Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 7, 2013.]

The workers at Hi-Lo Amalgamated must have had great fun coming up with that “edgy” band name. I think they had so much fun that they forgot how car and driveway go together: like so.

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All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

A Salinger review

A. O. Scott reviews the documentary film Salinger (dir. Shane Salerno) for The New York Times:

It does not so much explore the life and times of J. D. Salinger as run his memory and legacy through a spin cycle of hype. Salinger moved to the woods of New Hampshire partly to escape the intrusions and indignities of American celebrity culture. Salinger is that culture’s revenge.

It sounds dreadful. The biography, on its way to my door, sounds dreadful too. But to borrow a memorable line from John Williams’s novel Stoner : What did you expect?

Related reading
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

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At State and Lake (Route 66 ) Now with an e-mail from the daughter of the man who owned the State & Lake Fruit and Nut Shop, seen for a fleeting moment in a 1962 episode of Route 66.

The Internet will always amaze me.

A thought about writing

From Wilson Follett:

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose.

Modern American Usage (1966)

I like that near-rhyme: “the force of the thought.”

Borges manuscript found

Found, in Argentina’s National Library, an unpublished bit of writing by Jorge Luis Borges, an alternate ending for the 1944 story “Tema del traidor y del heroe” [Theme of the traitor and the hero]. The Latin American Herald Tribune offers this speculation:

Borges may have planned for the manuscript to be discovered, since in “Tema del traidor and del heroe” the protagonist’s great-grandson discovers a handwritten article in the National Library’s archives.

Well, no. The great-grandson himself, a man named Ryan, is the protagonist and the narrator of the story whose plot the narrator of “Tema del traidor y del heroe” describes. Ryan finds a manuscript in “the archives,” but Borges’s story does not say where they are located.

Still, I like the speculation.

[The story appears in translation in Labyrinths (1962) and Collected Fictions (1999). I missed hearing Borges read at Columbia University in April 1980, during a New York City transit strike, and I’ve never forgiven myself for not at least trying to get there.]

King’s Row, wet ink

[Parris Mitchell (Robert Cummings) writes home. Click on any image for a larger view.]

My dad has told me again and again that I should see King’s Row (dir. Sam Wood, 1942). I finally did. It’s a terrific film. That Ronald Reagan is one of its stars was no recommendation to me, but the principal players — Cummings, Betty Field, Claude Rains, Reagan, Ann Sheridan — are uniformly excellent. Another star of this film: James Wong Howe’s cinematography. King’s Row is one of the most luminous films I’ve seen. Look at the glistening ink above.

There’s a moment in King’s Row in which Howe pays tribute to fellow deep-focus stylist Gregg Toland. Here, from Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941), is Susan Alexander’s bedroom, foreground, middle ground, and background all in focus:



And here, from King’s Row , is Parris’s grandmother’s bedroom:



And now I want to see Transatlantic (dir. William K. Howard, 1931), Howe’s early effort in deep focus.

A deportee memorial

Sixty-five years later, there is a memorial for those who died in the 1948 plane crash that inspired Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” and whose names are now, all, known. In articles on the Labor Day dedication of the memorial, neither the Los Angeles Times nor The New York Times reported those names. The Los Angeles Times did include the names in an article earlier this summer:

Miguel Negrete Álvarez, Tomás Aviña de Gracia, Francisco Llamas Durán, Santiago García Elizondo, Rosalio Padilla Estrada, Tomás Padilla Márquez, Bernabé López Garcia, Salvador Sandoval Hernández, Severo Medina Lára, Elías Trujillo Macias, José Rodriguez Macias, Luis López Medina, Manuel Calderón Merino, Luis Cuevas Miranda, Martin Razo Navarro, Ignacio Pérez Navarro, Román Ochoa Ochoa, Ramón Paredes Gonzalez, Guadalupe Ramírez Lára, Apolonio Ramírez Placencia, Alberto Carlos Raygoza, Guadalupe Hernández Rodríguez, Maria Santana Rodríguez, Juan Valenzuela Ruiz, Wenceslao Flores Ruiz, José Valdívia Sánchez, Jesús Meza Santos, Baldomero Marcas Torres.

There’s much more about the crash and the memorial on this page from KNXT-TV.

If you’ve never heard “Deportee,” or if you have, here’s a version by Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris. Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman.

Just wondering: how long can a Blogger post title run? I mean, at what point does Blogger just shorten what’s there into something more manageable? Or does Blogger not do that? If it doesn’t, a title could conceivably go on for the length of a screen, or more. Which makes me wonder whether anyone has tried to work out an answer to this question. To do so, you’d have to type and post a really, really long title. You’d have to have some genuine content to it; otherwise, you’d just be running at the mouth — or the fingers — to see how long, or how far, things can go. Such an exercise would be in some way pointless, and yet it might be the only way to answer the question. Of course, any garden-variety advice on making post titles runs counter to the spirit of this inquiry: the usual advice is to make things short, so as to “grab” the attention of readers and make it easier for them to “share” what you’ve written. But, I mean, come on: a short title may be nothing more than merely calculating and predictable, built from “key words” to maximize search-engine attention. OED! Squee! Twerk! And sharing a post with a long title takes no great effort: the words weigh next to nothing, and the URL will exclude all but a fraction of the post’s title. At any rate, I’m not convinced that a short post title is the “key” to anything. I’m still not sure though how long Blogger will let a post title run.

But I think I’ve answered the question to my satisfaction.

Funny because it’s true

This could be my house. Yours too?

A vocabulary quiz

From Bryan Garner, a “20-question vocabulary exam based on Johnson O’Connor’s 1948 book English Vocabulary Builder.”

[I think I should get partial credit for no. 18.]