OSS 117: Lost in Rio

[Click for a larger, more 1967ish view.]

Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus [OSS 117: Lost in Rio] (2009) is the sequel to OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions [OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies] (2006). Here OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin) travels to Rio to deliver payment to the escaped Nazi Von Zimmel (Rüdiger Vogler) in exchange for a list of 50,000 French collaborators. (Talk about your politically incorrect plot premise.) Once in Rio, 117 ends up helping Mossad agent Dolorès Koulechov (Louise Monot) track Von Zimmel down. The Dujardin-Monot partnership lacks the comic zest of the Dujardin-Bérénice Bejo partnership in Nest of Spies, and some of the jokes we’ve seen before. But there are wonderful moments: a drug-fueled orgy (it’s 1967), a fight in a chicken coop, a costume party with Dujardin as Robin Hood (or is it Dujardin as Errol Flynn as Robin Hood?). And there are delightful over-the-top homages to North by Northwest and Vertigo. Not as funny as Lost in Rio, but very funny.

A related post
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

[Above, OSS 117 and CIA agent Bill Trumendous (Ken Samuels).]

Chris Matthews disappoints

Every time I think I should be more generous toward Chris Matthews, he disappoints me anew. The other day, after showing a clip of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in The Artist (2011, dir. Michel Hazanavicius), Matthews remarked, “I don’t know where they found those guys.” Interviewee James Cromwell, who appears in the film, was too tactful to respond. But it couldn’t have been too difficult for Hazanavicius to find those guys. Dujardin and Bejo both have long careers in film. Both have worked with Hazanavicius before. And Bejo and Hazanavicius are married.

Is it all right not to know these things? Sure. But when you’re on television, you should try to know what you’re talking about, or at least know what not to talk about.

Related posts
The Artist (and typography) (“ ” v. " ")
Chris Matthews explains it all for you
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (Bejo, Dujardin, Hazanavicius)

Doyald Young, Logotype Designer

From Doyald Young, Logotype Designer:

“To learn to draw a letter well takes a lot of time. I’ve been drawing letters since 1948, and I’m still learning how to draw.”

Dictionaries, pencils, pencil sharpeners: this beautifully made film has it (them) all.

Related reading
Doyald Young (his website)
Doyald Young, 84, Designer of Typefaces, Dies (New York Times)

Bill Withers on wanting to be cool

From the documentary Still Bill (2009, dir. Damani Baker and Alex Vlack), Bill Withers addressing an audience of young and younger people:

“When you’re a kid, you want to be cool, and you want to be cool with the cool people. And that doesn’t always happen. So if you can learn to value the people who value you —”

Still Bill answers the question “Whatever became of Bill Withers?” and reveals a man who is kind, patient, and endlessly wise. Especially when he’s schooling Tavis Smiley and Cornel West on the meaning of sell out: kind, patient, and wise. One of the best scenes is stuck in the DVD extras: Withers in conversation with Jim Brown, Bernie Casey and Bill Russell. Not to be missed.

Related posts
Ben Folds on the tyranny of cool
Bill Withers and John Hammond

Valentine’s Day

[“Whelan’s Drug Store, 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, Manhattan.” Photograph by Berenice Abbott. February 7, 1936. From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery. Click for a larger view. Happy Valentine’s Day.]

Selling the Iliad

On the back cover of the new University of Chicago Press edition of Richmond Lattimore’s 1951 translation of Homer’s Iliad, there’s an appraisal from Robert Fitzgerald:

The feat is so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad in English verse.

Yes, Fitzgerald wrote that sentence, in “Heroic Poems in English,” a review of Lattimore’s translation published in the Autumn 1952 issue of the Kenyon Review. Sometime after writing that sentence, Fitzgerald translated the Iliad (1974). His Odyssey (1961) though is far better known.

I’ll admit: if I were tasked with selling the Iliad, I’d like to quote great reviews too. But quoting a nearly sixty-year-old undated sentence on the likely longevity of a translation, a sentence whose writer went on to make his own translation of the poem, seems, well, odd.

Related posts (Homer in translation)
“Kchaou!”
Translations, mules, briars
Translators at work and play
Whose Homer?

[I’m unable to find a date for this edition’s other jacket quotation, from Peter Green, writing in The New Republic: “Perhaps closer to Homer in every way than any other version made in English.” Which versions did Green have in mind?]

Overheard

Last night, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman in a bookstore:

“I did, and I thought it was excellent. And I don’t do vampire.”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice

Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice tests:

Multiple-choice questions test nothing but passive-recognition knowledge, not active usable knowledge. Knowing something means the power to summon up facts and their significance in the right relations. Mechanical testing does not foster this power. It is one thing to pick out Valley Forge, not Dobbs Ferry or Little Rock, as the place where George Washington made his winter quarters; it is another, first, to think of Valley Forge and then to say why he chose it rather than Philadelphia, where it was warmer.

Multiple-choice tests, whether of fact or skill, break up the unity of knowledge and isolate the pieces; nothing follows on anything else, and a student’s mind must keep jumping. True testing elicits the pattern originally learned; an essay examination reinforces pattern-making. Ability shows itself not in the number of accurate “hits” but in the extent, coherence, and verbal accuracy of each whole answer. Science and math consist of similar clusters of thought, and, in all subjects, to compose organized statements requires full-blown thinking. Objective tests ask only for sorting.

“The Tyranny of Testing” (1962). In A Jacques Barzun Reader, edited by Michael Murray (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

Why Valley Forge? The National Parks Service explains.

A related post
Whitehead on primrose paths and external examinations

[A relevant anecdote: A student once asked, only semi-seriously, if our final exam would be multiple-choice. In life, said I, there are no multiple-choice tests. People expect you to develop answers, not choose them. A second student suggested that there was indeed one multiple-choice test in life: marriage. No, said a third student, marriage is a true-false test. No, said I, marriage is a matching test. It was a lively class, with an essay exam.]

Whitehead on primrose paths and external examinations

Alfred North Whitehead wouldn’t have approved of the collegiate “study guide,” the simple pre-exam handout (handout indeed), often requiring (I am told) no more than fifteen or twenty minutes of effort to memorize. From The Aims of Education (1929):

In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place. This evil path is represented by a book or a set of lectures which will practically enable the student to learn by heart all the questions likely to be asked at the next external examination.

Nor would Whitehead approve of what we now call the standardized test, what he called the “uniform external examination”:

We do not denounce it because we are cranks, and like denouncing established things. We are not so childish. Also, of course, such examinations have their use in testing slackness. Our reason of dislike is very definite and very practical. It kills the best part of culture. When you analyse in the light of experience the central task of education, you find that its successful accomplishment depends on a delicate adjustment of many variable factors. The reason is that we are dealing with human minds, and not with dead matter. The evocation of curiosity, of judgment, of the power of mastering a complicated tangle of circumstances, the use of theory in giving foresight in special cases — all these powers are not to be imparted by a set rule embodied in one schedule of examination subjects.

Nothing in my experience does more to kill intellectual curiosity and effort in young adults than schooling focused on the work of standardized tests. When every question has only one right answer, any thoughts you think will most likely be wrong.

[Whitehead’s understanding of culture: “Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.” My knowledge of the “study guide” comes from conversations over the past few years with students who have studied in many different institutions. A “study guide” often includes both questions and answers.]

Abby and Austin

[Click for a larger view.]

I rediscovered the above clipping between pages 10 and 11 in my copy of J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962). On page 10:

For one who says “promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act!” is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “I do” and the welsher with a defense for his “I bet.” Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

Other posts with J.L. Austin
William Labov
Write 5 sentence [sic] about cat

[Austin gives this translation of a line from Euripides’ Hippolytus: “My tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not.” “Our word is our bond” alludes to the motto of the London Stock Exchange: “Dictum meum pactum,” My word is my bond.]