More deep-focus Lassie

[From the Lassie episode “The Archers,” November 23, 1958. Right to left: June Lockhart as Ruth Martin, Todd Ferrell as Ralph “Boomer” Bates, and Jon Provost as Timmy. They are hoping for the best, which, according to Mrs. Martin, makes the best come true.]


[From the Lassie episode “The Bundle from Britain,” November 30, 1958. Right to left: Hugh Reilly as Paul Martin, June Lockhart, George Chandler as Uncle Petrie, and Jon Provost.]

The beautiful Gregg Toland-like shot I saw last night was no fluke. There’s more to Lassie than I thought.

Kenneth Peach (1903–1988), the cinematographer for these and many other Lassie episodes, began working in film in 1923.

Deep-focus Lassie

[From the Lassie episode “Our Gal” (November 2, 1958). Cinematography by Kenneth Peach. Right to left: Hugh Reilly as Paul Martin, George Chandler as Uncle Petrie, Jon Provost as Timmy, and, of course, Lassie.]

I wonder if this striking shot was a minor homage to the great deep-focus pioneer Gregg Toland.


[From The Grapes of Wrath (dir. John Ford, 1940). Cinematography by Gregg Toland. Right to left: Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, Dorris Bowdon as Rose of Sharon.]

Related posts
Everyday details in film
Joad’s Corollary
Jon Provost, yippee
Lassie and some rocks

[Yes, I watch Lassie sometimes. It’s there, on the television. Woof.]

Man’s Human evolution

“The discovery of a skull could change what we know about man’s evolution”: Scott Pelley, right before a commercial break on the CBS Evening News this evening. But when Pelley reported the story, he spoke of human evolution. We are evolving, sometimes with astonishing speed, sometimes not fast enough.

In a 2009 post about singular they, I wrote:

I find in he or she a still appropriate rejoinder to the language of patriarchy that permeated my undergraduate education. My first undergraduate philosophy course: “The Problem of Man.” The professor was a woman. A key text: William Barrett’s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958). And then there was William Faulkner: “Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Man oh man. I like humankind.

And I was surprised to hear — and see — the language of man tonight.


[Onscreen, right before the commercial break: dumb language, dumb apostrophe too.]

Two more posts with Scott Pelley and Bob Schieffer
Attack of the Clones
Plus ça change

Vin Scully on statues

KPCC’s Off-Ramp recently had a wonderful segment with Ben Bergman interviewing the sportscaster Vin Scully. Here is Scully responding to the question of what he would like a statue of him to say:

“I would rather just be part of the scenery, rather than be standing out. And there was another famous expression, and I forget who said it, but he said, ‘I would rather be questioned why they don’t have a statue for me than to be questioned as to why they do have a statue,’ and I’ll take that as a pretty good answer.”

I know next to nothing about baseball, but listening to this interview makes me want to listen to Vin Scully call a Dodgers game, something he has been doing since 1950, when the team was still in Brooklyn. There is at least one more chance this year, though in Illinois the Dodgers Radio Network is nearly nonexistent.

How to improve writing (no. 46)

[Mark Trail, October 17, 2013. Click for a larger view.]

Given the tools available to me, I can’t do much to improve Mark Trail’s “cell phone,” which looks more like the battery from my old Sony Vaio. But I can improve writing. The last panel is the problem:


[Mark Trail, original.]

As Dusty Rhodes asks, what are you getting at, Mark? What’s on that phone of yours? The problem is the misplaced modifier “except us.” Garner’s Modern American Usage explains:

When modifying words are separated from the words they modify, readers have a hard time processing the information. Indeed, there likely to attach the modified language first to a nearby word or phrase.

Garner offers a grimly comic example: “Both died in an apartment Dr. Kevorkian was leasing after inhaling carbon monoxide,” a sentence suggesting that Kervorkian inhaled before he leased. Here’s what Mark Trail should have said:


[Mark Trail, revised.]

Between today’s strip and tomorrow’s, Dusty will probably figure things out.

This post marks the second time I’ve improved writing in a Mark Trail strip. Here’s the first. I rely on the free Mac app Seashore when I make such improvements.

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 46 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Privilege signs

Those signs, often for Coca-Cola, sometimes for Pepsi-Cola, that used to adorn candy stores and small grocery stores, and sometimes still do: they are called privilege signs (The New York Times).

Reading the Times article reminds me that I should mention James and Karla Murray’s book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York (Gingko Press, 2011). It was a gift from my son. Thank you, Ben. There are samples online.

The Times reports that more than half the storefronts photographed for the book are now gone.

The worst sentences in Salinger so far

I’m now up to page 408 of David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger. For sheer hokum, pages 304 to 314, Shields’s trek through Nine Stories, are impossible to beat. But I can’t type all that. Here instead is a passage from page 376, also by Shields, prompted by a reference in “Franny” to Franny Glass’s “tense, almost fetal position”:

If pregnancy is not the main idea here, what is? That Franny, a mythological female, is suffering a postwar nervous breakdown? The mystic’s confused searching for meaning is fulfilled through the use of young girls’ bodies. The womb is the reincarnated war wound. Franny is prayerful witness to the necessity of her creator’s war survival.

Given these biographers’ reductive interpretations of imaginative writing (as disguised autobiography and symbols), it’s probably to the book’s advantage that it has relatively little to say about Salinger’s work. Salinger is reductive about the life as well. One example: Shields and Salerno write that “From his introduction to Vedanta until his death in 2010, Salinger’s life strictly followed the four stages of life, or asramas, as explained by Salinger’s spiritual teacher Swami Nikhilananda.” A clumsy sentence, sure. The bigger problem: Shields and Salerno date Salinger’s earliest acquaintance with Vedanta to 1946. But they offer a description of the first asrama that covers Salinger’s life pre-1946 : as student, suitor of Oona O’Neill, writer for “the slicks,” and infantryman. In other words, Shields and Salerno have Salinger following Vedanta before he was following Vedanta.

Shields and Salerno seem so intent upon believing in their four-stage scheme of things that they miss obvious humor: Buddy Glass’s description of himself (in “Seymour: An Introduction”) as “a fourth-class Karma Yogin” has, I venture to say, nothing to do with the four asramas. “Fourth-class” is a self-deprecating joke. It should make us think of fourth-class mail.

Related reading
The worst sentence in Salinger so far (to page 137)
The worst sentences in Salinger so far (to page 244)
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

A new book from David Plowden

The photographer David Plowden has a new book of his work, Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie. Here is a slideshow. Plowden captures, again and again, the desolate beauty of what I will call the Midwestern Sublime.

A related post
Photographer David Plowden

A historian’s take on current events

Geoffrey Parker, Professor of History at The Ohio State University, interviewed today on PRI’s The World :

Looking at the outside world, it is just incredulity that the greatest power in the world cannot get its act together. I mean, to link the default on sovereign debt, something which really does tarnish a country, to a particular piece of legislation which was already passed: I don’t think anyone outside the United States can understand that, how we could be holding the economy of the world to ransom, in return for some concessions on a piece of legislation which has already passed. What is there still to discuss? That’s what I think the rest of the world can’t understand. And I think one year, ten years, a hundred years from now, that will still be something which is very hard to understand.

*

October 17: Here’s a link to the interview, which was not yet online when I made this post.

“Quicksaaaand!”

Another item in Roz Chast’s book: quicksand, the subject of the recent Radiolab episode “Quicksaaaand!” The discussion of quicksand in the movies makes me realize that, yes, people were always falling into quicksand when I was a boy, in movies and in the schoolyard. You don’t see that so much anymore.

This podcast, a mere sixteen minutes, is one of the best Radiolab episodes I’ve heard.