tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post6551696817646720714..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Emily Jane Brontë: "All hushed and still within the house" (A Poetry Comic by Nora Sawyer)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-56868056264335909322013-03-20T07:28:19.928-07:002013-03-20T07:28:19.928-07:00Vassilis, what a way to speak of one's help-me...Vassilis, what a way to speak of one's help-meet -- mistaken (even if but momentarily) for a zombie! Well I never!!TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-39773589467129917092013-03-19T23:18:40.007-07:002013-03-19T23:18:40.007-07:00Thanks to Nora’s comic, the photographs and the li...Thanks to Nora’s comic, the photographs and the links leading me to the first five minutes of The Living Dead, last night I found myself in a dark room in a strange house, sitting on a sofa with my wife when I was suddenly attacked by one of <i>them</i>! I screamed and struggled to escape but to no avail; fortunately I was gently nudged awake by my wife and was saved from a fate worse than a living death—dying in the clutches of a deadly nightmare!vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85140403657675145202013-03-19T18:21:55.231-07:002013-03-19T18:21:55.231-07:00There's an uncanny strangeness about death mas...There's an uncanny strangeness about death masks, the 19th century vogue for making them curiously symptomatic of the historicism of the period, an urge to locate spirit in the material artifact. Some mysterious category shift must be involved -- the impulse that would grasp at the material artifact in search of something like a soul.<br /><br />The plaster remains, but what of the former animating principle. "The brain, that lighted chamber, that generating fire..." (Marguerite Yourcenar).<br /><br />One of the few possessions that remain from the long forced trek of Angelica's parents round the world is a collection of photographs of death masks, printed in Berlin in 1929. Here the concept of "The Great Man" is brought to cold fruition in slabs of white plaster.<br /><br />The contemporary artist Joanna Kane's The Somnambulists is a chilling collection of such images. In it we see the masks of "known" and "unknown" alike, and very like, having shed identities and in many cases also names.<br /><br /><a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/unknown-face-blake-proverbs-of-hell.html" rel="nofollow">Unknown Face (Blake: Proverbs of Hell)</a><br /><br />The past, always with us, always out of reach.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-56571035812793595432013-03-19T15:04:13.009-07:002013-03-19T15:04:13.009-07:00The crocheted bag holding (possibly) Charlotte Bro...The crocheted bag holding (possibly) Charlotte Brontë's death mask in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEiHnNALuXA" rel="nofollow">this video</a> is oddly heartbreaking.Norahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14439557611640319928noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-62033765381503743262013-03-19T14:25:16.358-07:002013-03-19T14:25:16.358-07:00That's what I call how I feel most nights on e...That's what I call how I feel most nights on earth any more. <br /><br />While awaiting the spectres we took the Tour.<br /><br />Emily's tiny-tiny manuscript books brought to mind Robert Walser's Microscripts.<br /><br />And beyond Brontë house, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ-T_plUKRc" rel="nofollow">a ghost-hunting tramp upon the Moors</a>...TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-69746857075962850732013-03-19T13:37:46.143-07:002013-03-19T13:37:46.143-07:00From "Without - all wind and driving rain&quo...From "Without - all wind and driving rain" to "Through rain and through the wailing rain". <br /><br />The images from the film sit very well with the poem, especially the last frame: memory pressing up against the glass, ready to eat us all up.<br /><br />"Are they slow-moving, Chief?"<br />"Yeah. They're dead. They're all messed up."<br /><br />That's what I call dialogue.Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-68918366724749132052013-03-19T12:38:47.626-07:002013-03-19T12:38:47.626-07:00The liberty of removing the Brontë thematics to a ...The liberty of removing the Brontë thematics to a Pennsylvania cemetery may jolt some. Others obviously could not care less. For myself, I thought the translation plausible enough.<br /><br />That ill-intending ghosts and horrific zombies might be haunting the Yorkshire moors, no great stretch there.<br /><br />The David Peace Red Riding series of novels brings this plot back home. Anybody familiar with that by any chance?<br /><br />IFC films turned the series into a terrific five-hour movie trilogy a few years back.<br /><br />Critic David Denby on the tone and atmospherics:<br /><br /> "West Yorkshire... featureless pale-green moors and, among them, small, rubbly towns with dead-looking brown houses... there are shadows of death everywhere: pale corpses, brutality and cynicism, and hints of perversion and obsession—a sense of violation fouling the terrain. ..a terrific sense of the uncanny, an atmosphere so spooked and suggestive that it becomes oddly attractive, like an enchanted forest in a children’s story. Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil... the primal sin, which sets in motion the years of nasty behavior, is greed. In the first film, the fictional top inspectors of the West Yorkshire police have been bought by a powerful real-estate developer..."<br /><br />So that's easy enough. The zombies are developers. Why are we not surprised.<br /><br />Experience suggests that if each of the following exit links led to a plastic egg containing one billion thought-dollars, no one would bother to click.<br /><br />All the same: the real fool is the one who takes the trouble for nobody.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXFTt4eGuRM" rel="nofollow">Red Riding: 1974</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBzjdCUHsnM" rel="nofollow">Red Riding: 1980</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ILbsBHq3nA" rel="nofollow">Red Riding: 1983</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-68233662888199268352013-03-19T08:35:05.116-07:002013-03-19T08:35:05.116-07:00intense Bronté´s...!intense Bronté´s...!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-57591015082004992662013-03-19T06:08:47.914-07:002013-03-19T06:08:47.914-07:00"This poem haunted me all week," Nora re..."This poem haunted me all week," Nora reports, "but I couldn’t quite put together images to go with it. Yesterday, I wasted my afternoon reading ‘true’ ghost stories online and stalking old friends on Facebook and avoiding the drawings I’d started. Finally... Zombies seemed like a good manifestation of memory as a sort of present absence, a clamorous sense of the past that obliterates the present-day."<br /><br />More poems by Emily Brontë:<br /><br /><a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/emily-jane-bronte-night-is-darkening.html" rel="nofollow">"The night is darkening round me"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/emily-jane-bronte-remembrance.html" rel="nofollow">Remembrance</a><br /><br />The remarkable Brontë family is the subject of a fine 2003 BBC documentary. This is part one of six, the successive episodes following on in side links:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQGgl-HtrmM" rel="nofollow">In Search of the Brontës</a><br /><br />And too there is that little-known (only 8,345,876,000 hits to date) cinematic chronicle of the Descendants of the Brontës, which Nora has used as her image-source, here in its grisly entirety:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFRPBW07SA" rel="nofollow">George Romero: Night of the Living Dead</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com