One night sitting around talking about movies, I dared to say to Jane: “You never want to see anything I want to see. We always end up getting Merchant and Ivory”. I know that’s what I said because Jane immediately wrote it down.
Then, referring to her records, she calmly compiled this list of the movies that we’d watched most recently:
Fame
Okie Noodling
Laurel Canyon
Ruby & Quentin
Woyzeck
Nosferatu (FW Murnau)
Nosferatu (Hertzog/Kinsky)
Braindead
The Business of Strangers
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
Steve Zissou and the Life Aquatic
Before Sunrise
After (sic) Sunset
Yolngu Boy
Annie Hall
All Quiet on the Western Front
Bad Santa
That must’ve been before we watched Cocteau’s “La Belle et la Bete”. Guess I should have kept my mouth shut.
Actually, I felt pretty damn smug that I had a partner who wanted to watch German Expressionist movies with me.
One reply on “Merchant and Ivory”
[…] If you knew her, you know that Jane kept diaries. Some were private, page-a-day journals. Accounts of her life, a bit like this blog perhaps. I sent years of them to Con, but not ‘76 and ‘77, yet. They are to go to Con, of course, as the Spears Family Archivist. I’m just not quite ready to part with them, especially the one that Jane was reading to me from, this time last year; the one with the pink post-it tabs for the ‘occurrences’. But the one open in front of me today is of the week-per-two-page-spread type that Jane also kept. I think this is a pretty well-known fact as she received three or four as gifts for both Christmases that we were together for. Each time, one was chosen to have the annual events transposed into it from its predecessor. Events that I use ‘recurring events’ in my electronic diary for, and that Jane may well have migrated to the same medium, enthusiastic user of her CPL iPAQ that she was. Birthdays of family and friends, wedding anniversaries (of both the still-together, and the not), anniversaries of overseas trips commenced and concluded (always noting the year and, if Jane herself was not among them, the participants), the anniversaries of the births and deaths of all her cats (their names mostly beginning with ‘Z’), anniversaries of deaths, acquisitions of properties; the anniversaries of our first meeting in 1976 (2 Nov), and in 2003, the first email I sent to Jane (30 April), our first dinner together in Christchurch (27 June), and our weekend at Rough Creek Lodge in Arthur’s Pass (22-25 Aug) and the day Jane shifted to Christchurch in 2004 (9 April). I’m still to blog all that. But the first half of Jane’s 2005 diary (an Escher one ~ who gave her that?) has liberal sprinklings of day to day and week to week happenings, cycles and trivia. There are departures and returns for holidays (eg Bannockburn Jan 8-12 and Sydney 2-6 April), day trips (eg Tumbledown Bay 14 Jan and Ashely Gorge the day after), movies watched (the source of the incriminating list), sports, social events, book club meetings, rehearsals and uni lectures attended, undergoings of surgery by our friends, collectings of my children, usually Elsie, from various locations, goings out for dinner, a play reading (Lysistrata, April 25, AZAC day) and the day that Jane “took seconds of sausage†(Thu 28 Apr). […]