JOAN FONTAINE

  I got up slowly, my old nervousness returning, and went out into the hall.  I wished I could have waited for him, and then, taking his arm, seen the rooms together.  I did not want to go alone, with Mrs. Danvers.  How vast the great hall looked now that it was empty.  My feet rang on the flagged stones, echoing to the ceiling, and I felt guilty at the sound, as one does in church, self-conscious, aware of the same constraint.  My feet made a stupid pitter-patter as I walked, and I thought that Frith with his felt soles, must have thought me foolish.

  “It’s very big, isn’t it?” I said, too brightly, too forced, a schoolgirl still, but he answered me in all solemnity.  “Yes, Madam, Manderley is a big place.  Not so big as some, of course, but big enough.”

   Joan Fontaine, the great movie actress who gained her superstar stripes in 1940’s Rebecca, based on Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel, passed away this week.  My old friend, the film critic Carrie Rickey, wrote this on Miss Fontaine’s passing:

 "Like a silent movie actress, Fontaine’s face communicated her character’s vulnerability more eloquently than dialogue could. With the exception of Lillian Gish, no one did vulnerable like Fontaine. Fontaine, the cultivated English rose who was actually born in Japan, was daughter of an English father and an American mother. She was one of the last links to Hollywood’s Golden Age. The last is Olivia de Havilland, Fontaine’s older sister, 97. Famous for their talent and radiant beauty, the sisters were infamous for a longstanding feud that de Havilland declined to confirm and Fontaine liked to talk about. She once explained the feud was due to her getting married first, winning an Oscar nomination and an Oscar before her sister did. When she and her sister were children, Fontaine wrote a will that read, 'I bequeath my beauty to my sister, because she has none.'” 

 

Daphne du Maurier, excerpt from Rebecca (1938)

Carrie Rickey, excerpt from Carrie Rickey blog, "Joan Fontaine - 1917-2013"

The Kinks: Two Sisters (Link)

The Kinks: Hatred (A Duet) (Link)

Timing Is Everything (Missed Connections)

        All of us have probably had occasion to feel or say that “it’s all a matter of timing, ” and fortunately we probably care in unequal degrees about the many things we may have “missed” through our inattention, miscues, missed cues, etc.

Peter Griffin, Example of "Post-Modern Architecture," Zhengzhou Green Fair, China

    I think I missed (am currently missing and will continue to miss) post-modernism.  The only thing the term has ever meant to me (that is to say, the image that forms in my mind whenever I hear it) is of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan becoming overfull (even after its porcine over-expansion), over-capacity, and art marketers desperately meeting in secret committees to coin a new term to promote and sell subsequent "art events" and so-called "art developments."  Branding, after all, is everything these days.

 

      Today, while engaging in research concerning the weird and deplorable "human microphone" (the people control device/exercise being used at contemporary political rallies), I learned that I really must have missed "queer theory"  too (although I knew of its existence) because it is apparently in the process of being supplanted by "post-queer theory" (skip to end of linked article).

 

Scully and Mulder.  For some reaon, Mulder is identified in this photo as the "Post-Modern Prometheus." 

        I can survive without regret both of these losses or deficiencies.  Generally I am able, when I need or want to, to understand complicated, even insanely prolix, pieces of literature or technical writing, provided their authors are sincerely trying to communicate, are making a palpable effort to make themselves understood. 

M.C. Escher, Relativity, 1953.  Modern? Post-Modern? None of the above?  Queer, certainly, and proudly so.

        I cannot accomplish this, however, nor can I abide reading self-involved, neologism and jargon-filled academic or pseudo-academic writing that clearly seeks to impress, but is nothing more than grotesque and distorted Fun House mirror fare.

         I sincerely believe that this kind of work is intentionally self-deceptive and that it also seeks to deceive readers based on the authors' contempt, anger and fear.

Post-modern Chinese surgical needles (Actual caption label)

Mrs. Danvers must fit in here somewhere.  The rest is silence, except for:

Look At Me, I'm Wonderful  &

Tent

(Bonzo Dog Band links from Keynsham, 1969)


[Please Note 3 links in Paragraph 3]