And boy are my arms controlled. Incredible time, incredible place. To come: the new regular cartoon-caption contest on the Back Page, and I attempt to time the complete reading of a single issue (the new one). Three hours? Six? I have no idea. But we'll all know soon!

By the way, I have the dynamics of group travel on the brain after reading the sprightly Tad Friend piece about Lonely Planet in last week's issue, and having just zipped around myself. This brings to mind A Room With a View, in this case the movie. I've been worrying over Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in The Ballad of Jack and Rose, because it's so curiously prissy considering his character's supposed anarchic oneness with nature. Or maybe it's all right because it would take a fairly fussy person to build a perfectly environmentally harmonic house and guard it like a cave-dweller, not to mention protect his adolescent daughter from pretty much the entire world until it's Too Late. Anyway, I took another look at the 1985 movie, and wouldn't you know it, Cecil "the sort who can't know anyone intimately" Vyse's superior smirk returns with a vengeance to Day-Lewis' face in Jack and Rose. I'm only a little alarmed because I'm not used to seeing his characters crop up again, since he's so famously versatile. Who could forget him as the canny, ardent punk Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette—which, remarkably, opened the same year as A Room With a View? And all the rest. I just don't want to see him narrowing. As his father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, once wrote of something entirely different,

A frost came in the night and stole my world
And left this changeling for it...

Still, I have faith. Johnny is still there, and Christy Brown and Tomas and Hamlet and Gerry Conlon, and so on. I'll be all right as long as I don't have to see that unchangingly haughty cast of face too often. I feel too much warmth for him to be iced out like that.

A Room With a View Is Everywhere and A Little Peek: Male Nudity in the Movies [Bjørn Smestad]
Two Travellers [Cecil Day-Lewis, via Old Poetry]

Categories: NYer, Friend, Movies