Mediterranean fatalism

Over five nights in late July and early August, I made my way through the twenty-one episodes of the sixth (final) season of The Sopranos on DVD. No spoilers, if you haven't watched: I'll say only that there's much time spent in hospitals, "facilities," "centers," and funeral homes. It's a season of sickness and violence and death.

As a semi-Italian Brooklyn native and former New Jerseyan, I take great pleasure in the show's dialogue, which sounds, from my experience, remarkably true to life. (The exceptions: when Tony Soprano is made to say things like "I'm miffled" and "Rick Sanatorium," à la Archie Bunker.) One bit of dialogue that I noticed returning with some frequency in this season:

"What are you gonna do?"

That's Mediterranean fatalism itself, in five words.

"What are you gonna do?" is a rhetorical question that suits a variety of circumstances: Somebody's wife ran off? Somebody has cancer? Somebody has Alzheimer's? Somebody died? What are you gonna do?

In the world of The Sopranos, this rhetorical question marks the temporary surrender of illusion. Tony and company would like to believe that they're in control, of their lives and the lives of others. But sometimes there's nothing they can do, because life is difficult and unpredictably painful.

The Greek warrior Achilles expresses this sense of life's mystery and suffering in his words to the Trojan king Priam in Iliad 24. Achilles explains that Zeus keeps two jars, one filled with "good things," the other "a jar of woe." Some human beings get things from both jars. Some get only woe. And it's not fair:

"Yes, the gods have woven pain into mortal lives,
While they are free from care."

What are you gonna do?

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo.]

Another Sopranos post
Angelo Bucco's notebook

Angelo Bucco's notebook

Artie Bucco's Nuovo Vesuvio is hurting. The problems: tired menu, tired decor, and Artie himself. He's a "warm" and "convivial" host, the guidebooks say, but people want to be left alone to eat and talk; they don't want to listen to his line of patter. One night, with the kitchen closed and some late arrivals wanting a meal, Artie takes out a notebook of his grandfather's recipes and rediscovers the vocation of cooking.



The people at The Sopranos have done a fine job of distressing, but — all due respect — it's easy to recognize this composition book as the kind that one can buy in any big-box store. An old, truly old, book would have a hard, thick cover, and something other than the single sans-serif word Compositions. I'm thinking of the Royal "Vernon Line" composition books of my elementary-school days, with varnished covers and watermarked paper. (Alas, I cannot find a single image of such a composition book online. But I recently saw a reproduction of a Royal inside-rear-cover in R. Crumb's Crumb Family Comics [Last Gasp, 1998].)

Artie is about to prepare coniglio (rabbit), with an animal he shot in his garden. Enjoy!

[Images from "Luxury Lounge," The Sopranos (sixth season, seventh episode). Click for larger views, and note the metric measurements.]

More notebook sightings
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Extras
Journal d'un curé de campagne
The House on 92nd Street
The Palm Beach Story
Pickpocket
Pickup on South Street
Red-Headed Woman
Rififi Another Sopranos post Mediterranean fatalism

Obama and inflation

Time considers inflation:

How out of touch is Barack Obama? He's so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce. Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled "Barack Obama's Energy Plan" to Washington reporters.

But who's really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

In fact, Obama's actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that's not what's so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.

"The primary goal of parenting"

The primary goal of parenting, beyond keeping our children safe and loved, is to convey to them a sense that it is possible to be happy in an uncertain world, to give them hope. We do this, of course, by example more than by anything we say to them. If we can demonstrate in our own lives qualities of commitment, determination, and optimism, then we have done our job and can use our books of child-rearing advice for doorstops or fireplace fuel. What we cannot do is expect that children who are constantly criticized, bullied, and lectured will think well of themselves and their futures.

Gordon Livingston, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 124

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Vacationing with Hi and Lois

I like the Flagstons, but what century do they drive in? From the NHSTA: "Children age 12 and under should ride properly restrained in back."

[Hi and Lois, August 3, 2008.]

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Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 4)

"ATwater 0-2390, please": Janet Cullen (Lisa Howard) tries to get in touch with her detective husband Andy (John Dall). She's calling from their arty basement apartment. ATwater, I am happy to report, appears in the Bell System's 1955 listing of recommended exchange names.

(Says my daughter: "Your blog is becoming a shrine to the telephone.")

The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950, dir. Felix E. Feist) offers the moviegoer some unusual opportunities:

1. The opportunity to see Lee J. Cobb and John Dall (thrill-killer Brandon Shaw from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope) play brothers.

2. The opportunity to see Jane Wyatt (Margaret Anderson from the television series Father Knows Best) smoke cigarettes and kill someone.

3. The opportunity to tour San Francisco's desolate Fort Point in a long final scene.

Lisa Howard's post-movie life took a remarkable and remarkably sad turn.

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Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 3)

It is the correction that matters

A correction in today's New York Times addresses the question of who said "It is the journey, not the arrival, that matters":

An article on July 20 about the economy's effects on Americans' vacations misattributed the saying that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters. Although it has been attributed through the years to T. S. Eliot — as the article did — Leonard Woolf, the author and the husband of Virginia Woolf, in his autobiography, "Downhill All the Way," cites Montaigne, the 16th-century essayist, as having written, "It is not the arrival, but the journey which matters."

The Times did better than me (as well it should, right?) by tracking down the work in which Woolf attributes the statement to Montaigne (I just confirmed it via Google Book Search). The correction makes no reference to Woolf's own The Journey Not the Arrival Matters and (perhaps wisely) avoids the question of whether Montaigne is the source of this aphorism.

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From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne

Joanna Newsom's items in a series

From an interview with Joanna Newsom:

Do you love your country?

I love William Faulkner, Dolly Parton, fried chicken, Van Dyke Parks, the Grand Canyon, Topanga Canyon, bacon cheeseburgers with horseradish, Georgia O'Keeffe, Grand Ole Opry, Gary Snyder, Gilda Radner, Radio City Music Hall, Big Sur, Ponderosa pines, Southern BBQ, Highway One, Kris Kristofferson, National Arts Club in New York, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway, Harriet Tubman, Hearst Castle, Ansel Adams, Kenneth Jay Lane, Yuba River, South Yuba River Citizens League, “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore”, “Hired Hand”, “The Jerk”, “The Sting”, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, clambakes, lobster rolls, s'mores, camping in the Sierra Nevadas, land sailing in the Nevada desert, riding horseback in Canyon de Chelly, Walker Percy, Billie Holiday, Drag City, Chez Panisse/Alice Waters/slow food movement, David Crosby, Ralph Lauren, San Francisco Tape Music Center, Albert Brooks, Utah Phillips, Carol Moseley Braun, Bolinas CA, Ashland OR, Lawrence KS, Austin TX, Bainbridge Island WA, Marilyn Monroe, Mills College, Elizabeth Cotton, Carl Sandburg, the Orange Show in Houston, Toni Morrison, Texas Gladden, California College of Ayurvedic Medicine, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Saturday Night Live, Aaron Copland, Barack Obama, Oscar de la Renta, Alan Lomax, Joyce Carol Oates, Fred Neil, Henry Cowell, Barneys New York, Golden Gate Park, Musee Mechanique, Woody Guthrie, Maxfield Parrish, Malibu, Maui, Napa Valley, Terry Riley, drive-in movies, homemade blackberry ice cream from blackberries picked on my property, Lil Wayne, Walt Whitman, Halston, Lavender Ridge Grenache from Lodi CA, Tony Duquette, Julia Morgan, Lotta Crabtree, Empire Mine, North Columbia Schoolhouse, Disneyland, Nevada County Grandmothers for Peace, Roberta Flack, Randy Newman, Mark Helprin, Larry David, Prince, cooking on Thanksgiving, Shel Silverstein, Lee Hazlewood, Lee Radziwill, Jackie Onassis, E.B. White, William Carlos Williams, Jay Z, Ralph Stanley, Allen Ginsberg, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, RFK, Rosa Parks, Arthur Miller, “The Simpsons”, Julia Child, Henry Miller, Arthur Ashe, Anne Bancroft, The Farm Midwifery Center in TN, Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Clark Gable, Harry Nilsson, Woodstock, and some other stuff. Buuuut, the ol' U S of A can pull some pretty dick moves. I'm hoping it'll all come out in the wash.

People and the rest of us

Another passage from Gordon Livingston:

Our attention spans are notoriously short. Events move past us with great rapidity. Our memories are consequently limited and we focus on the foreground. We pay attention to a limited number of mostly young, good-looking, and wealthy persons who fill the pages of one of our aptly named magazines: People. If they are the people, who are the rest of us? What does it signify to be obscure in a world preoccupied with fame, however earned or unearned? As long as we measure others and ourselves by what we have and how we look, life is inevitably a discouraging experience, characterized by greed, envy, and a desire to be someone else.

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 85

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I am nonplussed

My friend the dictionary has let me know not only that I've misunderstood the word nonplussed but that everyone around me misunderstands it too.

I've taken nonplussed to mean "not bothered," "unfazed," as did a colleague in a brief exchange about my son the college student:

"It's a lot more work than high school was."

"Well, I'm sure he's nonplussed about it."

"Oh, he's plussed. He's a little plussed."

Please imagine my rejoinder as Larry David might deliver it, for this conversation is as close as I've ever come to having life imitate Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Plussed, at least as I was using it, is not a word (as I suspected, and my son wasn't fazed anyway). Nonplussed of course means the opposite of what my colleague and I thought it meant. From the Oxford English Dictionary:

nonplus, v. trans.
To bring to a nonplus or standstill; to perplex, confound. Freq. in pa[st]. p[artci]ple. (cf. NONPLUSSED adj.).

nonplussed, adj.
Brought to a nonplus or standstill; at a nonplus; perplexed, confounded.

The words go back to the Latin non plus, meaning "not more," "no further." An OED sample sentence, from Josephine Tey's novel The Franchise Affair (1949): "Now, seeing the actual physical Betty Kane again, he was nonplussed."

Realizing my mistake about the word nonplussed left me nonplussed, but only briefly. It was probably a lot worse for the guy who saw Miss Kane, actual, physical, again.

[Faze: A word that looks as though it must be misspelled, no? I always reassure my students that, yes, it's legit.]