The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein: A novel by Theodore Roszak

   This can be viewed as a political novel about the most basic of struggles; The need of humans to own, control, make, and know as opposed to a call-of-the-wild acknowledgement of life and feeling being in everything and humans just a part of it all, more integrated. It is also a psychological study of humans and their interface with the rest of nature. It deals with issues personal and global at the same time, through story, metaphor. Or simply a story about the internal struggle between the thinking self and the feeling self in the individual.
It is the Prometheus story retold from another angle.

To me this is one of these holographic things available on view from varying perspectives. 

 It’s about different starting points of view of humans place in the earth. The notion that human lives were lived differently before beginning the naming, separation, discrimination, quantification of things done with the aim of the betterment, advancement, and expansion of human life separate and over all other earth entities. Dominion of humans over the earth God bestowed on them is basically the notion in vogue. Ownership an idea of accumulating what flies by. As if it is beneficial to keep it, as if it is even possible. Constant anxiety about scarcity.

The novel is set at a point when ancient feminist ritualistic nature-based technology meets with the rise of modern science and logic. Science being associated with the male impulse.

There is a possibility of the marriage of the two, the Mother Nature with the male logic/science. The memoir is a last testament of the nature side, about to be lost, maybe forever. Yet another fall from Eden. 

That’s the big picture overriding the whole thing. Moving in closer there is a young couple that cannot really bond. They cannot bond because he will not bond. He can’t believe, he must know. He can’t imagine, he must fabricate. He goes along up to a point, then withholds. Their ritualized sex is interrupted by his desires, his will.
The novel is written from Elizabeth Frankenstein’s point of view. I have not read Mary Shelley’s book in many years. This novel was therefore taken on its own terms rather than having any personal memory reference to the original material, so I wasn’t upset by anything that might have felt inconsistent with Shelley’s work. 

In close-up, the story is a tragedy, a beautiful romance and marriage that could create a beautiful magical powerful world for them. That can never be. A woman, Elizabeth, is longing and ready to learn to really bond, become one, through alchemical magic ritual, but this cannot happen because of something resistant in the man, Victor. In the beginning of the process he really wants to bond, wants to learn the magic pre-science technologies of witchcraft, but even the times are against this. The flow of interest, at the very end of the 16th Century Europe, is moving toward reason, science, rationality, thought, invention, and dominionism, as it continues to be. There are persecutions elsewhere in Europe referred to, burnings of women going on. 

The book presents this moment of the path of unity diverging into separation and commodification. 

Maybe we are at another fork in the road, or at least we see where this one leads and are looking back to see what happened in search of a direction. The big issues dealt with in the book are now even more with us and feel like they are coming to a head and something must be done. There is a growing number of people interested in more of a connection with something, spirit, nature, something other than the empty competitive consumer world we have inherited from the church of science and religion.

This book was written 25 years ago, but speaks to a counter movement that has grown with the hazards of the domiminist world view.
It turns out that the novel deal with topics and feelings related to the new psychedelic movement which is very much about this attempt to connect to the reality we live in, honoring it’s limits while exploring abandoned paths that could lead (back?) to wonder.

It can be a deep journey to read this beautifully crafted novel. It is a very serious piece within a successfully entertaining structure. 

There is a good deal of magic, wiccan, stuff going on early in the novel. There is even a communicative bird entry friend. 

It’s bold for a male writer to take on a young female first person like this. Although I can’t say I was with this all the way. There were few passages where I wondered what a woman would think of the portrayal of Elizabeth’s erotic thoughts. Maybe women don’t need to read this, only I and my kind, needed to.

I was very set up to enjoy this. I even found similar thematic connections to the book I read before this, Kangaroo by D H Lawrence. Lawrence hungered for the very same sort of thing, a reintegration. But these issues have always been in the background in my life.

Overall, considering the theme, this is one of the best novels I have read. Theodore Roszak is a great novelist. I read the outstanding Flicker this year. But this one even tops that. Pontfex, his first novel is very good but a victim of its setting 1970 type revolution scene and that makes it feel dated which doesn’t help in getting the point across. The point that is not far from this novel. Roszak’s academic field was something called Ecopsychology. Perhaps this is what I read in his novels. He may be teaching me that. I’m happy that there are two more novels of his I have yet to read.

Kangaroo by D H Lawrence

This novel is from 1922 and it reflects the trauma of the time after World War I.

Much of this trauma is personal, within. Big human events can cause questions, wondering, how this can be avoided in the future and how is this global world going to get on. The reverberations of the war are also in the people in one way or another, their movements and desires.

There is a bit of a meandering on the road plot to this novel but it is mainly a 365 page journey into the interior of the Richard character. It’s a story about how to deal with other humans. The plot is not the thing here. There is not much action. It feels like a pre-cinema a world view.

Australia is the setting for a story constructed to explore all this internal work. The character, Kangaroo, is a Australian lawyer. He is also a wannabe dictator who has attracted a band of followers mostly made up veterans from the war in Europe who have not had that type of excitement and bonding since.

A globe hopping English writer Richard and his not English wife Harriet land in Australia and Richard is seduced into this right wing oddball male scene through being rather reluctantly neighborly.

There is also a left wing working class socialist movement.
Yet a lot of the drama is the strange need of this Kangaroo man to be loved and followed. Kangaroo is a nickname for the lawyer leader man. The socialist have a leader too and there is a scene with him trying to recruit Richard as well because he is a writer of some note and renown. But he is nowhere near as grasping, needy, and ultimately grotesquely pathetic as Kangaroo. It shows the sick need if this type of narcissistic political, cult, or personal “leader”.

All this is set up really to look into an individual's place among others personally and politically. It works very well that way. We follow Richard as he is being seduced into “loving” Kangaroo, the fascist impulse stand-in. We feel the writer confronting these ideas within himself. He is a man open to ideas and faces the risk in that, he could be swept away. Fear of that makes him perhaps rigidly noncommittal. Open to ideas but rejecting all action options. Avoiding the associations and actions that can make the idea manifest. The novel is cogitation on these big waves of human political energy building up out of industrialization. Socialism and fascism.

Richard finds himself being pulled by both poles. The minimal suspense of the piece is in which will he choose. It might be useful for the reader to see this in context of 1922, before the triumph of German fascism and the horrible results, into and during WWII. And the Soviet Union was brand new. Everything was new and with a sweepingly rapid industrialization. We are at the edge and near the end of the greater  British Empire but 20th Century was still to come.

Yet Richard doesn’t want to choose, cannot choose. He does not trust this human, male, energy that tries to use grand ideas and romantic sentimentality to change the world. He distrusts this and feels silly when he notes it rising up in himself.

But he wants connection to something. He craves it. He has a sort of idiosyncratic philosophical/spiritual point of view. If he and all could be more attentive to some natural force a god in everything maybe things could somehow set right, otherwise the left and right are two sides of the same thing. It’s not that stark, he does make a stand and chooses a side in a noncommittal way. It would have been disappointing otherwise and he makes the correct choice even if he isn’t exactly joining up. After all few really do.

There is a long illuminating diversion into Richard and Harriet’s experience in England during the war. This reflects the actual war time experience of D H Lawrence. It is the outsider, the objector, dealing with a bonded unified nation’s jingoistic environment. This sort of thing apparently never changes.

On the personal level the novel depicts a lot of loneliness and desire. There is a craving for male bonding. A real love, caring, and trust between males as is available sometimes between men and women.

But Richard can’t  fit himself into any of that as much as he might want it or is interested in it. The whole construction of the settings for this male bonding do not work for him. He is simply not a team player up for any of these surface bonding programs that we make available. He doesn’t want to be touched. Is that because he needs to be touched too much if at all? He sees the limits and social dangers of any variance. It’s as if the an old type of male connection was removed in the construction of the commercial competitive world. The limits set in the bonding environments made available are not removed from the domination of a power hungry dualist world view. The business connections, military connections, sport fan bonding; all have a sort of ritual structure prohibiting spontaneity.

He wants another sort of connection out of his general spiritual outlook. He wants the humans to feel the flow or energy from the earth and reconnect with and through that rather than pretending to be something separate.

And there is really the only small hope for the redemption of humans.

The notion is that this type of bonding could be more open, not so much a dance of the restricted roles of mainstream male bonding. But that hazards opening to territory forbidden wherein, of course, there is some hope and danger.

There is mystery here. His notions are not exactly named. He calls part of it his dark god. But this is unseen and unnameable rather than dark equals evil.

He embraces mystery over knowing, naming, and structure. Yet craves connection to the mysterious structure beyond intellectual and emotional decisions. A surrender that would not have to be made.

Kangaroo offers a transparently artificial option for this. The novel could also be a warning about that type. The power hungry eager to exploit this spirit, hope, love, and our need to belong.

In a way Richard is a sort of fugitive wandering to the next stop in a trip initiated by disgust with his own homeland.

—-

I have been watching some film adaptations of Lawrence’s work recently. This is the first time I have read him since I was a young man, maybe 40 years ago. I had read The Rainbow back then and remember liking it but not much else about it.
I saw an interesting movie version of Kangaroo that made me read the book which is a lot better of course. The movie is good though.
After reading Kangaroo I read the wiki page on D H Lawrence and also about Australia. The book mentions it being a new nation and that is so have become one in 1901 after being a native homeland and used as a penal colony for a couple hundred years earlier by British colonialist invaders.  
That is where I got that Lawrence was relaying his actual war time struggles in the chapter about that.

Kangaroo feels like real writing to me. Telling the truth from the heart and the brain. It feels open and courageous. I can easily relate to his difficulties with men, and it's perhaps underlying homophobia, or if not phobia, but doubt as to if there is a compartment in which to put that neatly.  And really is there time for more caring? After all we need to make a living etc other than manage relationships. Richard and Harriet are a committed couple disagreements aside. That’s one intense relationship. D H Lawrence left a lot of writing in his short life. He must have had to push people off for that time, maybe it’s not that hard to not choose additional relationship if one is a solitary type to begin with and spend the time thinking and writing about it instead. Writing about wanting it at least is a guarantee of production. A relationship can leave one with nothing to show. Perhaps that is why we we remain disconnected. We need to be productive not just hang out in Eden.

This book was a joy for me to read and I felt a real connection to the main character, the conflicts, and his alienation.

A Star is Born (1976)

I saw this movie in a theater 40 years ago when it was new. I didn’t remember much about it. I saw the original March - Gaynor more recently a couple of times. It’s a good story which is why it keeps getting remade. I’ve never watched the Judy Garland movie. And now Lady Gaga has one in the can about to be released. One for every generation I guess.
But this Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand version showed up on Netflix and I decided to give it a go because I had not recalled anything negative about it. I’m glad I watched it again.

First off, all the singing in this movie is live. The audio of the voice is recorded at the same time as the picture. This adds enormous depth to the singer’s performance as opposed to the industry standard of pre-recording and lip sync on screen. I don’t like lip sync at all. It always looks fake to me. How can the performer really express showing physical emotion coming from their body if they are mostly attempting to move their lips in time with a recording they made sometime before? This is the worst thing that the movies have done with singing performers. It just makes them look foolish and pathetic, not powerful and present as they should.

It makes singing performers look ridiculous. It is a cheap insult to the audience to since it never really had to be done that way, it’s just easier.

(An example of how bad music and lip syncing can be in a movie can be seen in a movie of a couple years before this one with songs written by a contributor to this movie. That is The Phantom of the Paradise. It a pretty bad campy movie to begin with directed by a third stringer, but the very sloppy lip syncing is the worst I have ever seen. It’s like they don’t even try. Too busy doing lines of cocaine I guess. I never watched this movie before about a year ago. It is not at all good. It’s not even bad-good.)

But here we have a really well done version of the old Hollywood story and the power of Streisand’s live singing at the peak of her abilities makes it a very good movie. The singing in the movie is not like a conventional musical where the characters can’t help but sing. The story is about professional performers so the songs are on stage or in scenes in which one is playing a new song to another.
The Kris Kristofferson - Barbra Streisand relationship is believable because that both are appealing and sexy. Kris Kristofferson looks the part of a rock star even if his music doesn’t quite fit. The melodramatic aspects of the story are not at all overplayed.

The style of the movie is not far from the New Hollywood cinema of the post Easy Rider period. A Star is Born comes of as a New Hollywood musical complete with one of the period’s major directors, Paul Mazursky, in an acting role. It is not at all overly glamorous and this adds to the believability of the show.

This is a really well done movie.  

The Last Movie Star (2017) by Adam Rifkin

This is an odd little movie starring Burt Reynolds as an elderly movie star who is invited to a rinky-dink film festival in Nashville Tenn.

Vic, the Reynolds character, is old. He hobbles around with a walking stick. In the first scene he is letting go of his old sick dog at the vet. But he lives in a nice looking apartment and drives a mercedes so he’s not poor and on the street, just an aging movie star but no longer “rich” if he ever was. He gets the invitation for a festival and it’s lifetime achievement award. He lives in LA, were the movie stars are, of course, and talks about the invitation at outdoor lunch with his old buddy played by Chevy Chase. Chase is not in it much, apparently only worked one day as he is always seated at the same table the few times he pops up in the movie. The buddy convinces him to go to this thing.

He arrives in Nashville and finds nothing as expected which creates the conflict for the drama with some comic stuff.

The core of the movie is the relationship between Vic and the festival organizer’s 20 year old sister who has been recruited to be his driver for the duration in her beat up old car. This part is played by Ariel Winter, who apparently is a TV star on a show I’ve never watched. A lot of the movie is just the two of them with Vic advising her on her pathetic love life and her being put upon having to deal with this “Old Asshole” at all. She is kind of a white trash girl frustrated by her life.

There are a couple of scenes where Reynolds plays opposite his younger self. There is a scene like that is in a car and one on a small boat where young Burt is shooting fish in a river with a large bow. I don’t know what movies these were from. I was not at all interested it the movies he made in the 1970s, Smokey and the Bandit, etc. Anyway, these scenes are well done and add some visual spice to the movie as well as highlighting the contrast between young handsome Burt/Vic and the old man. At one point the Vic character is talking about his bad choices for acting roles in his heyday, while other male actors of that era did more quality and lasting films. I wonder if this is based on the real Reynolds. I would guess that the only movie he made that people still want to watch is Deliverance.
As far as I’m, concerned and can recall, The Last Movie Star is the best movie Burt Reynolds has ever done and he presents an interesting character with a believable performance.

Aside from the young woman, old star conflict, the movie has more than its fair share of looking back sentimental stuff. Writer Adam Rifkin, is only 50 so I feel he is projecting this stuff on the old and highlighting regret filled concerns that might not exactly be that of someone 80.

The rinky-dink film festival is presented as just film fans doing it out of love. Meanwhile I suspect that a lot of small film festivals are more cynical than that, ways for the organizers to make a little dough by taking in wannabe entrance fees and that sort of thing.

Ray Meets Helen (2018) By Alan Rudolph

I watched this new movie. Not out at the movie theater. I haven’t been to a movie theater in awhile. I watched it at home as a streaming rental from one of those big companies that sell that kind of stuff.

The movie is about a couple of old people down on their luck. Well, they just don’t have money which is part of the same thing. And Ray, played by Keith Carradine, is worse off than that because he has some kind of looming health crisis.

Anyway, they both come by some money separately and unbelievably. Then they meet up in a fancy/snobbish restaurant

Ray Meets Helen was written and directed by Alan Rudolph. We had watched a couple others of his movies lately including the great Choose Me with Keith Carradine again except it was made 40 years ago when he was a handsome young man and not the old guy he is and plays as Ray.
Movies are funny that way. Now with access to a lot of older movies practically instantly, one can watch someone go from young to old, well, to almost dead with a few clicks within the same hour.

This gives me the impression that life just zips by, that we are all young and old and here and gone at the same time and linier time is totally an illusion.

At any rate in this movie Carradine is old and so is Sandra Locke who plays Helen and so is Alan Rudolph who got all this together.

But one thing remains the same. That is that Alan Rudolph makes very amusing and thought provoking movies about the randomness of love/sex relationship. Because in a way, this movie is not at all remote from Choose Me.

I buy into this actually. These things are random here in the modern timeless USA. They have certainly been random in my life. My viewing companion and me as an example. I just saw her photo of Facebook one day maybe 6 years ago and throught, “Wow! I want THAT one.”

And here we are moments/years/instantly now/later. Just like in the movie when Ray approaches Helen in the restaurant.

Funny how things work that way.

Delightful how Alan Rudolph sees that and shows it to us in his hyper-realistic believable/unbelievable entertainments. He totally gets it. My kind of filmmaker for sure.

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

I recently read the new posthumus autobiography of Mr. Crisp called The Last Word.
That was so good that I wanted more and I had not read his first book to be published, the one that made him the international celebrity he became for the last 30 or so years of his life.

So off to the library I went after asking my branch to locate it for me. Yes, The Naked Civil Servant is even available in Nassau County Long Island, New York USA.

As he discusses in The Last Word, Quentin is more trans than gay, but given the fact that the variety of gender orientation had not been much explored by the time of The Naked Civil Servant’s publication in 1968 he was not fully aware of his own place on the spectrum.
I not really aware of the culture of the UK in those post Stonewall years after USA gay liberation had its defining action in 1967, but the feeling I had personally as a bisexual identified teen at the time was that the popular notion was that there are two sides, a person is one or the other; gay or straight. This didn’t fit me but anyway, that was the general impression I got and I think that is what the USA culture at the time thought.

Yet reading The Naked Civil Servant it is clear that even then Crisp knew he was something other than the one slot or the other categorization. He claims to have very early on worn makeup, but he is not really a crossdresser. He is not dressing as he is to act more like a woman to attract men really in any way, but rather to express what he felt within himself and what he ought to do and be.
The Naked Civil Servant is the work of an outsider critical to the workings of the society he found he had to live in. No doubt his gender feelings were part of the impulse that set him in the outsider direction, but what he becomes by the time of this writing is someone who looks at the world around him, does not really want to participate in it if he can avoid it and describes it in endless critical witticisms.  

So readers, this is not primarily a gay book. This is a work of an outsider that I would encourage other outsiders, whatever their sexual proclivities may be, to read. He is most definitely one of us who takes to the pages, his stage here, in a manner most entertaining and fortifying for the rest of us.

Of particular interest to me was the art model stuff as well as his other attitudes toward work. He is only willing to work because he has to. I think this should be the natural human response to the wage slave cycle we are forced into in our modern civilized world. If one looks into anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer people, which is the way human life was for 6 million years until the agriculture thing started just 10,000 years ago, one can find that people simply didn't “work” all that much. Maybe a few hours a day, and not every day, were necessary to get what was needed to sustain. The remainder of the time given over to hanging out, telling stories, resting , sex, whatever.
I like to think that Crisp, like myself was old school in that way.
Art modeling is the closest thing I have found for being paid for doing nothing. The model just sits there, the mind remains one's own, unsold.  

I first saw Quentin on The Dick Cavett Show in my youth and loved his not bullshit stance since.

Anyway, fine book.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)
Written and Directed by Angela Robinson

This is a very human story of the people behind the creation of the comic book character, who, of course, became the TV show, and ultimately the mega budget and super hit movie from the Disney Corporation.

Angela Robinson has made a very engaging movie about the triad love/sex relationship of William Marston, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne.  

I’m not really much into biopics. I don’t understand how they can even remotely approach the reality of the subject. Humans can not be contained in a two hour movie, and that is a good thing. Otherwise we would all be rather boring. We are more complex than that, especially if we are off the morn in any way.  Even the times people are living in are more complex than a historical movie setting. Modes of expression change from era to era, styles of conversation, and societal norms of engagement.

So I approached this movie from the angle of suspending disbelief as to the actuality of it all, the behavior of the characters. Did they really talk like that in the 1920s? This in particular with the frank dialog of the Elisabeth character at the very beginning of the movie.

If the movie and the queer woman writer/director, has an agenda, it is presenting a polyamorous relationship in a clear positive light without the usual melodramatic sensational. Being on Team Polyamorous myself I was on board form the outset to welcome that presentation and dropped the need for total accuracy especially since the characters involved were not actually pubic figures aside form William Marston himself, who used a pen name for his comic book writing and was therefore presumably invisible as a media figure.

What Angela Robinson presents is a realistic depiction of the struggles of people who need and dare to live differently from the intimate relationship norms and rules of their day. Their day that bleeds into ours, as the general community judgments of their behavior are not all that different now than they may have been then.

Meanwhile it is a very engaging love story entertainment. It is a beautifully written and directed movie with several scenes that are very effective emotionally.
Angela Robinson’s characters live and feel real, however remote they night be from the reality of the actual people.
Rebecca Hall as Elizabeth delivers a outstanding performance in her role as a modern woman of high intelligence and power in her relationships who must deal with new emotions in a complex situation.

Comics fans might be disappointed. It is not really so much about Wonder Woman although there is some content that has to do with comic censorship. It’s a love story.

This is a great movie by a supremely skilled filmmaker.
I will be looking for Angela Robinson’s future projects on the chance that she can do it again.