Pocket notebook: The Lady in the Lake

[Lieutenant DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan) takes notes. Note the bit of business in the background: two cops eating bananas.]

The Lady in the Lake (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1947) is an experiment in point of view, filmed from the perspective of its main character, Philip Marlowe (Montgomery), who is seen onscreen only in a mirror here and there. And that’s why Mildred Haveland (Jayne Meadows) appears to be aiming a gun at you. Yes, you. Look out!

I’m convinced that Meadows’s over-the-top performance in this film is a secret influence on Kristen Wiig.

Lloyd Nolan also appears in what be the most pencil-and-paper-centric film ever made, The House on 92nd Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1945).

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Union Station

Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Mitt Romney is seeking to bulldoze his 3,009-square-foot “oceanfront manse” in La Jolla, California, and replace it with an 11,062-square-foot manse.

Some might find this plan unseemly. They seem not to recognize that Mitt Romney has something of a poet’s soul. Consider his reason for living in La Jolla, at least when he’s not living in Massachusetts or New Hampshire at one of his other manses:

“I wanted to be where I could hear the waves,” Romney told a gaggle of media last year at a book signing in University City. “As a boy we spent summers on Lake Huron and I could hear the crashing waves at night. It was one of my favorite things in the world; being near the water and the waves was something I very badly wanted to experience again.”

Is it William Butler Yeats I hear in these words of longing? I believe it is.

I will arise now, and go to La Jolla,
And a large house build there, of brick and
    stucco made:
Nine bathrooms will I have there . . . .

Of course, the resemblance is not exact. Yeats didn’t build a small cabin in Innisfree and tear it down to build a larger cabin. He never even went to Innisfree. Romney went to La Jolla: he is more a man of action. Also, Romney didn’t build the first house. It was waiting for him when he got to La Jolla. Also, La Jolla is not a lake isle. As I said, not exact.

But get this: Romney’s $10-million New Hampshire manse stands by the edge of Lake Winnipesaukee. Yes, by the shores of Winnipesaukee, by the shining Big-Bucks-Water. A poet’s soul.

Related reading
The Bain of My Existence (Elaine’s adventures at Bain & Company)

[Details found via the Huffington Post. With apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Butler Yeats.]

Kurt Andersen on American politics

In the New York Times, Kurt Andersen writes about what’s wrong with American politics:

Sincere, passionate, hysterical belief that the country is full of (make-believe) anti-American enemies and (fictional) foreign horrors is the besetting national disease. And I’ve diagnosed the systemic problem: the American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders.

It’s a compelling metaphor, but it’s really nothing new. Richard Hofstadter made the same diagnosis in psychological terms in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (Harper’s, November 1964). Here’s a sample:

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. . . .

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

It makes sense then that Michele Bachmann just warned against “the rise of the Soviet Union”: she’s operating from the mindset that Hofstadter described in 1964. As Andersen points out, autoimmune disorders are incurable.

William Deresiewicz on heroes

William Deresiewicz on the word heroes and what he calls “the cult of the uniform”:

Perhaps no word in public life of late has been more thoroughly debased by overuse. Soldiers are “heroes”; firefighters are “heroes”; police officers are “heroes” — all of them, not the special few who undoubtedly deserve the term. . . .

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk.

An Empty Regard (New York Times)

Brian Wilson’s Disney album

From The Playlist, some details of Brian Wilson’s forthcoming In the Key of Disney. The song choices are sometimes spot on (“You’ve Got a Friend in Me”), sometimes cringe-inducing (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”). The cover art looks to my eyes less like a sunset and more like a Disneyfied nuclear event. Yikes.

A true fact: Disney music has a prominent place in the Brian Wilson story: “When You Wish Upon a Star” inspired “Surfer Girl.” Another true fact: Wilson’s collaborator Van Dyke Parks arranged “The Bare Necessities” for Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967). That song is to appear on the forthcoming album: I wonder if VDP will be lending a hand.

Alphabetizing Safari bookmarks

I’ve been using Safari more often and am surprised to find no option for alphabetizing bookmarks. But James Howard’s free utility Sortosaurus does the trick. Sortosaurus works with various versions of Safari and OS X. Thank you, James!

(Found via MacRumors)

The F word (Find)

According to Dan Russell, a “search anthropologist” at Google, ninety percent of people don’t know how to use Control+F or Command+F to find text in a document or on a webpage. Read all about it:

Alexis Madrigal, Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F (Atlantic, via Boing Boing)

I’ve observed that many digital naïfs don’t know that Find makes it much easier to make one’s way through a piece of writing. Digital naïfs: my name for digital natives who are “in the dark, or at least in dimly-lit rooms, when it comes to digital technology.” More in this post.

[In a document, on a webpage: that’s an interesting distinction, no? The document being a repository, and the page being a visual field, even when it’s scrolling out of view.]

∞

[Parking lot with hairband. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Dangling appostives of the Times

In today’s New York Times:

A critic of conventional wisdom and an amateur musician, Dr. Schipper’s work focused on improving efficiency in energy use and transportation.

Do you see what’s wrong? Claire Cook’s Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing (1985) has a good explanation.

Photographer David Plowden

Photographer David Plowden, on riding the last regular-service steam engine in New England:

“When I watched the gauge drop to zero, I realized that the era was over, and I realized very quickly that I had not only been photographing the end of the locomotive but I’d been photographing the profound change that was occurring in America. And I thought to myself, Plowden, you better get out there and photograph the other things that you remember so well as a young person, because they’re not gonna be here. And that’s what I’ve spent my life doing.”

Plowden and his photographs are the focus of an episode of The Story, Disappearing America (American Public Media). There’s a website devoted to his work.

*

October 16, 2013: I just discovered that this episode of The Story is no longer available.

[Thanks, Elaine, for pointing me to this podcast.]