Tips for reading The Power Broker

Elaine and I began reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974) a couple of weeks ago. It’s a daunting book. I don’t mind long — not at all — but The Power Broker isn’t Joyce or Proust. I was ambivalent about devoting so much time and energy to the life of Robert Moses. But Elaine already had a copy and had made a start. I bought a copy on impulse in New Jersey. Elaine was happy to go back to page one, and here we are, with the Four Seasons Reading Club (our household’s two-person reading project) not having to think about what to read next for quite some time.

Two hundred-odd pages in, I can offer some suggestions to a prospective reader:

~ Decide on a set number of pages per day. We decided on fifteen and have added a bit here and there. Having a page count lets us know that we should be finishing the book in mid-to-late January.

~ Place a sturdy throw pillow on your lap to support the book. Yes, book. It seems wrong to fly in the face of fifty years’ worth of hardcovers and paperbacks by reading The Power Broker as an e-book.¹

~ Do not be tempted to lift the book from its pillow and support it with one hand, with one finger pressing into the book’s upper rear corner. Rapt in reading, you won’t realize that you’re going to end up with a weird little bruise on that finger, looking as if someone has pushed a pencil point into it. The dent will last for some time. I speak from experience.

~ Recognize that everything will develop slowly. It’s like listening to a storyteller who stops to say “But first I have to tell you about —.” You’re along for the ride, so to speak, and there are many stops to make along the way.

~ Marvel at the depth of research that’s gone into the book. As Caro says, it’s the research that makes his books take so long. He’s done his homework — as well as the homework for every kid in the school district. On every page you’ll find details, mentioned in passing, that are occasions for wonder. No spoilers here.

As you may suspect, I think The Power Broker is a great reading experience, all about the acquisition and use of power to reshape — and deform, really — the life of a city. What a time to be reading a book about reshaping and deforming things. The Power Broker is so intensely readable that I could kick myself for ever doubting.

Robert Caro, in Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022):

“I’ve always felt that if a nonfiction book is going to endure, the level of the prose in it, the narrative, the rhythm, et cetera, the setting of scenes, has to be at the same level as a great work of fiction that endures.”

We have 917 pages to go.

Related posts
Caro on facts and truth : “Is there desperation on this page?” : Longhand and a Smith-Corona _____

¹ But if circumstances make an e-book the right choice, choose the e-book.

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its ninth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, Mr. Palomar

Anton Chekhov, The Prank: The Best of Young Chekhov

E.T.A. Hoffman, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

Helen Keller, The World I Live In

Katherine Mansfield, Stories

Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, We Others: New and Selected Stories, Voices in the Night, Disruptions

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure, The Mountain Lion, Collected Short Stories

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children

United States of America v. Donald Trump (the Jack Smith indictment)

Thanks to the translators who brought several of these works to us: Anthea Bell, Maria Bloshteyn, Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Slater, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, and William Weaver.

The FSRC is forging ahead with Chekhov’s Peasants and Other Stories (trans. Constance Garnett).

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, 2022, and 2023.

NYRB sale

Attention, shoppers: New York Review Books has all books on sale: buy two and get 20% off; buy three and get 30% off; buy four or more and get 40% off. Free shipping for orders of $75 or more.

The Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me) placed an order this afternoon for Anton Chekhov, Helen Keller, and Jean Stafford. Two copies of each book, of course. As I’ve written in another post: One could do worse than be a reader of New York Review Books books.

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eighth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Richard Hofstadter. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"

Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse, In a Lonely Place, The Expendable Man

James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

Nella Larsen, Complete Fiction (short stories, Quicksand, Passing )

Robert McCloskey, Homer Price

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, Portrait of a Romantic, In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus, The Barnum Museum, Little Kingdoms, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, The Knife Thrower, Enchanted Night, The King in the Tree: Three Novellas

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Thanks to the translators who brought three of these writers to us: Philip Boehm (Boschwitz), Constance Garnett, Leonard J. Kent, and Nina Berberova (Dostoevsky); Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky (Tolstoy).

The FSRC continues its SMS (Steven Millhauser Spree) with Dangerous Laughter, beginning today.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, and 2022.

[I just couldn’t bring myself to separate the Millhauser titles with semicolons because of Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.]

Domestic comedy

From a meeting of the Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine and me):

“It’s a good book. Its pages are good. It feels good to read it.”

“Good.”

The book is Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947), reissued by New York Review Books. The Hemingwayesque good appears often. Here are the first dozen, smooshed together into a single paragraph for ease of reading:

It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lifting itself like gauzy veils to touch his face. That too was good, his hand was a plane passing through a cloud. The sea air was good to smell, the darkness was soft closed around him. It was a good moment. This time it tasted good. It was a good omen; it meant Brub wouldn’t have changed. A good fighter. Eyes, hazel; nose and mouth right for the face, a good-looking face but nothing to remember, nothing to set it apart from the usual. Good gabardine suit, he’d paid plenty to have it made, open-necked tan sports shirt. The room was a good one, only the chair was gaudy, the couch was like green grass and another couch the yellow of sunlight. Good prints, O’Keeffe and Rivera. “Because we had to isn’t good enough.”

But really, it’s a good book. As is Hughes’s The Expendable Man (1963). I can’t say as much for Ride the Pink Horse (1946). That one is not good.

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Little rituals

In New York Times, readers share rituals that keep them going. I’m reminded of the fourth of five tips for success in college that my daughter Rachel wrote sixteen (!) years ago.

My rituals for daily sanity: tea, writing and posting, a long walk, coffee, a meeting of the Four Seasons Reading Club (reading with Elaine), one drink in the evening. You?

[The Times link is a “gift” link. No need for a subscription.]

“The turning point of summer”

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

The Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine, me) is taking on another long book.

[Someday I will have to write a post about the difficulty of searching Amazon for this edition, or for any particular legitmate edition of a work in the public domain.]

Ten movies, two seasons

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

The Girl in Black Stockings (dir. Howard W. Koch, 1957). There are no black stockings, except in a misogynist and misandrist rant about “men who set up a howl like a backyard cat” at the sight of a woman wearing them. The scene is Parry’s Lodge in Utah, run by the ranter (Ron Randell), who suffers from hysterical paralysis, and his all-sacrificing sister (Marie Windsor). One, two, three grisly murders, and everyone still alive, even the ranter, is a suspect. The dialogue is redubbed; the plot has a large pothole; and the ending is too tidy; but there are strong performances from Windsor and Anne Bancroft (a switchboard operator at the lodge), in a movie that hints at but never explores questions of sexual desire — who’s permitted to feel it, and for whom. ★★★ (YT)

*

5 Against the House (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955). Four Korean War vets, now attending college, plan a perfect crime, timed to the second: a heist of the (real-world) Reno casino Harold‘s Club. Thus we have overtones of Leopold and Loeb, Rope, and The Asphalt Jungle. The screenplay is by Stirling Silliphant, with many of the elements that would re appear in the Naked City television series: an outlandish premise, a tense scene at great height (here, in a parking garage), and a motley crew of crimers (mastermind Kerwin Matthews, sane Guy Madison, dweebish Alvy Singer, and PTSD-suffering Brian Keith, with Kim Novak as a lounge singer and Madison’s girlfriend). But the ending — huh? ★★★ (TCM)

*

Mister Soft Touch (dir. Gordon Douglas and Henry Levin, 1949). Nightclub owner Joe Miracle (Glenn Ford) steals a pile of loot from what was his nightclub (it’s been taken over by the mob) and takes refuge in a settlement house, where he promptly falls in love with social worker Jenny Jones (Evelyn Keyes). But she thinks he’s married (it’s complicated). The movie begins with a chase and ends with a chase, and in the middle — well, the title gives it away. Here too, the ending makes me ask “Huh?” ★★★ (YT)

*

Hollywood Without Make-Up (dir. Rudy Behlmer and Loring d’Usseau, 1963). I’d never heard of Ken Murray, who shot home movies of stars at play. The scenes are often patently staged, and Murray is a pretty shameless cheerleader for an industry: “They’re still making great pictures in Hollywood,” his voiceover says, and the proof is Son of Flubber. Highlights: Groucho, Harpo, and Jackie Cooper in a go-cart race, with Charles Laughton waving the checkered flag; San Simeon in full swing, with William Randolph Hearst, wild animals galore, and Charlie Chaplin playing a tennis-racket guitar. I find it sad that so many of the unidentified faces and even some of the identified faces on the screen are mysteries to me: “No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard,” as Robert Frost said in “Provide, Provide.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Talk About a Stranger (dir. David Bradley, 1952). It has the feel of an Afterschool Special, but it’s an MGM release, a B movie (just sixty-five minutes) with superior production values, thanks to John Alton’s cinematography and David Buttolph’s music. Billy Gray (Bud Anderson of Father Knows Best) is front and center as Bud Fontaine Jr., a San Fernando Valley boy whose suspicions about an odd, surly neighbor (Kurt Kasznar) lead to rumor-mongering and near-disaster. An unmistakable allegory of the Red Scare, and it looks forward (I think) to Scout and Jem and Boo Radley. With George Brent, Nancy Davis, Lewis Stone, and the Morey Mansion. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in a film from the director of Laura. Andrews is Mark Dixon, a vicious police detective with a family history that accounts for his animus against criminals; Tierney is Morgan Taylor, a model. Things get complicated when Dixon’s penchant for violence leaves Taylor’s cabdriver father charged with murder. I wanted to watch this movie again for one reason: to see the eerie images of a woman (Grayce Mills) in her basement apartment, drowsing in a chair as her radio plays classical music. A bonus: the scenes in Martha’s Café with a wisecracking proprietor (Ruth Donnelly) who calls Mark Dixon “Mr. Detective.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

My Little Pony: A New Generation (dir. Robert Cullen, Mark Fattibene, and José Luis Ucha, 2021). No, it’s not film noir, and as you may have guessed, younger viewers were responsible for this choice. The story is surprisingly timely: the magic has gone out of the world, and pegasi, ponies, and unicorns live in perpetual conflict and fear. There’s considerable othering, an “angry mob” (that’s language from the movie), but — no surprise — a happy ending. Good songs, great “sets” (computer animation), and highly compressed voices. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Myrna Loy feature

Love Me Tonight (dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1932). Myrna Loy has little to do in a pre-Code musical comedy that’s dominated by Maurice Chevalier as a tailor/faux–nobleman and Jeanette McDonald as a princess. The songs are by Rodgers and Hart, and I was surprised to discover that this movie introduced “Isn’t It Romantic” and “Lover.” The first is given royal treatment, with the melody passing from the tailor’s shop to a cab to a military unit to a gypsy camp to a castle; the second is a throwaway that reveals McDonald’s gift for comedy. For me the story is tiresome, but the ending is gloriously zany. ★★★★

Penthouse (dir. W.S. Van Dyke, 1933). Warner Baxter (Julian Marsh in 42nd Street) is Jackson “Jack” Durant, a lawyer who’s found himself unwillingly tethered to acquitted gangster client Tony Gazotti (Nat Pendleton). Myrna Loy is Gertie Waxted, a witty, self-deprecating call girl who becomes Jack’s (chaste!) partner in working to find the real killer of Gertie’s co-worker Mimi (Mae Clarke) and free Jack’s ex-girlfriend’s fiancé. With low-cut gowns, fancy elevators, and pre-Code innuendo galore. What did Depression-era moviegoers think when they saw these swank types on the screen — that these people were better than them? ★★★★

Manhattan Melodrama (dir. W.S. Van Dyke, 1934). Two boys (Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Butler), orphaned in the General Slocum disaster, grow up to be gangster Blackie Gallagher (Clark Gable) and DA Jim Wade, on different sides of the law but still friends, even after Eleanor (Myrna Loy) leaves Blackie for Jim. But when Blackie goes too far to help Jim become governor — that precipitates a moral crisis. Though the principals are terrific, I think of this as James Wong Howe’s movie: his cinematography is on display in a remarkable variety of scenes, moods, and camera angles: watch and you’ll see. Bonus: “The Bad in Every Man,” the Rodgers and Hart song that became “Blue Moon.” ★★★★

*

Two seasons of Nathan for You

First season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2013). My daughter recommended this series, and I laughed so hard that I coughed and choked and choked some more. Nathan Fielder presents himself as a consultant with innovative ways to invigorate sluggish businesses; thought his affect does not inspire confidence, his clients seem to be willing to go along with whatever scheme he suggests (e.g., promoting poop-flavored yogurt, permitting attractive women to shoplift). I was reminded — often — of the schemes in Letters from a Nut by “Ted L. Nancy” (comedy writer Barry Marder), a book I have somewhere and will have to find. For now, I am imagining some future civilization watching this series hundreds of years from now with no idea that it’s comedy. ★★★★ (HBO)

Second season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2014). More lunacy: e.g., a realtor encouraged to hype her properties as ghost-free (which requires the services of a psychic and an exorcist); a pet shop advertising on a massive gravestone in a pet cemetery. Some of the businesses featured are playing along: Pink’s, for one, needs no help from a consultant who recommends that customers with legitimate reasons be allowed to cut the line. The highlight of the season is Dumb Starbucks, a clone of a Starbucks with Dumb-branded drinks and Dumb CDs (Norah Jones duets). You’ve probably read about it, even if you’ve never seen the show. ★★★★ (HBO)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

“Once upon a time”

One of the great beginnings.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, is about to engage in some heavy lifting: Ulysses begins today.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Geen : not a typo. The song is “Lilly Dale,” by H.S. Thompson. Here are the lyrics. And here are two recordings. Whoever sings to young Stephen Dedalus changes grave to place.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its seventh year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our seventh year we read novels, novellas, short-story collections, graphic novels, non-fiction, a Socratic dialogue, a children’s story, and a poem. In alphabetical order:

Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen, trans. unknown

W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Honoré de Balzac, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, trans. Jordan Stump

Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village

Emmanuel Bove, My Friends, trans. Janet Louth

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Jerry Craft, Class Act, New Kid

Robertson Davies, The Salterton Trilogy: Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, trans. Thomas Teal

Robert Musil, Intimate Ties: Two Novellas, trans. Peter Wortsman; Young Törless, trans. Mike Mitchell

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

Jed Perl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Plato, Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton and Chris Emlyn-Jones

Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

Anna Seghers, The Dead Girls’ Class Trip, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo

Gilbert Sorrentino, Aberration of Starlight

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island

Adalbert Stifter, The Bachelors, trans. David Bryer; Motley Stones, trans. Isabel Fargo Cole

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown

Eudora Welty, Thirteen Stories

Now it’s on to Nella Larsen, Passing.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

“Favorite Books”

An anonymous reader asked me to “correct” the Favorite Books section of my Blogger profile by listing titles instead of writers. From my point of view, there’s nothing to fix.

As my wife Elaine suggests, you can take any name on the list as prefaced by the words “anything by.” They are all good bets. Elaine does something like that in her Blogger profile: “everything by Stefan Zweig, Willa Cather, and Balzac.”

If you want titles, you might look at the Pinboard tags for OCA fiction and poetry posts. (There’s a list of top tags in the sidebar.) Or you might look at the annual reports of the Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in books: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. The names in tagged posts and the FSRC reports go well beyond those on the profile list.

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its sixth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our sixth year we read nine novels, two plays, and one short-story collection. And we spent almost five months climbing one mountain. In alphabetical order:

Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy : The Rebel Angels, What’s Bred in the Bone, The Lyre of Orpheus

William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley

Erich Kästner, Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Julio Ramón Ribeyro, The Word of the Speechless: Selected Stories

Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross, Transit

Sophocles, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis

Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin

Kurt Tucholsky, Castle Gripsholm

Thanks to the translators whose work opens up other worlds: Cyrus Brooks, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, Lydia Davis, Margot Bettauer Dembo, Sophie Duvernoy, James Grieve, Michael Hoffman, Peter Meineck, Ian Patterson, Katherine Silver, John Sturrock, Mark Treharne, and Paul Woodruff.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Proust for two

If I were CNN, this post would begin, “We are now less than ten minutes away from the start of.”

And if I were Rocky and Bullwinkle, this post would continue, “In Search of Lost Time, or That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles.”

The ascent of Mount Proust is the Four Seasons Reading Club’s greatest challenge to date. Wish us well.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

A “publicity-inflamed dummy”

Ezra Grindle, industrialist and spiritual seeker. Also mark:


William Lindsay Greshman, Nightmare Alley (1946).

Scratch the contained waistline and the rowing machine. Still, eerily reminiscent.

Nightmare Alley is available as a New York Review Books Classic. I’m reading it again for the Four Seasons Reading Club. The novel is a great example of what I just decided to call demotic modernism. Epigraphs from The Waste Land, including one of that poem’s epigraphs!

Also from this novel
“GEEK WANTED IMMEDIATELY”

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Clash by Night (dir. Fritz Lang, 1952). You know Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck) is trouble: the first time we see her, one morning in a Monterey café, she’s drinking coffee and doing shots. You know Earl Pfeiffer is trouble: he’s an unashamed (and married) misogynist who’s always hanging around Mae. You know Jerry D’Amato (Paul Douglas) is in for trouble; he’s an uber-responsible type who’s smitten with Mae and best friends with Earl. The excellent actors in this often seamy story are undercut by an overwrought screenplay, adapted from Clifford Odets’s play. ★★★

*

Pitfall (dir. Andre de Toth, 1948). What a self-reinvention Dick Powell undertook, going from the wholesome “juvenile” of 42nd Street to a convincing Philip Marlowe. Here he plays a character who looks back to Walter Neff (Double Indemnity) and forward to Scottie Ferguson (Vertigo): John Forbes, an insurance agent who becomes involved with Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), a model whose boyfriend is in prison. Raymond Burr, playing a detective obsessed with Stevens, does his best to channel Laird Cregar. The only problem with this film: you have to believe that John Forbes would prefer Mona Stevens to his own wife Sue, who’s played by none other than Jane Wyatt. ★★★★

*

To the Ends of the Earth (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1948). Dick Powell again, in the documentary-style story of a narcotics investigator whose hunt for opium smugglers takes him from California to China to Egypt to Lebanon to Cuba. Good points: a powerful scene early on (chained laborers sliding from a ship to their death), a nifty smuggling trick, and a spirited message of international cooperation against the drug trade. Bad points: a lack of clarity, a myriad of characters. Robert Stevenson must have been a director for all seasons: he also directed Jane Eyre and a slew of Disney films — Mary Poppins and The Love Bug, among others. ★★★

*

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (dir. Frank Capra, 1936). Our household had never sampled this bit of Capra-corn, which plays like a rehearsal for the superior Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In each movie Jean Arthur is a savvy city gal who ends up falling for the naïf she’s supposed to be in charge of: here, Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) tallow-factory proprietor, poet, and, all of a sudden, multi-millionaire. But Lordy: the crowd scenes are like Norman Rockwell paintings or Saturday Evening Post covers, which, come to think of it, amount to the same thing. Among all the downtrodden folk looking for some help from Mr. Deeds, not one face that isn’t white. ★★★

*

Mädchen in Uniform (dir. Leontine Sagan, 1931). Eros vs. authority at a boarding school for girls. Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck) is a beautiful, compassionate teacher, every girl’s crush. Manuela (Herta Thiele) is a new student whose declaration of love for her teacher precipitates a crisis at the school. This celebrated film was of particular interest to our household right now because of our plunge into novels from Weimar Germany, with authoritarianism rising then and now. ★★★★

*

From the MGM series Crime Does Not Pay

Wikipedia lists thirty-four short films in this series. There may be more. Between TCM and YouTube, I found three. And yes, they should get stars.

Think It Over (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1938). “There’s either a pyromaniac or a professional torch in this town!” It’s professionals, two feral firesetters and a dapper front man who calls on struggling businesses. I like the breakfast scene, with a furniture-store owner eating grapefruit as his daughter hits him up for $100 to join a social club and attend its dances. Tourneur’s art comes through in the fire scene, all flashlights and shadows, as celluloid burns and an arsonist (Dwight Frye, perhaps best known as Renfield from Dracula) struggles at a high window. ★★★★

Know Your Money (dir. Joe Newman, 1940). Counterfeit tens are turning up all over town. Trace the paper and you’re on your way to solving the crime. Scenes in a tobacco shop provide satisfying glimpses of material culture and retail density. Watch also for William Edmunds (Mr. Martini from It’s a Wonderful Life) as an engraver. ★★★★


[Retail density. In the glass case, lower left: Bull Durham, Chesterfield, Philip Morris. Frank Orth is the tobacconist; Edward Hearn, the customer. Is that a cigar cutter on the counter? Click for a larger view.]

Don’t Talk (dir. Joe Newman, 1942). “One or two of you might have dropped an idle word that was picked up by some big-eared bartender or bellhop.” Or perhaps by a waitress in some cafe, say, the Elite Cafe, no accent, right across the street from the plant where sabotage destroyed a shipment of manganese, and where Beulah the waitress (Gloria Holden) is doing some funny stuff with the menu in the window. Dwight Frye is here again as a saboteur. Watch also for Arthur Space (Doc Weaver from television’s Lassie) as another saboteur. ★★★★

*

Stranger on the Third Floor (dir. Boris Ingster, 1940). Thank you, TCM: this is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen. It may be the ultimate combination of light comedy, film noir, and German expressionism — also the only such combination, all in a B-movie barely more than an hour long. Peter Lorre is the nominal star as The Stranger, but the real stars are John McGuire (a John Garfield type, I’d say) and Margaret Tallichet, whose brief career in movies ended with her marriage to William Wyler. Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography and Van Nest Polglase’s sets contribute mightily to this film’s deep weirdness — and greatness. ★★★★

*

The Lady from Shanghai (dir. Orson Welles, 1947). Rough and ready seaman Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) signs on for a yachting trip with disabled lawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), his wife Elsa (Rita Hayworth, then married to Welles), and law partner George Grimsby (Glenn Anders), and a plot to fake a murder develops. I hadn’t seen this film in many years — all I could remember was the spectacular Fun House finale. This time around I was much more alert to human relations: Bannister’s sexual incapacity (intensifed by his creepy habit of addressing his wife as “Lover”), Elsa’s masculine authority (captain’s cap and jacket!), and the unmistakable suggestion that Grimsby, Bannister’s partner (partner?), is gay. Welles’s seaman, like Odysseus, lives to tell the tale (no spoiler: he’s the narrator). ★★★★

*

The Eyes of Orson Welles (dir. Mark Cousins, 2018). Did you know that Orson Welles was an accomplished artist, and that he drew and painted all his life? The filmmaker Mark Cousins has made a painstaking, brilliant documentary of Welles’s life and work, tying together places, films, and artworks. One of many details that took me by surprise: Welles used to tell friends visiting Chicago that they must visit the Thorne Miniature Rooms in the Art Institute. Cousins speculates, with photographs and stills as evidence, that those rooms influenced the design of interiors in Welles’s films. ★★★★

*

#UNFIT: The Psychology of Donald Trump (dir. Dan Partland, 2020). We caught the July Fourth weekend online screening. The psychopathology of our president, with insights into the ape brain, autocratic strategies (e.g., say it three times and it’s true), and malignant narcissism. The film begins with Trump*’s first day in office and closes with the pandemic. The last word, spoken by George Conway: “demented,” pointing to matters that the filmmakers can, I suppose, only hint at — Trump*’s declining intellectual and physical abilities. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Old and new bookmarks

Elaine has posted photographs of her old and new bookmarks. The old one, a DO-NOT-USE-AS-BOOKMARK bookmark, made it through five years of the Four Seasons Reading Club. The new one is a legit bookmark, from Three Lives & Company.

Other bookmarks
Gotham Book Mart : Paint samples : Paperback Booksmith : Strand Bookstore

[The Four Seasons Reading Club: the two of us, reading the same book.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fifth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. In our fifth year we read twenty-one books and a book’s worth of uncollected short stories, and we climbed one mountain, Mount Musil. In non-chronological order:

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, The Professor

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders)

Eva Hoffman, How to Be Bored

Olivia Jaimes, Nancy’s Genius Plan

Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

Guy de Maupassant, Afloat

Duncan Minshull, ed., Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction, uncollected stories

Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Stefan Zweig, Journeys

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, Dmitri Nabokov and Vladmir Nabokov, Douglas Parmée, Will Stone, Sophie Wilkins.

Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Support your local or not-so-local independent bookstore

Elaine and I are great fans of the New York City bookstore Three Lives & Company. We visit whenever we visit the city, and we always come away with a pile of books. It seems unlikely that we’ll be able to visit Three Lives, or New York, any time soon. What to do?

Three Lives is currently doing business by telephone and e-mail (also curbside pickup, and hand delivery in the West Village). I e-mailed to say that I wanted to buy some books, and suggested that the store post photographs of their display tables on their website. They were unable to do that (the website is pretty rudimentary), but they sent me photos. So we now have nine books coming our way for further adventures in the Four Seasons Reading Club, our two-person adventure in reading.

I like the idea of supporting an independent bookstore in all seasons. But especially now.

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My timing is good: Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York has announced a #SaveNYC Quarantined Cash Mob for Three Lives.

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In Chicago, the Seminary Co-op Bookstores are doing business on the Internets. And — gasp! — they have, or had, a copy of Robertson Davies’s The Cornish Trilogy on the shelf.

Also in Chicago: Pete Lit reports that Madison Street Books, a weeks-old bookstore, is doing business on and off the Internets. The bookstore offers curbside pickup, free delivery in the West Loop, and one-dollar shipping in the States.

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From The Washington Post: “Independent bookstores survived the rise of online retail. Coronavirus poses bigger challenges.”

[Nine books for two people? Yes, because we already have one copy of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley.]

“Fellows of the first importance”

Young Dunstable Ramsay aspires to the life of a magician:


Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970).

Fifth Business is the first novel of The Deptford Trilogy, one of Elaine’s favorite works of literature. The trilogy is now the stuff of the Four Seasons Reading Club, our two-person adventure in reading. Ninety-eight pages in, I can say that Fifth Business is indeed a wonderful novel, mysterious in small ways (so far, at least, they’re small), and highly Dickensian. How can you not love a novel whose second section is titled “I Am Born Again”?

[David Copperfield, Chapter One: “I Am Born.”]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its fourth year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our fourth year we read twenty-three books (same as last year). In non-chronological order:

Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Bette

Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock, Clark Gifford’s Body

Clifford Hicks, Alvin’s Secret Code

Yoel Hoffman. ed. The Sound of One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs

Toni Morrison, Jazz, Song of Solomon

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Arthur Schnitzler, Desire and Despair: Three Novellas, Late Fame, “Night Games” and Other Stories and Novellas

Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and England, Tristram Shandy

Johannes Urzidil, The Last Bell

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: David Burnett, Adrienne Foulke, Michael Hoffman, Yoel Hoffman, Michael Hulse, Kathleen Raine, Margret Schaefer, and Alexander Starritt. Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, and 2018.