What Wharton put out is a bewitching, and frequently terrifying, collection of tales which more often than not fulfill her criterion for a successful ghost story: “If it sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well.” In her preface, Wharton frets about the public’s ability to appreciate a good ghost story, an instinct she sees “being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema.” Modern life in 1937 was too noisy, too diffuse and distracted, for a ghost to make much headway. “Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity,” she wrote. “For where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours, when at last the wireless has ceased to jazz.”
Despite being nominated for an Oscar in 1996, playing out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival that May, and being, at the time, the first true Mickey Mouse theatrical short to play for theatrical audiences in more than 40 years has been all but erased from existence. The short is not locked in the Disney Vault, it’s seemingly buried underneath it in a lead-lined box.
How “Runaway Brain” came to be, and why it’s been deemed a forbidden object in the years since, is one of the weirder stories in modern Disney history.
Before the days of Apple Genius Bar appointments booked online, when your MacBook finked out in New York City you schlepped it down to Tekserve on West 23rd Street, where you pushed a lever for a numbered ticket, as if you were at Zabar's smoked fish counter. Then, surrounded by other Mac users distressed by coffee spills and un-backed-up data, you settled into a fold-down wooden theater seat until your number flashed on the screen of a re-purposed Macintosh. Sometimes it was a very long wait.
I never thought I'd look back on those lost, scruffy days with nostalgia — until Tamara Shopsin's unusual and oddly moving debut novel, LaserWriter II, brought it all back to me.
“What do I / to say. I cannot say it,” writes Robert Creeley in the title poem of For Love (1962), far and away one of the most influential books of American poetry to emerge during the postwar era. In a characteristic move, Creeley develops the poem around what the poem cannot say; gestures of refusal and uncertainty abound, with the poet seized by something that “despairs of its own / statement, wants to / turn away, endlessly / to turn away.” The poet is trying to write a love poem for his wife, but the attempt produces a general skepticism about his own authenticity, a worry that he has not “earned” the right to demonstrate his love in literature rather than in life. This in turn leads to the worry that the idea of “earning” love might itself be too transactional, mechanical.