Directed by Ol Parker
I have conflicted feelings about Imagine Me and You. On one level, I quite enjoyed watching it but, at the same time, this is the kind of lesbian film that fills my heart with dread.
Northanger Abbey is the Austen novel that I’ve read least over the years. This is odd, considering how much I love the late eighteenth-century gothic that it satirizes so well. Austen started writing the book in 1898 when she was 23 and while it’s not as sophisticated or well-written as her later works, this is Austen at her liveliest – witty, sarcastic and impudent.
I first read Charlotte Bronte’s last novel, Villette, for my MA about 10 years ago. I remember being impressed, while finding it very bleak. On the second reading, I find it even more impressive and even bleaker than I did the first time around. Although I do love Jane Eyre, I think Villette is Bronte’s masterpiece. It isn’t anything like as enjoyable as Jane Eyre, but it’s a deeper and far more complex work.
Albums
I’m Your Man: Motion Picture Soundtrack
Martha Wainwright, Martha Wainwright
The Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawlers
Steve Earle, Townes
Aimee Mann, Lost in Space
REM, Green
Giant Sand, Chore of Enchantment
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig Lazarus Dig!
Tracks
Thea Gilmore, Mainstream
Mark Lanegan and PJ Harvey, Hit the City
The Manic Street Preachers, Indian Summer
Kate Bush, Breathing
Kate and Anna McGarrigle, St James Hospital
Goodness me, Tor.Com is exciting today.
Posts about gender in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan.
Also, an interesting post about the new Star Trek movie looking at how it changes the philosophy underpinning the orginal show. This bothered me too but I couldn’t quite articulate it until I read this post and realised that Star Trek’s humanist philosophy and the ethical issues it produces are absent from the new film.
Frankensteinia – a blog entirely dedicted to the cultural phenomenon that is Frankenstein!
The other night I was bemoaning my lack of light reading before bedtime. My girlfriend suggested I read the copy of Wendy Cope’s Serious Concerns she gave me. I complied, and here’s a selection of my favourites from the collection.
‘Defining the Problem’
I can’t forgive you. Even if I could,
You wouldn’t pardon me for seeing through you.
And yet I cannot cure myself of love
For what I thought you were before I knew you.
‘Another Unfortunate Choice’
I think I am in love with A. E Housman,
Which puts me in a worse-than-usual-fix.
No woman ever stood a chance with Housman
And he’s been dead since 1936.
‘Men and Their Boring Arguments’
One man on his own can be quite good fun
But don’t go drinking with two-
They’ll probably have an argument
And take no notice of you.
What makes men so tedious
Is the need to show off and compete.
They’ll bore you to death for hours and hours
Before they’ll admit defeat.
It often happens at dinner-parties
Where brother disputes with brother
And we can’t even talk among ourselves
Because we’re not next to each other.
Some men like to argue with women –
Don’t give them a chance to begin.
You won’t be allowed to change the subject
Until you have given in.
A man with the bit between his teeth
Will keep you up half the night
And the only way to get some sleep
Is to say, ‘I expect you’re right.’
I expect you’re right, my dearest love.
I expect you’re right, my friend.
These boring arguments make no difference
To anything in the end.
‘Legacy’
She left two Premium Bonds
And what remained of that week’s pension,
Her clothes, photographs, and china ornaments
We’d given her as children.
Also the crotcheted mats
She made as wedding presents,
Babies shawls, the suit
My teddy bear still wears,
And fifty pairs of woolly socks
In drawers all over England.
Renaissance man.
Poet, linguist, musician, painter, photographer, horseman and actor.
When I watch him act I think about surfaces and depths.
And violence.
A lot of violence.
Grungy ranger, or King of Middle Earth?
Good with swords.
Small town family guy, or violent ex-criminal?
Good at hand-to-hand combat.
Violent eastern european gangster, or something else entirely?
Good at fighting knife-wielding assassins while completely stark naked in a sauna.
I haven’t seen The Road yet, but I’m hoping for more unravelling of appearances and anticipating violence.
Apparently he only has two bullets in his gun.
A lovely actress. See the post on House of Mirth and Movies for more.
It has always been said in my family that, when she was young, one of my aunts bore a resemblance to Jean Simmons .
Watched ‘The Gift’, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5 finale for about the 5th time last night, hoping that I might have become hardened to the point of not crying. WRONG. I sobbed and sobbed. We had to watch some Star Trek: The Next Generation just to recover.
I am a fan of disaster movies. They allow me to confront my death anxiety while indulging in the fantasy that I and my friends might manage to survive, but over the last few years I have noticed something interesting going on in disaster movies with respect to patriarchy.
With a few exceptions, disaster movies tend to present strictly gendered worlds in which men are MEN and women are WOMEN. Since the 1990s a lot of disaster movies have more or less explicitly linked the representation of a terrible disaster with the representation of fatherhood. The emotional centre of these narratives is the story of a man who is a Dad, or at least a potential Dad. At the beginning of the film, he does not appear to be a good candidate for fatherhood because he’s emotionally shut down/divorced/doesn’t see enough of his kids/obsessed with his work etc. But as the disaster unfolds, so too does his increasingly heroic Dad potential.
Warning: this post contains spoilers for several disaster movies. Read the rest of this entry »
The Guardian highlights a poem by the Victorian poet “Michael Field” which was really the pseudonym of Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley, an aunt and niece who were also lesbian lovers, which is a bit disturbing, but hey, those wacky Victorians got up to all sorts (Freud didn’t come out of nowhere!). Their poetry is pretty obscure now, so nice to see them get a mention.
Directed by Nicole Conn.
OK I’ve decided to get this one out of the way. Claire of the Moon was one of the first mainstream lesbian films and, as such, deserves a place in lesbian herstory, but there’s really no point in prevaricating, this is one of the worst films (never mind lesbian films) that I’ve ever seen.
Warning spoilers! Read the rest of this entry »
Three Summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe – but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day.
Her smile went out, and ’twasn’t a woman–
More like a little, frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.
“Out ‘mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
‘Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wasn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.
She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk stay away.
“Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?
The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low gray sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ‘Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh, my God! – the down,
The soft young down of her; the brown,
The brown of her – her eyes, her hair, her hair!
Charlotte Mew (1869 – 1928)
I love the poetry of Charlotte Mew, although I find it extremely disturbing. Mew was writing on the border between the Victorian and Modernist periods and her poems have a strange quality, partly traditionalist and partly experimental. Two of Mew’s siblings were committed to asylums and she was terrified of becoming “mad” herself. She was a lesbian, but was unable to form a stable relationship with another woman. She eventually committed a horrible suicide by drinking disinfectant.
The mysterious speakers in her poems are often outsiders, people at extremes, on the verge of breaking down completely, like the speaker in this eerie poem. ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ haunts me with its fairytale-like quality, its allegory about patriarchy, and its double-voiced expression of desire. I say double-voiced because even though the speaker in this poem is male, I sense a subtextual expression of frustrated lesbian desire, especially in the last stanza.
I put all my unread books on one shelf (well, one and a half shelves) with the intention of reading them before I buy any more. But it only made things worse because then I couldn’t decide where to start. My girlfriend suggested I organise them alphabetically by title and I have to say its made things more interesting. Once I’ve finished the books I’ve currently got on the go, I’ll start working my way through them. This does mean that David Copperfield is scarily imminent though.
I didn’t put as much energy into music this year as I usually do. It’s been so hectic that quite a few activities got marginalised. Still, I heard some very good things.
Gigs
Only three in 2009, but excellent ones with high lesbian content.
Theoretical Girl, supported by King Alexander and The Duloks
Mary Gauthier
The Indigo Girls
Albums
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Beware
The latest in scary/funny/filthy melodic indie-americana from Will Oldham. I don’t think he’s ever made a bad record, but this is already one of my favourites. It’s one of his ’full band with backing vocals’ outings and it sounds much more upbeat than the title suggests – joyously dark. Altogether now, “Beware of meeeeeeeeee”.
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt
I think this is even better than their previous collaboration Ballad of the Broken Seas. It’s a more coherent album. Campbell writes the songs and Lanegan sings them with her on backing vocals. The Johnny Cash/Tom Waits comparisons are easy to make, but I can also feel the ghost of Townes Van Zandt haunting this record, especially on the string arrangments.
Steve Earle, Townes
Two of my favourite artists together. Well, Townes is dead, but here his friend, Steve Earle, finally gets around to releasing an album of covers. I think that Townes Van Zandt is one of the great songwriters, so with the also amazing Steve Earle on duty, you’re pretty much guaranteed a great record. I’ll be listening to this for years.
The McGarrigle Sisters, Heartbeats Accelerating
I first came across the McGarrigle Sisters singing back up on Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s album No More Shall we Part and a very good job they did too. I like Martha Wainwright (who is Kate’s daughter) so I thought I’d give one of her Mum and aunt’s albums a go. This is very well produced with lovely harmonies and melodies. It’s a grower and I’ll be looking up more of their stuff.
Tracks that never left my mp3 player
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Beware your only friend
Mark Lanegan, Man in the Long Black Coat
Neko Case, Never turn your back on Mother Nature
10,000 Maniacs, Because the Night (Unplugged)
Thea Gilmore, You Spin me Right Round
John Parish and PJ Harvey, Sixteen, Fifteen, Fourteen
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Albert Goes West
Kristin Hersh, Spring
April March, Chick Habit
Placebo, Every Me, Every You
With links to the ones I’ve written about on this blog.
Books read for the first time (in the order in which I read them)
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil (1859)
Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture (2005)
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer theory and the Death Drive (2005)
Sheridan Le Fanus, Uncle Silas (1864)
John Sam Jones, Fishboys of Vernazza (2003)
Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls (1992)
Susan Williams (ed) The Penguin Book of Classic Fantasy by Women (1995)
Clive Barker, Cabal (1988)
Octavia Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (2005 edition)
Ursual K. Le Guin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1966- 7)
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)
Sarah Eyre and Ra Page (eds), The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease (2008)
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (2006)
Stephen King, On Writing (2000)
Kate Figes (ed) The Penguin Book of Interational Women’s Stories (1996)
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1981)
Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road (1970)
Alice Walker, Anything we Love can be Saved (1997)
Martin H. Greenberg (ed) New Stories from the Twilight Zone (1991)
Stephen King, The Dark Tower Book 1: The Gunslinger (2003)
Roger Walsh, Essential Spirituality (2000)
Dorothy Alison, Skin: Talking Sex, Class and Literature (1994)
Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence (2008)
Stephen King, The Dark Tower Book II: The Drawing of the Three
Henry James, Selected Tales (2005)
David Brazier, The Feeling Buddha (2001)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese (2004)
Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)
Susan Hill (ed) The Penguin Book of Modern Stories by Women (1990)
Marcey Alderman, Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians (1986)
Winnifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938)
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989)
Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman (1998)
Tanith Lee, Red as Blood (1983)
Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980)
Re-reading
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890)
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
The Guardian has decided that 2009 was the year of the short story.
I like short stories so this is ok with me.
I thought the Christmas Dr Who was rubbish!
My nephew liked it, but he is two years old and I think he was mainly impressed by the flashing lights.
The Star Trek: Fan Collective – Borg Box Set
Trouble is, we are at my parents’ house and my mother won’t let us watch any of it without her. Andy and I have been taken aside separately and instructed “not to watch the Borg” unless she’s present.
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Carol Ann Duffy, Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past
Alice Munro, Carried Away: A Selection of Stories
My immediate reaction to this collection was to feel stunned by the breadth of Tanith Lee’s imagination. As rewritings of fairy stories go, I’m also very impressed by Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, but I prefer Lee’s versions, not least because she goes beyond the sexual readings privileged by Carter. Warning: some spoilers. Read the rest of this entry »
What is “love”? And what is a “good woman”? Alice Munro’s collection offers eight ambivalent stories which imply that “Love” is not something that can be pinned down and the concept of a “good woman” is oppressive at best.
Munro is a Canadian writer often hailed as one of the best short story writers of recent times. I first read her work in The Penguin Book of International Stories by Women. That story really impressed me, but it took me a while to dig up a collection because Munro is not widely read in the UK.
Though these tales of psychotherapy abound with the words patient and therapist, do not be misled by such terms: these are everyman, everywoman stories. Patienthood is ubiquitous; the assumption of the label is largely arbitrary and often dependent more on cultural, educational and economic factors than on the severity of pathology. Since therapists, no less than patients, must confront these givens of existence, the professional posture of disinterested objectivity, so necessary to scientific method, is inappropriate. We psychotherapists simply cannot cluck with sympathy and exhort patients to struggle resolutely with their problems. We cannot say to them you and your problems, because our life, our existence, will always be riveted to death, love to loss, freedom to fear, and growth to separation. We are, all of us, in this together (14).
By the end of the ‘Prologue’ I already knew that I was in the company of a writer who was going to stay with me long after I finished reading the book. Irvin D. Yalom is a renowned psychiatrist and existentialist psychotherapist who works at Stanford University. Existentialist psychotherapy is one of the less well known strands in comparison to psychodynamic, person-centred and cognitive behavourial approaches. It is concerned with the “existence pain” that comes from our awareness of the inevitability of death, the terrors of freedom, our ultimate aloneness and the absence of any obvious meaning to life. It is interested in finding meaning in what we do. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello to the rather amazing number of people reaching this blog by searching for “A Christmas Carol” or “The ghost of christmas present.” The culprit is this old post.
I have a backlog of book posts which I’ll probably do over the holidays.
I can’t decide which lesbian movie to write about next.
And I notice I haven’t posted any poetry for a while.
Prior: The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter. Ice in the pipes. But in the summer…it’s a sight to see, and I want to be around to see it. I plan to be, I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. And the dead will be commemorated, and will struggle on with the living and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward, we will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now, you are fabulous each and every one and I bless you. More life, the great work begins.
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