Clever Strangers and Strange Friends

The very first thing that happened when I climbed over the huge barnacle-scaled chunks of granite and weathered pilings that form the breakwater at the western edge of Corporation Beach was that I saw a seal: sleek, dulse-dark, bobbing its head in the waves not more than two breakers offshore. It looked at me. I sang it the seal-calling song learned from Jean Redpath. If I had just spent the afternoon till sunset sitting on the breakwater and watching the tide come in serpentine-green under thick foam and burst into spray that showered me to the shoulders of my coat, it would have been a wonderful time.

( Penny on the water, tuppence on the sea. )

Being now officially unemployed after an internal ten and really fifteen years at the same job and having Robert Carlyle on my mind, I should probably just rewatch The Full Monty (1997). Tomorrow I plan on a salt marsh.

This week having in the main sucked on ice, I am on Cape Cod drinking hot water with lemon from a tall mug hand-painted with a sea-green octopus and the call sign for WCAI. The hope for the next couple of days is a profound amount of nothing, with sea. I have already eaten some slightly fancy tinned fish.

Marooned (1994) closes with an assurance from ScotRail that under no circumstances except the exceptional are items of left luggage opened, which fortunately no one told the protagonist of this elliptical, a little noirish, just faintly magical realist and haunting short film.

Peter Cameron (Robert Carlyle) mans the left-luggage office at Glasgow Central, but in his solitude, his oddity, and the dreamlike circling of his days, he might as well be employed in the outer reaches of Kafka. Ceaselessly surrounded by human movement and direction, he shifts to the other side of his narrow counter to change up the crick in his neck. The clock cuts his hours out in claim tags and skeleton keys, the dip of a paste pot and the closing of his hand on the coins he's dropped as impersonally as a vending machine. His eyes are absorbingly dark, the thinness of his wrists in their rolled uniform sleeves gives him a furtive, vulnerable look from his covert of sports bags and suitcases, taking a mugging, an assignation, arrivals and departures all in. The caustic familiarity with which he can greet a commuter of prior scrutiny, "And where's the redhead? I thought you married her. Did she finally figure you out?" never makes it past the thousand-yard crease in his stoneface that can crumple into real petrifaction if he's caught outside his professional script. The nautical title seems a touch dramatic for the hub of a mainline station, however landlocked, but Peter as he makes himself a precisely arranged cup of tea while listening to the shipping forecast in the office's industrially riveted recesses does have a kind of marine overcast about him, a glass-greenish tint filtering his regulation pigeon-blues, the tea towel's plaid, the leatherette of the Roberts R200 serenely intoning its warnings of gales in Fair Isle and Rockall. When he unlocks and examines the contents of bags in his care, it seems less voyeuristically invasive than quizzically alien, as if trying on the idea of what it means to have a life that can be carried in cross-section anywhere its owner feels like. He always repacks them unnoticeably. It seems a very small existence, but we have no idea if we should even wonder how he feels about it until we learn that he had a clear other choice, one which perhaps ironizes that daily ritual of a brew-up with the Met Office. "Have you been to sea? Nah, I didn't think so. You're the only one that's not been. You're breaking the tradition."

What happens to jolt this recessive character out of his routine naturally involves some illicitly opened left luggage, but much of the pleasure of the small, slant plot that precipitates is how steadily it doesn't even seem to refuse the expected next move, it just stands aside at its own slight angle. It's no twist that a man who lives at such a second hand of other lives will have no defenses when one of them touches him directly, so deer-shocked by the appearance of the black-haired, sad-eyed Claire (Liza Walker) that even before he finds her suitcase filled with the evidence of the end of a bad affair, Peter misses a tongue-tied beat of the transaction, their hands holding the same receipt for such a momentous second that for once he volunteers information he doesn't have to—"I close at half past eleven." Even more than the off-duty sight of him outside the cavernously murmuring habitat of the concourse and climbing the stairs of a grottily sodium-buzzed terrace at that, it is a real shake of the kaleidoscope to have this isolated figure situated suddenly within the ties of a family, especially a brother as big and blond and laddish as the sometime merchant seaman Craig (Stevan Rimkus), boasting of his girls and their tricks while the slight, silent shadow of his sibling holds so still that his pulse can be seen hollowing the side of his throat. "I jumped ship in Port Elizabeth . . . I owe some guys rather a lot of money. Can you help me?" A tighter, more conventionally triangulated narrative could make more of these tensions, like the snapshot memento of a happier Claire wrapped playfully around a denim-jacketed Craig that queries her unfamiliarity to Peter. Marooned lets its uncertainties lie between characters who know their own histories and turns its attention instead to the consequences that skitter off more obliquely, as riskily compassionate as enclosing a first-ever note for a fragile passenger or as heedless as slamming into a fight that wasn't expecting a mad little coathanger of a man that can't normally get three words in order, never mind a crowbar. Afterward he looks just as worried as ever, flattening himself around a seedily lit kitchen on just the wrong trajectory to avoid the other person in it. If he's peeling himself off the sidelines of the life he has always screened through timetables and sea areas, stories observed in fragments or construed from odd socks and bottles of scent, he may not be much less awkward when he gets there. Where? Standing on the deck of the ferry Juno, wiping the windblown curtains of his dark hair out of his eyes as the firth and the fog churn past almost the same sea-sanded steel-blue, he's already difficult to picture fitting as neatly behind his anonymous counter as the first time we saw him folded there, consolations of the shipping forecast or no. In the end, the hardest thing he may have to do—or the easiest, when he finally sees it—is take his own advice.

Marooned was written by Dennis McKay, directed by Jonas Grimås, and BAFTA-nominated for Best Short Film in its year, which it would have deserved: it does not feel in 20 minutes like a sketch or a slice but an elusive, immersive hinge of time where we don't need the details of the past filled in to understand the weight of what has happened in the last few days. Dialogue-wise, it's nearly silent, but it's shot by Seamus McGarvey with such an Eastmancolor-soaked combination of cinéma vérité and slow-tracked tableaux that it has the intimacy of a photo album and something of the same selective quality of time, too, edited by David Gamble as if we had to be there to find out what happened between the snaps. Occasionally it reminded me of the short fiction of M. John Harrison and not only for the late sequence where nothing more than an ear-filling hum on the soundtrack, a splutter of tea, and a pair of stares that seem to meet through the fourth wall, one somber, one shocked, confirms a fact like a folktale. The score was composed and partly performed by Stephen Warbeck and it is minimal, modern—accordion, saxophone, bass—not hopelessly sad. Much of the rest of the sound design was contributed by Glasgow Central. I found it on Vimeo and was unable to get it out of my head. It looks at almost nothing straight on, which doesn't mean not deeply. So much of it happens in Carlyle's eyes, so dark and soulful that in another kind of Scottish story, they would clinch him as a seal. "I forgot about you for three whole hours yesterday, but then it started raining and you were back in the front of my mind." This relation brought to you by my only backers at Patreon.

choco_frosh just came by in the nor'easter which had better be amending our drought and dropped off the attractively Manly Wade Wellman-sounding T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025) and a bagful of apples, including a Golden Russet and a Northern Spy. Digging into my book-stack was the best part of last night. I remain raggedly flat, but I really hope this person whom selkie brought to my attention gets their Leo Marks fic for Yuletide.

After a run of welcomely lovely days, it was perhaps inevitable but deeply resented that I should hit a couple that sucked on toast, logistically, emotionally, resource-wise. I lost one completely to driving to a doctor's appointment that could have been virtual and too much of this afternoon and evening was spent in the kind of frustrated flat uselessness that I hope counts as convalescence because otherwise it's even more of a waste than it feels to me. Without spending that much time in the car, I have been listening to a lot of college radio. Girl in Red's "I'll Call You Mine" (2021) turns out to be a queer outlaw ballad while Jay Som's "Float (feat. Jim Adkins)" (2025) is a sweetly affirming house party. I was doing all right with the Divine Comedy's "Achilles" (2025) until it pulled out Housman and Patrick Shaw-Stewart and then the video was directly in the line of Jarman. I am unduly entertained by the reference to methylene blue in Jealous of the Birds' "Tonight I Feel Like Kafka" (2016).

It is my birthday. I am forty-four years old, the age some fictional character must be. I woke to a pair of packages, one from nineweaving that proved to be Vaughn Scribner's Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and from my parents which was a DVD of The Sea Wolf (1941). Hestia was a small black round of purr like an extra present at the foot of the bed. It is bright and brisk and cloudless as all the classical autumns outside.

a_reasonable_man thought I could use a talisman and brought me a 1923 Peace dollar that belonged most likely to his grandfather's second wife. It's as old as my grandmother would be. I have buttoned it inside my coat. It's a treasure.

He said, I'm just out of hospital,
but I'm still flying.
—H.D., "R.A.F." (1941)

I had a lot of help—I was that sort of chap.
—Margery Allingham, The China Governess (1962)

Northbound and once again rear-facing for all the good that selecting my seat in advance did me, I watched the trees start to change beyond the gravel-span of the tracks from late southerly green to the occasional bright lick of Halloween leaves, as if the train were coming in to autumn. spatch met me at the station with a roast beef sandwich. Hestia sniffed me all over intently and then licked my nose: I was acceptable despite a week in the company of other cat. I spent the rest of the night in a sort of liquescent state and reconstituted myself this afternoon just enough for a doctor's appointment, after which I promptly decohered for several hours again.

It was such a good trip. It was low-key, which was literally what the doctors ordered. I sat on a bench with my godchild and watched him sketch in his lesser notebook. I slept into the afternoon and no one cared that I often napped after just about any exertion from a walk around the block to dinner out at a Balkan market that served me a pljeskavica that it was doing its best to be bigger than my head and the first can of Schweppes Bitter Lemon I have seen in a store for years. I ate several species of fancy tinned fish. I did not manage to get to a museum with selkie, but all things considered it may have been even better that we spent so much time just hanging out, mostly on the couch where one night my godchild came down to impart weird medical facts before returning to bed. Because he's reading it in English class, I left the first two lines of the Odyssey written for him on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker and Homeric Greek. I took many fewer photos than usual, but have my favorite: my godson, the Star.



I did not get a picture somewhere in Connecticut of the old fender pier of a swing bridge so overgrown with trees and brush, it had become an oak-trussed island, like the prow of a ship burial, but it was the best thing I saw on the return train. Changes in circumstances still being assimilated, but at least I was somewhere loving when they hit.

The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.