E&I's 15th anniversary: 10 favorite posts from the past 5 years

Eve (Barbara Stanwyck) tempts Charles (Henry Fonda) in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, from one of my favorite posts from the past 5 years. Image source: Hollywood Soapbox

This post is the 511th published on Exotic and Irrational Entertainment, and marks E&I's 15th anniversary (the very first post, on Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist, John Ford's The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, was published on July 22, 2007).

E&I began as a way for me to explore my "indefensible obsessions": literature, primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries, and especially by women authors; opera, primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries; and Indian movies, primarily those produced by the mainstream commercial Hindi film industry known as Bollywood. Although in the five years since my 10th anniversary post I've lost touch with current developments in Indian cinema, my other obsessions have certainly continued unabated (and have been joined by a few others).

So in honor of the 15th anniversary of E&I, here is a list of 10 of my favorite posts (or post series) from the past 5 years:

Books:

Angela Carter: A post on Edmund Gordon's biography The Invention of Angela Carter, plus four posts devoted to the best of her fiction, including the evocative The Magic Toyshop and the uncanny tales of The Bloody Chamber. (September–October 2018)

Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel: Du Maurier's fiction has always been popular, but has long been viewed with unwarranted condescension by many literary critics. My Cousin Rachel (like "The Birds" and Rebecca) is another of her masterpieces of growing dread and inexorable fate. Margaret Forster's groundbreaking biography of Du Maurier, the first to reveal the extent of Daphne's same-sex attractions, was one of my favorite books of 2021. (April 2021, October 2021)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: The 19th-century Brazilian author, the grandson of slaves, is amazingly modern in his subjects and style. I wrote posts on recent translations of his brilliant Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, in which a dead man looks back on his inconsequential life with ironic humor, and on his wistful final masterwork, Counselor Ayres' Memorial, in which an older man observes a young widow's struggles to remain in mourning as she is inexorably drawn back to life and love. (March 2018 and July 2020)

Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks: Victorian novelist Margaret Oliphant is not as well-known today as her contemporaries Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot, but she can be equally acute about the strategies that determined, ambitious women in her era had to pursue in order to achieve their aims. In Miss Marjoribanks, the title character (pronounced "Marchbanks") wants to transform the moribund society of the town of Carlingford and inject some youth and life; her matchmaking is so successful that she almost runs out of eligible bachelors for herself. (August 2020)

Opera:

The mysteries of Dido and Aeneas: The greatest opera in English, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, is surrounded by mysteries. We don't have all the music: the scores that exist are incomplete copies that don't agree with one another, made for performances that occurred decades after Purcell's death in 1695. We don't know the date of the first performance, or who sang which roles: there is only a single surviving copy of Nahum Tate's libretto from the first (or at least a very early) performance "by young gentlewomen" at a Chelsea boarding-school. In this post I discuss new evidence that has emerged in the last 15 years or so that may enable us to provide at least partial answers to some of the major questions that remain about this opera. (March 2018)

Vittoria Tesi: The first Black prima donna: Vittoria Tesi, the first Black or biracial prima donna, is an extraordinary and ground-breaking figure. She was a star singer who performed on equal terms with other superlative singers of the mid-18th century. And yet I've been listening to Baroque opera for nearly 30 years and can't recall having heard her name before. This post series attempted to bring together all the documented information about Tesi, including some amazing descriptions and images of extravagant Baroque opera spectacles in which she participated. I included arias from the roles she peformed, and identified (for the first time, to my knowledge) a possible image of her father as a young servant in the Medici household. (March–May 2022)

The operas of Antonio Salieri: In the play and film Amadeus, the composer Antonio Salieri is portrayed as "the patron saint of mediocrity," so envious of Mozart's talent that he finally poisons him. One of the many problems with this image is that during Mozart's lifetime Salieri was by far the more successful composer, and Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte drew inspiration from Salieri's work in creating their own. In my post on Salieri's La grotta di Trofonio (The cave of Trofonio) I show that it influenced Mozart's Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte (All women are the same), while in the post on Salieri's La scuola de' gelosi (The school of jealousy) I show that it helped shape Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) as well as Così. The third Salieri opera that I've written about, the one-act Prima la musica, poi le parole (First the music, then the words), was actually a joint production with Mozart, who wrote his own one-act opera, Der Schauspieldirektor (The impresario) to be performed the same evening. In my post on La scuola I wrote, "Salieri may not have been Mozart, but being Salieri was more than sufficient." (December 2018, March 2021, July 2021)

Film:

René Clair: Between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, years spanning the transition between silent and sound films, French director René Clair directed a series of now-classic comedies. Entr'acte (1924) and The Italian Straw Hat (1927) exploit the visual possibilities of film to tell a series of running jokes. In Sous les toits des Paris (Under the roofs of Paris, 1930), the protagonist is a sheet-music peddler whose code of class loyalty leads to a prison term for a crime he didn't commit. Clair's visual inventiveness and working-class sympathies perhaps reached their highest expression in the gentle humor and humanistic ideals of À nous la liberté! (Give us freedom!, 1931), in which an escaped prisoner becomes a wealthy industrial magnate, only to be reminded of his principles by an encounter with his former cellmate. (September–December 2017)

Ester Krumbachová: A survey of three films written and designed by Krumbachová, a central figure in the Czech New Wave cinema of the 1960s: the surreally feminist Daisies (1966), the bitterly funny and morally chilling A Report on the Party and Guests (1967), and the dreamlike Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). A few years after the 1968 Soviet invasion ended the Prague Spring, Krumbachová was blacklisted for a decade, but these films remain as a testament to the courage and creativity of Krumbachová and her colleagues. (November 2018)

Preston Sturges: Between 1940 and 1944 seven comedies written and directed by Preston Sturges were released by Paramount Studios. There's not a dud among them, and some are among the best comedies ever produced in Hollywood. In my view Sturges' peak achievement is The Lady Eve (1941), with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, but others might vote for Sullivan's Travels (1942), with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, or the rueful Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), with Eddie Bracken and Ella Raines. (May 2021)

Over the past decade and a half this blog has received (to my astonishment) 657,000 page views. This is a particularly gratifying surprise given that my average post is probably close to two thousand words long, and some far exceed that total. My deepest thanks to everyone who has stopped by E&I since 2007 to read my thoughts and share their own. While I can't guarantee that I'll be continuing for another 15 years, I have no plans to stop writing anytime soon. Take that as fair warning!