What Do You Meme?

In the midst of this week, we are in a block of doctor's appointments, but following this afternoon's I climbed up to the railings behind the Salem Street Burying Ground and hung over them with my camera, an operation which still put me in snow to mid-calf. Its winter-drifted gravestones date from the late seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries, with one modern interpolation for the unmarked, enslaved dead. I should go back for their slate-carved winged skulls in spring.



The current sunset is one of those violet riots, but at the time of this photo, the clouds above the fan of trees were just starting to flush gilt-grey. That attenuated stretch of the Mystic that always looks more like an industrial canal than a river was a glaucous freeze at its margins and flat-skimmed snow down its center. I cannot believe I never encountered Socalled's Ghettoblaster (2006) until its twentieth anniversary. Then again, only forty years after the fact did it occur to me that I would have accepted The Last Battle (1956) much more readily if Lewis had made it Ragnarök instead of Revelations.

The snow has built a slice of six or eight inches against the glass of my office window, like the honeycomb of an observation hive. Out in the street it looks twice that height not counting the drifts which have crusted where the sidewalks used to be and swamped at least one car and its forlorn antennae of windshield wipers. I would have enjoyed more of the snowglobe of the day without the return of the phantom detergent which spatch could smell even through the storm as soon as he turned up North Street, but I took a picture early on in the snowfall. None of the needles are visible any more.



I can't believe no one has ever written a crossover between Mavis Doriel Hay's Death on the Cherwell (1935) and Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935). It must have been unspeakably awkward for Oxford to suffer two unrelated criminal investigations in separate women's colleges in the same year. Just as Sayers modeled her Shrewsbury College on Somerville, Hay fashioned her Persephone College after her own alma mater of St Hilda's and then inflicts on it the discovery of the body of the college bursar by the same quartet of students who were meeting that afternoon to hex the victim with no expectation of such immediate or spectacular results. They plunge into the business of detecting with the same gestalt enthusiasm, a fast-paced, fair-play, often very funny blend of detective and campus novel as their amateur sleuthing attracts the competitive interest of an equivalent circle of male students as well as the police and the resigned relatives who starred in the author's previous Murder Underground (1934). Every now and then an appropriately chthonic allusion surfaces from the winter damp hanging over the river which loops around Perse Island and its contested territory to which an Elizabethan curse may be attached, but it's not, thank God, dark academia; the ordinary kind can be lethal enough. With its female-forward cast and its touches of social issues in the humor, it would have made a terrific quota quickie. "Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult. It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human."

It delights me deeply that my mother regards the young Mel Brooks, as pictured c. 1949 in a recent edition of the Globe, as a snack.

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.