Mark Trail and Abbey Powell

[Mark Trail, April 14, 2015.]

OMG, Abbey Powell is a real person at the USDA. And now she’s trapped in the Trail world. Run, Abbey, run!

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Ariel

[Left right: Matti Pellonpää as Mikkonen, Turo Pajala as Taisto Kasurinen, Susanna Haavisto as Irmeli Pihlaja.]

Ariel is a 1988 film from Finland, directed by Aki Kaurismäki. It’s the second film of his Proletariat Trilogy. Like The Man Without a Past (2002), it is dark and funny. Elaine thought of Umberto Eco’s characterization of Casablanca : Ariel, too, is “the movies,” with many deadpan moments of noir homage and parody. And yes, the protagonist Taisto looks as if he stepped out of Pulp Fiction (made six years later).

One of the many delights of this film is its wonderfully eclectic, eccentric soundtrack. What a treat to hear Casey Bill Weldon’s “WPA Blues” accompanying a scene of looking for work.

To understand why the sequence above is funny, you’ll have to watch the film.

[Weldon is identified as “Bill Casey” in the credits. Oops.]

Word of the Day: lotusland

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is lotusland:

1 : a place inducing contentment especially through offering an idyllic living situation

2 : a state or an ideal marked by contentment often achieved through self-indulgence

M-W explains:

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and his men discover a magical land of lotus-eaters. Some of the sailors eat the delicious “lotus” and forget about their homeland, pleading to stay forever in this “lotusland.” (It is likely that the lotus in question was inspired by the fruit of a real plant of the buckthorn family, perhaps the jujube, whose sweet juice is used in candy making and which has given its name to a popular fruity candy.) The label lotusland is now applied to any place resembling such an ideal of perfection, but it also carries connotations of indolence and self-indulgence, possibly derived from the way the sailors refused to work once they reached the original lotusland. The dreamy unreality of a lotusland is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Well, sort of. Lotusland is not a nice place to visit, precisely because to visit is to stay. As Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation puts it,



The Lotos Eaters offer a dangerous form of xenía [hospitality] — an anti-hospitality, really, that erases the identity of the xeinos [guest]. There’s nothing malevolent about it: the Lotos Eaters have some choice stuff, and they’re happy to share. But to eat the lotus is to lose one’s nostos [homecoming]; the guest consumes the lotus, and the lotus consumes the guest. Think of the language of substance abuse: crackhead , meth head . The substance takes over the user’s consciousness.

I first encountered the lotus as a schoolboy, in Ross Russell’s Bird Lives (1973), a biography of Charlie Parker. One chapter is titled “Yardbird in Lotus Land.” I thought lotus land was slang for California. I didn’t yet know about Homer.

[If you’ve seen what happens to lines of poetry in various browsers on various devices, you will understand why Fitzgerald’s lines appear as an image.]

Domestic comedy

“I’m just going to make a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll put water on for you.”

“I’ll continue narrating.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Billie Holiday, 29¢

[Billie Holiday stamp by James Leddy. 2¾″ × 2½″.]

I’ve had this artistamp on my office door for many years. It predates the USPS’s Billie Holiday stamp (September 17, 1994) and must postdate the first-ounce stamp’s rise to twenty-nine cents (February 3, 1991). My dad is a fan — of Billie Holiday, not of the post office. He heard her sing at the Apollo Theater, sometime in the 1950s.

More by James Leddy
Abe’s shades : Boo! : Happy holidays : Hardy mums : Questionnaire : Thanks!

[Billie Holiday’s centenary: April 7, 2015.]

Scott Pelley’s Bob Schieffer

Scott Pelley, paying tribute to Bob Schieffer on the CBS Evening News: “Bob Schieffer, my friend, my colleague, my mentor.” He left out doppelgänger. Doppelgänger.

[If you’re reading in a reader: there is an apostrophe in the post title. I added it after posting so as not to complicate the URL, not realizing that it wouldn’t have done so.]

The Man Without a Past

The Man Without a Past (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2002) is a Finnish film about a man (M, played by Markku Peltola) who suffers a terrible beating, loses his memory, and remakes his life. It is the first Finnish film I’ve seen. It is quietly, strangely funny.

Is there something deeply Finnish about the film’s dark, awkward humor? My guess is yes . The Man Without a Past reminds me of Robert Bresson (whom Kaurismäki acknowledges as an influence on his work) and, of all things, Napoleon Dynamite (dir. Jared Hess, 2004). The sprawling subdivision of Kaurismäki Heights is now part of our Netflix queue.

Thanks to Fresca, who seems to be an infallible recommender of films.

Michael Oakeshott on education, again

One more passage:

Education, I have contended, is the transaction between the generations in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world which they are to inhabit. This is a world of understandings, imaginings, meanings, moral and religious beliefs, relationships, practices — states of mind in which the human condition is to be discerned as recognitions of and responses to the ordeal of consciousness. These states of mind can be entered into only by being themselves understood, and they can be understood only by learning to do so. To be initiated into this world is learning to become human; and to move within it freely is being human, which is a “historic,” not a “natural” condition.

Thus, an educational engagement is at once a discipline and a release; and it is the one by virtue of being the other. It is a difficult engagement of learning by study in a continuous and exacting redirection of attention and refinement of understanding which calls for humility, patience and courage. Its reward is an emancipation from the mere “fact of living,” from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth, from the tyranny of the moment and from the servitude of a merely current condition; it is the reward of a human identity and of a character capable in some measure of the moral and intellectual adventure which constitutes a specifically human life.

“Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972), in The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

I like that characterization of children as “newcomers to the scene.” And I’m inspired by just about everything this essay says about education.

Two more Michael Oakeshott posts
On education: being and becoming human
On higher education

Michael Oakeshott on education: being and becoming human

The marks of a good school are that in it learning may be recognized as, itself, a golden satisfaction which needs no adventitious gilding to recommend it; and that it bestows upon its alumni the gift of a childhood recollected, not as a passage of time hurried through on the way to more profitable engagements, but, with gratitude, as an enjoyed initiation into the mysteries of a human condition: the gift of self-knowledge and of a satisfying intellectual and moral identity.

Thus, this transaction between the generations cannot be said to have any extrinsic “end” or “purpose”: for the teacher it is part of his engagement of being human; for the learner it is the engagement of becoming human. It does not equip the newcomer to do anything specific; it gives him no particular skill, it promises no material advantage over other men, and it points to no finally perfect human character. Each, in participating in this transaction, takes in keeping some small or large part of an inheritance of human understandings. . . . Education is not learning to do this or that more proficiently; it is acquiring in some measure an understanding of a human condition in which the “fact of life” is continuously illuminated by a “quality of life.” It is learning how to be at once an autonomous and a civilized subscriber to a human life.

“Education: The Engagement and Its Frustration” (1972), in The Voice of Liberal Learning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

Forty-three years later, Oakeshott’s words may serve as a strong reply to all efforts to cast education as the acquisition of “skills” for college and the workplace. Is your first-grader “college-ready”?

A related post
Michael Oakeshott on higher education

Door management

I was telling my students about visiting Mystery Pier Books in Los Angeles. Rare books? We didn’t have the money. Should we go in? Would we be welcome? We went in. Boy, were we glad that we did.

My advice to my students: when you come to a door, open it. Go through it. Unless the door says “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” or something like that. Don’t open that door.

Visiting Mystery Pier Books is a Thing to Do in Los Angeles.

[That’s John Ciardi’s translation of Dante. And yes, my advice echoes Yogi Berra’s “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”]