A P.S. 131 class picture, 1963–1964

[Click for a larger view.]

Dig the flag. Dig the hairdos. Dig the cross ties. (They’re coming back; I know they are.) Dig the diamond-shaped tie of the boy in the top row, middle, a tie whose proper name escapes me. Dig the glasses of the girl in the middle row, left. Dig the glasses of the girl in the middle row, left. Yes, I said it again: her glasses are that cool. Extra credit if you recognize any of the kids from Mrs. Frazier’s class.

The above photograph shows Miss M.’s second-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1963–1964. I remember my second-grade classroom as something like a performance space for teacherly fury. Miss M. once tried to quiet us by throwing her shoes into the “cloakroom” as we bundled up to go home. A teacher throwing shoes? The response is likely to be helpless, giggling frenzy, as of course it was. On another occasion, Miss M. tried to quiet us by lifting and dropping one corner of her desk. Dr. I.O. Gimprich, the principal, happened to be walking by in the hallway. The noise brought him into the room. Was everything okay? Yes, it was.

I wonder what became of Miss M., and I wonder what might become of anyone trying to teach thirty-four second-graders.

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow second-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid with the blue shirt and black cross tie.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1962–1963 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

A P.S. 131 class picture, 1962–1963

[Click for a larger view.]

Looking at class photographs from P.S. 99 moved me to make my own small contribution to grade-school nostalgia. Here’s the first of five class pictures that my parents handed over to me some years ago. The above photograph shows Mrs. Frazier’s first-grade class, P.S. 131, Boro Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1962–1963. Mrs. Frazier was my mother’s first-grade teacher at P.S. 131 in the late Depression, a fact of our family life that still amazes me.

I like seeing the details of this classroom, which looks like a lively place (especially with thirty-one kids). I remember reading at a table off to the side of the room with my friend Barry (sitting, wearing a cross tie). We must have been in the Library. I believe that we were ahead of the class, reading-wise, and that Barry was ahead of me. Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur was my book of choice. Note the Play House: “We can have tea.” And we still can!

Do click for a larger view. The girl in the saddle shoes rules.

[I’m uneasy about identifying fellow first-graders by last name without permission, so I haven’t. These photographs have faded and remain so here, as unimproved scans. I’m the kid with the red cross tie.]

More from the P.S. 131 collection
1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

Related posts
P.S. 131
P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn
Some have gone and some remain

P.S. 99 class pictures

Class pictures, 310 of them:

P.S. 99 Class Photographs (A Picture History of Kew Gardens, NY, via Boing Boing)

“We’re all in this together,” says a class picture, “and we’re doing the best that we can.”

Pocket notebook sighting: Spellbound

[Drs. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) and Alex Brulov (Michael Chekhov) penetrate the labyrinth of the guilt complex.]

Dr. Petersen’s pocket notebook holds the details of a dream reported by her amnesic patient John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck). That dream in turn holds the secrets of Ballantyne’s identity and his guilt complex.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is oddly satisfying. The episodes of dream interpretation and psychiatric diagnosis now play like parody. The film’s presentation of psychiatry as the talking cure clashes absurdly with a casual recommendation of a few days’ drugs for one patient, unexplained surgery (lobotomy?) for another. What saves the movie is Bergman and Peck’s plausible chemistry, as Dr. Petersen, hitherto devoted to her work, finds herself falling in love with a man equally smitten. Their ardor leads though to dialogue like this:

Ballantyne: Professor, I never quite realized in my amnesic state how lovely you are.

Petersen: Oh, now that you got your head back, you mustn’t lose it again.

Ballantyne: Oh, no. It’s too late. I’m beyond cure.

Michael Chekhov, as Dr. Petersen’s mentor, has the film’s best line: “And remember what I say — any husband of Constance is a husband of mine, so to speak.”

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces
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
The Sopranos

National Handwriting Day

It’s National Handwriting Day (aka John Hancock’s birthday). Above, a recent sample of handwriting, created with a portable ink-delivery apparatus called a “Model T.” Yes, handwriting recalls the good old days, like the day last week when I wrote a review of Alvin Levin’s Love Is Like Park Avenue (New Directions, 2009) for World Literature Today. Handwriting is not dead yet.

Related posts
Five pens
“Necessary and beloved tools of thought”
On handwriting and typing
Writing by hand
Writing, technology, and teenagers

Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 is now available. It feels very fast, much faster than 3.5. Scientific testing confirms: fast!

The big new feature of 3.6: Personas (Personae?). I’m happy with the GrApple Delicious theme for Mac. No Personae for me.

Geoffrey Chaucer, Ezra Pound, B.P.E.

Reading Joan Acocella’s piece “All England,” on renderings of The Canterbury Tales in “translation” (that is, in modernized English), made me remember this observation, which as an undergrad I wrote in pencil on the inside front cover of my Chaucer:

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 99.

I remember that I used a large paper clip to hold together the thirty or forty pages preceding the glossary, which was, yes, small. The clip made it easier to flip to the glossary and not be shut out from the reading of good books forever. It was life B.P.E. (Before the Post-it Note Era). The nationwide sale of Post-it Notes began in 1980.

Acocella’s piece appears in the December 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker (online for subscribers only).

How to improve writing (no. 26)

I always enjoy reading Nancy Franklin’s New Yorker pieces about television. But this sentence, from a smart and funny review of Jersey Shore, needs work:

Promos showing a group of young men and women of Italian heritage making entertainingly ridiculous statements about themselves and whooping it up on the boardwalk at night — dancing, throwing punches, that kind of thing — advertised “Jersey Shore” as set in a “house like you’ve never seen, full of the hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos,” and Italian-American groups, and eventually New Jersey tourism officials, protested and some of them called for MTV to cancel the series.

One problem: the number of participles separating subject and verb: Promos [showing, making, whooping, dancing, throwing] advertised. A second problem: the number of ands as the sentence ends: “and Italian-American groups,” “and eventually New Jersey tourism officials,” “and some of them.” A third problem: the missing comma before the and that begins the sentence’s final clause. One more: “some of them” seems ambigious: some of the officials who eventually protested? Or some of the groups and officials?

Things look much better when the matter of this sentence is divided among several sentences:

MTV advertised “Jersey Shore” as set in a “house like you’ve never seen, full of the hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos.” Promos showed a group of young men and women of Italian heritage making entertainingly ridiculous statements about themselves and whooping it up on the boardwalk at night — dancing, throwing punches, that kind of thing. Italian-American groups and New Jersey tourism officials protested, some of them calling for MTV to cancel the series.

The ambiguity of some remains. I’ve let the word apply to both the groups and the officials. And if you’re wondering: I’ve seen enough of Jersey Shore to have seen enough of Jersey Shore.

[This post is no. 26 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Seven hours, thirty-eight minutes a day

In the news:

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day, survey says. Read more:

If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online (New York Times)
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds (Kaiser Family Foundation)

White Heat and High Sierra

Arthur “Cody” Jarrett (James Cagney) has a question:

“Supposin’, supposin’ you wanted to push in a place like Fort Knox and, ah, grab yourself a couple of tons of gold. What’s the toughest thing about a job like that?”

“Gettin’ inside the joint,” one crony suggests.

“A silver dollar for the gentleman in the balcony. Right on the button, gettin’ in. Which brings me to a story Ma used to tell me when I was a kid, a story about a horse. Way back, there was a whole army tryin’ to knock over a place called Troy, and gettin’ nowhere fast. Couldn’t even put a dent in the walls. And one morning, one morning the people of Troy wake up, look over the walls, and the attacking army disappeared. Men, boats, the works. Takin’ a powder. But they left one thing after them — a great big wooden horse. And according to Ma —”

And there the scene ends. Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly) is Cody’s ultimate authority, his ultimate consolation, his muse. “And according to Ma”: the fall of Troy is her story.

This bit of dialogue is from White Heat (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1949), the best Cagney film I’ve seen. White Heat makes fascinating the sheer drudgery of crime: planning routes, designating drivers, packing, unpacking, checking the time. It’s a film with something for everyone: a great train robbery, a morgue scene, snappy police work (teletype machines, car phones, radio transmitters, wall maps), spooky facial bandages, a car chase, vast prison interiors, an explosive ending. Best of all are the film’s breathtakingly twisted relationships. Only ten minutes into the film, Jarrett seeks his mother’s lap to be comforted. His relationship with his snoring, spitting wife Verna (Virginia Mayo) is a mess of physical and emotional tyranny: there is room for only one true romance in his life. His moments of sudden violence, toward Verna and others, take us into the realm of pathology.

White Heat pairs well with other Cagney films: The Public Enemy (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938) are the obvious choices. To my mind though, the ideal partner for White Heat is not a Cagney film but Walsh’s High Sierra (1941). If White Heat gives us the gangster as psychotic killer, Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of bank-robber Roy Earle gives us the gangster as damaged saint. Earle heals the lame (or at least covers the bill) and inspires devoted followers, one of whom unwittingly betrays him, one of whom weeps for him. The two films together are a fine introduction to the fascinating and repellent figure of the criminal in American screen culture.