Geography Isn’t Defined by Roads
Jan. 15th, 2023 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraDreamed a pal and I were listening to this self-styled female poet and just howling with laughter over how awful she was.
(Poet was in the Amanda Gorman School of Poetry. I happen to think Amanda Gorman is awful and that no one would care about her if she wasn’t young, gorgeous, and Black.)
What am I? droned the female poet. I’m a sistah! I’m a n____r, I’m an ample land!
The dream pal was Black too, which I suppose was what gave me the courage to laugh. Because not even in my dreams am I politically incorrect enough to laugh at a bad poet who cloaks herself in 500 years of oppression.
###
I subscribe to every streaming service known to man, and I’m also able to slipstream on the Internet platforms of any number of cable TV channels merely by signing on with L’s Comcast password.
Thus it was that last night I stumbled across the movie I Want to Live! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title), which is the story of Barbara Graham, the third woman in California to be executed using the then newly humane technology of the gas chamber.
I first saw this movie when I was—wait for it—six years old!
This was on account of my insane mother was a huge movie buff and never had enough money for babysitters, so she used to drag me to every movie she wanted to see. In those days, kids under 12 got into movies for fre-e-e-e-eeee!
I can’t say I remembered anything about the movie besides its name.
But watching it again was highly entertaining. And illuminating!
Barbara Graham was a Bad Girl, thus the film is an homage to everything that was Bad in 1958. Bad Things in 1958 included hipsters, thugs, fire escapes, bongos, and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. There is actually a scene of people passing a joint!
Barbara Graham was also a prostitute, and it was fascinating to watch the various workarounds for conveying this because coming out and branding her a hooker was, of course, verboten under the tenets of the Hays Code.
The director was Robert Wise.
Wise got his start as Orson Welles’ editor on Citizen Kane and went on to direct The Sound of Music.
So, you know. An interesting career trajectory.
The last half hour or so of I Want to Live is about as profound an argument against capital punishment as anything I have ever run across anywhere.
And Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham is absolutely mesmerizing. Just a superb performance.
###
Today will be more tax code cramming, and then Loraine and I will go hiking through the forest down to the quaint and tiny village of Hyde Park.
I remember that one of my great discoveries when I first began bicycling seriously was that freeways don’t actually define geography.
The corollary to this, of course, is that geography isn’t actually defined by roads either.
I live on a suburbanized country road surrounded by a deep forest.
Since I have a really bad sense of spatial orientation, it has never really quite jelled for me that Hyde Park village is on the other side of that forest. No! To get to Hyde Park Village, you had to go on the road.
I mean—of course, I knew intellectually that Hyde Park Village is on the other side of the woods. But I didn’t feel it.
So this gives the hike I will be doing with Loraine something of the feel of a magical adventure.
###
What else?
Once again, this morning, I've been seized with a sense of my own insignificance.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be reminded of one’s own insignificance.
But one doesn’t want to become too obsessed with that.
(Poet was in the Amanda Gorman School of Poetry. I happen to think Amanda Gorman is awful and that no one would care about her if she wasn’t young, gorgeous, and Black.)
What am I? droned the female poet. I’m a sistah! I’m a n____r, I’m an ample land!
The dream pal was Black too, which I suppose was what gave me the courage to laugh. Because not even in my dreams am I politically incorrect enough to laugh at a bad poet who cloaks herself in 500 years of oppression.
###
I subscribe to every streaming service known to man, and I’m also able to slipstream on the Internet platforms of any number of cable TV channels merely by signing on with L’s Comcast password.
Thus it was that last night I stumbled across the movie I Want to Live! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title), which is the story of Barbara Graham, the third woman in California to be executed using the then newly humane technology of the gas chamber.
I first saw this movie when I was—wait for it—six years old!
This was on account of my insane mother was a huge movie buff and never had enough money for babysitters, so she used to drag me to every movie she wanted to see. In those days, kids under 12 got into movies for fre-e-e-e-eeee!
I can’t say I remembered anything about the movie besides its name.
But watching it again was highly entertaining. And illuminating!
Barbara Graham was a Bad Girl, thus the film is an homage to everything that was Bad in 1958. Bad Things in 1958 included hipsters, thugs, fire escapes, bongos, and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. There is actually a scene of people passing a joint!
Barbara Graham was also a prostitute, and it was fascinating to watch the various workarounds for conveying this because coming out and branding her a hooker was, of course, verboten under the tenets of the Hays Code.
The director was Robert Wise.
Wise got his start as Orson Welles’ editor on Citizen Kane and went on to direct The Sound of Music.
So, you know. An interesting career trajectory.
The last half hour or so of I Want to Live is about as profound an argument against capital punishment as anything I have ever run across anywhere.
And Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham is absolutely mesmerizing. Just a superb performance.
###
Today will be more tax code cramming, and then Loraine and I will go hiking through the forest down to the quaint and tiny village of Hyde Park.
I remember that one of my great discoveries when I first began bicycling seriously was that freeways don’t actually define geography.
The corollary to this, of course, is that geography isn’t actually defined by roads either.
I live on a suburbanized country road surrounded by a deep forest.
Since I have a really bad sense of spatial orientation, it has never really quite jelled for me that Hyde Park village is on the other side of that forest. No! To get to Hyde Park Village, you had to go on the road.
I mean—of course, I knew intellectually that Hyde Park Village is on the other side of the woods. But I didn’t feel it.
So this gives the hike I will be doing with Loraine something of the feel of a magical adventure.
###
What else?
Once again, this morning, I've been seized with a sense of my own insignificance.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be reminded of one’s own insignificance.
But one doesn’t want to become too obsessed with that.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-15 03:25 pm (UTC)I remember in England when we followed footpaths through fields to arrive at a festival in a different village--it was exactly as you say: magical. We had walked on fairy paths and materialized in this whole other place. And similarly, when I was a kid, there was this dirt road that only was used by the town water department--you could get on it on your bike and get secret views into backyards and behind shopping plazas, and you could go places on it easily that you couldn't get to easily in other ways. Magic.
Have fun on your adventure!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 10:58 am (UTC)One of the more enchanting motifs in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is Zevin's invention of secret roads. If you can only discover them, you can get to Point B from Point A ten times faster than you would on the freeway! Except first you have to discover them. 😀
Zevin takes great pains in her Afterword to explain to over-eager readers that these roads do not exist. 😀
no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 01:31 pm (UTC)Oh I see how it is. Trying to hoard them for yourself, are you, Gabrielle? Well I'm NOT HAVING IT!
no subject
Date: 2023-01-16 03:09 pm (UTC)Caviar
Date: 2023-01-15 11:37 pm (UTC)So bad contemporary poetry should be the (managed) expectation, not something special.
Re: Caviar
Date: 2023-01-16 10:54 am (UTC)We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
Admirable sentiment, no doubt.
Not poetry.