211. Of Denis Diderot’s } La Religieuse.

Sainte-Suzanne, the nun of Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse, while meditating in her cell “about the strangeness of women’s mentality” determines such strangeness is due to  “the effect of segregation” and concludes,

Man is born for life in society; separate him, isolate him, and his ideas will go to pieces, his character will go sour, and hundred ridiculous affections will spring up in his heart, extravagant notions will take root in his mind like tares in the wilderness. … It may well be that greater strength of character is needed for standing up to solitude than to poverty, for if poverty degrades us segregation depraves (136).

Additionally, she claims that “The urge to hurt and torment gradually wanes in the world outside; it never dies in the cloister” (59).

Am I insensitive to those who feel isolated now? I feel the loneliest when I am not with my daughters. And I am with my daughters.

This morning I did wish I could go to a coffee shop to write, but it’s not the company I want. I plan to go outside shortly, windy and cold as it is, and write there. That ought to do the trick.

Saint-Suzanne’s problem isn’t isolation (although when she’s thrown into solitary confinement—

…a little dark underground cell and threw me onto some matting half rotten with damp. There I found a piece of black bread and a pitcher of water, with a few other necessary vessels of the coarsest kind. For a pillow you had to roll up one end of the mat, and one a stone block was a skull with a wooden crucifix. My first instinct was to put an end to myself; I tried to throttle myself, I tore my clothes with my teeth, uttering fearful cries and howling like a wild animal. I banged my head against the wall until it was covered with blood. In fact, I went on trying to kill myself for three days; I thought it was going to be for the whole of my life (65).

—she doesn’t do very well). Sainte-Suzanne’s problem is who with she’s segregated. Specifically, two Mother Superiors who warp the environment around them to suit their own wants. Sister Sainte-Christine finds gratification through punishment; Madame *** (the second superior is unnamed) finds gratification through sex.

(Though certainly not Diderot’s intent, I read Saint-Suzanne’s narrative at the second cloister, where she is loved by Madame ***, as a caution against celibacy and a caution against the condemnation of homosexuality.)

Leonard Tancock, translator of La Religieuse, confuses me when he writes, “A recent French film of the novel… ended by showing Sainte-Suzanne, lured into the brothel, break way from a man’s lewd embrace….” I would not be confused if he wrote, “lured into a brothel”—then I would know the brothel scene was entirely the filmmaker’s invention. But the brothel—I’ve reread the ending several times and there is no brothel.

Tancock also writes, that, “After years of convent life she is unsuited for anything, a lost, helpless soul with no knowledge, no skill except for some music, no initiative, no future.” I’m not sure this is true, either. Sainte-Suzanne writes, in her application to be a maid,

In my father’s home I learned how to work, and in the convent to obey. … I can sew, spin, embroider and launder, and when I was still in the world I mended my own lace…. I am not clumsy at anything and nothing is beneath me. I have a voice and am musical, and I can play well enough to entertain any mother who would like me to, and I could even give lessons to her children, but I should be afraid of betraying my identity by these signs of a superior education. If I had to learn hair-dressing I would quite like that, and I would take some lessons and soon master this little skill (188).

That she is asking for a job shows she has initiative, and within that request she shows an interest in learning new skills—more initiative. Does she have no future? She has knowledge. Unless she has exaggerated throughout her narrative (that would be uncharacteristic of her), her singing voice is extraordinary; furthermore, she can play harpsichord—more than "some music."

Maybe she has no future. Diderot does not decide her fate. Her benefactor is dead, but she has a job. Does she have no future? We suspect that she does not.

[Quotes from Penguin Classics 1974 edition of The Nun, translated by Leonard Tancock. Above image from La Religieuse, directed by Jacques Rivette ,1971.]

210. February 22 - 23, 1969 } from 8pm – 5am.

Mark Lewishon writes “…a number of [Abbey Road’s] songs were well under way by that time. One was ‘I Want You,’ a fine John Lennon song…” A “fine” John Lennon song? And, “…begun now with 35 takes of the basic track and John’s guide vocal (one experimental take was sung by Paul McCartney)…” Is there a McCartney vocal bootleg somewhere? [from The Beatles Recording Sessions, Harmony Books, 1988.] Kevin Howlett writes, “…in a session produced by George Martin, ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ was recorded from eight o’clock on a Saturday evening through to five on Sunday morning at Trident Studios….” And, “During that night in Soho, there were 35 takes (many of them breakdowns) recorded on three reels of eight-track tape.” [from Abbey Road Anniversary Edition, Apple Corps Limited, 2019.]

Consider the nature of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”: lyrically simple / repetitive and musically repetitive (you might object to repetitive; the music changes quite a lot); what would it be like to work on 35 basic rhythm tracks?

When the session was over, did McCartney, the only Beatle still living in London, step out into the brisk air—it was in the mid-30s but with clear skies in London on February 23, 1969—and contemplate a walk back to Cavendish Avenue? It’d be a long walk—52 minutes. Too bad, he might’ve thought, we weren’t at Abbey Road, just a 10-minute walk from his place.

Coming out into the city so early on a Sunday morning, high from a productive session of artistic collaboration with friends—McCartney surely looked up at the sky, smelled the air, wondered if he ought to go straight to bed, or locate a bakery, or if he could find some way to ride the high a little longer—why not walk toward St. John’s Wood?

# # #

Posted to YouTube in 2011 by Astrid Shapiro is “Paul’s house” a 1:42 video that shows “my best friend” (in purple, with a slightly downcast expression) outside the gates at 7 Cavendish Avenue, where McCartney lived in ’69 (and he still owns the house). Their timing is good. The gate is opened for a messenger by someone who works for McCartney, and he’s very friendly. As they’re talking, the front door opens, and another employee steps out, and Astrid and her pal are simply beside themselves.

# # #

And, you can walk with “American drummer Marty Richards” from 7 Cavendish to Abbey Road Studios (posted to YouTube by ursulageorge in 2010). A familiar walk.

209. Mountain series } ATH 1 - 4

[ Mountains ATH 1 ]

[ Mountains ATH 2 ]

[ Mountains ATH 3 ]

[ Mountains ATH 4 ]

208. Nightfall post } & addenda (pt. 2)

Like the radio show Inner Sanctum (1941 – 52), Nightfall featured memorable introductions and memorable hosts—Henry Ramer during the first two seasons and Bill Reiter during the last. Ramer possessed a deep, gravelly voice, and he opened each show with these lines (I’ve added commas where Ramer pauses): “In the dream, you are a falling, lost, in the listening distance, as dark locks in.” This was followed by a scream and then Ramer’s voice: “Nightfall!” For Reiter’s intro, the “In a dream you’re falling…” bit was gone; Reiter’s intro was individualized to fit each story. For example, “Private Collection” led with, “When your suspicions turn to terrible truths—it’s Nightfall”; “The Tie that Binds” led with, “For people who believe they have a grip on themselves—a strong grip—this is Nightfall.” Reiter also introduced himself: “Good evening, Frederick Hende here.” Reiter’s voice wasn’t like Ramer’s either: it was muted. Nigel Bruce’s Watson—without the bluster—comes to mind.

“Ringing the Changes,” was the eighteenth episode of the first season. The Nightfall series produced a good number of other exceptional plays based on short stories. “The Monkey’s Paw” is especially successful. So too are “The Stone Ship” (William Hope Hodgson), “They Bite” (Anthony Boucher), “The Screaming Skull” (F. Marion Crawford) and “The Signalman” (Charles Dickens). This is but a small selection of strong adaptations. The wide range of stories chosen for adaptation reflects the process by which they were chosen. Nightfall writers approached the producers with stories they wanted to adapt, rather than the other way around.

Ultimately, it’s the plays written especially for the Nightfall series that make Nightfall a success. Out of a hundred episodes, only a few are duds (“Mind Drift,” for instance, a tedious and predictable Manchurian Candidate story). Episodes I consider to be mediocre—the plays that rely wholly on gruesomeness and nastiness—are still highly entertaining: will he rip out his own heart? will the vengeful spirit cut off his legs? Seated by one’s radio, in the dark, these simple stories work the same way any good campfire tale works—with a bump in the night. Terrific heart-rending and leg-tearing sound-effects abound.

The best episodes are those that demand another listen. Some, I listen to again and again because the story remains mysterious from start to finish. Tim Wynne-Jones, a well-known Canadian author of young adult books, wrote a few such mysterious Nightfall episodes. “The Road Ends at the Sea” is set at a lighthouse by the Bay of Fundi, where the tides rise and fall twenty-five feet within an hour. The young couple who maintain the lighthouse are visited by an old friend—of sorts—a fellow writer who sold-out and now wants to steal the woman he felt he should have had in college, the woman who instead married the lighthouse keeper. The young couple are living at the lighthouse in pursuit of real isolation—at first under the guise of wanting peace and quiet for their writing, but now for a more profound and intangible reason. During the old friend’s visit, a great black ship appears in the bay. This ship is the lighthouse keepers’ ticket to isolation, so they believe; the old friend resists. And there isn’t much else to the story—a struggle and a little anti-climax with the police who come to check on the couple who live in the lighthouse. This episode is marred by maudlin incidental music, but otherwise it’s perfect, perfectly mysterious. “The Strange Odyssey of Lennis Freed,” also by Wynne-Jones, is similarly rich, though not so much because of the story—a fairly basic ghost story—but because of the atmosphere. A husband and wife are making an annual holiday trip—they follow the same route each year, stay in the same hotels and eat at the same restaurants, but this year there’s a terrific snowstorm, which—with the occasional accompaniment of the chronically coughing Lennis Freed—has totally transformed their trip. Janet Bonnellie’s “In the Name of the Father,” John Douglas’s “Lazarus Rising,” and Tony Bell’s “The Jogger” are other stories I admire for their strangeness.

The episode that still unnerves me, no matter how many times I hear it, is “The Porch Light,” by Randy Brown. Another basic ghost story carried off entirely by atmosphere: the light that won’t stay off, the new house, the snow, the figure seen from the bedroom window but not when the front door to the house is opened—and oh! what a mistake opening the front door is, and yet, a mistake you and I would make, in spite of all the ghost stories we’ve read. The acting, too—just two people in a studio—carries “The Porch Light” to its peak, to a moment when I almost can’t stand to listen anymore.

For years, Nightfall was still under copyright, so most of the episodes sold were bootlegs, and often the sound quality of these recordings is very poor—a few, in fact, are nearly impossible to listen to. (Some include unexpected pleasures: a weather report, a promo for an upcoming show, a little bit of local news.) Several Nightfall episodes were sold, on cassette and in stereo, by Durkin-Hayes Publishing and by CBC Enterprise. Those cassettes crop up in abebooks.com, at the CBC’s shop-online and elsewhere. There is also a CD, a volume one that never went beyond volume one, which includes four episodes—all very different episodes, all good (even my least favorite of the four, “Future Fear,” is good). Recently, the show (presumably) came into public domain, and all the episodes can be streamed here. The sound quality is generally good.

As I listened through my Nightfall collection again and again, I began to wonder about the biography of the show. I began to pay attention to the credits and to contemplate the research that would be involved in writing a long essay or even a short book about Nightfall. The Web, for all its gathering of the obscure, yielded very little information. Then, something new cropped up online: Neil Marsh’s www.nightfall-25.com. I began to read Neil’s LiveJournal, and was delighted by what and by who Neil had located. Somewhat relieved that someone else was doing all the hard work, I contacted Neil and he’s proven to be a generous fellow. Only marginally interested in the horror genre, but fascinated by this particular show and by radio drama in general. I am currently surrounded by pages of research Neil kindly sent. Though www.nightfall-25.com isn’t yet complete (and may never be), there’s an enormous amount of material there. If you have any interest in the show, visit Neil’s site. It’s also worth noting that Neil produces his own audio dramas (to call the shows “radio drama” is anachronistic) with the Post Meridian Players. [Recently, Neil has surrendered his research materials “to a couple of fellow long-time fans.” He writes “there's a Facebook group for Nightfall (as Nightfall CBC)…. Not a lot of traffic, but there's usually something new once a week.”]

I asked Neil about a little bit of promo copy that is often included in blurbs about Nightfall that reads, “The show ignited complaints from many listeners that it was too frightening, prompting some stations to drop the series from their programming.” Neil has found no evidence that the show was ever dropped from a station’s line-up because of angry listeners, though he believes such calls were likely to have been made. True or no, Nightfall being too scary for radio is a nice legend.

Why the series was finally cancelled isn’t really clear. Susan Rubes said, “[the producers] simply felt they had done enough episodes for any future release or syndication….” That answer’s a little too neat. Perhaps the producers wanted to evolve—after Nightfall, there is CBC’s The Vanishing Point, a similar anthology series, featuring many of the same actors and writers (A favorite of mine is “The Testing of Stanley Teagarden,” by none other than Tim Wynne-Jones). Some episodes of The Vanishing Point are horror stories, but most are just strange. Of course, I’d’ve kept Nightfall on the air. The series produced some of the best horror radio shows ever, as good as the best of Lights Out, The Hall of Fantasy, Inner Sanctum, etc.—as good as the greats.

207. Nightfall post } & addenda (pt. 1).

All Hallow’s Eve, 1980: the CBC broadcasts “Ringing the Changes,” a new episode of the radio series Nightfall. Years later, but not that many years later, I begged my father to turn off “Ringing the Changes,” which we were listening to on cassette; the story was about to reach its climax: Holihaven’s bells had stopped ringing, an anonymous street evangelist had cried, “The dead are awake!” and, indeed, the dead were dancing and chanting: “The living and the dead dance together. Now’s the time. Now’s the place. Now’s the weather.” My father finally snapped the tape off, but not until one voice rose above the chanting: a phlegmy, corpse-with-little-left-of-its-vocal-chords kind of voice: “Now’s the time. Now’s the place…”

Eventually I heard all of “Ringing the Changes” and it has since become a favorite episode of Nightfall—in no small part because it introduced me to Robert Aickman.

Aickman’s short story “Ringing the Changes” is the better version, of course. P. Norman Cherrie, who wrote the radio adaptation, fit the story into a half-hour by cutting some of Commandant Shotcroft’s story (he is punishing himself, living in Holihaven—for what he did during a war, perhaps) and other details, such as the samurai suit at the end of the hall (an element of atmosphere that goes unexplained in the Aickman story—a perfect illustration of Aickman’s understanding that while everything in this world might add up, we are unlikely ever to discover how or why). Nonetheless, Cherrie’s script does Aickman’s story justice.

As does the production. “Ringing the Changes” is perfect for radio, and the sound effects people met the story’s potential. The ringing of Holihaven’s bells steadily increases, and the chanting of the dead, as I described, became too awful for me to bear as a boy. When Phrynne and Gerald walk down to the beach, looking for the sea—“I think seaside attractions should include the sea,” Phrynne says—Phrynne screams. Her scream is not just a high-pitched scream, but something subtler. She sounds revolted and chilled all at once. And all the while sodden ground squishes and church bells ring. Cherrie adds a line here that, though too heavy-handed for Aickman, works well for the show: Gerald asks, “What do you think it was you stepped on?” and Phrynne replies, “It was something soft. Something soft and…” she hesitates, Gerald pushes her on, “And?” he asks. She says, “…And bone.” Perhaps the best sound-effect moment comes when Gerald and Phrynne attempt to leave Holihaven. They rush into the streets; the bells are ringing like mad—and then the bells stop. From the moment Gerald and Phrynne arrived in Holihaven, bells rang, so the listener becomes inured to the sound. When the bells stop—we freeze. A moment later, the evangelist announces that the dead are awake and we hear earth churn.

Nightfall began in 1979, when Susan Rubes was hired by the CBC to update their radio dramas. She, “asked for an increased budget, more air time, and a variety of time-slots in order to reach a wider audience.” She was contacted by a producer from Toronto, Bill Howell, who sold her on his idea for a horror radio anthology. Rubes felt she had a hit on her hands, and gave Howell the go-ahead. Bill Howell, several years later, wrote a piece called “Notes on Nightfall for NPR” (America’s National Public Radio aired about thirteen episodes of Nightfall, beginning October, 1981). He wrote this about the origin of the show:

It started innocently enough. Somebody on a network management task force decided that CBC Radio Drama should shed its tweed-pipe-and-smoldering-jacket-image, and a seductive way to do this would be to produce a new horror series, “like the Inner Sanctum or The Shadow.” Five senior executive producers immediately had heart attacks, sixteen script editors resigned in protest…

Most of Howell’s writings regarding Nightfall are a mix of truth and his delightfully creaky horror humor. The series ran for two seasons under Bill Howell’s production, with episodes recorded in Toronto at “studio G,” which Howell described thusly:

Imagine a barn of a room, chipped and flaking institutional pastel walls, black drapes, stained glass, arcane gray sound effects doors and wind machines, a spider’s web of microphone cables, dilapidated armchairs, sections of scripts spread everywhere, and a control room jammed with dim nodes humming to be transformed. And, since you are a guest in this article, we’ll provide the bats.

For season three, the show’s final season, Nightfall was transferred to CBC Vancouver and the production duties were handled by Don Kowalchuk. Another thirty-two episodes were aired, and then Nightfall was no more.


A version of this post is still online at the Open Letters Monthly archive; the editors titled it “As Dark Locks In” when it was published in October, 2012. I’ve made revisions for clarity and to include information I’ve learned about the show since, but my motivation to repost is a recent re-engagement with the show itself and a correspondence with one of its authors. Part two will complete the re-post of the original article. Subsequent parts will be “addenda.”

206. An impression of } Xenocles' qualities.

[ from Aristophanes' Clouds, possibly "coming from Xenocles' Licymnius and spoken by Alcmene on hearing that Licymnius had been killed by Tlepolemus." Cast: Second Creditor, flannel short pajamas, Nordstrom; Strepsiades, Westerly metallic wind shell coat, Athleta. Commentary and translation, M. J. Cropp from Minor Greek Tragedians. ] 

205. The bleeding of one category } into another.

The narrator of Throat Sprockets (Tim Lucas, 1994), sees The Cure at Dulles airport: “I watched with fascination as this troupe of fern-haired, powder-faced specters trudged with their entourage through the crowd toward a private exit.” Shortly thereafter, he considers the Billboard Top 100:

Nearly all the nation’s hit songs, I noticed, had been recorded by mannish women and ambivalent men, with mournful lyrics tenderly addressed to the genderless lovers no longer in their lives. I recognized the symptom. All of us—the people who shaped society—were somehow touched by the same depression, and our blue funk was profiting no one but the business we represented in order to stay alive and in this pathetic state. To the record companies who recorded these balladeers, their sorrow was a platinum payoff, a jackpot of skulls crowned that particular week (the chart said) by Sinead O’Connor’s interpretation of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” This, I told myself, was the first generation of compact disks: silver stacks minted to perform repeatedly, to spin eternally without distortion or diminishment; the voices encoded on them—the first sounds chosen for such preservation—shared a ubiquitous sadness that seemed to yearn for the gone days of vinyl, their voices plaintively aching to be abused once again with yesterday’s needles.

This passage caught my attention in a way it wouldn’t have when I first read the novel in 1994. Then, it served only as a metaphor: compact disk as vampiric, ever-living undead. Lucas’ idea that a historic event—the advent of the compact disk—would be associated with the malaise of a certain group of artists forever, didn’t make an impression.

Fall, 2013, I spent an afternoon with music writer Geeta Dayal—I’d invited her to speak to my students about her Another Green World monograph. I picked her up in Cambridge, drove her to Providence, brought her to both my classes, and took her to lunch. She was a memorable speaker. Between classes, she regarded the CDs in my office (I’m right now listening on an inexpensive Sony boombox to a CD pressed in 1993). She preferred vinyl, she said—she said she always thought “CDs are ugly.” I was surprised. Sure, I was aware of the rhapsodizing vinyl inspires (especially its sleeve), but the beauty of an LP does not ipso-facto suggest that compact disks are ugly. I told her I disagreed, that I love the oil-slick rainbow of an unadorned CD, the different iterations of the jewel case, iterations of the booklet, other varieties of packaging (including mini-reproductions of the vinyl sleeve); I have CDs that are black on both sides, a CD that changes color when played, a CD shaped like Paul McCartney’s head, gold CDs, a short-playing CD set in a transparent ring, double-sided CDs, and CDs that look like little LPs. I doubt I swayed Ms. Dayal. And I will forever be envious of the stack of Kompact LPs she told me she obtained for free.

Coming from the narrator of Throat Sprockets, lost in the midst of his obsession with neck porn and the inevitable unhappiness that accompanies obsession, the observation rings true. Not so out of context.

# # #

I don’t like the phrase “mannish women and ambivalent men.” If “mannish women” is shorthand for lesbian, it’s pretty weak shorthand; if it’s shorthand for women who are tough, or muscular, or for women with short hair (or none), etc., it’s weak. Sinead O’Connor is not mannish, she’s Sinead O’Connor. And what does “ambivalent men” mean in this context? Bisexual? Asexual? Gay? Or just guys who don’t care?

Throat Sprockets is kinda queer, but it’s also very hetero. Once the narrator sees a film that objectifies throats his sexuality is radically changed. He loses all interest in what once aroused him (he was a “breast man”). But he’s only attracted to heterosexual women’s throats, and the women who are also into throats are invariably subservient.

The kinda queerness of Throat Sprockets is its virtue. At the start of the novel, the narrator goes to the Eros during his lunch break to watch pornographic films, even though “X movies, Triple X, whatever you want to call them—have never particularly aroused me.” Instead, he goes

because of my disenchantment with mainstream films; [he] was fed up and growing weak on a steady diet of movies made by money and interested in only attracting more money. American films had become an art form with the agent as auteur; their lack of serious adult concerns was enforced by an outmoded and unrealistic ratings system that refused free expression to works of original or unpopular thought. … Adult films also had a peculiar knack for capturing the listlessness I found at the core of my real life, better than so-called “legitimate” films.

An ambivalent man.