Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Catching an Old Film on Television
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
for Gordon Redding
in which William Holden plays a square-jawed war-veteran
big dumb ox, riding the rails into small-town clapperboard
America to bum a job from a Hell-we-go-a-long-way-back
College pal, whose pa owns half the prairies; and Kim Novak's
a blonde dumb broad, the clean-cut buddy's Miss America,
gorgeous girl-next-door big-date.
A dumb movie.
Didn't see it that simply those picture-palace years ago: a town
unbuttoned, pieties fingered, smugnesses stripped bare,
a caught-out spluttering aftermath; then the old (can see it now)
corny formula: wrong-side-of-the-tracks rough-and-ready nice-guy
versus country-club rich-kid; precocious younger tomboy-sister
versus doll-pretty empty-head; hazards of true love
versus apple-pie at-homes.
She bewitched, was the only thing we focused on – radical, new,
female James Dean, (that save-me-from-myself look) with the nerve
to act adolescent-vulnerable, not witlessness but the what
would become of Sylvia Plath, another blonde cookie we once saw
cycling with a basket of apples on King's Parade.
Dumb us.
Yet who can forget the scene on the jetty, reflections
of Chinese lanterns nonchalantly bobbing, that stunning sultry
‘Moonglow’ dance: Holden and Novak swaying with such
explicit passion you just knew there was another kind
of knowing, one you were then and there fumbling for
on back rows of Odeons, another American dream to pack
your bags for and follow hopelessly into the brave Blue Beyond.
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- Getting There , pp. 21Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001