photographic evidence of this sort of reverse supergroup experiment in democratic theater. (Shepherd at far right resembles a pre-Raphaelite pin-up in jeans, but I like to think if I had Caroline Blakiston's arm round my shoulders I wouldn't look that brooding about it.) Then again, I missed most of his film and famous television work, too: my reaction to his death is derived entirely from his astonishing Renfield in the BBC Count Dracula (1977), who holds more than a candle to the icons of Dwight Frye or Pablo Álvarez Rubio, a heartbreakingly weird and human performance of a character who may not be entirely sane in a world with vampires in it, which doesn't mean he's not to be trusted about them. I loved how much of his lucidity slides between his Victorian hysteria and his careful impersonation of a reformed lunatic which is not always and for good reason convincing. I loved his kiss of Judi Bowker's Mina, not his master's initiatory drink, but a damned soul's benison, the offering of his life. Not just because he became my default horror icon on this site, I thought about him more than any other character from that sometimes surprisingly faithful adaptation. His bare wrists, his shocked hair. His actor had such a knack in the role for the liminal, death seems on some level too definite to believe.

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Book Review: The Harvester

All of Gene Stratton Porter’s books are An Experience, and The Harvester is no exception. At the beginning of the book, the Harvester has just posed to his dog (his sole companion) his yearly question: shall I get married this year?

He is appalled when the dog signifies a resounding YES! So he sits on his stoop, staring over the lake and sulking about how he’ll have to go COURTING and put on clean CLOTHES and she probably won’t like his CABIN, when out of the moonlight on the water a vision appears: a beautiful girl, glowing in gold, who floats across the lake to him, plants a kiss on his lips, and disappears.

Charged with this vision of the Girl, the Harvester begins to build a proper house for her. “Going to get married?” the builders ask. “Yep!” says the Harvester, who has not yet met the Dream Girl in the flesh.

(A sidenote: the Harvester and the Girl do eventually get names, but the narrative mostly refers to them as the Harvester and the Girl and so will I.)

The Harvester, by the way, is named for his profession of gathering medicinal herbs from the woods. Over the past decade, he has slowly transplanted to his woods medicinal herbs from the surrounding area, so the whole forest is one great medicinal garden where these plants can grow to their full medicinal potential in natural conditions.

But to return to our story. A few months later, the Harvester at last catches sight of the Girl at the local railway station! After a protracted search, he finds her staying at the home of her uncle, the Harvester’s most perfidious neighbor. To rescue her from this uncle (and after suggesting various other solutions to the problem of getting her away from this uncle, like sending the girl who is very ill to the hospital), the Harvester asks the Girl to marry him.

“YES we are going in for some FORCED PROXIMITY” I shrieked, and OH BOY ARE WE. The Girl moves into the Harvester’s house! The Harvester promises that she shall be free until she comes to love him! The book is about as forthright as a book in 1911 can be that this means the marriage will remain unconsummated until the Girl feels a reciprocal, passionate sexual love for the Harvester.

But the Girl’s ill health catches up with her. She is sick with Fever, that convenient early-20th century literary disease so conducive to hurt/comfort. In her delirium only the Harvester’s touch can soothe her. (GSP knows what the people want and she is GIVING it to us.) He strokes her hands and tells her of the beautiful life of the woods, tethering her to this world with the sound of his voice! When medicine gives her up for dead, he cures her with a natural elixir made from the medicinal plants grown on his land!!!!

The Girl is now passionately attached to him, and during her convalescence there’s lots of cuddling and hand-kissing. But she’s still not sexually attracted to him. At this point her mother’s relations conveniently appear, and she’s whisked off to a round of Society in Philadelphia, at which point the Harvester wearily confides to his friends that she loves him but she doesn’t LOVE love him, at which point they roundly scold him: doesn’t he know that a good girl won’t LOVE love him till after the wedding night? It’s up to him to teach her what passion is!

This is a common nineteenth-century idea, and GSP both kind of embraces and repudiates it. On the one hand, there’s all this cuddling and hand-kissing and face-kissing and that times the Harvester gives her a single passionate kiss on the lips just to show her the difference between that and the kiss of sisterly affection she gave him, and what can you call that but coaxing along the growing tendrils of the Girl’s sexuality?

But in the end, the Harvester’s decision to let her go and see if absence will make the heart grow fonder is vindicated. The Girl does come back to him from Philadelphia: she did realize, on her own, that she now passionately loves him, and it does give her that flush of warm sensation that he tried to describe. She comes to him through the moonlight, sitting by the lake, and at last plants her kiss on his lips.

Current Music: Hen Ogledd, "Scales Will Fall"

Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken

Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.

I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.

Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to

spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.

I really appreciate

asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and

ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.

Current Music: Girl Ray, "Space Song"

The dusty light, the final hour

My ability to get any sleep has deranged like a spiderweb on LSD, but just a moment ago in the street it was thinly but distinctly snowing. I turned on WHRB and got Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time (1944). I still can't believe Opera Boston folded right before they would have staged the Mozart-out-of-Eliot Hermetic crack of The Midsummer Marriage (1955). I can't believe in impending Thanksgiving.

Current Music: Lucinda Williams, "The World's Gone Wrong (feat. Brittney Spencer)"

Everybody knows the world's gone wrong

My mother referred earlier this evening to the state of my health as farshlimmert, which definitely sounds classier than my saying it's gone down the tubes. On the other hand, I do not apparently have TB, so we can hold off on the consumptive poet jokes a little while longer yet.

As a reworking of Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) is trashtacular even beyond the whipsawing of its trans reading when it mixes the novella's Gothic horrors with historical ones—scrunching about six decades in the penny-dreadful process of folding in not only the Whitechapel murders but Burke and Hare, even without throwing in an allusion to Sweeney Todd or a street singer straight out of Val Lewton—but it dovetailed unexpectedly well with an article sent me by

selkie about the obtrusiveness of AI-generation in art because it contains an in-camera effect so good that I stopped the film to gush about it to

spatch. It's the emergence of the so-called Mrs. Hyde. One-shot, Jekyll wrenched with the effects of his absinthe-green potion buries his face in his hands, slowly straightens to perceive, in the cheval glass where a moment ago he was convulsing, a woman as severely dark-haired, night-pale and shocked as himself, who she is. It's not a trick of double exposures or duplicate sets or dissolves. While the camera tightly pivots behind the hunched protagonist, it looks as though a slight adjustment to the angle of the mirror allows an otherwise offscreen Martine Beswick to reflect beyond the identically dressed shoulder of Ralph Bates, their breath heaving in time, their hands slowly unmasking their shared face. It's very simple and uncannily effective. In some ways I find it more impressive than the red-filter transformation of Fredric March in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it's all sightlines. He's never out of shot and she's suddenly in it. Especially to an eye distracted from consideration of the sets or the cinematography by the switch of actors in the glass, it looks impossible. And someone had to think of it, or at least translate it from a stage illusion. It has never broken a film for me to see how a practical effect is done, which feels different from the suspicion of how much of an image is AI-slopped.

The almost talking blues whose first two lines I missed tonight on WERS turned out to be Lucinda Williams' "The World's Gone Wrong" (2025).

P.S. And a random thirty seconds of Clive Francis mixed in with the bleak London ultraviolence of Villain (1971), why not?