At a certain point in the wonderful new movie Julie & Julia, there is a plot twist so shocking the audience gasps. Julia Child does something that seems so totally out of character that even on the way out, people were still shaking their heads. “How could she?” Well, that’s one mystery I can solve. I was right there in the middle of it.Food writer Russ Parsons tells all:
“A guitar is a great bartender, a great psychiatrist, a great mistress.”That’s Les Paul speaking, in a years-old newspaper article that’s been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. Les Paul died today in New York.
President Barack Obama:
This isn’t about politics. This is about people’s lives. This is about people’s business. This is about our future.The White House has created a website to combat the toxic legends in the air:
Mario Camerini’s 1954 film Ulysses is now available on DVD. I am the proud custodian of a videotape copy, rescued from a going-out-of-business video-rental store.
The film’s a hoot in any format. Kirk Douglas is a plausible Odysseus, wily to the core, though his character lacks the grumbling moodiness that befits a man of constant sorrow. In an inspired bit of casting, Silvana Mangano plays both Circe and Penelope. And Anthony Quinn is the suitors’ ringleader Antinous. Hoo boy!
A related post
Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) (With a still from the film)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, sort of, that we are all writers now. Walter Benjamin’s observations suggest that we were all writers “then,” too:
For centuries the situation in literature was such that a small number of writers faced many thousands of times that number of readers. Then, towards the end of the last century, there came a change. As the press grew in volume, making ever-increasing numbers of new political, religious, scientific, professional and local organs available to its readership, larger and larger sections of that readership (gradually, at first) turned into writers. It began with the daily newspapers opening their ‘correspondence columns’ to such people, and it has now reached a point where few Europeans involved in the labour process could fail, basically, to find some opportunity or other to publish an experience at work, a complaint, a piece of reporting or something similar. The distinction between writer and readership is thus in the process of losing its fundamental character. That distinction is becoming a functional one, assuming a different form from one case to the next. The reader is constantly ready to become a writer.“The reader is constantly ready to become a writer”: as this post attests. Benjamin here, as at so many other points in this essay, is eerily relevant to our time. What he of course could not foresee was that publication itself would become the work of the everyday citizen online.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. A.J. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2008), 22–23.
Elaine and I have been volunteering at a soup kitchen this summer, serving hot lunches and making up takeaway sacks. Thus we have become acquainted with hairnets — one of us directly.
The figure to the left appears in Magic Marker on the kitchen’s box of hairnets (“Lightweight Nylon,” “144 / Ct.”) beneath a handwritten explanation, also in Magic Marker:
If your hair is shoulder length you must wear a net.I like the way this illustration softens what might otherwise be mistaken for the voice of impersonal authority. Seeing this smiling, vaguely Mesopotamian figure has made me smile several times this summer.
Yes, you too can learn the uke chords for Beatles songs, at Ukulele Beatles Fun! (“Self-improvement for free.”)
No “Revolution 9” though — I must search on.
[This post is dedicated to my favorite ukulelist and favorite banjoist.]
The news of prisoners plagiarizing poems prompted Geo-B to comment via a poem of his own. I’ve added it to my previous post, but this poem should have a room of its own:
Editor’s LamentThanks, George!
Whose words these are I think I know
He’s not from cell block seven though
I heard it might be Bobby Frost
Who’s doing time up on death row.
We’re publishing a prison mag
With poems and stories in the bag
It’s “Prose and Cons,” so aptly named
Yet this seems pilfered as a gag.
I’ve read it someplace else I think
But I have plenty time to do
And miles to go before I fink
And miles to go before I fink.
You need to post more than once a week to have any hope of attracting readers to your blog. Daily postings are even better.Further reading
Tom Parker, Rules of Thumb: A Life Manual (New York: Workman Publishing, 2008), 224.
