Raymond Carver and Ovid

In Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” cardiologist Mel McGinnis is telling a story about an old couple with in the hospital after a car crash. They are in casts and bandages, head to foot:

“Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”

I’ve known this story for a long time, but it was only recently, teaching Ovid, not Carver, that it came to me: Orpheus and Eurydice.

[A clarification: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” is Gordon Lish’s edited version of Carver’s story “Beginners.” This passage above is Lish’s work, not Carver’s. You can read the original story and Lish’s edited version at the New Yorker. Which do you prefer? Either way, the story remains a late-twentieth-century version of Plato’s Symposium, a drunken discourse on the nature of love.]

Longuyland

Are you from Longuyland?

[You don’t have to be from to say “Longuyland.” Ask my mom.]

Mac Quick Look

If you use a Mac: do you know about Quick Look? It’s been a part of OS X since Leopard. Even better than Quick Look itself: in Lion, changing a setting lets you copy text from a Quick Look window. Yowza.

[A strangely delightful feature of using a Mac: stumbling upon a wonderful feature that you never knew was there. It happens with surprising frequency.]

The Descendants

Elaine and I went to see Alexander Payne’s new film The Descendants last night. It’s a good film, but not nearly as good as Election or Sideways (both of which I love). Tone seems to be the problem here: sometimes we’re in a world of the blackest comedy; sometimes we’re in an upscale Hawaiian version of Raymond Carver territory, with scenes of painful, plainspoken pathos. And sometimes it’s difficult to know whether a line of dialogue is meant to sound overwrought or moving — not because what we’re hearing is unsettling, but because the film seems so uncertain about its intentions.

The performances are excellent; the cinematography (think Hawaii) is beautiful; the soundtrack (Hawaiian guitar music) is a delight. But is this movie really the stuff Oscars are made of? I’m not so sure.

Have you seen The Descendants? Whadja think?

The Glasses, illustrated

Here’s a four-part series on the J.D. Salinger’s Glass family, commentary by Michael Norris and portraits by David Richardson: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

DR’s portraits seem uncannily right. I especially like his Les Glass, who bears a strong resemblance to another fine vaudevillian. (Recognize him?)

Related posts
Resemblance: The Portraits
Salinger, illustrated

Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe

“Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it. Scotch. It depends”: Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe.

Related reading
All Mingus posts (via Pinboard)

Foot Clinic sign

Tax examiner Chris Fogle was a drug-taking “wastoid” in college, at the University of Illinois at Chicago:

The dorm we roomed in was right on Roosevelt, and our main windows faced a large downtown podiatric clinic — I can’t remember its name, either — which had a huge raised electrified neon sign that rotated on its pole every weekday from 8:00 to 8:00 with the name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668 on one side and on the other a huge colored outline of a human foot — our best guess was a female foot, from the proportions — and I remember that this roommate and I formulated a kind of ritual in which we’d make sure to try to be at the right spot at our windows at 8:00 each night to watch the foot sign go dark and stop rotating when the clinic closed. It always went dark at the same time the clinic’s windows did and we theorized that everything was on one main breaker. The sign’s rotation didn’t stop all at once. It more like slowly wound down, with almost a wheel-of-fortune quality about where it would finally stop. The ritual was that if the sign stopped with the foot facing away, we would go to the UIC library and study, but if it stopped with the foot or any significant part of it facing our windows, we would take it as a ‘sign’ (with the incredibly obvious double entendre) and immediately blow off any homework or supposed responsibility we had and go instead to the Hat, which at that time was the currently hip UIC pub and place to hear bands, and would drink beers and play quarters and tell all the other kids whose parents were paying their tuition about the ritual of the rotating foot in a way that we all appeared nihilistically wastoid and hip.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

The real thing is found not on Roosevelt Road but on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles:

[Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for larger views.]

Laura Miller has tracked the Foot Clinic’s life in literature and music.

[3668? FOOT.]

Christopher Logue (1926–2011)

The British poet Christopher Logue has died. He is best known for reimagining Homer’s Iliad in a long work that he called “a poem in English dependent on the Iliad” or simply “my Homer poem.” Or as others have called it, “Logue’s Homer,” a decades-long project that began in 1958 with a section of Iliad 21 commissioned by the BBC. Logue noted in his autobiography Prince Charming (1999) that when the opportunity to work on the Iliad came his way, his copy of E.V. Rieu’s prose translation of the poem was in a box of books he had planned to sell.

You can read Logue’s Homer in three volumes: War Music (1997, collecting Kings, The Husbands, and War Music), All Day Permanent Red (2003), and Cold Calls (2005), whose jacket flap calls it “the penultimate installment.” (Will there be another?)

Logue’s Homer seems to me the last great work of literary modernism, collapsing past(s) and present with grim wit and startling originality. Three brief examples:

“Hail and farewell, dear Ek.”
(The Husbands, Paris speaking to Hector)

Blurred bronze. Blood? Blood like a car-wash:
    “But it keeps the dust down.”
(All Day Permanent Red)

They find him with guitar,
Singing of Gilgamesh.
(Cold Calls, the embassy to Achilles)

[“Hail and farewell”: “ave atque vale,” from Catullus 101, the poet addressing his dead brother.]

Lynda Barry on Carrie

Lynda Barry on her “absolute favorite monster movie” (which, she acknowledges, might not really be a monster movie):

“Whenever I’m depressed, I always put Carrie in and watch it, because there are times when you just really would like to stand in front of a bunch of people, covered with blood, and blow stuff up with your mind.”

Here There Be Monsters (ttbook.org)

As exams approach

[“Actress Elizabeth Taylor, 18 (Feb. 27), at graduation time, posing at desk in classroom at Hollywood’s University High School.” Photograph by Peter Stackpole. January 19, 1950. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

For the end of the semester, strategy and tactics: How to do well on a final examination. Best wishes to all finalists.

[Where is Miss Taylor sitting? In a drama classroom? A home-ec classroom?]