gletschergenossen

For the first night of Hanukkah, my mother accompanied me to None Shall Escape (1944) at the Harvard Film Archive. It snowed into the late afternoon, silver-dusting the unsanded streets. The wind chill feels like zero Fahrenheit. spatch and I lit the first night's candle for strength.

At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.

As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.

( We know by now that time does not take sides. )

With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

After years of not even being able to pirate it, spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.

This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."

I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.

Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser. spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.

( Twenty-four hours every day. )

We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.

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 factor 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 started 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 knowledge of older British actors is not nil; 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.