Incubus (1966)

Due to my growing interest in learning Esperanto, today I watched the 1966 horror film Incubus (Esperanto, Inkubo), which was directed by Leslie Stevens (the creator of The Outer Limits) and starred a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. The film's dialogue is delivered in Esperanto (which, by the way, is an artificially constructed language, created by L. L. Zamenhof to be an easy-to-use auxiliary language), apparently because the director thought it would give the film an eerie quality. I think that in this the film is partially successful (some of the black and white visual imagery also works well in this regard), but one major problem is that the cast is not very good at pronouncing the language. Even for a beginner, many of the gaffes are painfully obvious, and it makes one wonder if Stevens knew that much about Esperanto himself.

Other than the language and the imagery, the acting just isn't convincing, and the story is rather banal and doesn't make a lot of sense (e.g. the elder succubus, Amael, goes from forbidding her sister succubus from harming Shatner's character to wanting him destroyed in almost the blink of an eye; later on Marko is said to have "blood on his hands" for killing the incubus, when the thing didn't really die; etc). These issues are typical for an American B-movie of the period, and I knew that is what this was beforehand, so I am not really complaining. It was kind of entertaining, in a cheesy, stupid way, and it does have an interesting title sequence of interspersed magical and Satanic symbols. My grip is just that the idea of the film was promising, and I think it would have been so easy to make it work more effectively.

Revival

Recently I have decided to revive this blog, although I have some reservations. I am out of practice, and generally I do not find my writing to be very satisfactory. But one can only improve through practice, and what is wrong with publishing (on a private, little blog) this practice? My inclination in writing for blogs has always been to either write short fragments that are totally unpolished, only half thought out and often quite oblique, or to focus on carefully edited reviews and articles. For some reason it pains me to see these two formats side by side, so, for instance, on this blog, I have deleted all the short rants and left only the reviews (although I must admit that they are not all that polished either). I should try to avoid this habit and must say now that this blog will be a dumping ground for whatever comes out of my head. And yet I shall endeavor to make whatever comes out of my head sound as good as possible to the reader's inner ear.

Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial

Sir Thomas Browne is a fascinating figure in the history of English letters. Perhaps his best known work is Hydriotaphia, Latin for urn burial, an essay about some urns containing burnt bones that were dug up at Old Walsingham, Norfolk, in 1657. While Browne supposed that the urns were Roman ("no obscure conjecture"), their origin was instead Saxon. Nevertheless, the text is noteworthy not for its scientific account of the bone fragments but for how Browne is able to use this discovery as a departure point for a highly poetic meditation on mortality.

Some excerpts:

It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine.

We live with death, and die not in a moment.

If the nearnesse of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happinesse in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors.

Particularly eye-catching are his pronouncements concerning human vanity and the pretensions of being remembered after our death:

Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grosly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrians horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equall durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamenon: Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, then any that stand remembred in the known account of time?

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.

Since our longest Sunne sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our light in ashes. Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying memento's, and time that grows old it self, bids us hope no long duration: Diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.

His discourse resembles Ecclesiastes in his denouncement of vanity and his exhortation to find solace in the "Register of God." But the religious message is almost beside the point. His glorious yet gloomy words emanate from the pages and stick in the mind.

Browne is also remembered for making two statements that would prove incredibly prophetic. First, there is the fact that he died on his birthday. Brown wrote about such a coincidence. In his Letter to a Friend, he writes:

Nothing is more common with Infants than to die on the day of their Nativity, to behold the worldly Hours, and but the Fractions thereof; and even to perish before their Nativity in the hidden World of the Womb, and before their good Angel is conceived to undertake them. But in Persons who out-live many Years and when there are no less than three hundred sixty five days to determine their Lives in every Year; that the first day should make the last, that the Tail of the Snake should return into its Mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon the Day of their Nativity is indeed a remarkable Coincidence; which, tho' Astrology hath taken witty Pains to salve, yet hath it been very wary in making Predictions of it.

The second statement, which so fascinated W.G. Sebald that he undertook a quest to discover the ultimate fate of these circumstances, can be found in the very epistle that serves as an introduction to Hydriotaphia.

Browne's remains were fated not to rest in peace. In 1840, during preparations for another burial in the chancel, his coffin was damaged and its contents partially exposed. Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn:

As a result, Browne's skull and a lock of his hair passed into the possession of one Dr. Lubbock, a parish councillor, who in turn left the relics in his will to the hospital museum, where they were put on display amidst various anatomical curiosities until 1921 under a bell jar. It was not until then that St. Peter Mancroft's repeated request for the return of Browne's skull was acceded to, and, almost a quarter of a millennium after the first burial, a second interment was performed with all due ceremony. Curiously enough, Browne himself ... offers the most fitting commentary on the subsequent odyssey of his own skull when he writes that to be gnaw'd out of our graves is a tragical abomination. But, he adds, who is to know the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?

 

The King of Limbs

The new Radiohead album, The King of Limbs, received its online release on Friday, and I've given it a couple of listens. My preliminary impression is that it's underwhelming yet promising. I began waiting expectantly for this release as soon as In Rainbows first reached my ears, but in the ensuing three years and some four months, I've somewhat lowered my expectations and was not all that excited when I heard that TKOL was coming out.

What I've been reading from many others is the same underwhelming feeling. A lot of people, unsatisfied with the skimpy number of tracks (eight), have gotten it into their heads that this is only the first half of the full release. Whether or not that's true (I doubt it), it shows that the album lacks the epic sound of previous albums, from OK Computer to In Rainbows. TKOL is subdued, even minimalistic in places, emphasizing electronica over rock (guitars are few and far between, and that's a downer because their guitars are one of their strengths). I don't think it quite sounds like anything else, except perhaps, as has been noted, the Amnesiac b-sides, and a tad like The Eraser, with a few flourishes reminiscent of IR.

I don't think that TKOL is any less emotional (though that's what people have been saying) than Kid A or their other albums. It just lacks the epic sweep - which allows one to become emotionally invested - that comes with a longer, more varied album. Although there is some variety, most of the tracks coalesce into a dominant mood that I would characterize as a kind of paradoxical lighthearted gloom. I don't notice anything on here that has the uplifting quality of "Reckoner" or even "4 Minute Warning."

Personally, I was disappointed with "Morning Mr. Magpie," which I thought sounded better in its earlier, rawer form (which makes me wonder if I should continue to hope for a studio version of "True Love Waits"). My favorite tracks so far are "Codex," a slow piano meditation with doleful horn bleats that exudes pathos, and "Separator," with its groovy drums and dulcet guitar interjections. Interestingly, codex is Latin for "tree trunk or book," and of course, the album's theme includes a 1,000 year old oak tree. What gives some potential credence to the idea that this is only the first half of the full album is that lyric in "Separator": "If you think this is over, then you're wrong."

It's not really fair (though it is inevitable) to compare this to their previous work. I think it's their least commercial release, barring their experimental b-sides, and that would explain much of the disappointment coming from people who would like more "Creep"s and more "Paranoid Android"s. I'm sure that in time it will grow on me, as tends to be the case with Radiohead's music.

Transparent Things

Transparent Things (1972) by Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps it is inevitable that all great writers run out of innovatory steam and are forced to produce a "few variations on favorite themes," as Borges put it. This novella, packed with weary Nabokovian games and tropes, is minor literature, yet it retains, through those same games and tropes, some of the classic Nabokovian charm. The protagonist, Hugh Person, a perpetual pun, is typical of the author's leading men. Nabokov had a penchant for anti-heroes, and was able to make the most depraved human beings at least appear humorous. Hugh ("our Person") is pathetic, dogged at first by the influence of his bumbling father, and then errant and unambitious in his career, settling for what he concedes is a highly mediocre (he sees himself as a genius; his protagonists are usually not without delusional self-confidence) position as a publishing assistant. More than this, he is incompetent in sexual matters and displays an alarming attraction to young girls, echoing several other Nabokov men in their pubescent propensities.

The core of the story describes his four trips to Switzerland and his tragicomic marriage to a half-Belgian, half-Russian skiing socialite named Armande Chamar (chamar is either a Hindu leather worker or Portuguese for to name). Of some interest is Person's meditations on memory, a ubiquitous theme for the writer, and his metaphysics of time, which recalls J.W. Dunne's thesis, that the future already exists and that we nightly commune in our dreams with both the past and the future. In the first chapter, the narrator speculates that "perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future." Of course, the irony lies in the fact that the whole story revolves around his nostalgic pilgrimage to Witt, to the Ascot Hotel, and his attempt to reconnect with a lost past, with the ghostly image of lost love. It seems that neither the past nor the future were lucid for Person.

The work is very tightly-plotted, in 26 terse chapters traveling back and forth in time, and has the manner of an inevitable logic about it, although the final flame seems like a quirk, in the same way that I felt that Mrs. Humbert's road accident was both arbitrary and necessary. It has been described as "openly artificial," laying out the clockworks of the fiction, to provide an account of "transparent things," and overall the plot is more straightforward than in some of his other books. He also experiments, as has been his style, with different methods of narrative, from eyewitness accounts to interrogation to a letter from the moribund novelist, Mr. R., a self-parody who "wrote English considerably better than he spoke it," and whose orthography Hugh finds to be idiosyncratic (if one examines Nabokov's note cards, printed in The Original of Laura, it will be seen that they have an ample amount of spelling errors, or, as he puts it, "unorthodox punctuation corresponding to singular thought").

The greatest gift of Transparent Things may be its humor, although I cannot say that it is exceptionally more humorous than his other novels; in fact, it may be somewhat less so, but since I am searching for the positive properties of this one hundred and four page piece of prose, the comic moments stand out. For instance, Nabokov provides a humorous description of what happens when Hugh goes to see Armande at the Villa Nastia, the house her father had built, and finds that she has gone off with some boys. There is also the issue of Hugh's somnambulism, which gets him in trouble more than once. Armande's kinky sexual proclivities (such as her insistence on making telephone calls to friends and acquaintances while Hugh makes love to her in bed) and an incident involving a Swissman named Wilde and a magazine in the hotel lobby (I don't want to give too much away) are other examples that come to mind. The most one can venture is to call it a tragicomedy, if not a pure comedy, not even excepting, but especially for, the melodramatic ending.