At The Daily Dish:
Religious warfare, once begun, is hard to stop; and when it is tacitly endorsed by a political party many of whose members believe that the president is a Muslim and no one in the GOP directly attacks, rebuts and discredits this nonsense, we are in very dangerous territory.
From a summary of research published by the American Psychological Association:
Students who cheat in high school and college are highly likely to fit the profile for subclinical psychopathy — a personality disorder defined by erratic lifestyle, manipulation, callousness and antisocial tendencies . . . .Read more:
College students who admitted to cheating in high school or turned in plagiarized papers ranked high on personality tests of the so-called Dark Triad: psychopathy, Machiavellianism (cynicism, amorality, manipulativeness), and narcissism (arrogance and self-centeredness, with a strong sense of entitlement).
At the New Yorker: four samples of Roland Barthes’s handwriting. (He was using a fountain pen.)
After knowing Frank O’Hara’s poem “A Step Away from Them” for thirty years, I woke up this morning and realized (I think) the point of these lines:
Neon in daylight is aThe key word (I think) is write (not say). Edwin Denby (1903–1983) was a celebrated writer on dance and, in a much less public way, a terrific poet. (He was also a friend of FOH’s.) Denby’s poems are usually sonnets, what might be called American vernacular sonnets, made with a deliberate awkwardness in meter. A few opening lines:
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write
I myself like the climate of New York. (“The Climate”)In such company, the seven words from O’Hara’s poem sound like a line of Denby’s pentameter:
The subway flatters like the dope habit. (“The Subway”)
The great New York bridges reflect its faces. (“A New York Face”)
Neon in daylight is a great pleasure.I’d scan the line like so: NEon in DAYlight is a GREAT PLEASure. That’s iambic pentameter, with a pyrrhic in the middle and trochees substituting for iambs at the beginning and end:
/ x | x / | x x | x / | / xOr, for emphasis: NEon in DAYlight IS a GREAT PLEASure. That’s a more recognizably iambic line:
/ x | x / | x / | x / | / xPart of what makes O’Hara’s homage to Denby itself a great pleasure is that these words appear in the guise of O’Hara lines, so (seemingly) casually enjambed: “a / great pleasure.” I’m reminded of how Ted Berrigan relineates William Shakespeare’s pentameter in “A Final Sonnet” and of how Robert Creeley relineates Emily Dickinson stanzas in his poem “Desultory Days.” Creeley relineates William Wordsworth too, somewhere — where?
Here’s a forty-six-year-old description of the Minetta Tavern, from Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (1964).
[Photograph by Elaine Fine.]
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write
Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), “A Step Away from Them”
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Clare and the Reasons and Van Dyke Parks will soon begin a U.S. tour. Bob Hart of Frog Stand Records (Clare and the Reasons’ label) sent me this link to share: Van Dyke (piano), Clare, and the Reasons performing Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me” in Amsterdam earlier this summer. Enjoy.
Related posts
“[J]ust like a good flu shot” (Van Dyke Parks on touring)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (My review)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (VDP’s card)
Who Is Harvey Pekar?: thirty-six Pekar commentaries, from WKSU-FM, Kent, Ohio. A sample:
“Once Good Morning America came to Cleveland, and they invited me to be on their show until they saw my comics. Then they said, ‘These stories are so dark; they’re disturbing.’ What do they want? Hugh Downs?”Other Harvey Pekar posts
Music clip of the day says “Happy birthday” to Sonny Rollins, who turns eighty today.
Related posts
Sonny Rollins and golf
Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins is seventy-eight
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent
[The Moving Finger looks up an address; and, having looked up an address, moves on.]
I sat down to watch Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949) expecting a so-so thriller and was surprised to discover a great film. The premise is deeply noir: an everyday Joe (literally: letter-carrier Joe Norson, played by Farley Granger) makes a mistake and finds himself in way over his head. The film has strong overtones of The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948): aerial views of New York City; a street-level montage of city life; a Tiresias-like narrator meditating on the lives of city dwellers and Joe’s plight; a blackmail racket; brief moments of brutal, intimate violence; a chase through lower Manhattan. There are fine performances by Granger (bruised and sweaty), Harry Bellaver (a cab-driving thug), Whit Bissell (a skinny bank-teller with a fluffy dog), Jean Hagen (an alcoholic nightclub singer), and Paul Kelly (the police-captain narrator, in a performance that is a model of economy and understatement). It was Cathy O’Donnell’s name that made me curious about this film: O’Donnell’s stagey performance as Wilma Cameron (the girl next door) in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946) has long seemed to me to be the one false note in that film. As Ellen Norson, Joe’s wife, O’Donnell has little to do here, and her New York accent fades in and out. Her finest moment — no spoilers here — comes when she has almost disappeared from the film. It’s entirely unexpected.
The real stars of Side Street are its New York streetscapes and the cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg. Ruttenberg is said to have disliked fellow cinematographer Gregg Toland's deep-focus effect, but many of the shots in Side Street are strongly evocative of Toland’s work in Citizen Kane: unusual angles, oddly-placed objects, strong contrasts of light and dark. This shot of Farley Granger is my favorite:
The film’s final chase is a marvel of camerawork, alternating between aerial views (tiny cars moving through impossibly narrow streets) and the interior of a cab. One moment you’re watching from on high; the next, you too have a gun at the back of your neck. Thank goodness the narrator steps in one last time to tell us what to make of it all.
Side Street is available on DVD with They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1949), also starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. (Good, but it’s no Side Street.)
[29 W. Eighth Street, the address of the Village Beauty Salon, is now home to Smoke Express and Cafe Underground. Upstairs is L’impasse, selling what one guide to the area calls “quality slutwear.” It’s a pity that the telephone listings in Side Street have only a “BUtterfield 4”: Joseph Ruttenberg was to work on BUtterfield 8 (dir. Daniel Mann, 1960) a decade later. “The Moving Finger” comes from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, as translated by Edward FitzGerald: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on.”]
More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy
