Aldous Huxley and "The Crows of Pearblossom"

First published as a children's chapter book in 1963, The Crows of Pearblossom is a story Aldous Huxley created for his niece in 1944 while she was staying with the Huxleys in the Mojave desert.

In a new Abrams picture-book edition with illustrations by Sophie Blackall, Mr. and Mrs Crow are still bedeviled by the snake who lives at the bottom of their tree and steals their eggs. The new book is meant for kids ages four to eight, and if there are any parallels to Brave New World it's that the world may not be all that it seems. As a Christmas gift to his young niece Olivia during World War II, Huxley's story has dark edges that were likely meant as an introduction to the adult world that faced very uncertain challenges ahead.

The story itself was nearly lost when fire destroyed the original manuscript. The Huxleys' California neighbors had a copy, and gave it to Olivia when her uncle died in 1963. In the book, Mrs. Crow catches the snake eating her 297th egg that year -- she does not work on Sundays, you understand -- and requests that Mr. Crow go into the hole and kill the snake.

The Rattlesnake (as snakes throughout literary history are wont to do) thoroughly enjoys his thievery:

"I cannot fly -- I have no wings;
I cannot run -- I have no legs;
But I can creep where the black bird sings
And eat her speckled eggs, ha, ha,
And eat her speckled eggs."

Instead of killing him, Mr. Crow decides to teach the snake a painful lesson and confers with his wise friend Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl bakes mud into the shape of eggs and paints them to look appealing. These dummy eggs are left in the nest to trick the Rattlesnake, who unknowingly eats them the next day.

When the eggs get to his stomach, they cause the Rattlesnake such pain that he thrashes about, tying himself in knots around the branches. Mrs. Crow goes on to hatch "four families of seventeen children each" and "uses the snake as a clothesline on which to hang the little crows' diapers."

It's a story that young readers will probably thrill to be scared by, filled with the kind of darkness that children instinctively suspect hides out in the trees and woods. The new illustrations are colorful and swirling, owning more than a bit to Huxley's history of LSD use, and fans of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey will like Brooklyn artist Sophie Blackall's artwork.

Olivia de Haulleville

And little Olivia? In 1982, Olivia de Haulleville entered Indonesia as member of the entourage of H.H. The Dalai Lama during his consecration of Borobudur. She continued her pilgrimage there by the name of "Tara" and was requested to write a history of Buddhism in Indonesia by the ethnic Javanese Buddhist teacher, pak Sumarsoeno. In 2000 she published Pilgrimage to Java, An Esoteric History of Buddhism. Her son, Michael A. Cassapidis is a Tibetan monk in the Gelugs-pa order. She now lives near Joshua Tree National Park and has aFacebook page with the following quote:

If I were given a wish

To be what I wish

I would wish to be

Who I am

—mySelf

"Bats Have No Bankers And They Do Not Drink" (John Berryman)

Dream Song 63:

"Bats Have No Bankers And They Do Not Drink"

(John Berryman)

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink

and cannot be arrested and pay no tax

and, in general, bats have it made.

Henry for joining the human race is bats,

known to be so, by few them who think,

out of the cave.

Instead of the cave! ah lovely-chilly, dark,

ur-moist his cousins hang in hundreds or swerve

with personal radar,

crisisless, kid. Instead of the cave? I serve,

inside, my blind term. Filthy four-foot lights

reflect on the whites of our eyes.

He then salutes for sixty years of it

just now a one of valor and insights,

a theatrical man,

O scholar & Legionnaire who as quickly might

have killed as cast you. Olé. Stormed with years

he tranquil commands and appears.

"Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair — and fuck them, I'm not Henry; Henry doesn't have any bats." (John Berryman, 1914-1972).

"In Danger: a Pasolini Anthology," edited by Jack Hirschman

Even in the anything-goes decade of the 1970s the work of film-maker, author and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini appeared over-the-top. His art was too much for some, who found his open homosexuality too challenging, and yet his Communist politics didn't go far enough for others. His life and work didn't hew to perceived boundaries, and his polemics challenged even revolutionary ideologues to the point of anger.

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology presents the first translations of much of Pasolini's work in English, and although the book covers a dizzying amount of ground from poetry to polemics, it's a valuable resource toward an understanding of the Italian multi-media artist, who relished confronting realism with firebrand idealism and constantly questioned the effect of mainstream culture on human values.

This constant shift toward extremes of thought kept even his admirers off balance, and it may not be unrelated that his murder at the age of 53 remains a mystery of unresolved motive, an un-captured assailant, and a creative life cut short just at the point of a robust middle-age. Many point to his final essay, "What Is This Coup? I Know," as a cause of his final confrontation between art and life in a polarized and very politicized Italy.

These personal politics make Pasolini's inscrutable creativity a great source of intellectual challenge and interest for his translators and others interested in Pasolini's creative process. He was willing to consider many ideas in his desire to understand the simple thing that art creates: a reaction, no matter how inexplicable or iinescapable. Jack Hirschman, himself a multi-faceted artist, has edited these translations not so much with an eye toward easy comprehension (which Pasolini himself would likely abhor) but with a depth of feeling in the language, a sorting-out of ideas.

Class-consciousness, to get into the head of an American, needs a long, twisting road, an immensely complex operation: it needs the mediation of idealism, let’s say the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois variety, which for every American gives meaning to his entire life and which he absolutely cannot disregard. There they call it spiritualism. But both idealism in our interpretation and spiritualism in theirs are two ambiguous and incorrect words. Better, perhaps, it’s about the moralism (Anglo-Saxon in origin and naively adopted by the other Americans) that rules and shapes the facts of life, and that, in literature for instance — even the popular kind — is exactly the opposite of realism. Americans always need to idealize in the arts (especially at the level of average taste; for instance, the “illustrative” representation of their lives and their cities in their popular movies are forms of an immediate need to idealize).

The poems, essays and reviews feature an array of translators. Pasolini's earliest poetry -- strong, declarative, youthful -- is translated from the Friulian by Lucia Gazzino ("I leave my image to the conscience of the rich ... Long live the courage and the sorrow and the innocence of the poor!"). A growing disillusionment in a poem from 1960, "The Rage," is captured by musician Jonathan Richman ("I can't pretend now that I don't know the world / or that I don't know how it wants me.") Because he was also a film-maker much of Pasolini's writing is visually evocative: this is especially so of autobiographical poems that circle about ideas of youth and vulnerability but also the enthusiasm of the young ("I'm insatiable about our life / because something unique in the world can never be exhausted," he writes to one lover.)

I know, because I wake up with so much strength in my head:

the strength to suck up the new, sweet

power of daylight woken ahead of me,

and to express the absolute, already attained in secret and

in peace, with the most naked words: it's grief, my pain

that always has a reason, is never without an object,

is not neuroses, it's anger, disappointment,

it's fear, it's fury that physically bleeds

in my chest and throat.

Ah, morning! I know it, it's summertime, steady

as a sea, in it's freshness

the city's ready for an entire day,

and its noises are sheer and deeply grieving

like human beings become cool

doves, gentle elephants ... animals in life ...

(Summer, 1961)

As his poetry -- and world-view -- matures to a kind of wary disenchantment in the political upheavals that never really seem to change anything, he attaches a deepening mistrust of the right wing in politics. But he also faulted the hippie culture for losing its energy as it spread into a bourgeois mainstream of "hipness" and "cool" ideas that were co-opted into advertising and the culture at large.

Yet he held fast to his cantankerous heroes for their indomitable spirit: Ezra Pound, for one, even though he had ardently supported Fascism during the war -- and after it, as well. This is, after reading several of the essays here, a provocative stance meant as a pin-prick to easy categorization. Many of his more blatantly acid judgements ("Neruda is a bad poet") read as asides to a larger arguments rather than generalities by themselves.

Reading the twisting and ideological essays in translation, one might understand the difficulty in determining Pasolini's intent and his expression. Philosophical word-play and semantics can spring their own traps in any language. Since the writer himself was walking an ideological balance-beam of ideas it is uncertain whether the often complex result is Pasolini's thought, or the individual translator's effect of the phrasing he chooses. This is less so in the poetry, which offers itself a wider field of meaning.

The individual concerns of Pasolini's essays -- fascism, racism, intolerance, poverty -- remain universal though his targets are specific: the very first essay included, "Civil War," is a Pasolini blast aimed at racism of all kinds: "It is racist hatred -- that is, nothing less than the exterior aspect of the deep aberration of every conservatism and every fascism." It would be more than interesting to read what the agent-provocateur would make of recent political uprisings, as well as the latest outrages by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and what's about to happen as we peer with one eye covered into the future. A reader has a pretty firm idea it would be best to keep our wits about us.

His last observation -- "we're all in danger" -- was made in a final interview hours before he died in a mysterious assault, and it acts as an ultimate warning and a final lesson to watch out for all the traps, to be wary of the comfortable solutions that seem not to threaten us, but to enfold us in their easy choices. In our own creative life, and in our culture of affluence, many times these are traps we make for ourselves.

"Literary Lives," Edward Sorel: "avarice, duplicity, and selfishness can be amusing."

Some claim the comics page as their first exposure to literature ("once you can read the words in the balloons, the drawings are a zillion times funnier,"cartoonist Matt Groening says his brother explained to him before he could read). Edward Sorel's Literary Lives is a collection of cartoons lampooning the careers of ten writers -- in sharp, acerbic, sometimes wildly funny episodes -- and all of them are far from a Classics Comics telling of literary history.

Depending on your appreciation of Yeats, Jung, and Ayn Rand (to name three whose tales appear), Sorel's pen skewers or demolishes the reputations of some of the world's prominent literary figures.

It's not surprising that the skepticism and anti-authoritarianism evident in his political cartoons surfaces in Literary Lives. He's always had a mistrust of authority, Sorel said in an interview when the book was published, in 2006. Frankly, he admits, "there may be some deep psychological need I have in tearing down people who are better artists or writers than I am."

While he was creating the biographies, which originally appeared in The Nation and The Atlantic, the artist realized that "once artists or writers receive a lot of fame they seem to think of themselves as godlike, and they change a lot."

Tolstoy repents a life of dissipation at the age of 34, by Edward Sorel

This realization created a change in Sorel's approach. Tolstoy was only "just odd and kind of crazy," Sorel explained, and his first piece, on the life of Honore Balzac, turned out to be quite sad; Balzac spent much of his life trying to win the approval of his mother, and was a very sympathetic character. Not surprisingly, the Balzac biography isn't included here. Sorel told an interviewer it "wasn't funny."

After these first two installments, the artist decided to bring out the darker and more unpleasant traits of his subjects which most biographies ignore. As he put it, "avarice, duplicity, and selfishness can be amusing. Vices are amusing, and these are all writers with vices."

"They weren't all bad ... but some of the others were nasty. (Lillian) Hellman was nasty and Bertholt Brecht was one of then 10 worst people in the whole world, I'd say. And so was Carl Jung. I was not too fond of Sartre. No, they were nasty pieces of work."

The aging Yeats is shown infatuated by Maud Gonne, who turns him down; then he turns his attentions to her daughter. Norman Mailer sneaks into the hospital and suggests to his recovering wife she doesn't tell the police the truth, that he stabbed her at a party: it might hurt his New York mayoral campaign.

Sorel can be gently satiric as well: he imagines Proust's hometown filled with billboards advertising madelaines and, in the Illiers-Combray town square, there's a Cafe du Temps Perdu.

There's more: During the Nazi occupation of France, where he is a successful playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre (in tuxedo) gets his cigarette lit by a German soldier. Next to Sorel's child-like script declaring A Cult Is Born, Ayn Rand holds a biblical tablet emblazened with the wordsPush Grab Take Keep to frenzied admirers. And, as can be expected by Sorel's distrust of idealogues, Yeats comes under fire for his admiration of Mussolini.

Carl Jung in his fantasy as an Aryan Christ, by Edward Sorel

This sort of satire lends itself to the single-panel layout of each page, as the hunan follies (and character flaws) of each artist gets the full-color Sorel treatment. Jung imagines himself as the Aryan Christ holding the golden-haired Brunhilde; another panel shows Jung, in 1933, suggesting to a group of psychologists that "the Jews be forced to dress differently so they are not mistaken 'for people like ourselves'."

I'll be the first to admit I can't read Ernest Hemingway -- not skewered here, but with hope there'll be more Sorel to come -- without thinking of Kurt Vonnegut's assessment of Hemingway's war novels: "He was never a soldier, and never shot a human being except, finally, himself." Exactly. Whatever a reader thinks of a writer for good or bad, casting a critical eye on the foibles of heroes is great fun in Literary Lives. It's also a hell of a lot more entertaining than the entire library of Classics Illustrated comics.

Adam Thorpe, on his new translation of "Madame Bovary"

Flaubert did strange things, such as eliminating any authorial voice or stable moral centre; he used the imperfect as his main tense, giving a single action the sense of being suspended in time; played with varying shades of irony down to the deepest hues of pastiche; slipped between the subjective and the objective viewpoint without a tremor. The first quarter of the book is more about Charles, the dullest of husbands, than about Emma – whose enamel-like eyes are blue, deep blue, brown and black.

In his new essay, author and translator Adam Thorpe calls Flaubert's Madame Bovary "the Everest of translation," and from his description above, it's easy to see why. Yet it is a deceptively simple story, almost boring in numbing detail, that turns even adultery into despair.

It is this precision with the mundane, the expression of nineteenth-century mores at the heart of a soul-crushing, bourgeois marriage, that Flaubert captured so realistically. What Thorpe calls the novel's "shimmering surface" is a treacherous ice-field of meaning, the difference between Flaubert's intent and his author's realism a thin edge that makes the story the first recognizably modern novel, as well as a nearly cinematic one.

Best to go carefully: in attempting this, the 20th translation of Bovary, Thorpe spent three years not only on linguistics but historical research, and comparing earlier drafts of the novel at the University of Rouen. He thought to use an 1853 French dictionary, and even found a first edition of the novel -- as he writes, the copy was only affordable because "oeuvre immorale" ("immoral work") had been scrawled with a quill on the flyleaf, and an anti-royalist page torn out. But Thorpe found even comparing the author's original drafts could be tricky:

For instance, Flaubert bizarrely uses the plural "jours" (normally "days", less usually "chinks", but also "daylight" in the singular) to describe light filtering in through a trellis on the dying Charles: "Des jours passaient par le treillis." Flaubert had included the following in an earlier draft: "All the sorrows of his life returned to him … from the first day to the last."' He cut this, but persisted (if hesitantly) with the awkward "jours"; I was sure that he intended this to be initially misread as the poetic and ambiguous "Days passed by the trellis", suggesting memories and the changing seasons.

For a translator, language and the various meanings of words have to be evaluated in context, their shadings examined as well as the author's intent. Of course it helps to have original notes, if you're lucky, but there are passages in Flaubert that depend on the sound of the language as well as meaning. Here's Thorpe describing Emma's waltz at the chateau:

In the French, the whirling dissolves the words into a streaky, clicking blur of vowels: "Ils tournaient: tout tournaient autour d'eux …" It seemed essential to mimic this mimicry, but how? Previous translations had not even tried: "They turned, and everything turned round them …" (Alan Russell); "They were turning: everything was turning around them …" (both Geoffrey Wall and Davis). I felt the key was to use stretched vowels and to find an equivalent echo between "tout" and "tournaient": "They were reeling round: all reeled round and about them …"

Then there is the fact that Flaubert himself revised the novel on subsequent printings, a translator's ultimate challenge. Thorpe admits that, faced with Flaubert's changes, he may feel just as free to alter his translation in later editions. Ultimately, however, the translator describes Flaubert as the "disappointed romantic" who wrote his realism with a kind of "quasi-scientific exactitude." As he points out, "Flaubert created an autonomous parallel universe: fiction as refuge from an outside world full of pain, peevishness and bourgeois vulgarity."

Even more is at stake when the very genius of the novel lies on the shimmering surface. This is not to do with ornament, but meaning. Flaubert wished to close the gap not just between words and emotional truths, but between words and things: the sound of Hippolyte's wooden leg in the church ("They heard on the flagstones something like the sharp click of an iron-shod pole tapping them with even strokes"); the lumbering sway of cattle; the scoop of a hand in sugar-white arsenic.

Today most readers would recognize Emma Bovary as a contemporary figure, caught in the demands of a culture filled with its own bourgeois vulgarity. That authorial awareness which Thorpe describes as exactitude -- Flaubert's triumph -- eventually became a hallmark of literary realism, familiar to most readers who expect stories these days to present life in some kind of real-life versimilitude. Unfortunately, that more often than not results in much fiction being as dreadful and boring on its own, which makes Flaubert's "shimmering surface" all the more remarkable.

"Crowded by Beauty," a new biography of Philip Whalen

Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen

Here is an excerpt from Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. A longer extract is published in the current issue of Trticycle magazine.

Whalen, along with Gary Snyder, was integral in the San Francisco group of poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955. They were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation, who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to establish their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly poetry readings. That night, Snyder read "A Berry Feast", and Whalen,"Plus Ca Change."

This excerpt describes Whalen's experience living as Snyder's roommate in 1952. Whalen eventually followed Snyder to become a Forest Service lookout, although as Schneider notes, Whalen "was much given, even then, to the sedentary life."

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”

This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.

They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.

During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Snyder, Whalen and Lew Welch

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication—theBerkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.

These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could. ...

Photos: (top) Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan(Brancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). (bottom) Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poerty reading at Longshoreman's Hall (Photograph by Jim Hatch).

Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête": “The vague land of fairy-tales"

Josette Day as Beauty, and Jean Marais as The Beast,
in Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête.

When weather turns colder and thoughts run to darker recesses of the psyche, the chills of a Halloween season must not be far away. I am wary of the current desire to be scared out of our wits 365 days a year in reading and at the movies -- like much else these days, easy availability of things once reserved for a turn in its own season, like Halloween, makes for duller thrills when the time is right.

Last Halloween, I saw The Exorcist -- for the first time. As my host burst out when I told him I had never seen it, "You've never seen The Exorcist! What the hell have you been watching?" My excuses must have seemed weak and weary: looking back to the early 1970s there was Fellini and Scorsese, Coppola, Altman ...Last Tango in Paris ... so yeah, I skipped on seeing The Exorcist. Meekly I offered Fantastic Planet and he drew a blank. No, he hadn't seen that one. Cue The Exorcist credits.

I'm glad I saw it, but I watched it as a film fan would watch Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It was mildly interesting but thoroughly filled with hoke, and just as theatrically staged for maximum audience chills as "I never drink ... wine" was for an earlier age. I admired Friedkin's craft -- wonderful stuff, absolutely top rate, he can make a bed shake like no other -- but the story -- pffft. As a recovering Catholic, maybe I just have never been scared of the Devil or his minions. Who can say.

There are other movies, though, that continue to send a chill down my spine in a Halloween season. Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bete, from 1946, is one. No blood or gore or pea-soup in this black-and-white telling of Beauty and the Beast, but a spectacular and haunting film to this day.

Here's Jonathan Williams, sage of the Jargon Society and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, describing one of my favorite seasonal films. He begins by roundabout route, with the admission that it’s dangerous, going back to films you adored when you were 18 or 20, and then meanders his way to the subject by way of one film that -- to put it discreetly -- has at least stood the test of passing young Williams's time.



When he gets to the wind-up, it's great to read his words on Cocteau's incomparable visual poetry. Williams writes:

... The thing is, however, La Belle et la Bête, though it creaks a little technically and must have been made with hardly any budget at all, remains as compelling a fairy tale as ever. It is “Once upon a time” from beginning to end, childhood’s open sesame. Cocteau kept a journal of the film and it’s been sitting on the shelf, essentially unread, for 46 years because my French has never developed past knowing the names of foods and drinks. With a dictionary and the investment of 15 minutes of my friend Tom Meyer’s time, we can offer you this paragraph from Cocteau:

“My method is simple: I let the poetry alone; it comes on its own. It can only be called untameable. I’ve tried to build a table for the poetry. And for you, then, to eat there, to talk to it, or build a fire with.”

One would love to see the Beast’s chateau dans le fôret, but Cocteau’s journal makes it unclear to me whether it is named Rochecorbon in the Touraine, or Raray, north of Paris near Senlis. Most of the book appears to be about visits to doctors and dentists between rare moments on the set.

What one remembers with astonishing clarity are some of the great visual moments: the hall of candelabra held by human arms; the living caryatids with fiery eyes and smoke coming from their nostrils; the balustrade of animals in the Beast’s park; the door that tells Beauty that it is hers; the mirror that tells her it is hers alone. I have never forgotten the magic password: “Va ou je vais, le Magnifique, Va—va—va!” And the wonderful scene where Beauty’s wicked sisters, Felicie and Adelaide, hanging up the sheets on the washline, are dressed in great hats that make them silly goose girls. Henri Alekan‘s cinematography is luminous. You can’t hear much of Auric’s music on the soundtrack, but what’s there is very good.

Diana, goddess of the hunt, in La Belle et la Bête

Josette Day is enchanting as Beauty, and Jean Marais convincing as the poor Beast. He is at his best when he reveals to Beauty the secrets of his magic power in truly incantatory fashion: “My horse, my glove, my golden key, my mirror, and my rose!” It’s a real downer when he changes into Prince Charming — so big and butch, straight from the pages of the French equivalent of Physique Pictorial. But, that’s the look Cocteau and Genet liked in those dim days of yore. Treat your imagination to 90 minutes in “ce vague pays des contes de fées.”

Nowadays most everything is available online or on disc, and La Belle et la Bête is as close as a click at Amazon.com. I had the great pleasure of hearing Philip Glass conduct his own score at Atlanta's Fox Theater a few years ago, and the restored film was a glorious black-and-white treat to see on a large screen. A version with the Glass score (on a separate track) is available on DVD.

I only watch my copy once a year. I might not ever make time for The Exorcist again at Halloween, but La Belle et la Bête will forever be on the schedule as one of my favorites. Everything in its season ...