Art Unlike Fine Wine

I've been watching 1930s Bette Davis movies lately, nominally for research. One of the main characters in Highbinder sounded exactly like Bette Davis in All About Eve in my head when I wrote her, but since the book takes place over a decade before that movie was made, I had to see that Davis's elocution sounded just as clipped in the earlier days of her career. I name-checked Davis in the prologue of the book to indicate what the character sounds like and wanted to make sure that was appropriate.

Thursday's was the third I've watched, Marked Woman, after The Petrified Forest and Jezebel. Dark Victory is next, because I've really developed a taste for 30s movies in the last few months, and because three movies is not enough evidence, believe it or not. (She adopted a southern accent in Jezebel, which changed her diction significantly, and she was mushier than I expected in The Petrified Forest. Marked Woman was perfect, just what I wanted to hear. So it's really a tie, so far.)

All of these movies have been worth seeing, and all of them are really problematic, either for one big reason or a scattering of little ones. That seems to be the way with 30s movies. Either they're embarrassingly racist or sexist, or they're off-putting because filmmaking style has changed so significantly in 80 years, or there's something else weird about them such that I can't insist that friends and family sit down with them to see how worthwhile they are. Shit, a movie that's fast rising into my top 10, Footlight Parade, has one bizarrely racist scene - hardly a few seconds of screen time - that means I can't recommend it in good conscience. Even Astaire did blackface after a fashion in Swing Time, by far the best of the Astaire/Rogers movies.

I don't want to turn this post into a discourse on what to do with problematic attitudes in old art, because I am so not qualified to write that. I guess I'm just amazed that I've watched three pretty good 1930s movies in a row that I can't recommend without asterisks. All for different reasons, but still. This is art that hasn't aged well, and I'm very sorry for that, because at times it's phenomenal art. A stirring scene at the end of Marked Woman really didn't make up for the molasses of the first act. A scene in Jezebel that was simply appalling racially also had some of the best acting I've ever seen from Bette Davis, or really from anyone else in that period.

So back to Davis: After all this, three movies and more to come, I told Matt the other night that as good as she is when she's not quite 30, as beautiful and intriguing, she doesn't compare for a moment to herself at 42 in All About Eve. Not even remotely.

In her twenties...

And from Eve. 

In brief: Youth does not make charisma.

In reading news, I finished By Nightfall, and gave it a big thumbs-down and raspberry. No one is more surprised than me, but this one should have stayed in the drawer. It was static, repetitive, and thoroughly insecure. I couldn't shed the feeling that Cunningham, in trying to show how pretentious and self-obsessed these characters were, only succeeded in showing how pretentious and self-obsessed his own artistic interests are.

I'm presently reading an anthology, Ghosts by Gaslight, a gift from Matt for my birthday [insert shame that it's taken me five months to open it]. It collects Victorian-style ghost stories with a scatter of steampunk. The first story had a good concept but not the best execution, and the second story was reasonably good if paced pretty awkwardly, and that's all the feedback I can offer so far.

I just ordered a book called Revolution in the Head, which is a song-by-song rundown of the Beatles' entire goddamn career. It was excerpted in Slate and given such a positive review that I just had to get it. Stay tuned for more.

Best film quote I heard this week: "Cat dead. Details later." Name that flick?

Rejection and Reading

Some miscellany for today.

I owe thanks to my anonymous commenter of a few days ago. Whoever s/he was, s/he drove a spike of traffic to my blog the likes of which I haven't seen since I got an acceptance in late January. Anonymous criticism: the gift that keeps on giving.

Speaking of comments, a handful of readers (okay really just like three readers) have complained that leaving comments on this blog is annoying and buggy. I didn't understand how that could be, as comments were as open as I could get them - anonymity OK, no spambot text boxes required, etc. A whiz friend has helped me to solve this problem, with any luck, so comment away, even with silly comments, because I love comments. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled comments yearning to speak your mind.

On Tuesday I got the most painfully awesome rejection I imagine I'll ever get (after waiting for six months): "I really wish I could use it, but unfortunately, I can't. ...I suspect you won't have much trouble placing it elsewhere, though, and I look forward to seeing more from you in the future." I laughed a bit at the first half of this last sentence, as it's a pretty exact echo of someone else's words about this story (crazy robot), and this is my third rejection for it.

Despite the positiveness of this rejection, I'm not sure what to do next with this story. It's a bit long as compared to many markets' preferred lengths - over 8,000 words - and it's definitely in the realm of SF. Problem is, this rejection was primarily because the story's too soft in the science for this market. Also, it has sex and violence in it, which nixes markets like Clarkesworld and Orson Scott Card's Etc. Too long (and not right) for Shimmer, and Strange Horizons didn't want it. I'm going to scour Duotrope again for a market that'll suit, but I'm not that optimistic, as my notes from the fall (when I did this the first time) indicate pretty slim pickings for a long, soft, violent, sexy SF story. Maybe I'll just retire it and write some more.

The itch to write has started to come back into my fingers. I have plenty of ideas in my notes book, but none of them are developed, which means a lot of work before the regular work begins. Boo. And I've really enjoyed a total O.D. on movies over the last few weeks. (Like, a gross gluttonous mass of movies. Three a day, sometimes.) But I think I'll have to get back to the red chair - and the notebook - pretty soon.

On to books: I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender on Monday, and passionately adored it. I read it all day, compulsively, to the point where when I emerged from the book, all sorts of things had gone on while I was reading that I had neither heard nor seen. Like the dishes getting done and the dishwasher getting started, and my husband switching video games. I'd had no clue at all. GoodReaders were not so kind to the book, but I believe they were looking for plot where there was intended to be emotion and concreteness where suggestiveness was purposeful. There were answers I wanted badly to know at the end of the book, but answering them was not the point; the journey was the point. I recognized so much of myself, cringing in horror, in various places. What an extraordinary book.

And I finished Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades. Worth reading for the handful of essays that were good, but the essays that weren't good - most of them - pissed me off. Some of them were little more than advertisements for whatever work the essayist did, whether s/he was a writer or an educator or an event promoter (!). You may be unsurprised to learn that the authors who had some dabbling knowledge and/or lacked personal experience with BDSM? They saw nothing wrong with the power dynamics in the books, while those who had deep, broad knowledge of the subject were distressed by the relationship portrayed. Gee, I wonder what that means.

I also finished Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which took me a very long time for such a short book. I didn't like to start right in on another story as soon as I was finished with the last. The stories tired me, they were so lavish and thick with detail and subtlety. I have a short list of friends to whom I want to send copies of this book, because despite all that it was a remarkable book. But I have this feeling like she's an author that those friends already know about (which is part of why those friends are such cool people), and I'm the last one to the party, and I don't want to embarrass myself.

And finally, I started By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham's latest. He is best known for The Hours, but his 2006 book Specimen Days basically made me want nothing more or less than to write a book exactly like Specimen Days. (And if it takes me my entire life, I will.) The first hundred pages of By Nightfall are...kind of bad, to my great surprise and disappointment. But I'm planning to read the whole thing anyway, so I'll keep you posted.