Lace and Feather

A round of Roulette. Two pictures. Newspaper comics and a novel both from 1928. A friend and I exchange messages about old-timey cartoon characters.

Roulette

Yes, Let’s by Galen Goodwin Longstreth and Maris Wicks, read in 2011. Occasionally the Roulette feature of One Could Argue, where I randomly select three titles from the complete reading list I’ve maintained since 2011, turns up a title it has furnished before. Our policy is to refer readers back to the prior installment of Roulette.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville, read in 2013. This was my second time consuming this novel after having read the book around 2007 or so. At some point I heard about this enticing project called The Moby-Dick Big Read which was being released as a podcast in which each chapter was read by a different person, many famous and/or noteworthy and many regular working folks. Some were great readers with mellifluous voices — none other than the outstanding and vocally-gifted film actor Tilda Swinton read the very first chapter — while others had some kind of conceptual tie-in, such as in the famously gay Chapter 94 in which Melville’s mysterious narrator who likes to be called Ishmael recounts down-low hand-squeezing with his shipmates while they are elbows-deep in giant vats of globular whale sperm, a sequence for which the organizers of the reading project got the gay writer Tony Kushner to take over reading responsibilities.

I listened to every episode of the podcast, which is to say I effectively listened to an unabridged audiobook edition of Melville’s book, so I considered this to count as an official addition to the complete list. Some time I’m going to read the book again as a book anyway.

Melville wrote some interesting poems about the Civil War, one of which I can recite from memory, the one he wrote about the fascinating and technologically world-altering Battle of Hampton Roads. It’s a short poem of five stanzas in a very peculiar meter and rhyme scheme and is well worth a quick online read. It’s entitled A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.

Me, Frida by Amy Novesky, illustrated by David Diaz, read in 2017. A well-written and stimulatingly-illustrated children’s book about Frida Kahlo’s time spent living in San Franciso from 1930 to 1931. I vividly remember reading this with my learner as part of my responsibilities as an adult literacy tutor for the San Francisco Public Library; children’s books are a great way for semiliterate adults to practice reading and we often tried to focus on topics of particular interest to her, such as this true account of a Mexican woman living in San Francisco, which my learner herself is. We never lost touch after I moved to Seattle and then back to San Francisco and we still work together these days from time to time, now just as friends rather than through the formal channels of the library system’s tutoring program.

Picture Priesthood

St. Elmo’s Fire, directed by Joel Schumacher, 1985. Brat Packer about a handful of twenty-two-year-old friends who all recently graduated from Georgetown University and still live and hang out together in Washington, D.C. They get into various kinds of trouble trying to sort out their career ambitions and romantic entanglements.

What’s least uninteresting about these characters are the ways in which they are unappealing or emotionally ugly. Emilio Estevez’s character’s plotline involves him being obsessed with a former classmate played by Andi MacDowell and behaving in an unacceptably unhinged manner in trying to woo her. Demi Moore’s character bangs her married boss and then secretly stops going to work so she can do more blow and suffer a predictable breakdown. Judd Nelson’s character is a pitilessly cynical and craven political operative who cheats on his beautiful and charming partner played by Ally Sheedy. Rob Lowe’s character is an emotionally unwell musician who drives drunk, gets into brawls, manipulates Mare Winningham’s character into sex and finally ditches his wife and infant child to take a bus to New York City, a move in which all of his friends support him and encourage the viewership to do the same. The filmmakers wrote the ensemble characters as annoying and unsympathetic while also rendering them as entitled brats. If this was intended as some self-imposed constraint, they didn’t make it hard enough to be challenging for themselves — there are no real stakes for these kids and no sense that they have to answer in any way for their poor choices, or even acknowledge those choices as being their own responsibilities.

Orlando, directed by Sally Potter, 1992. Speaking of Swinton, this movie features one of her signature roles, one that very few if any other young actors of the time could have played.

I think this was my third time watching this film. I got turned on to it by a teacher in a university class and then watched it at least one more time after that, which lead to me reading the 1928 Virginia Woolf book (I recently finished reading it for the second time; more on that below). I haven’t seen the movie in years and was intrigued to give it another look immediately after having notched the book on the complete reading list.

This movie is outstanding and I recommend it very highly. It takes the basic premise of the book, that of Orlando as a young nobleman of the late sixteenth century who stops aging, lives for hundreds of years and manages along the way to spontaneously and magically change from male to female and become an acclaimed writer, and departs just enough from the source material to make a succinct, sharp, funny and involving movie out of it.

Director and co-writer Potter makes significant elisions from the novel to the filmed version, carving out a reworked structural approach that seems to unearth thought-provoking considerations and wry jokes that Woolf buried under heaps of sometimes onerous prose. The filmmakers combine and reduce several of Woolf’s characters into new and more interesting ones who are easier to keep track of, allowing them to mine the most interesting parts of Woolf’s excessively lengthy and dense story and make a short, sprightly and entertaining film out of it.

In other words what I’m saying is that, in contrast with the novel on which it’s based, Potter’s film is fun. She adapts and rewrites the character of Orlando with a nearly-imperceptible smirk and a fourth-wall-breaking gaze that smolders with bitchy indignation, traits that the gifted Swinton enlivens with a skilled and subtle touch (which is all the more impressive since she has to play Orlando both before and after the character’s fantastical sex change). Potter is situating Orlando firmly in the camp tradition here, correctly recognizing that the sexually-transgressive themes of the novel dovetail snugly with gay aesthetics of the Eighties and Nineties, harvesting stylistic capital from the opulent and sumptuous English dress modes of bygone eras and creating what must have been tons of gratifying hard work for the film’s superb costumer designers Sandy Powell and Dien Van Straalen.

Potter and her cinematogrphaer Aleksei Rodionov have a great working relationship with their camera, frequently evincing a yearning, probing restlessness but displaying a confident certainty of when to stand still and let Orlando keep moving out of, and then sometimes right back into, the frame. Since Orlando regularly looks down the barrel of Potter’s camera to address us directly, the viewer’s attention is animated by a sensation that subject and depicter are falling about one another in a mischevious and sensuous push-and-pull tussle.

Comics Clergy

I’ve been reading the newspaper comics of E.C. Segar for the very first time!

I didn’t realize that the character of Popeye originated as something of a walk-on in the sprawling ensemble cast of Segar’s strip Thimble Theater and that the character’s surprise runaway popularity led to his taking over the strip and ultimately giving rise to the multimedia television and film franchises we all grew up with. This was new information that I gleaned from Bill Blackbeard’s scholarly essay at the beginning of the volume.

Said volume is one of a Popeye series from Fantagraphics, a typically lavish and lovingly-designed coffee table collection of the earliest Popeye strips called E.C. Segar’s Popeye: “I Yam What I Yam!” These are installments from 1928 into 1929 in which Thimble Theater goes from being about characters like the rowdy and boyish Castor Oyl and his sister Olive to focusing on the sailor who happens into their lives when Castor needs to hire a boat to transport him and his African whiffle hen to a remote island getaway for ultra-wealthy gamblers. (Long story.)

It took some weeks of Popeyeless reading and of getting acclimated to Segar’s joyful cartoon environment before I got to the strip from January 17, 1929 — the first ever appearance anywhere of Popeye the Sailor Man, arriving more or less fully formed and replete with corncob pipe, grouchy squint, imposing forearms and anchor tattoo. (No spinach though; according to the book’s jocular introduction by none other than Segar acolyte Jules Feiffer, “the daily and Sunday newspaper strip Popeye was perfectly capable of winning fights without strength-enhancing, vegi-based steroids.”)

Segar’s cartooning style instantiates everything a great strip artist should practice: spare and economical pen-and-ink work that uses as few strokes as possible to breathe vibrant life into the kind of fictional world where we daily feel poised on the precipice of who-knows-what-next whacky misadventures alongside softly-rounded and dynamically-stretchy characters who somehow at once appear both laughably reductive and empathetically relatable. This collection is thick and dense and I’m really pleased that it’s going to be part of my reading habits for a considerable while yet. I’m excited to see where the story goes now that Popeye’s charisma is hijacking Segar’s intentions and his facility for fisticuffs is beginning to attract notice from friendly and antagonistic characters alike.

I texted a good pal a panel I liked from the Thimble Theater strip from October 25, 1928 in which two old-timey black-clad eccentrics confer about trying to buy Castor’s whiffle hen out from under him (before Castor and the hen and the reader meet Popeye). “Shall I make him an offer?” says the bearded fellow, to which his mustachioed compatriot replies “By all means do that.” I transcribe the ensuing exchange:

Me: [sends photo of above-described panel]

Me: I love old-timiness

Pal: they are both you

Me: [deploys “HAHA” tapback on her message]

Me: Yeah

Pal: you are both of them

Me: Good point

Pal: the old timiest guy i know

Me: They are; you’re right

I at once don’t exactly know for sure what she meant and also understand on a profound level that she is absolutely and incontrovertibly correct. I can’t do the math on that one but I know it all adds up correctly.

Literature Laity

A few months before that panel was printed in the newspaper, Virginia Woolf’s biographical parody/pastiche novel Orlando: A Biography was published. I finally finished re-reading it and I think I’ve figured out what I don’t like about it.

It’s basically that Woolf’s preferred unit of narrative cohesion is the paragraph. She likes ‘em long, blocky, densely verbose. She likes to drown her bons mot in these paragraphs’ murky depths. While sitting in a San Francisco bar one evening medicating myself through my stagger to the book’s finish line, I divined that Woolf, or at least Orlando Woolf, likes to crown a long unbroken chunk of text with some trenchant witticism rather intended to redefine or upend the whole purpose of the punishing paragraph through which the reader has just trudged. So you gotta go back and re-read a lot of ‘em just to keep up with what’s going on and even get the jokes at all.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of exquisitely good and poetic writing in Orlando: A Biography, for example in a bravura passage in Chapter Six in which Woolf complains that the subject of her “biography” “will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine,” compelling the supposed biographer of the fictional Orlando to “look out of the window” and embark on a discursive, rambling, beautiful and deliriously poetic two-page digression about nothing less than “what life is.”

I coulda done with an entire book, albeit probably a much shorter one, written in the style of these two pages. If Woolf did in fact write anything along such lines, anyone please feel welcome to let me know so I can scope it out. I can ultimately recommend this one as something only to broadly respect, intermittently admire and occasionally enjoy.

Next: standing by Ellroy and Segar, reading a children’s book and watching a newish documentary and new feature film. Might squeeze some other comics in there too but we’ll see.