Me or I

Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall) speaking, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930):

“No, no, no, that’s me — or is it I ? You know, Markham, I never know.”

I’ve been told that even British audiences have difficulty understanding the dialogue in early Hitchcock films, and I believe it. Some of Murder!, at least in the print we watched, was unintelligible. The Spanish subtitles (no English ones on our DVD) were sometimes helpful, though they left at least one important bit of dialogue untranslated. I think the translator must have given up.

Murder! is well worth seeing, if only to see how much of “Hitchcock” is there early on: the layman pressed into the work of a detective (as in The 39 Steps and many other films), the use of theatrical settings (as in that film and Stage Fright ), the wonderful bits of throwaway dialogue. (See above.) And there’s an eerie moment on a trapeze that made me think of the staircase scene in Psycho.

The cheap videotape-transfer Laserlight DVD that we watched (borrowed from the library) runs about 92 minutes. YouTube has a print that runs about five minutes longer, with a scene that’s missing from the Laserlight disc. (In this scene, a young girl exclaims, “He’s got my pussy!” — meaning cat. Was the scene censored?) The IMDb listing for the film has running times of 92, 100, and 104 minutes. Your guess is as good as mine, or maybe better.


[On the flying trapeze. Esme Percy as Handel Fane.]

Hotel glasses

From a 2012 NBC News interview with Jacob Tomsky, author of Heads in Beds, a book about the hotel business:

“Housekeepers are only provided with cleaners, so they’ll often put some hot water in the sink and put the mini-bar glasses in there with shampoo. Also, they want them streak-free, so they’ll often use some kind of furniture polish just to really get the shine there.”

[Found in a free publication distributed by a local HMO. The HMO’s recommendation: use the disposable cups instead. See also Snopes. Cheers.]

Recently updated

Charlie Haden (1937–2014) With links to a New York Times obituary and a recording.

Henry, sink

[Henry, July 12, 2014.]

This is what a sink looks like, or once did. My grandparents had sinks strongly resembling Henry’s sink, paternal sink in the kitchen, maternal in the basement. I can see and almost smell the bar of Octagon Laundry Soap now.

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[I read Henry online via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]

Charlie Haden (1937–2014)

Charlie Haden was a giant of music. My recommendation right now: Steal Away: Spirituals, Hymns and Folk Songs (Verve, 1995), an album of duets with Hank Jones. Here is a sample: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The best way I can describe Haden’s sound: deep.

More: Remembering Jazz Legend Charlie Haden (NPR).

*

July 12: The New York Times has an obituary.

Searching for a simile

This Google search brought a seeker to these pages: homeric simile about assholes.

Sorry. Homer don’t play that.

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[When a user is signed in to a Google account, the content of a Google search is hidden from all eyes but Google’s. Whoever was searching for similes was not signed in: that’s how I was able to see the search in my blog stats. If there were a Homeric simile about assholes, it would have to be about Agamemnon. But to call Agamemnon an asshole is to engage in metonymy or synecdoche, or both.]

-wise, usagewise

Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day today addresses the suffix -wise. That suffix was an occasion of cultural angst in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The suffix even showed up in comic form in Leave It To Beaver. In real life, I heard it used not long ago in a startling way.

Garner recommends avoiding -wise generally, though he points to taxwise as a recent, plausible word of choice. And he adds that “some writers use the suffix playfully” — as did Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (The Apartment), as did the writers of Leave It to Beaver. And as did I, when I asked a friend, now our houseguest, what we should have on hand foodwise and drinkwise.

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[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. You can subscribe to Usage Tip of the Day at Bryan Garner’s LawProse. Scroll down and look to the right.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1912 letter:

Du côté de chez Swann is the fragment of a novel, which will have as a general title A la recherche du temps perdu. I should have liked to have published it as a single whole, but it would have been too long. They no longer publish works in several volumes. There are novelists, on the other hand, who envisage a brief plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous. I hope that by the end of my book what I have tried to do will be understandable; some unimportant little event will show that time has passed and it will take on that beauty certain pictures have, enhanced by the passage of the years.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November ?, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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Recently updated

Seymour Barab (1921–2014) With a link to a New York Times obituary.

VDP talks, plays, sings

At dublab (“a non-profit web radio collective devoted to the growth of positive music, art and culture”), Carlos Niño interviews Van Dyke Parks. I would say that Van Dyke is in fine fettle, but doing so would require that I first look up fettle. So I will say instead that he is in rare form — expansive, generous, funny, wise. A sample: “I worked very hard to be anonymous. And I finally achieved that goal.” Maybe. But Van Dyke has many irons in the fire and still more waiting on deck.

I just mixed metaphors.

Post-interview, Van Dyke plays and sings “The Silver Swan” (Orlando Gibbons), “Home in Pasadena” (Harry Warren, Grant Clark, Edgar Leslie), and his own “The All Golden” and “Orange Crate Art.” You might recognize the final little phrase from the theme music for PBS’s This Old House : it’s a bit of “Louisiana Fairy Tale” (Mitchell Parish, Haven Gillespie, and Fred Coots). Eclectic? It’s all music, and it’s all good.

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