what I did on my not-vacation
May. 17th, 2012 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI just realized that I haven't posted in over a week. My work and my life both got unexpectedly busy. I've been around and reading, but I haven't had the time/mental energy to compose a coherent post.
So, here, have a semi-coherent one about things I've been reading, watching, and thinking about.
1) Wade Davis's Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest is an interesting and very long book, the latter especially when mostly read in little chunks during lunch breaks. I still haven't actually even got through the account of the first Everest expedition yet, and there are two more after that. It's occasionally odd (Davis simultaneously deplores the war and shows incredible contempt for pacifists, and he writes about sexuality in a way I can only describe as undertheorized, claiming for example that George Mallory's documented love affair with one man and his intense, if unprovenly sexual, relationships with several others did not constitute "homosexuality as we now know it" because Mallory later fell in love with a woman and married her; "bisexual" is apparently not in Davis's vocabulary), but I applaud Davis for trying to put the Everest craze of the 1920s in the context of British imperialism and the aftermath of the war. And this metaphor, which I've paraphrased as the book is in my car rather than to hand, will always stick in my mind: if everyone who died in the First World War had a single page on which to write their life story, the result would be a library of 26,000 books, each 600 pages long.
2) Richard and Mary is an account by writer Micky Burn (WWII commando, ex-POW in Colditz, man who when backmailed in the 1950s for having gay sex got his blackmailers arrested and sent to prison) of his late wife's relationship, in the early 1940s before she and Burn met, with wounded fighter pilot and writer Richard Hillary. What I like best about the book is Burn's loving and respectful attitude towards everyone involved, but unfortunately both Richard and Mary, but especially Richard, irritate the hell out of me. Their letters, which Burn quotes at length, are full of endless navel-gazing and self-absorption, and Richard has the special unbearability of a young man with (what he believes are) great ideas. If he'd lived, I think he'd have turned into a pompous, womanizing Tory politician; since he insisted on going back to piloting and crashed fatally in early 1943, he become something of a romantic legend instead. I can't quite get past the fact that Richard's insistence on flying again even though he *knew* his hands were too badly damaged to control the plane properly meant that with every flight, he unnecessarily risked other people's lives as well as his own. His radio operator was killed with him in the crash, and that man and his wife and children might have thought his life was too much to pay for Richard Hillary's need to feel he was contributing to the war and living a "real" genuine life among comrades.
I only read this book because I'm interested in Burn. What I really want to read is Burn's autobiography, and also a biography written of him; hopefully I can get those through Interlibrary Loan soon.
3) On a less war-and-death note, I watched the famous 1951 Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, about a mild-mannered bank clerk who steals a shipment of gold bullion. Alec Guinness stars along with Stanley Holloway as his accomplice and friend. There's rather a lot of gay subtext. There's also, in one brief scene, a young woman who startled me with her resemblance to Audrey Hepburn; as the credits rolled I saw that in fact it was Audrey Hepburn, in her first film role.
4) I'm watching an important and incredibly depressing docudrama about the 1954 conviction of Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood for consensual gay sex. More on that when I've finished it. I have to watch it in small chunks because it makes me so sad and angry.
ETA: 5) I saw The Avengers. I liked it, didn't love it, don't feel fannish about it although I did rather find myself shipping Tony/Bruce.
So, here, have a semi-coherent one about things I've been reading, watching, and thinking about.
1) Wade Davis's Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest is an interesting and very long book, the latter especially when mostly read in little chunks during lunch breaks. I still haven't actually even got through the account of the first Everest expedition yet, and there are two more after that. It's occasionally odd (Davis simultaneously deplores the war and shows incredible contempt for pacifists, and he writes about sexuality in a way I can only describe as undertheorized, claiming for example that George Mallory's documented love affair with one man and his intense, if unprovenly sexual, relationships with several others did not constitute "homosexuality as we now know it" because Mallory later fell in love with a woman and married her; "bisexual" is apparently not in Davis's vocabulary), but I applaud Davis for trying to put the Everest craze of the 1920s in the context of British imperialism and the aftermath of the war. And this metaphor, which I've paraphrased as the book is in my car rather than to hand, will always stick in my mind: if everyone who died in the First World War had a single page on which to write their life story, the result would be a library of 26,000 books, each 600 pages long.
2) Richard and Mary is an account by writer Micky Burn (WWII commando, ex-POW in Colditz, man who when backmailed in the 1950s for having gay sex got his blackmailers arrested and sent to prison) of his late wife's relationship, in the early 1940s before she and Burn met, with wounded fighter pilot and writer Richard Hillary. What I like best about the book is Burn's loving and respectful attitude towards everyone involved, but unfortunately both Richard and Mary, but especially Richard, irritate the hell out of me. Their letters, which Burn quotes at length, are full of endless navel-gazing and self-absorption, and Richard has the special unbearability of a young man with (what he believes are) great ideas. If he'd lived, I think he'd have turned into a pompous, womanizing Tory politician; since he insisted on going back to piloting and crashed fatally in early 1943, he become something of a romantic legend instead. I can't quite get past the fact that Richard's insistence on flying again even though he *knew* his hands were too badly damaged to control the plane properly meant that with every flight, he unnecessarily risked other people's lives as well as his own. His radio operator was killed with him in the crash, and that man and his wife and children might have thought his life was too much to pay for Richard Hillary's need to feel he was contributing to the war and living a "real" genuine life among comrades.
I only read this book because I'm interested in Burn. What I really want to read is Burn's autobiography, and also a biography written of him; hopefully I can get those through Interlibrary Loan soon.
3) On a less war-and-death note, I watched the famous 1951 Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob, about a mild-mannered bank clerk who steals a shipment of gold bullion. Alec Guinness stars along with Stanley Holloway as his accomplice and friend. There's rather a lot of gay subtext. There's also, in one brief scene, a young woman who startled me with her resemblance to Audrey Hepburn; as the credits rolled I saw that in fact it was Audrey Hepburn, in her first film role.
4) I'm watching an important and incredibly depressing docudrama about the 1954 conviction of Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and Peter Wildeblood for consensual gay sex. More on that when I've finished it. I have to watch it in small chunks because it makes me so sad and angry.
ETA: 5) I saw The Avengers. I liked it, didn't love it, don't feel fannish about it although I did rather find myself shipping Tony/Bruce.
