For everyone who will be at Readercon on Friday, an addendum to my schedule: I will be performing Lal Waterson's "The Scarecrow" before nineweaving's reading at 9 PM. This is not a recent addition. Just no one thought to make a formal note of it until now.

And now I must move some cabinets upstairs.

As promised, my schedule for Readercon. The translation is as follows.

Thursday 9:00 PM. Panel
You Don't Know Dictionary!
Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Vylar Kaftan (L), Sarah Micklem, Sonya Taaffe

There's no need to make up new words when there's so many great unknown old ones. Tolkien introduced many readers to the likes of "wain" and "fell" (in the sense of fierce and cruel), while later writers such as Greer Gilman and Gene Wolfe have gone much further in plumbing the depths of unabridged dictionaries. Our panelists share their adventures with prodigious vocabularies and blank pages. And for the reader, what are the pros and cons of relying on context versus consulting the Book?

Friday 1:00 PM. Reading (30 min.)

Sonya Taaffe reads her short story "Odd Sympathy."

Friday 2:00 PM. Group Reading (60 min.)
Mythic Delirium / Goblin Fruit Group Reading
Mike Allen, Amal-El Mohtar, and Jessica Paige Wick (co-hosts) with Leah Bobet, M. M. Buckner, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente, Joselle Vanderhooft et al.

Joint reading from Mythic Delirium, the biannual magazine of speculative poetry edited by Allen (which just published its tenth anniversary issue), and Goblin Fruit, the quarterly online zine of fantastical poetry edited by El-Mohtar and Wick (whose Summer 2009 issue is due out now).

Saturday 1:00 PM. Panel
The Old Plot of Summer and Winter: The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival
Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Erin Kissane, Kathryn Morrow (M), Faye Ringel, Sonya Taaffe

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions from ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and literature of the fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to the average reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that underpins much of our field—an older world beneath this one which still seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs and their framework, starting with our own Guests of Honor (Greer Gilman's Cloud derives its physics from The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love not only draws on the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the fiction of all three). Is this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must, but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.

Saturday 2:00 PM. Panel
The Fiction of Greer Gilman
Rachel Elizabeth Dillon, Lila Garrott, Donald G. Keller, Faye Ringel (L), Michael Swanwick, Sonya Taaffe

Saturday 3:00 PM. Event
The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan
Mike Allen (MC) with Michael Bishop, Leah Bobet, Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Ernest Lilley, Darrell Schweitzer, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente

(A "poetry slan," to be confused with "poetry slam," is a poetry reading by sf folks, of course.) Climaxed by the presentation of this year's Rhysling Awards.

Yeah, that'll keep me busy.

Hope to see many of you there!

I am not dead. My brain has been accumulating a list of narranda, which I consistently fall asleep before posting: the ongoing renovation of the kitchen, including the complete relocation of all dishes, utensils, spices, foodstuffs, and refrigerator to far-flung parts of the house (not to mention the plumbing), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), all of Thursday, La strada (1954), and lavender. Divers books. Rain. Cooking. My cousin Tristen has been here since Friday, so we walked around the Arlington Res to the tune of Pele and her jealous sea-sister and a rain-god captured by the Queen of Stone and Steel; he was very helpful yesterday in making a hot peach syrup to be eaten over the traditional homemade strawberry ice cream, and today we spent the entire afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts. He had never been to an art museum before. He recognized the statue of Orpheus with Cerberus charmed to sleep as soon as we walked through the Huntington entrance. I know him! His wife died from a snake and he went into the underworld to get her back, but he looked back when he'd promised not to and he had to leave her there. So you may understand it was a success: we spent most of our time with the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman collections, with a substantial detour into South Asia after he told me he wanted to visit Ganesha and I figured out that the god whose name he couldn't remember—You know, the one who sits like this—as he assumed the lotus position in the middle of the hallway—was in fact the Buddha. He was twice mistaken for my child and seemed neither wishful nor offended. The Sargent murals blew him away. We spent about fifteen minutes sitting underneath the rotunda and the stairwells, him pointing to each group of figures and either identifying them for me or asking me to tell him their stories; these included Herakles with the Hydra, Orestes pursued by the Furies, and Phaethon falling from the zodiac in fire, but I don't think any of it freaked him out. He really, really wanted a poster of Sargent's Pegasus, but the store did not sell them; he settled for a small model pegasus and I got him a large children's book of Egyptology, with hieroglyphs. He had already correctly identified the logogram for "water." He wants to go to the aquarium tomorrow morning. We'll see if I'm functional. He is wonderful.

I have my schedule for Readercon; I will post it tomorrow.

Things that charmed me today: Eric doing the math for "Seven-and-a-Half-Cents" in his head, figuring inflation rates for the appropriate years, and concluding that while the song exaggerates the twenty-year returns of a seven-and-a-half-cent raise by about fifty-seven cents per hour, it's worth it for the line "I'll have myself a buying spree and buy a pajama factory / Then I can end up having old man Hassler work for me." This while programming Readercon; I had put on The Pajama Game (1954) as work music and halfway through the first chorus he starts talking. Eat your heart out, Hines.

Things that did not charm me: Karl Malden. I found out from TCM; The Barefoot Contessa finishes and all of a sudden they broadcast a beautiful little montage of his film work, with birth and death dates at the end. He had an excuse, being ninety-seven, but I am still sorry to see him gone. I may take this as a cue to rewatch A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954), if anyone cares to join me in a few weeks.

On the other hand, this article about screwball comedy is all the things I have tried to say about the genre for years, only better:

Welcome to another world—of sleeping cars and porters, automobiles that start with handles and stop without warning; of starlit ocean liners, long-distance buses and auto camps. Luggage, purses, clothing, memories, identities and minds will be lost. Almost everyone can render popular tunes in close harmony and dance, but almost nobody can safely carry a tray—crockery and silverware will be dropped. The books here have titles such as Why Snakes Are Necessary and archaeologists post each other bones that don't exist. Telephones are vaguely monumental, ring as loud as fire bells, and are ignored. Even face-to-face communication is confused. This may be in part because three or four people will often talk at once and at speeds that are medically ill-advised. There could also be animals around. And a great deal of falling—over logs and feet and sofas, into ditches, into water, into love.

That's a film festival I could always find time for.

My poem "Homeric Hymn to Demophoon" has been accepted by Goblin Fruit. I should also mention again that my poem "Αὐδήεσσα" will appear before the end of this month in Sirenia Digest #43, where may also be found greygirlbeast's evocatively titled "The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean." Today's program brought to you by the letter α, the letter χ, and the number ϝ.

Neither of these poems are my own, but I just discovered them: Kenneth Slessor's "In A/C with Ghosts" and "Five Visions of Captain Cook." I am clearly going to need a book of him.

If Peter Crowther ever reads my livejournal, he should please take it as a compliment that I thought until about three hours ago that he had invented Weldon Kees.

This question is directed primarily toward frequenters of the Boston Museum of Science, but anyone with with relevant information is free to chime in: does anyone know what happened to the murals in the exhibit that the Butterfly Garden replaced in 2005? I think it was called the Sun Lab; it focused on photosynthesis and meteorology, with time for hydroponics and the greenhouse effect. One of the murals depicted the main cloud types in brushwork that would not have embarrassed N.C. Wyeth, culminating in an anvil-topped thunderhead. The other was one of the most pagan things I have ever seen in a science museum: a yellow sun-face turning greener and greener, budding out and leafing, until its rays were a cornucopia of fruit and flower. Obviously, I want to find out they were not destroyed; I like to think they were stored in the basement or some wistful employee took them home. But I have no idea. Do any of you?

Last night I watched Mongol (2007), which I need to show Viking Zen. Genuinely epic, dirt under everyone's fingernails; I completely failed to recognize Tadanobu Asano from Zatoichi (2003) and Khulan Chuluun as Börte is to watch out for. It even has shamanism and the sky-god Tengri in the form of a blue wolf. It is also one of the few movies I've seen that achieves a visceral sense of violence through means other than blood-splatter and crunching sounds—its battle scenes have the kind of physical heft and minutiae I associate with the prose of Mary Gentle and the poetry of Seamus Heaney; a first-person swordfight should be nausea-making, but instead it functions as a shift in narrative voice—and it does not show the audience everything, which unobtrusively heightens the feel of an oral tradition, in which the inlay of a sword and a coat of bride-price sable can be described in ten lines, a span of seven years compressed into a single verse. I am sorry not to have seen its steppes on a big screen.

The kitchen is in such a state of renovation that nothing remains but the floor (which may be pulled up in part tomorrow; there were three compacted layers of linoleum, as there was wallpaper under decades of paint strata on the ceiling. The former owners of our house may have been very nice people, but from upkeep they knew nothing); the dishwasher and oven are junked out on the curb, the refrigerator has been moved downstairs to the summer kitchen. There is plastic sheeting fastened up over the open wall where the archway to the kitchen used to be. It looks slightly quarantine-like, a closed ward in a hospital. I spent my morning painting new boards in the driveway, my afternoon first mowing the lawn and then raking it. I finished just as it began to thunder. I feel like a character in the corners of a Breughel painting.

Look, I don't know Neil Marshall from a poke in the eye with a pilum, but all things being equal, I'd rather see The Eagle of the Ninth. No offense, but General Virilus? Does he have a very great friend in Rome named Biggus Dickus?

(Oh, movies. How is it you can beautifully realize Middle-Earth and still fuck up the Romans on a regular basis?)

How did we know we were human? We made music and devoured our own. The juniper tree's roots run deep. I am waiting for the flute that, blown, cries out in the voice of an ancient child.

There is salt on Enceladus.

The mail just brought me a CD of music I was not expecting and a DVD of a film I was not expecting either. It hasn't stopped raining all day, but the summer is off to not a bad start.

I meant to post about this yesterday, but it got hijacked by White Heat. (And I still need to put my thoughts on FairyTale into some coherent form rather than scattered enthusiasms throughout my semi-restored e-mail.) The night before last, I read a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called D'entre les morts (1954, published in English two years later as The Living and the Dead). The reprint lying on my windowsill, however, is titled Vertigo—this is the novel from which Hitchcock adapted his film. I hadn't even known it existed until last week. It's fascinating. The film is an amazingly faithful translation of the action from Paris in 1940 and '44 to present-day San Francisco, the novel's ex-detective Roger Flavières transposed into James Stewart's Scottie. The great-grandmother, the churchtower, the girl who cannot be who she looks like, all the pieces are there. Allowing for the changes in setting, some of the scenes match almost shot-for-shot. They are really not the same story.

The change in titles is significant. Flavières' acrophobia is far less central to the novel than his basic estrangement from the world. What I remember of Scottie is an everyman caught in the drag of a nightmare, first someone else's and then his own; half the film's effect is how readily the audience identifies with him before he begins to scare them. Flavières is never so comfortable. Pushed into police work by his family, resigned in disgrace after his colleague's death, he's a shabby lawyer with few clients and fewer social graces when his old schoolfellow Gévigne turns up on his doorstep with the unexpected, if not entirely unreasonable demand that Flavières keep an eye on his wife. He agrees, for reasons he does not examine. They might be the obligations of an old friendship it would take too much effort to evade, a kind of satisfaction in seeing the successful businessman asking favors of the failure, the fantasies through which he is already beginning to regard Madeleine Gévigne; for someone so gnawingly self-conscious, Flavières is only intermittently illusionless about himself. It is left for the reader to observe his resentful shyness, his raw nerves, the painful ease with which he fastens on Madeleine as someone he can save. He has no close female friends. He has hardly any friends. Going on forty, he's still a child peering into the caves at Saumur, clutching his dog-eared book of mythologies, haunted by the cold smell of earth and the sounds of dripping water and an illustration of Orpheus stepping from the tomb, Eurydike's hand in his hand. All his life, he's been looking for a myth to fall into. All Gévigne does is provide him with one that goes all the way down to Hades.

And that, I think, is the real difference. Where Vertigo plays Pygmalion and Galatea through a glass darkly, the presiding spirits of D'entre les morts—From among the dead—are Orpheus and Eurydike, the weightless image of a woman and the man who cannot keep from fatally looking back. The characters themselves identify the retelling. A Eurydice ressuscitée, Flavières signs a gift he gives to Madeleine, their mutual joke after he hauled her drowning out of the Seine. The way she eats reminds him of the Aeneid, the ghosts thickening around the blood. Sometimes he feels like the sacrifice, drained to hold a shade to the upper air; a dynamic he will reverse in the second half of the novel, as he forces Renée Sourange from Dambremont into the shape of Madeleine Gévigne from Paris, but still one shot through with the language of the supernatural. Even at his most unstable, Flavières does not imagine that Renée impersonated the woman he fell in love with. He believes her to be inhabited by the spirit of Madeleine, as Madeleine before her was inhabited by the spirit of Pauline Lagerlac: mundanely a stranger, achingly familiar in flickers as the ghost comes and goes. Dressing her as Madeleine, restyling her hair, buying her Madeleine's perfume, he hopes to trigger the same kind of full-body possession that led to her former incarnation's (as he now understands, temporary) death, sympathetic magic worked from the outside in. The results may be even more claustrophobic than Hitchcock's film. Flavières is trapped not only inside his own fears and obsessions, but inside a myth that will break them both. She wants to be flowers, but you make her owls. And when Orpheus looked back, his wife died for the second time.

I am not going to discuss the fact that the original story takes place on either side of World War II (although I actually think it's important: people disappear and reappear all the time in wars, unexpectedly killed, mistakenly believed dead, in the Schrödinger's limbo of no information; it's both a plausible and resonant backdrop for a story of literal and figurative ghosts). I am not even going to speculate what an adaptation of D'entre les morts might have looked like with a French director, or someone more interested in the mythological template of the novel and its intersection with postwar France (Jean Cocteau's Orphée was in 1949. I wonder if that had an effect). It is very late. What I am going to do is rent Vertigo and watch it again in the near future, and add Boileau-Narcejac's novel to the list of classical retellings that should be better known. And then maybe fall asleep before the sun comes up, summer-minted. A sad tale's best for winter.

ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par leuibus uentis uolucrique simillima somno.
—Vergil, Aeneid 6.700—702

It rained here all day, no chance of sun. There are no stars to see fading in and out of this shortest night. The seasons are not our sight. The planets don't hit or fail our marks: leap fires or oversleep, it's summer all the same. And all the same, happy solstice, all.

I wish the Brattle Theatre did not feel the need to deafen its clientele. It's a small theater; it doesn't screen big dumb action movies; it doesn't need to go all the way up to eleven. I had tissues stuffed into both my ears and they still ache sharply. Maybe everyone else in the audience is losing their hearing, but I don't need to be made to fit the profile. Otherwise, Mrs. Lincoln . . . Actually, I loved White Heat. Right now I'm having trouble thinking of another actor who uses himself as physically as Cagney—he hurls himself into the role literally and it's like watching lit magnesium, it's mesmerizing. He was a dancer. He could sculpt matter out of motion. But the result is not at all stylized, and neither is the film; one of the aspects that struck me most was its modernity, carphones, fast food, electronic tracking, the increasing difficulty of vanishing off the grid even in 1949. The edges of the map are closing in. Cody Jarrett goes up in a sheet of flame: he looks like apocalyptic science fiction, the end of the gangster era in a mushroom cloud. I don't know what the hell the movie should be classified as, but I'm very glad I saw it. I think my ears are still out on their verdict, though.

I just finished watching La dolce vita (1960). All my life, people have told me how beautiful Marcello Mastroianni was; I never saw him in anything, so I had no basis for comparison. He died in 1996, but I don't remember photographs. I saw his daughter in Un conte de Noël and she was very beautiful, but her mother is Catherine Deneuve—she got some of the best genetics going in 1972. So what do you know? Marcello Mastroianni was beautiful, and not in any of the ways I expected. I can't find a good image online; all anyone seems to post from this movie is Anita Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi. But he doesn't have a boyish face, a sleek one, a classically structured face; at least as Marcello Rubini, the helplessly self-destructive journalist, he's heavy-lidded, long-mouthed, with a rakish shock of hair that blows back silver at the temples, brazenly spoken when he knows his lines, but he looks away too much when he doesn't, a little puckish and a little flinching, and he appears most conventionally handsome from the angles that suit him least. By profession he's an intrusion on other people's lives, but he projects the wayward wistfulness of a pierrot caught up and dropped by each harlequin whirl, a marionette who is aware that he cannot summon the strength to snap his strings. (Which does not mean he's harmless: as desperately as he wants something more in his life than hangovers and camera flash, he also hurts, very badly, the character who does love him. Her own mental health is rocky, but she's more stable than his spinning weathercock. At least she can say what she wants.) Women don't fall into his arms. Sometimes he wakes up in their beds, but more often they snub him in nightclubs. I didn't expect that from an international sex symbol. It makes me want to see more of his films. Also, more Fellini. With Le notti di Cabiria (1957), this makes two for two. His movies are worlds.

Score of the day, spelled S-Q-U-E-E: nineweaving has lent me David Jones' The Anathémata (1952). I have been looking for this poem for years. She found it two days ago—a first edition in near pristine condition, jacket only a little air-browned and nicked—left out for all comers by someone with the evident literary sensibilities of a beer-stunned head of cabbage, and I am probably insulting cabbage. What kind of person abandons a book as rare and good as that? And why don't they live next door to me? Anyway, I opened the book and got this post's subject header. I am taking it as a good sign.

The old padrone
            the ancient staggerer
            the vine-juice skipper.
What little's left
            in the heel of his calix
asperging the free-board
            to mingle the dead of the wake.
Pious, eld, bright-eyed
            marinus.
Diocesan of us.
            In the deeps of the drink
his precious dregs
            laid up to the gods.
Libation darks her sea.
He would berth us
            to schedule.

The anti-score is that last night my computer crashed and lost all of my e-mail. The battery has been failing lately; when it woke back up, it thought it was December 31, 1969. I wouldn't have minded if this meant I got free Serge Gainsbourg. Instead the folders appear to be gone from the hard drive; the application doesn't even want to open; I am sure this is some kind of karmic balance for a healing weekend, but I am unamused. So if you have e-mailed me recently and received no response, it's not the cut direct; I am going to be sporadically responsive (webmail, other people's computers) until I can figure out what can be reconstructed from backups in March and what is just gone.

When I get home, I should post about FairyTale: A True Story (1997), which aside from some sticky music, a slight decompression in the third act, and one of the most forgettable titles since the invention of the cinematograph, I was very surprised and pleased by. In the meantime, Readercon stuff.

Being informed that my committee bio for the Readercon souvenir book could be as vague as "[So-and-so] is way too busy doing X, Y, and Z to write a proper bio," I wrote mine in the form of a Roman curse tablet.

I am back in Boston, in case that is not evident. I got up at another eye-bleeding hour of the morning on Monday in order to make my return train, and was very kindly allowed to swap my reservation for an earlier ticket after it only took me an hour to get to Union Station. Three days in D.C. with strange_selkie and darthrami were some of the best time I have spent anywhere in the last year, and not only because they took me to museums and fed me amazing fish and chips and talked until after midnight. I may post when I am not engaged in carpentry, then leaving to see The Public Enemy (1931) at the Brattle Theatre. I have never seen James Cagney in a tough-guy role; I know him only from Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and twenty wonderful minutes out of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935). I am aware this is kind of backwards. They are showing White Heat (1949) on Sunday, which I plan to see as well.

I should get back to deconstructing the kitchen.

I have spent three weeks now on a poem that will neither resolve nor get out of my head. I cannot make it work at all. I don't know why it isn't working. I want to put my head through plate glass.

Who does this blog belong to? And will someone please tell me that "William Lilly foresees the Great Fire of London" is going to see print? That is one of the most beautiful poems I've run across in days.

I am in D.C. with strange_selkie and darthrami and three cats and a Jack Russell terrier. One of the cats is investigating my luggage, the other one is sandpapering my hands as I type. Until six o'clock this morning, I was not sure I was going to make the trip because I spent much of last night coming down with a cement-mixer cold, but I hauled myself out of bed and onto a train, which thanks to six years of Amtrak Guest Rewards I did not have to pay for; there's some free publicity for them. No free publicity for the woman who sat behind me in the quiet car and listened to music on headphones so loud I could make out the lyrics to the songs, so that I could not sleep on the train; I read Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day (2008) and a quarter of the new biography of Isaac Rosenberg and bashed my head against a poem. Selkie met me at the station. She brought mango chocolate. We met Rami at the apartment of two friends whose fifteen-month-old she was sitting; I did not get a chance to see the child in question, but said hello to the parents (who are probably on Livejournal, if someone points me in their direction) before coming home to be bounced on by the terrier before he started dashing in circles and rolling over. Apparently I can look at him so that he recognizes me as pack leader. I am sure this skill will be useful in various arenas of my life. (One of the cats, meanwhile, is contemplating drinking out of my water glass. Observe how deferential she feels toward me.) I have been awake for over twenty hours now, with three hours of sleep before that. I have remarked before that this state is what my brain recognizes as familiar, therefore normal: I really need to find a way of getting around it.

I feel ambivalently about Dreamers of the Day. It reads like two or possibly three novels spliced into one, but I think I would have preferred to read them separately. One is a novel whose protagonist is T.E. Lawrence, crossing paths with Winston Churchill and others at the Cairo Conference of 1921, poised between the shadows of what he has accomplished and what he will fail to achieve; the other is the reminiscence of a never-married teacher and librarian, Agnes Shanklin, whose seven weeks in Cairo were a love affair, an Oriental romance and a harsh jolt of self-awareness, and an encounter with the shape of the Middle East to come, even though she does not realize it until after her death; the possibly third being the fact that Agnes narrates all of this from the vantage point of an afterlife much like a slow bend of the Nile, where she has fetched up with other spirits, among them Napoleon and Saint Francis, who in life "drank from the Nile" and seem as a result bound somehow to its flow, anchored perhaps by the remembrance of the living, without even a Book of the Dead to guide them on. This fact is dropped casually into the last chapter, along with a rather didactic infodump summarizing her life and global politics up to the present day; I cannot be alone in thinking it's a terrific conceit, and not only because it enables such commentary on the current war as:

General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. "Non, non, non!" he'll cry. "Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn't anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?"

"This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia," George [McClellan] predicted.

You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.

The problem is that once she leaves her native Ohio, where the first third of the novel brings her from birth to middle age and her mother's death, what Agnes primarily does is provide a limited third-person view onto the Cairo Conference and the famous personalities that attended it; I am genuinely not sure what her interaction with them adds, except layers of historical irony. Winston Churchill does not come off particularly well. Lawrence does, but with fewer complications than my admittedly limited knowledge of his life—yes, I know Peter O'Toole is not the historical record—led me to expect. I cannot tell whether Agnes is meant to be a reliable narrator or one whose own biases must be winnowed from the text like the prevailing geopolitical assumptions of 1921, which in hindsight of 2008 are a desk to the head. She claims the dead are clear-sighted. I have my doubts, but I worry that I am not supposed to. So I do not recommend against the book, but I'm curious for other opinions: am I missing the point? Has someone already written a novel about T.E. Lawrence? And why does Churchill's painting get such a bad rap?

My brain still thinks it should be awake. A cat is sprawled across both my wrists, kneading my lap and generally doing her best to distract me from the keyboard. I'm going to shower.

I don't know if Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite filmmakers. I have seen twenty of his films,* which is probably more than I have by anyone who didn't direct for television; if he doesn't make me seize strangers' lapels and proselytize like Powell and Pressburger, I know I don't dislike him. Some of his movies, from acknowledged masterpieces like Notorious and Vertigo to lesser lights like Suspicion, I could watch over and over. To this number I can now add The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I saw a few nights ago—not the more famous version which got "Que Sera, Sera" stuck in everyone's head, but the 1934 original with Leslie Banks, Edna Best, and Peter Lorre in his first English-language role. It surprised me. I have the impression I saw the remake at some point in my childhood, although I can remember no details—I understand now that Foul Play (1978) is riffing off the assassination plot in both versions—but I have a hard time believing I would prefer it. Even more so than The Lady Vanishes or The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) jags unpredictably from coziness to chilling realization, horror to humor with liberal eccentricity throughout; you never know which way the narrative is going to jump. I didn't expect a turnabout of gender roles from Hitchcock—diffident and sometimes clumsy as he is, the leading man isn't a silly ass, but neither does his homespun detecting metamorphose him into an effective man of action; his wife is the sharpshooter, familiarly blonde, but no cool and alluring foil: she is the mother of a kidnapped daughter and when the police hang back from shooting an assassin for fear of hitting the kid, she seizes the rifle and dispatches him herself, like the narrator's mother in Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber." The villain is not a mastermind, but a conversational anarchist, quite friendly with the Lawrences when he meets them in Switzerland, amused at the altered roles of all concerned once the wrong information has changed hands; he will not scruple to kill a twelve-year-old girl, but he is not a sadist. And yet he laughs so mercurially, with an elm-streak of white in his hair; it's funny until it's not and then it's funny again. There's an interlude at the dentist's. There's an interlude with a cult. The stakes are high, but no one hangs off the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore—the police don't even carry guns until someone fetches them. It's a short-story movie and I do not disdain those, especially when they are such tonally shifting sand that the viewer can't even conjecture who's going to make it to the end credits, even among the protagonists. (We never even learn the motives behind this attempt on a foreign diplomat's life. The British government wants the man alive and well and politically active, but who knows? We might side with Abbott and his gang.) I have run out of intelligent things to say, except why has Criterion not put this film out on DVD? I will have to think about it more when I'm awake.

* The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), The Lady Vanishes (1938), Jamaica Inn (1949), Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Saboteur (1942), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Under Capricorn (1949), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966). I realize there are some odd gaps in this list; probably the ones I want most to see at the moment are Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), and Frenzy (1972), but I'll take recommendations.

Chris Newby, The Old Man of the Sea (1989):

Newby's equivalent initially seems harmless, a bed-ridden old man swathed in white satin sheets, but his languid, erotic and sometimes violent fantasies are vividly realised through poetic analogy. A splayed, almost naked male body reclines, starfish-like, on a rock, surrounded by dried salt and damp bladderwrack. A set of fish bones seems to have become detached from the plastic components of a model ship. Waves retreat in reverse motion, leaving a perfectly-arranged line-up of shells in their wake. Gravestones, their texts long eroded by time and the sea, still harbour beating hearts, while monumental religious architecture has much in common with that of shells and tiny sea creatures, especially when heat haze makes the buildings appear to tremble as though alive. In an appropriately Protean act of transmogrification, pages from Dickens are refashioned into a sail, a large starfish becomes the ship's wheel, a church spire its prow, a statue its figurehead and rumpled bedsheets the sea.

I need to find this film.