It was smart to end up watching Paterson (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2016) for a second time last night with friends, one day after posting a review of Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. In a closing scene at the Great Falls, a Japanese poet visiting the city of Paterson (Masatoshi Nagase) takes out a bilingual paperback of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and asks Paterson (Adam Driver) if he knows Williams’s work. Yes. Is Paterson a poet? No. (As the viewer knows, Pateson is a poet, but the notebook with all his poems has just been torn to shreds by his dog). After some further talk of Jean Dubuffet and Frank O’Hara, the visiting poet hands Paterson a notebook:
“A gift?”How about that?
“Sometime empty page present most possiblities.”
Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)
[Fun fact: Masatoshi Nagase played the Carl Perkins fan in Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989).]
https://books.google.com/books/content?id=IDRktr7YjaMC&pg=PT16&img=1&pgis=1&dq=%22ladies+and+gents%22+paterson+nj+restaurant&bul=1&sig=ACfU3U3RmJl5uxojTHLooem6xzcn1Az5UQ&edge=0
ReplyDeleteI've seen others too. It must have been a way to announce that women would be welcome and not regarded with suspicion (?).
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