Fifty blog-description lines

For many years the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — served as what Blogger calls a “blog description line.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, always choosing some word or words or element of punctuation from a post then on the front page, and always keeping the quotation marks that had enclosed Van Dyke’s words. I like looking at these bits of language from a distance. Sometimes I recognize the context at once. The first comes from a post about Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; the second, from Villette itself. The third? You got me. “Pflaaaap!”

“The estrade — okay, platform”
“The nobody you once thought me!”
“Get on with it”
“Post stuff”
“Space for thought”
“At work or at play”
“Walking through a wooded area”
“Brought to the screen on an excellent shoestring”
“When we started communicating, we were using pay
    phones”
“They grow up so fast”
“Click for larger turtles”
“The wet lead makes a darker line”
“Extensive parking facilities”
“Now with more Chock full o’Nuts”
“Stealing radio tubes and engaging in fisticuffs”
“Faculty-sharpener”
“A candy store of the imagination”
“E, G, D, A”
“Ontological underpinnings”
“Not a clue”
“Eyes open”
“And supplies”
“Did he write this himself?”
“Torn between ‘Huh?’ and ‘Wha?’”
“Qua qua qua”
“Where has Merrick Garland gone?”
“Redolent, redolent of coffee”
“Just ‘music’”
“Giveaway”
“Why a duck”
“Shirtsleeve weather”
“Dose folks”
“Check your local listings”
“Mid-century postmodern”
“America is minorities”
“Once a subfolder, always a subfolder”
“Truth matters”
“Pflaaaap!”
“Hey, what a cat, to dig Troy”
“67 + 92 + 25 = 184”
“Run rushes with Zanuck”
“I’m on it”
“Items in a series”
“Changeable signs”
“The reason is not because”
“Sound it out”
“I hope this blog post finds you well”
“Easy to install … see back of box”
“For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”
“Shiny topics”

More blog-description lines
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty : Is there no end to this folly? : It would appear not

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.

Brontë weather

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).

See also Jane Austen’s February. But see also James Schuyler’s December.

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Invisible woman

Agnes Grey, governess, walks back from church with — but not with — her charges and the young gentlemen of the neighborhood.

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey (1847).

See also Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe, ex-governess and still a “nobody.”

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts (Pinboard)

“The Moors”

[A Peppa Pig story.]


The premise developed when Elaine and I were walking. I am lucky to have such a partner.

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts (Pinboard)

[Daddy Pig’s knowledge of the moors appears to derive from Merriam-Webster. Yes, an American dictionary. It’s my story. A little context for the Gift Shop scene: after Anne Brontë’s death in 1849, Charlotte Brontë prevented republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall until 1854.]

“Idiosyncratic excess”

Uh-oh:

This sentence represents an extreme instance of Anne Brontë’s idiosyncratic excess and defect in the use of commas. I have not deleted the formally intrusive comma after “Because,” because I have chosen to read it as an emotional notation indicating the staccato breathlessness of speech under high stress; neither have I inserted a comma between “a trifle more” and “I imagine,” which may therefore represent the outpouring of indignation Anne Brontë intended.

I think I’m going to stop reading the notes in my edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. ”Idiosyncratic excess” too often describes the editor’s commentary.

“Life apart”

One last post from Villette. Lucy Snowe insists on her selfhood.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Hand and seal

Handwriting and a wax seal as indices of character:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Remember when girls really flipped for guys with great handwriting? And great seals? Me neither.

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

“A stilly pause”

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Nobody and Somebody

Ginevra Fanshawe, Miss Thing herself, wants to know, “Who are you, Miss Snowe?”


And a little later:

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

A rising character indeed. Lucy Snowe is a protagonist in a novel.

I would like to imagine that these passages from Villette stand behind Emily Dickinson’s 260 (1862):

260, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

Noting that Dickinson read “competitively,” seeking to outdo other poets, Richard B. Sewall points to a different inspiration for 260: “Little Nobody,” a trite poem by Charles Mackay that appeared in the Springfield Republican (1858). The closing lines of its two stanzas: “I’m but little Nobody — Nobody am I,” “Who would be a Somebody? — Nobody am I.” Okay. But I’d rather think of Dickinson finding inspiration in Brontë’s protagonist, whose life of aloneness, walking by herself in empty classrooms, stealing away to an attic to read a letter, must have made compelling reading for the poet.

There were two copies of Villette in the Dickinson family library: one from 1853, one from 1859. In neither are the passages I’ve quoted marked. Then again, in all of Jane Eyre there are just two passages that Dickinson marked.

”Who are you, Miss Dickinson?”

“I am a rising character — Vesuvius at home.”

Related reading
All OCA Brontë posts and Dickinson posts (Pinboard)

[Miss Fanshawe doesn’t speak the word “somebody”: the contrast between “nobody” and “somebody” is Lucy’s. Sewall writes about Mackay’s poem in The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974). Sewall doesn’t mention Villette in relation to 260. “Vesuvius at home”: from Dickinson’s 1691, which ends, “A Crater I may contemplate / Vesuvius at home.” The phrase became the title of Adrienne Rich’s 1976 essay “Vesuvius at Home.”]

Paving-stones

Back at Madame Beck’s school after a concert.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

This passage seems to presage one in Marcel Proust’s Finding Time Again (1927). As Proust’s narrator enters the Guermantes’ Paris courtyard, its uneven paving stones bring back the past: “And almost at once I realized that it was Venice,” and the narrator experiences the sensation he felt “on the two uneven flagstones in the baptistery of St. Mark’s.” There’s nothing like an exact resemblance here: Lucy Snowe is back at the scene of a crucial moment in her life; remembering it, she notices a detail she noticed then. For Proust’s narrator, one discrete moment brings back another without conscious effort. Still, paving-stones.

A colorful detail about one of the hired men in the male brothel in this volume of Proust’s novel: he was involved in the murder of a concierge at La Villette. La Villette is a Paris park.

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

[Translation by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).]

“The radiant present”

Off to a concert. Lucy Snowe begins to see more of the city of Villette, capital of the fictional French-speaking kingdom of Labassecour.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

“Empty, quiet, cool, and clean”

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

Brontë manuscripts

Brontë manuscripts for sale: “A trove of Brontë family manuscripts — all but unseen for a century — will be auctioned by Sotheby’s as part of what the auction house is billing as the sale of a legendary ‘lost library’ of British literature treasures” (The New York Times ).

Words of the day: estrade and dais

What’s the word for the platform at the front of a classroom where the instructor’s desk stands? Is there a word for it? I was reaching for such a word on Saturday and later found one in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette : estrade.

From the Oxford English Dictionary : “a slightly raised platform; a dais.” Estrade is borrowed from French, which gets the word from the Spanish estrado. The first OED citation for the word in English is from 1696. But when Brontë uses the word, it’s undoubtedly meant to be read as French, in the company of classe, classroom; grenier, attic; salle à manger, dining room; and so on. The OED provides a citation that places us in a classroom. From J.G. Fitch’s Lectures on Teaching (1880): “The teacher . . . should have his desk on a mounted estrade or platform.”

Dais is a much older word, first appearing in English in the thirteenth century. It has relatives in Old French, modern French, Italian, and Provençal. The primal source is the Latin discum, table. The OED definitions:

A raised table in a hall, at which distinguished persons sat at feasts, etc.; the high table. (Often including the platform on which it was raised.)

The raised platform at one end of a hall for the high table, or for seats of honour, a throne, or the like: often surmounted by a canopy.

The dictionary notes that these meanings became obsolete in 1600 but were later revived by historical writers and antiquarians.

Another meaning came later, with a first citation from 1888, post-Brontë:

By extension: The platform of a lecture hall; the raised floor on which the pulpit and communion table stand in some places of worship.

I will admit that in my life as a student and teacher, I never heard anyone speak of a dais or an estrade. A reference to the first would have made me think of the table at a Dean Martin celebrity roast. A reference to the second would have baffled me:

Professor: “Come up to the estrade after class and we can talk about that question.”

Me: “?”

But some of my earliest teaching took place in a classe with an estrade. (I’m sticking to the French of Villette for fun.) The estrade — okay, platform — must have been at least a foot off the classroom floor, with an extra step between platform and floor. I often descended from my perch to walk around the front of the room at an altitude that felt more congenial.

*

A question came up in the comments: Geo-B wondered about a name for the front-of-the-room classroom fixture with sink and Bunsen burner. I asked a chemistry teacher. It’s called a demonstration table or demonstration bench. Thanks, Phyllis!

Here, from the American Chemical Society, is a description of a properly outfitted chemistry classroom.

Shadow-world

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

“Anglaise!”

In a coffee-room in the fictional French-speaking kingdom of Labassecour, forty miles from the capital Villette, Lucy Snowe is alone in several ways.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

Related reading
All OCA Charlotte Brontë posts (Pinboard)

“Weeks of inward winter”

At Dreamers Rise, a passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette that seems made for these times.

The sentences that made me give up on Shirley

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

“Ah!” said I, shaking my head, and heaving a deep sigh. Life’s too short. And Shirley hadn’t even shown up yet.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things : Some trees

Word of the day: hogwash

As found in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). Hortense, indignant, reports what Sara said about the choucroute. Go ahead, Hortense:

“That barrel we have in the cellar — delightfully prepared by my own hands — she termed a tub of hog-wash, which means food for pigs.”

Yes, it does, or did.

The Oxford English Dictionary: “kitchen refuse and scraps (esp. in liquid form) used as food for pigs; pigswill. Now chiefly historical.“ The dictionary’s first citation is from circa 1450. Its most helpful citation is the most recent one, from Judith Flanders’s The Victorian House (2004):

Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called “wash,” and the washman visited regularly to buy it: he then sold it as “hog-wash,” or pigswill.

By 1610 the word acquired a “depreciative” meaning: “any liquid for drinking that is of very poor quality, as cheap beer, wine, etc.” I like this citation, From Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat (1923):

“Wine? You call that red hog-wash wine?”

And later, a third colloquial meaning originated in the United States: “nonsense; esp. worthless, ridiculous, or nonsensical ideas, discourse, or writing.” The dictionary’s first citation is from Mark Twain, writing in The Galaxy (1870):

I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is “hogwash.”

In OED citations, it’s sometimes hogwash, sometimes hog-wash. In our time, the hyphenless form is vastly more frequent. As perhaps is hogwash itself.

Twelve movies

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

Black Legion (dir. Archie Mayo, 1937). Humphrey Bogart plays a machinist, embittered when a promotion he thinks should be his goes to a “foreigner.” And so he joins up with the hoods and robes of the Black Legion. Based on contemporary events and disturbingly of our own time, with warnings about “anarchists” and cries of “America for Americans.” The supporting cast includes Dick Foran (later a regular on Lassie), Charles Halton, Samuel Hinds, Ann Sheridan, each of whom, I have to say, is a better actor than Bogart. ★★★

*

Fright (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1956). A chance YouTube find that we had to watch, because Nancy Malone. It’s her first movie role, and she does just fine in a bizarro story of past lives and hypnosis. Other viewers might want to watch to see Eric Fleming, who would soon star in Rawhide. A bonus: fans of The Honeymooners should watch for Frank Marth, branching out to play a serial killer. ★★

*

Night Must Fall (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1937). Look past the staginess (it’s from a play by Emlyn Williams) and you’ll find a deeply suspenseful story of a young psychopath (Robert Montgomery) who ingratiates himself with a wealthy invalid (Dame May Whitty) and her niece (Rosalind Russell). The principals are excellent, and if you know Whitty only as Hitchcock’s Mrs. Froy, you’ll be surprised by her performance here. And speaking of Hitchcock: this film would pair well with Shadow of a Doubt. There’s even a hint of the twinning that unites Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlie. ★★★★

*


[Source: IMDb.]

Devotion (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Incredible: a movie about the Brontës that seems not to have mentioned the Brontës in its American advertising. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland) and Emily (Ida Lupino) form an improbable love triangle with a fusty cleric (Paul Henreid, complete with his accent), as Anne (Nancy Coleman) is kept off to the side, her writing coming in for no attention. Branwell Brontë (Arthur Kennedy) is here in all his dissoluteness, and there’s an inchoate but unmistakable suggestion of incestuous desire at work in this reclusive family. Lupino to my mind is the star (her Emily is the ur emo-kid), but Sydney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray threatens to steal the show. ★★★

*

Riffraff (dir. J. Walter Ruben, 1936.) Love, labor trouble, and canned fish. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow play Dutch and Hattie, fisherman and cannery worker. At key points the story requires the suspension of disbelief — painfully so. Joseph Calleia, Una Merkel, and Mickey Rooney provide some comic relief. The best performance by an actor I’d never heard of goes to J. Farrell MacDonald as a wise, compassionate fisherman known, rightly so, as Brains. ★★★

*

A Man Called Adam (dir. Leo Penn, 1966). Sammy Davis Jr. as Adam Johnson, a Miles-like musician (cornet, not trumpet, solos by Nat Adderley) living with a massive burden of grief, guilt, and racism. There’s a fair amount of malarkey here: Louis Armstrong has a small role as a has-been purveyor of “true jazz” who’ll soon be going back to “the rice fields” (what?); Cicely Tyson is a civil rights activist but seems to have nothing to do except hang out with Adam; and Frank Sinatra Jr. is a young wannabe following in Adam’s footsteps. I found more to appreciate in the moments between Adam and his pianist (Johnny Brown). Look too for Ja ’Net DuBois, Lola Falana, and Kai Winding — and Mel Tormé, who gets the last word. ★★★

*

The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). A Capraesque fairy tale of happy times for labor and management. Charles Coburn shines as a cranky department-store owner who goes undercover in the shoe department to root out union organizers. Jean Arthur shines as a clerk who takes for him a fellow without money enough to afford lunch. Spring Byington, Bob Cummings, Edmund Gwenn, and S.Z. Sakall shine — and these working folks, they’re not so bad after all, eh, Mr. Capitalist Big Shot? ★★★★

*

Illegal (dir. Lewis Allen, 1955). I’m impressed again and again by Edward G. Robinson’s range as an actor. Here he plays a DA who unknowingly sends an innocent man to the chair, falls apart, quits, and ends up working for the mob, with startling results. Nina Foch plays Robinson’s prosecutorial mentee, in what might be her best role. Television fans will like seeing DeForest Kelley and Edward Platt. ★★★★

*

Fear in the Night (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1947). And speaking of DeForest Kelley, this film is his feature-length debut, with a strong assist from Paul Kelly. The premise: a man dreams he’s committed a murder and wakes up with objects from the scene of the crime in his possession. Two crucial questions: did he really kill someone, and more importantly, had we seen this film before? Alas, the eeriness diminishes as the story develops and we figured out that yes, we’d seen it before. ★★

*

Politics (dir. Charles F. Reiser, 1931). Wives and mothers take action to combat gangsters and bootlegging. I saw a few minutes on TCM and mistook the movie for a variation on Lysistrata, but the women’s strike — an effort to withhold “everything,” meaning “Yes, everything, parlor, bedroom, and bath” — is but a small element in the story. What’s here, really, is a vehicle for two great comediennes I’d never seen before: Marie Dressler as a mayoral candidate, Polly Moran as her pal and supporter. Another welcome presence: Karen Morley, whom I think I know only from King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread. ★★★

*

Mystery House (dir. Noel M. Smith, 1938). Ann Sheridan and William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) brighten this movie, in which one person after another dies in or near a hunting lodge. If you discovered that someone in your company had embezzled a fortune, you’d invite all suspects to a remote gun-filled lodge and promise to reveal the culprit’s identity there, wouldn’t you? What, you think that’s improbable? My favorite element in the film: the eerie motto above the fireplace, which comes from the novel that is film’s source. ★★


[“The End of all Good Hunting is Nearer than you Dream.” Mignon G. Eberhart, The Mystery of Hunting’s End. 1930. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.) William Hopper played clean, well-soaped Lal Killian.]

*

The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963). Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which a small team of psychic researchers seeks the truth about a haunted house. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom (the latter in a Mary Quant wardrobe) give great performances as young recruits; Russ Tamblyn as heir to the house provides comic relief and a dash of sanity; Richard Johnson as team leader is a bit of a bore with his clipboard and pipe and talk about “man” and his superstitions. Davis Boulton’s cinematography adds all sorts of fear and uncertainty to the proceedings. Here’s a real mystery house, in an ultra-scary film that looks back to Poe and ahead to Stranger Things. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Some trees

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things

[“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

Small things

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

I stepped away from Shirley, but I had to save this lovely sentence.

Small things today: walking, reading, take-out because it’s Friday. I take none of these small things for granted.

*

I just discovered the source, Zechariah 4:10: “For who has despised the day of small things?” (KJV).

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky”

“In all quarters of the sky”

Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (1857).

This passage is for my friend Diane Schirf, who likes the night sky sans light pollution.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head

[X—— is a mill town.]

Bumps

Like the Brontës, William Crimsworth’s new acquaintance Hunsden Yorke Hunsdsen appears to ascribe to physiognomy and phrenology:


Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (1857).

The Professor, published posthumously, is an odd duck. Of greatest interest: its principal characters (both teachers), its depiction of marriage, and, in the person of Mr. Hunsden, its barely coded presentation of a gay man.

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist

[X—— is a mill town.]

Jane Eyre, descriptivist

”There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in persons or things,” sighs Jane Eyre. In contrast, Jane herself, as she sets off from Thornfield Hall to mail a letter:


Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847).

And we can already figure out from the way novels work that something important is about to happen on this walk.

Descriptions of landscapes are what I like best in Jane Eyre.

Related posts
A word from Charlotte Brontë
Three words from Charlotte Brontë

Three words from Charlotte Brontë

From Jane Eyre (1847), ing, holm, and beck :

How different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow! — when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds along those purple peaks, and rolled down “ing” and holm till they blended with the frozen fog of the beck!

Ing is the most recent of these words. The Oxford English Dictionary has a first citation from 1483 and gives this definition:

a common name in the north of England, and in some other parts, for a meadow; esp. one by the side of a river and more or less swampy or subject to inundation.

The word derives from the Old Norse eng, meaning “meadow, meadow-land.”

Holm goes back to Beowulf, where it means “the sea, the wave.” But the meaning in Brontë’s sentence comes much later:

a piece of flat low-lying ground by a river or stream, submerged or surrounded in time of flood.

This sense of the word derives from Old Norse holmr, “islet in a bay, creek, lake, or river, meadow on the shore.” The earliest citation is undated but predates 1440. The dictionary adds that holm is still

in living use in the south of Scotland (howm) and north of England, and extending far south in place-names; “a flat pasture in Romney Marsh (Kent) is yet called the Holmes” (Way).

“Living use” in that sentence means in 1899, but holm does appear to still be used in place names. And there’s still a Holmes Way.

And now for beck:

a brook or stream: the ordinary name in those parts of England from Lincolnshire to Cumbria which were occupied by the Danes and Norwegians; hence, often used spec. in literature to connote a brook with stony bed, or rugged course, such as are those of the north country.

Beck dates to before 1400 and comes from the Old Norse bekk-r, “brook, rivulet.”

“Such as are those of the north country”: that’s beautiful, no?

A related post
A word from Charlotte Brontë: beck

A word from Charlotte Brontë

It’s Barmecide, from Jane Eyre (1847):

That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings.

It’s a noun. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this defintion: “One who offers imaginary food or illusory benefits. Often attributive.” The etymology is the good part:

the patronymic of a family of princes ruling at Bagdad just before Haroun-al-Raschid, concerning one of whom the story is told in the Arabian Nights, that he put a succession of empty dishes before a beggar, pretending that they contained a sumptuous repast — a fiction which the beggar humorously accepted.

Pass the potatoes.

A related post
Three words from Charlotte Brontë: ing, holm, beck

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.

Word of the day: gormless

From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847):

“I’ve tied his tongue,” observed Heathcliff. “He’ll not venture a single syllable all the time! Nelly, you recollect me at his age — nay, some years younger. Did I ever look so stupid, so ‘gaumless,’ as Joseph calls it?”

Joseph, you may recall, is a sour, pious servant at Wuthering Heights. He speaks a Yorkshire dialect — thus gaumless, or gormless.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains gormless as the union of the dialect word gaum, for gome, “notice, understanding,” and the suffix -less. To be gormless is to be “wanting sense, or discernment.” The dictionary’s first citation is given as ?1746. The question from Wuthering Heights comes second, followed by citations from 1861, 1881, 1883, and so on. It seems reasonable to speculate that Brontë’s novel led to more frequent use of the word. This Google Ngram shows use beginning to rise in 1854. Gaumless started to rise in 1853. Granted, the various editions of Brontë’s novel in Google Books might account for those initial spikes. The steep drop from 2011 to 2012 for both words is probably best explained by a lack of scanned books.

I always think of gormless and followed by wonder — the kind of insult people toss around in old movies. No gormless wonders in the OED though.

Twelve movies

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

Motherless Brooklyn (dir. Edward Norton, 2019). Norton stars as Motherless Brooklyn, a ticcing private detective (born in Brooklyn, then orphaned, thus the nickname) whose effort to uncover the truth about his mentor’s murder leads him to the heart of municipal corruption and personal scandal. This film feels interminable at first but picks up considerably with the entry of Alec Baldwin as Moses Randolph, a thinly disguised and highly Trumpian version of Robert Moses, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Laura Rose, a citizen who fights against so-called urban renewal with Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones), a thinly disguised version of Jane Jacobs. Alas, the film tries hard to check all boxes (detective has an audience with Mr. Big, detective arranges to meet someone and finds a dead body, detective begins an inevitable romance) and thus always seems like it’s trying to be noir. Bonus: Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire ’s Omar Little) as a thinly disguised, unnamed version of Miles Davis. ★★★

*

Moontide (dir. Archie Mayo, 1942). It went into the Netflix queue because of Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino, and I was happily surprised by how good — and strange — this film is. Bobo (Gabin) is a longshoreman who falls in with unemployed waitress Anna (Lupino). Waterfront types Tiny (Thomas Mitchell) and Nutsy (Claude Rains) are visitors to the bait barge where Bobo and Anna have made a home of sorts. Terrible events lurk in the past, and terrible events are to come, all presented in a stagey, dream-like setting, with brilliant effects of light and fog. ★★★★

*

Sapphire (dir. Basil Dearden, 1959). A police procedural with a focus on race in British culture, with two (white) detectives moving through white and black London to solve the murder of a beautiful young woman. The film is so steeped in casual racism — sometimes blatant, sometimes more genteel — that it’s possible to imagine any of the principals having committed murder. Most interesting scene: the visit to International Club, the one place in the film where humankind in all its varieties is welcome and at home. Sapphire is the third Dearden film we’ve seen (after All Night Long and Victim). ★★★★

*

Cold War (dir. Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018). Love and doom across decades and borders, in a story set in Poland, East Germany, France, Yugoslavia, Poland, and elsewhere. Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), composer, pianist, director of a state-sponsored folk-music ensemble, meets Zula (Joanna Kulig), singer, at an audition. What might have been a bittersweet episode consigned to memory becomes a relationship revived again and again, with ever more terrible consequences. The already harrowing story becomes more harrowing when you learn that it’s inspired by the relationship of the director’s parents. ★★★★

*

Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 (dir. Frank Stiefel, 2016). My library now requires the completion of an online form for a Kanopy film (the cost to have all films available to stream is prohibitive), so for “Reason” I typed “Curiosity,” and that was enough. Thank you, library. This is a beautifully made short documentary about Mindy Alper, a Los Angeles artist who turns her childhood traumas and psychiatric struggles into profound pen-and-ink drawings and papier-mâché sculptures. My favorite line: “I wish to want to make art.” ★★★★

*

Crossing Delancey (dir. Joan Micklin Silver, 1988). Isabelle, or Izzy (Amy Irving), works at a tony Upper West Side bookstore, in awe of the writers who gather there, including alpha-male Anton (Jeroen Krabbé). But down on the Lower East Side, Izzy’s bubbie (Reizl Bozyk) and a matchmaker (Sylvia Miles) have another man in mind for Izzy: a plainspoken, unassuming mensch, Sam the pickle man (Peter Riegert). If Izzy could only figure out that she’s a character in a film, everything that you know is going to happen would happen a lot sooner — but where would be the fun in that? Favorite moments: the utterly pompous literary “soiree,” with Rosemary Harris channeling (I think) Elsa Lanchester as the eccentric painter in The Big Clock; the mix of Run-D.M.C. and “Some Enchanted Evening” in Gray’s Papaya; Benny Goodman playing on what must be a magical radio. ★★★

*

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story (dir. Gregory V. Sherman and Jeffrey C. Sherman, 2009). I knew in a vague way that Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman were the sound of Disney: “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and all that. I didn’t know that their songwriting also included, say, “You’re Sixteen” (a hit for Johnny Burnette and, years later, Ringo Starr). Filled with interviews and clips from movies, this documentary tells a story of musical collaboration and brotherly alienation, though just what went wrong between the Shermans is never really explained (but it’s easy to guess). The filmmakers are their fathers’ sons, working together, which suggests some element of next-generation healing. ★★★★

*

The Mask of Dimitrios (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1944). For years, never having seen this movie, I’ve had a bit of nonsense from it in my head, something I read somewhere, something about Algerian coffee: “It takes a little longer to prepare it, but I prefer it.” The premise is pretty plain: a meek and mild writer of mysteries (Peter Lorre) uncovering the story of the dead criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott) teams up with a suave criminal (Sydney Grenstreet) who is also on the Dimitrios trail. Flashbacks follow, but alas, there’s nothing especially interesting about Dimitrios or the big plot twist — painfully obvious, and yet a mystery writer misses it. But I liked the movie for its atmosphere (that staircase!), its Maltese Falcon overtones, the chance to see Lorre and Greenstreet as a serio-comic duo, and the opportunity to finally hear the line about — is there such a thing? — Algerian coffee. ★★

*

Wuthering Heights (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1958). A television adaptation from The DuPont Show of the Month, rediscovered and recently aired on TCM. Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris are an excellent partnership as Heathcliff and Catherine. The sets are spare, the camera is right in the actors’ faces, and somehow the larger-than-life performances seem strangely suited to the small screen. I give major props to the mid-century American culture that found Emily Brontë suitable for prime-time television. ★★★★

*

Being Canadian (dir. Robert Cohen, 2015). Cohen, a writer for television comedies, does something of a Michael Moore imitation, going on a road trip in search of what it means to be Canadian. As I watched this documentary, I thought of a moment from a long-ago graduate seminar: as we went around the room introducing ourselves, our prof asked one student, “And you are?” and she replied, “Canadian.” Apologies, diffidence, and self-deprecation are on full view here, but the film is little more than an increasingly tedious shtick, with too many comedians, too much belaboring the obvious (maple syrup, maple syrup), and a forced last-minute epiphany. Margaret Atwood, Glenn Gould, Joni Mitchell, Alice Munro, Neil Young: there’s no sign of their Canada here. ★

*

Berlin Express (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1948). The first time I watched, I followed the plot. This time I had a better chance to marvel at the locations, as the film was made largely in post-war Frankfurt. Remarkable to see Merle Oberon and Robert Ryan and company striding past and into the ruins. A bonus in this brilliant movie: the two clowns. ★★★★

*

The Limits of Control (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2009). I can make sense of it, of some of it, some sense of some of it, if I have to. The protagonist, known in the credits as Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé), is, I think, a character in “the movies,” in costume, taking direction, moving through Spain as he completes tasks and has a series of (one-sided) conversations with colorful cameo-appearance strangers. Lone Man’s mission seems to be the destruction of some Burroughsian Reality Studio (“Break though in Grey Room,” I kept recalling). Beautiful landscapes and one extraordinary moment of flamenco, but overall, a slog. ★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

[The phrase “Break though in Grey Room” appears in William Burroughs’s three cut-up novels: Nova Express, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. After-the-fact discovery: Jarmusch’s title comes from an essay by Burroughs.]

Night class

I was waiting to teach a night class — my least favorite kind of teaching. The class was to start at 7:30. I waited outside the room in a narrow hallway: low ceiling, bare lightbulbs, tile walls, no windows, basement-like. The water fountain in the hallway was combined with a urinal. The drain was in the floor, right next to the fountain’s foot pedal, so that pressing to get a drink would almost certainly have meant stepping into someone’s urine. Still waiting for class, I went out to walk by the seashore with my teacher Jim Doyle. I told him how surprised I was to learn — from reading his notes and marginalia — that he loved football. He’d written to the president about it and had received a reply. Jim’s voice sounded raspy. I knew that Jim had died, but here he was. I was happy to see him.

I started teaching at 8:00. I asked the students, “How’d it get so late?” No one knew. I was teaching a Dickens novel and had notes, of some sort, with me, but I hadn’t read the novel, or at least not for a long time. Among its elements: an orphan girl at school, an adjunct instructor, an evil headmistress, a mysterious woman. I described the novel as “a vast canvas.” Instead of beginning with the orphan, the first character to appear, I began with the mysterious woman. Comparisons to Ishtar and Circe — the dangerous seducer. This woman was also a damsel in distress. I showed a clip from a French film adaptation of the novel and wanted to go back to a moment in which a great many emotions play across the character’s face: fear, confidence, doubt, longing. But I could find only commercials. At some point I noticed a colleague — one of my least favorite colleagues — sitting in the back row, smiling. He had come to observe.

Time was running out. “Next time we’ll begin by talking about the orphan,” I said. Students were already leaving. Two students in a corner had turned on a television and were watching a cowboy movie. “I need one more minute to finish what I need to say,” I yelled. “Please turn off the TV.” I asked four times before walking to the set, unplugging it, and waking.

Likely sources: a tiled hallway in Widener Library (perhaps this one), rest-stop bathrooms, manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum (including A Christmas Carol and many Charlotte Brontë items), Jim Doyle’s videotaped reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” an NPR story about letters to President Barack Obama, Jean Stapleton’s expressive face in an All in the Family episode, academic politics, and who knows what else. This is the sixth classroom dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.