The Weekend and After

Too tired to post anything substantial, but do want to record a couple of things before they fly out of my head. Yes, this is a mishmash. Watched, or was it heard, Wynton Marsalis at 50 on PBS last night, while unfriending more than a hundred people on Facebook whom I have never talked to and who never talked to me. I liked the more complex, more "classical" compositions than the more populist ones. But what do I know about jazz? Zilch. I heard jazz at Iridium once, a long time ago, and did not enjoy the music, though the company was delightful. In New Orleans earlier this year, I heard an old-style jazz band, and imagined that this was the kind of music that Larkin loved and hated Charlie Parker for destroying.

GH and I watched Weekend last Saturday night. There are at least four different movies that go by that name on imdb, not including movies titled The Weekend. You would have thought that directors or studios would try harder to come up with something original. The Weekend that we watched is directed by Andrew Haigh. Russell (played by a very good-looking Tom Cullen) picks up Glen (Chris New) at a club, and their relationship develops over the course of a, you guess it, weekend into something deeper. Both guys are convincing at different stages of their relationship, Russell a lifeguard, shy orphan, looking for a committed relationship, Glen an artist, who came out as a teen to a supportive mother, who just has his heart broken and has sworn off boyfriends. The script is realistically meandering, full of hesitations and half-heard mutterings. The sex scenes are unembarrassed but not glamorized. I don't think the film is great, but it is certainly superior to most gay relationship movies that I have seen.

I bought and read H.D.'s Trilogy at one sitting on Sunday. More about that later. I have been going back to Mina Loy, and wondering what I really think of her. She can be so good, and then she can be so bad. I can see why Thom Gunn was so drawn to her poetry: it has verve. Yesterday and this morning I revised "domed/doomed/deem'd." I have clarified what Lady Mary Wroth means by "A knowing part of joy is called the hart."

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