over the garden wall really just aired its 10 episodes once in 2014 leaving a whole generation with irreversible damage and then fucked off never to be seen again
The oceanโs a verified scary place, but coasts are also strangely compelling. If you ask me, that space where the ocean meets the land must be the most haunted of all. This story explores the boundary.
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“Gestation” by Marguerite Bennett, Jonathan Brandon Sawyer, Doug Garbark, Nic. J. Shaw (2014) “I’ll deal with the corpse, my lady-love.”
I havenโt watched anything from Roger Cormanโs wheelhouse until this. It was a decent and straightforward creature feature with emphasis on the ecological consequences of bioengineering and ignorance about colonialism, but then there are also some clearly exploitationy scenes in which women are raped by monsters. (The poster tips the viewer off to that aspect.) It looks like there was behind-the-scenes drama in which Corman mandated the nudity and rape scenes to give the movie more oomph without telling the director or actors about it. Beyond that, this had thematic crossover with the ocean stuff from todayโs short story and the birthing stuff from the comic, so it tied things together in an interesting way.
โI think Christopherโs translations are generally adequate. But he made one mistake which is worth describing because it was deliberate and because it illustrates a fundamental difference in outlook between the translator and his author. โPolly Peachumโs Songโ tells how Polly behaved to her suitors before she met the right one, Macheath. In each verse, a boat is mentioned. Polly and one of the suitors get into it. In the first two verses, the boat is cast loose from the shore, and Polly adds, โBut that was as far as things could go.โ In the third and last verse, however, the boat is โtied to the shore,โ when she has got into it with Macheath.
Christopher found this incomprehensible, because he took it for granted that the proper poetic metaphor for sexual surrender would be the casting loose of the boat. So, quite arbitrarily, disregarding the meaning of the German text, he transposed the lines and had the boat tied up in the first two verses, only to be cast loose in the last verse when Polly is possessed by Macheath.
No one protested. The book appeared with Christopherโs version of the poem. It was only when Christopher met Brecht for the first time, in California about six years later, that he had his misunderstanding corrected. Brecht told him mildly, with the unemphatic bluntness which was so characteristic of him: โA boat has to be tied up before you can fuck in itโโ
โ Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
I doubt I will ever read a funnier anecdote than this one.ย
