Weekly tallies, LW

July 1-7

Die träumenden Knaben / Der weiße Tiertöter, Kokoschka ❤

Icelandic folk and fairy tales, Icelandic folk legends

Physically strong women are appealing. Premarital sex not a big deal (cf. rural customs pretty much everywhere). Parallel elfin worlds, with churches and preachers.

Cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, Derrida

On forgiveness, it all sounds logical but emotionally impossible and, frankly, I suspect practically inadvisable.

Time for outrage, Hessel

Well, yes.

Der Tulpen bitterer Duft, Herbert

Better go mad over tulips than beany babies, if you ask me. No doubt it was just about money and speculation but I *like* to think the unpoetic Dutch gave in to some uncanny wave of aesthetic mania.

Vorn die Ostsee, hinten die Friedrichstraße, Tucholsky ❤

Flow my tears... "'The German people', someone once said, 'possesses two passions: beer and antisemitism.' (...) The slogan of German nationalism, "Kill the Jews!" is therefore well-chosen, because {it can rely} on those popular instincts and adroitly deflect from the true causes of national misery..." (1921)

America: a prophecy & Europe: a prophecy, Blake

Kooky but impressive.

Trust no aunty, Qamar

Likeable feminist-y pop art & advice by a desi for desis. Beneath the humour one senses the enormous pressure and constraints placed on girls in the community.

More pictures than words:

Gorey's worlds--should get this, the juxtapositions of the collected art and his own especially interesting, suggestive links but definitely not mere copies...

Resemblances, amazing faces, Le Brun

Well yes, it's all stretched a bit, but really funny--should have done caricatures. I'm amazed he (apparently?) didn't go for comparing animals and women.

Working women, Strang

Published before the infamous lippy pissoire, but that plexiglass tabletop on the kneeling woman is included... Frankly I'd like the nutcracker on the cover; don't mind architectural structures and embellishments. The gadgets and novelty items reminded me of the yahoos during Mardi Gras, tit mugs, penis ties... "salt of the earth... idiots..."

Moving pictures:

Diaboliquement vôtre, 1967

Worse than mediocre story, Duvivier couldn't have done too much with it regardless of age and ebbing energies, but it has beautiful photography (Decaë) and Delon at his prettiest.

Wild target, 2009

Quite funny and likeable for a remake of a French movie. Really enjoyed Nighy's repressed killer, formidable mum Eileen Atkins, and sexy Emily Blunt.

To Sleep with anger, 1990

Danny Glover is excellent. If not the devil, definitely devilish. Leave the bayou and all its demons behind, good people. Never look back... Direction as people-loving as Cassavetes.

Carry on up the Khyber, 1968

The dining room sequence is immortal. James is rubbish but the rest are actually clearly good actors.

July 8-14

Ghosts and tales of witchcraft; Outlaws; Icelandic Folktales III

The fear of books, 1932, by Holbrook Jackson

Copacetic until the swivel-eyed-fanatic womanhating segment.

Le Fauteuil hanté, 1909, Gaston Leroux

Funny digs at the Academy, chortful. Dickhead clowns with their fake little epées...

One day when I was lost, 1965, Baldwin

A strained screenplay for a Malcolm X movie. Black-man-abuses-a-blonde-as-payback theme is starting to get on my nerves.

Une mort très douce, 1964, Beauvoir

Shattering, true, painful. The way she conveys how much she loved the mother she didn't love, and how everything remains unresolved, unfinished, unexplained, unforgiven, useless... do we ever finish being born? Separated from our parents? Or do we constantly drown in the psychological miasma of emotion and memory... choked...

The men who explained miracles, John Dickson Carr

L'ultima regina di Firenze, 2018, Luca Scarlini

A dynasty falls due to... excess homosexual progeny, I guess. Indifferent style, but reads fast.

Romare Bearden in black and white

Die Waldsteinsonate, Hartmut Lange

The title story brings together--ironically, we suppose--Magda Goebbels and Franz Liszt in the bunker before Goebbels' family suicide. What did poor Liszt do to deserve that.

More pictures than words:

Parisian fashion, vols. I and II, Christina Nuzzi, pre-WWI, hemlines were low, backs (in the evening) already exposed.

The design of dissent, expanded edition 2017, Milton Glaser and Miroslav Ilic



Moving pictures:

Seven days to noon, 1950, taut and lean atomic-bomb apocalypse threat, remarkable attempt to influence the public, but for naught (British atomic weapons programme started some years later). Great vistas of contemporary London. Middle-aged whore with a golden heart quite the heroine. Insipid young couple; Andre Morell as almost-Quatermass, Joan Hickson's shabby landlady with a cigarette stuck to her lower lip and a dozen cats.

Totò, Peppino e la dolce vita, 1961 (reprise, of course...) Anti-depressive of choice.

Blackmail, 1929, Hitchcock

Like a sketchbook of films to come. The painter-victim's lifestyle is instructive--even British "bohemians" are ridiculously middle-class.

Viktor und Viktoria, 1933, direction Reinhold Schünzel (the gay blackmailer in Anders als die Anderen)

Finally, even if it is just a bad YT copy (but do I want to blow 50 dollars on the DVD? yes, yes I do.) Tame compared to what had already been done (Oswald, Leontine Sagan, even Dietrich swanning in a tux) but for sure the longest stretch of transvestism/transgenderism on screen so far. Extra twist, for those who know, in Walbrook (Adolf Wohlbrück in the credits) actually being gay and for once allowed to fall for a "guy".

July 15-21

La vie sexuelle au Maroc, Leila Slimani

I like her voice.

Le dernier des Justes, Schwarz-Bart

Hard-hitting (that ending...) but in parts oddly... mediocre? So much that reads like set pieces and clichés. Most likely I didn't want to take that trip again.

Moving pictures:

The magnificent Ambersons, 1942

Great cinematography, trite story. No idea what Welles saw in it--himself I guess, in that horrid little prat.

Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, 1965

So bad it's bad.

July 22-28

King Kong Théorie, Despentes, 2006

Dreadful. Shocking that it was published as late as that; as if the seventies never happened. Damn French "cultural exception" at its stultifying work no doubt...

Freedom: The Art of the Novembergruppe 1918-1935

First monograph-sized, richly documented volume on the association. To get.

Moving pictures:

1-2-3 Corona, 1948

Interesting scenery of postwar city ruins. Black market. A gaggle of boys and a single girl, passive centre of everyone's affection (they caused the incident that renders her bedridden for most of the movie) and of course the boys' great motivator. She can make them do anything but accept women as equals.

1. April 2000, 1952

Oh THIS baby deserves a special review, and then some. Waiting for the DVD.

Kočár do Vídně (Carriage to Vienna), 1966, reprise

Still fantastic but I completely forgot about the ending and stopped watching. How I loved that peasant girl and her axe and her horse and the way she shifted the coach on her back and the bit where she lets the twerp run around and make a prize fool of himself, measuring the distance between the trees looking for a spot the carriage may go through, and then she calmly drives the carriage around the obstacle--just glorious.

But spare me that ending, once is enough.

Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, 1956, (Käutner), doesn't hold a candle to the 1931 version. Also I can't stand Heinz Rühmann, I find his popularity a personal affront. Bleating featureless myopic ninny.

Finished Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995--that turned out very surprising. Good stuff. Also now I notice that practically everything that came later ripped it off--RahXephon almost beat for beat (as far as I watched).

July 29-August 4

To wake the dead, 1938, Carr

Nice little flourish for Latinists.

A partridge in a pear tree, 1957, Shahn

The partridges and the pear trees actually increase at a slower rate than the other stuff... only one partridge in a pear tree per day.

Über das Marionettentheater, 1810, Kleist

Beautiful title essay, and a bunch of odd little scraps. Kleist and Büchner, two comets, popping up from who knows where, vanishing the next minute.

Bled, 2016, Monénembo

Yet another harrowing story of a woman's abuse in Algeria, but with a happy end. Empty, unconvincing, a lot of jabber about nothing.

Moving pictures

47 morto che parla, 1950, Totò, reprise, a picker-upper... e io pago! IO PAAAAAGO...!!

La maldición de Frankenstein, 1973, Jess Franco

Great location (a Portuguese castle), some inspired madness, embarrassing amount of beaver shots. Boh, worse than Billy the Kid vs. Dracula it is not.

Marathon Man, 1976

Can't stand Hoffman but worth it for Olivier's brilliant performance. Everything in him could act separately--the eyes, the mouth, the voice, the gestures... simply stunning.

Verbotene Filme, 2014, Moeller

Yes, all that dreck is on NaziTube, playing to oodles of adoring white dickheads. And that's where it should remain, where the scum know they are grubbing around in dirt. No legalization, no promotion.

Professor Mamlock, 1961, and

Lissy, 1957, both directed by Konrad Wolf. As deep as postwar German cinema cut into the monstrosity of Nazism--and only in the East.

(See Labyrinth of lies for the state of general knowledge about the Holocaust in the BRD in the sixties.)

Knock, 1951

Louis Jouvet, gargoyle face, so watchable.

August 5- August 11

Catholics, 1970, Brian Moore

Religious mafia in turmoil of forced evolution.

One fat Englishman, 1965, Amis

Repulsive men gather praise for mooning everyone.

Les Français aussi ont un accent, 1999, Nadeau

Moderately illuminating.

Beber un cáliz, 1963, Garibay

Death of a stern, traditional father in Mexico. Agony given in detail. Very good.

Birds of the Athenian Agora, 1985

Lovely.

Egon Schiele: landscapes, 2016

Excellent, photographs of sites included.

Small world, 1992, Suter

Slow destruction by Alzheimer's. Not what I should have read but once started couldn't stop.

Moving pictures

Ernst Thälmann, Sohn seiner Klasse, (1955), direction Kurt Maetzig

The sloganeering makes it seem more artificial than it really was, and yet that was an element of reality then--heightened emotion, immediate action, direct combat, imminent death. Very theatrical production. The cleanup makes the greenish grey makeup visible. Liebknecht gets a fiery speech and some dialogue; Luxemburg only silent in the background. Almost no women.

August 12-August 18

Le Curé de Tours. La Grenadière. L'illustre Gaudissart., 1832/3, Balzac

The Curé contains a two-page+ eye-watering ass-pulled bloviation on the nature & condition of spinsters, the Grenadière is sickeningly sentimental, and Gaudissart, just, why? Ballsack.

Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back, 2016

Excellent.

The use and abuse of cinema: German legacies from the Weimar era to the present, 2015

Confirmed my most depressing observations about film in the FRG and then some. With all the implications... (Watching Heimat as a kid and wondering if *I* was crazy or what.)

Moving pictures

Beauty and the Beast, 1991, Disney

*shrug*

August 19-August 25

Seetee Ship, Williamson and Spaceling, Piserchia for the "oldie" science-fiction & fantasy read.

I wish I could approach these things with the carefree joy of my teens. (Or have I forgotten my teens?)

Satanic feminism, 2017, Faxneld

Lots of stuff I didn't know and make promises to explore... Especially intrigued by the Luciferianism of the working classes.

Moving pictures:

Fellini's Satyricon, 1969, reprise--for the extras on the Criterion

Carnal knowledge, 1971, Mike Nichols and Jules Feiffer

Superb dialogue, fresh as a daisy.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1965, Vadim

So now I can say I saw it in a cinema, on 35 mm, and yet guess what, both the picture and the sound were worse than on the internet copy I snagged years ago.

Vadim's squeeze du moment somehow even more insipid than on previous viewings. Juliette's gambling even riskier--for the first time felt sorry for her. Could be due to Vadim's intro, hearing how he framed the narrative, saw the characters.

But also probably that Moreau could not have avoided infusing the character with vulnerability. Intentionally or not, she seems to tell us that she loves him--considerably more than he does her. Pain sits so well on that face. It reads like pain, not hurt vanity, pride. So hers is a losing game from the start.

August 26-September 1

Emil und die drei Zwillinge, Kästner, 1934 --failure of imagination on Kästner's part but he must have been hounded for sequels

Nine princes in Amber, Zelazny, 1970; Algorithm, Gawron, 1976, both for the oldie SFF read, Algorithm worth revisiting

Thérèse Desqueyroux, Mauriac, 1927--Mauriac at his best and (arguably) later never equalled. Odd to think Beauvoir spooked him so when he could imagine a character like Thérèse--let her go freely, that is.

Briefe an eine junge Frau, Rilke, 1930--rather pointless without context (her letters not given nor any editorial apparatus), apparently a fetching young woman asking writing advice and/or musing about art

The Germans and their art, Belting, 1998--important but somewhat frustrating in that he too seems to operate partly under the influence of the nationalist framework. For instance, I don't believe north-western Poles would happily agree that they are "culturally German"; at least, they would not put it that way. Western supremacists (to say nothing of the Nazis) put it that way. The moment one "ethnicises" certain general, transnational cultural practices, one has fallen prey to the supremacist nationalist narratives. And why should "saving German patriotic tradition" from the "insipid radicalization by the Nazis" (insipid?!) be seen, postwar, as any sort of laudable goal? When he himself details how that very same "patriotic tradition" paved the way for Nazi instrumentalization of the arts, to the point that the Nazis were simply borrowing pre-existing talking points about degeneracy (of foreign art) and natural superiority of the German!

Also, were the Middle Ages in any sense a "western European phenomenon"? Presumably the rest of Europe and the Balkans spent that period on the dark side of the moon. Learned professors shouldn't fear admitting there are some things they simply don't know.

Le désarroi, Gourmont, first published 2018

Remnants or reworked fragment of a project for a larger work, Le destructeur, with the same central figure, a decadent Satanist. Salèze is more active than Des Esseintes, less odious than Durtal, and the world, if fallen, still given the dignity of a reality that matters. Unlike Huysmans, Gourmont cared for philosophy far more than for religion. Nietzsche-lite, Nietzsche one could take around to the elegant salons.

Une mélancolie arabe, Taïa, 2008

Attracted by the title, but it's the same story I've read now four or five times from him.

Le collier rouge, Rufin, 2014

The cover on my book gave away the principal point, not that it matters... Effective anti-war novella, but not very much to it. I nearly thanked the gods on my knees that the doggie got to live and with a better master too.

Buried for pleasure, Crispin, 1948

The most interesting (or even the only interesting) thing about this is Fen's excoriation of British politics du jour. A few tweaks and you'd have a perfect (except far more literate and intelligent-sounding) pro-Brexit screed.

Moving pictures:

White Right, 2017, Deeyah Khan

She turned a couple Nazis, fine. Would be interesting to see how a Jewish man, say, would have fared in her shoes. Especially with the one who said he's changed his mind about Muslims, but insisted frothingly that he still absolutely hates Jews.

Star Trek: the motion picture, 1979

I like it. V-ger: I'm a sucker for that sort of retro-futuro nostalgia.

Eyewitness, Hough, 1971

Dumb story and ridiculous direction but great shots of Malta and an entertaining Lionel Jeffries. Susan George in a terrible "stupid female ruins everything" role. Oh god, the continuity... that is, lack thereof... in one scene the annoying boy goes magically from tousled, slightly wet hair to a rip-roaringly hilarious coiffed, lacquered bouffant that made him look like a diminutive drag queen or an oddly unwrinkled grandma. Actually worth getting for that belly laugh.

Count Dracula, Franco, 1970, reprise

For some reason I needed to see Kinski's Renfield again.

The Man Who Cheated Himself, Dearden, 1971

I'll always love Dearden but this is a tedious bomb. His last movie.

September 2-September 8

The Skylark of space, Smith, 1915, for the oldie SFF read

Moving pictures:

My neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki, 1988, reprise

Black butler the movie, 2014

The story is no great shakes but what excellent casting of the leads. Hiro Mizushima as the Butler is simply uncanny. Nice fight scenes; all in all, anime is proving a source of superior sci-fi/fantasy entertainment.

Ferris Bueller's day off, Hughes, 1986

Picture making this today and marvel at how much the world has changed.

September 9-September 15

A house of pomegranates, Wilde, 1891

I remember when I first read this as a little girl feeling I had never read words so beautiful, been made to see pictures more wonderful.

Lieber Freund! Lebenszeichen aus der Fremde, Alfred Polgar and W. Schlamm, collected 1981

Correspondence covering the Polgars' last moment escape to the US through the mid-fifties. Polgar old and weakened but still wonderfully observant and acerbic. 1949 (returned to Europe--Vienna too but mostly Switzerland):

Der Antisemitismus gedeiht, die alte Nazi-Frechheit kommt wieder ungeniert nach vorn, und die Amerikaner geben ihren Segen dazu. Sozusagen: die SS-Leute vertragen sich ausgezeichnet mit den $$-Leuten.

Victoriana, 1930, Sitwell and Barnett

Tons of shocking stuff. Well, shocking to me as I am aparently like unto a babe in the woods.

ROEBUCK on THE ANNIHILATION OF NATIVE POPULATIONS (1851)

We have no business in Kaffraria, except on the understanding that we are going to plant there a people of higher intelligence, and this can only be done by the gradual annihilation of the native population.

It is an utter pretence to talk of humanity, and the principles of Christian religion, and the Decalogue; the black man must vanish in the face of the white.

Caricature, Gombrich, 1940

Mickey Mouse figures along with Egyptian anthropomorphic animals etc.

Je suis née grecque, Mercouri, 1971

Fascinating insight into Greek social life. She went from the right (conservative political family, grandfather mayor of Athens 30 years) to the left (post-war). Incredible casual misogyny. An early boyfriend tells her he'd like her to be his mistress because he loves her, but cautions her that if she agrees he is ALSO going to despise her as the only women worth respecting are the wives (but this "respect" of course doesn't extend to being faithful to them).

Her mother and NEXT her grandmother both getting abandoned by their husbands for younger women. (Old goat grandpa was then 85.)

Moving pictures:

The great killing, Kudo, 1964

Very satisfactory mass slaughter of dickheads--by hand too. None of that drone, remote, computer calculated malarkey.

Il Decameron, Pasolini, 1971, reprise

E questa sia bella coda di cavalla!

ahahahahaha

Fabulously grotesque teeth on everyone except a few pretty maidens.