Separated at birth?

 
[John Davis Chandler (as Vincent Coll) and Steve Buscemi.]

Mad Dog Coll (dir. Burt Balaban, 1961) is a magnificently lurid crime story. Abusive father: check. Sexual inadequacy: check. Phallic weaponry: check. (Mad Dog carries a machine gun as you or I might carry a wallet.) Unattainable woman with some class: check. (She plays the violin.) Available woman with less class: check. (She’s a, uh, dancer.) Increasingly bold and dangerous criminal schemes: check, and checkmate. With Brooke Hayward, Jerry Orbach, Telly Savalas, and Vincent Gardenia as Dutch Schultz.

A special treat: seeing James Greene (Davey McQuinn of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Councilman Milton of Parks and Recreation) as a hit man. Good call, Elaine.

Related posts
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt
Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov
Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks

Bad metaphor of the day

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, Joe Scarborough made reference to “all sides of the political spectrum.”

Related reading
All metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[I think it’s seven sides: Roy G. Biv.]

Two-word utterances of my adolescence

In imaginary order of increasing frequency:

No way. Right on. Double dribble. Oooh, cutdown.

[Cutdown, noun, with the accent on the first syllable: an insult. This meaning has eluded both Merriam-Webster and the OED.]

“Swing for the L”

Reading Kitty Burns Florey’s Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting (Hoboken: Melville House, 2009), I realized that the perfect L in my dad’s signature is straight outta Palmer:


[From A. N. Palmer, The Palmer Method for Business Writing (Cedar Rapids: A. N. Palmer, 1915). Found at the Internet Archive.]

Handwriting is in the news again this morning, as I discovered only after deciding to make this post.

Salinger bio and documentary

From Time:

A new J. D. Salinger film and biography are being billed as an unprecedented look into the mysterious life of the author of The Catcher In the Rye.

Simon & Schuster announced Tuesday that it had acquired The Private War of J.D. Salinger, an oral biography compiled by author David Shields and filmmaker-screenwriter Shane Salerno, whose screenplay credits include the Oliver Stone film Savages.

Salerno has been working for several years on his documentary, which PBS will air next January for the 200th of its American Masters series.

No news about whether unpublished work from Salinger is forthcoming.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (Pinboard)

David Bromwich on higher education

David Bromwich:

[H]igher education is the learning of certain habits, above all a sustained attention to things outside one’s familiar circuit of interests; and it is the beginning of a work of self-knowledge that will decompose many of one’s given habits and given identities. In these respects the aims of education are deeply at odds with the aims of any coherent and socializing culture. The former is critical and ironic; the latter purposeful and supervisory.

Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

[From the back cover: ”In this eloquent book a distinguished scholar criticizes attacks on liberal education by ideologies of the right and left, arguing that both groups see education as a means to indoctrinate students in specific cultural and political dogmas. David Bromwich calls for a return to the teaching of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and tolerance of other points of view, values that he claims are the essence of a true liberal education.” I found my way to this book after reading Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise.]

Butch Morris (1947–2013)

Sad news in the New York Times:

Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. . . .

Mr. Morris referred to his method as “conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”

Here is Morris’s website, Conduction. And three examples of conduction, from 2009, 2010, and 2011. Try one, or more. As the narrator of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” says at that story’s end, “It’s really something.”

Diction levels, crisscrossing

On the PBS NewsHour last night, a New York Times reporter referred to Judy Woodruff and company as “you guys.” And on the local PBS station, a student-weatherperson referred to “tornadic activity.”

[What’s a good alternative to “you guys,” good people?]

Bobbing for apples

I have nothing against Halloween customs, but I dislike bobbing for apples. That’s my name for a habit that makes classroom discussion more difficult and less productive than it should be. A student who bobs for apples might offer the following observations in discussion:

The speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is asking someone he loves to go for a walk: “Let us go then, you and I.”

The father in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” works in an office.

The poet in Sappho’s fragment 31 sees the man she loves talking with another woman.

In each case the bobber, largely or wholly unprepared, has bent down and come up with something. Someone who had read these works (and accompanying assignment pages, full of guidance) would not — could not — make the bobber’s mistakes. The possibility that Prufrock can speak to anyone but himself (much less that he is in love) is one that the poem belies at every moment; the “overwhelming question,” whatever form it might take, is one that never gets asked. The father in Hayden’s poem has “cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather”; the poem’s “offices” are the lonely rites the father performs for the members of his household: building fires, shining shoes. And in Sappho’s poem, pronouns make clear the object of the poet’s desire: the man is seated next to “you,” and it’s the sound of “your” delightful laughter and one glance at “you” that leave the poet unable to speak.

Bobbing for apples makes things difficult in several ways. It impedes the give and take of discussion by requiring a teacher to function as an arbiter of interpretive truth, one who must take up the unpleasant task of saying no — or let any old absurdity fly. There’s little point in asking about the basis for the student’s response when no reasonable evidence could be forthcoming: to ask would yield only embarrassment. (What, for instance, could be the evidence that the father works in an office, aside from the glanced-at, not-looked-up word offices?) Another problem: bobbing for apples fosters the notion, especially among students who might not recognize bobbing as such, that literary interpretation is an arbitrary, haphazard affair: to vary the metaphor, a Rorschach test. You see something (or think you do); you say something. Who’s to say whether it’s right or wrong?

One good answer to that question: literary study is typically not about right and wrong. There are many plausible things one might say about a poem, some of which will contradict others. Another answer: every reader of a work of literature — anyone who really reads it — has a say. And to read, really read, one must do much more than bob. Repeated immersions, to the limit of one’s ability to remain underwater: that’s what will let you come up with something worthwhile.

A related post
Zadie Smith on reading

[The examples in this post are from my imagination, not from life.]

“Silent film effect”

[Hello, solvers. If you’re looking for an answer to the clue “Silent film opener” (August 16, 2017), please read all the way to the end. It’s complicated.]

A baffling answer in today’s New York Times crossword, 32-Down, “Silent film effect”: IRISIN. Even after getting it, I was lost: was irisin a chemical used to treat film stock? No, the answer is iris-in. An explanation:

Iris: A technique used to show an image in only one small round area of the screen. An Iris-Out begins as a pinpoint and then moves outward to reveal the full scene, while an Iris-In moves inward from all sides to leave only a small image on the screen. An iris can be either a transitional device (using the image held as a point of transition) or a way of focusing attention on a specific part of a scene without reducing the scene in size.

Here is an iris-out, from Buster Keaton’s Neighbors (1920), found here. Please imagine that it is an iris-in.

*

August 16, 2017: A reader has let me know that IRISIN appears in today’s Times crossword, 47-Down: “Silent film opener.” Today’s clue is, well, problematic. I checked several reputable books about film: three define iris-in as the move inward and iris-out as the move outward; two others reverse the terms. So is an iris-in a “silent film opener”? It depends. But no matter what the Times crossword says, Mel Tormé still isn’t a “cool jazz pioneer.”