Too Late the Phalarope

Jim Doyle, the best teacher I’ve ever known, recommended Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope (1953) to me more than thirty years ago. I bought the novel in paperback, a long time ago — so long that the price, $3.45, now looks like a highly improbable price for a book. The book sat on one shelf or another until last week, when I thought I should read that.

And now I can recommend Too Late the Phalarope. The novel tells the story of the destruction of Pieter van Vlaanderen, Afrikaner, police lieutenant, footballer, stamp collector, husband and father, a man undone by his desire for a black woman named Stephanie. The narrative works as does ancient Greek tragedy: we know from the beginning that Pieter is doomed. His family falls with him: the house of van Vlaanderen. The novel’s narrator is Pieter’s aunt Sophie van Vlaanderen, disfigured, unmarried, unable to prevent what is to befall her nephew (and thus something like the chorus of Greek tragedy). Here and there, we read excerpts from Pieter’s journal, now in Sophie’s hands. In these pages, Pieter is never able to articulate what it is that he feels for Stephanie: his is a desire that dare not speak its name, or that has no name.

Too Late the Phalarope captures the agony of living with the expectation that one’s secret will be (or has already been) found out. A neighbor’s glance, the tone of an offhand remark: to Pieter, the slightest gesture or word begins to seem dangerously meaningful. He hides his secret in a world divided into irreconcilable categories: black and white, body and soul, damnation and salvation, justice and mercy, love and sex. Presiding over all events is an angry patriarch — Pieter’s nearly humorless, rigid father, who is willing to banish his son and lock the door against his return.

I think I’m a better person for having read Too Late the Phalarope. And now I wonder why its enigmatic title didn’t move me to read it sooner.

[A comment on a previous post places Jim’s first encounter with the novel in spring 1980. And if it doesn’t go without saying: Paton was a committed opponent of apartheid.]

Higgs boson explained (?)

My son Ben passes on a link to a video from PhD Comics, The Higgs Boson Explained. It’s beyond me. But I find a satisfactory explanation of the particle in the work of Luther Dixon and Al Smith:

Higgs boson, can’t you hear me when I call?
Higgs boson, can’t you hear me when I call?
Now you ain’t so big, you just small, that’s all.

The Fourth of July

[“American children of Japanese, German and Italian heritage pledging allegiance to the flag.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. California, April 20, 1942. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Saying no to xenophobia is the American way, or ought to be, always. Happy Fourth of July.

Andy Griffith (1926–2012)

Sad news in the Chicago Tribune:

Actor Andy Griffith, whose portrayal of a small-town sheriff made The Andy Griffith Show one of American television’s most enduring shows, has died at his North Carolina home, television station WITN reported on Tuesday.

Another reason to remember Andy Griffith: his performance as Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957).

A pipe with a cigar in it

Navigating the parking lot of my local multinational retail corporation, I noticed a man behind the wheel of a station wagon. He was smoking a pipe with a cigar in it. The bowl of his pipe held perhaps three or four inches of cigar.

Men do smoke in this manner. Women too. Card Cow has proof that even roosters enjoy a cigar in a pipe. The why though puzzles me. Can anyone suggest an answer?

[I stopped smoking cigarettes almost twenty-three years ago. But sometimes, still, je veux fumer.]

Proust in the NYT crossword

Marcel Proust makes an anagrammatic appearance in today’s New York Times crossword. The clue for 25-Across: “French writer’s state of drunkenness.” The answer: PROUSTSSTUPOR. The maker of today’s puzzle is ninety-eight-year-old Bernice Gordon, who has been making crosswords for sixty years.

Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Nancy meets Alfred Hitchcock

Caution: If you’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, you may want to skip this post.

Behold Nancy Ritz and Sluggo Smith, in their screen tests for the roles of Madeleine Elster and John “Scottie” Ferguson, roles that went to Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. Nancy’s Madeleine, possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes, is about to speak the haunting line “Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died.”




[Click for a larger view of Novak, Stewart, and a cross-section of a redwood.]

More haunting still is the Ritz and Smith version of Vertigo’s recognition scene. In the blue-green light of the Hotel Empire’s neon sign, Scottie sees Judy Barton transformed at last into the now-dead Madeleine.



Vertigo is my favorite film. I think it can take a joke.


[Click for larger views.]

Other Nancy posts
Charlotte russe
The greatest Nancy panel?
Nancy is here
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick (screen test for The Shining)

[Nancy panels by Ernie Bushmiller, March 13 and March 30, 1945, from Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012). I’ve removed speech balloons from the second panel. Blue-green light courtesy of the Hotel Empire.]

Recently updated

Parker and Barab tonight in NYC Now with a link to a New York Times review.

Ice-cream cones

[“Ice cream cone melting outside rolled up window of air conditioned car. (Note intact cone inside).” Photograph by John Dominis. Fort Worth, Texas, August 1952. From the Life Photo Archive.]

But look: the inside cone too is melting. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The temperature here in east-central Illinois: 102 °F. The heat index: 115 °F.

Related reading
Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (Poets.org)

Neatening up

[Before and after.]

What I’m about to suggest might be common knowledge, but perhaps not. The paint-can tool in an image editor offers an easy way to neaten up a scan from Google Books (or from anywhere). Choose a color (perhaps with an eyedropper tool) and pour. Digital artifacts, begone.

The image above is from Google Books, an illustration of the Robinson Reminder pocket notebook. I used the paint-can tool in a more elaborate way last week after scanning a page from Hart’s Guide to New York City. When I pressed hard to get the text on a verso page, chunks of the text from the recto page came through. So I aimed and poured, and poured again and again.

[I like Seashore, a free image-editor for OS X.]