Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country ]

[Inside: Rodolphe (Jacques Brunius) and Henri (Georges D’Arnoux). Outside: Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) and her mother Mme. Dufour (Jane Marken). Click for a larger view.]

Adapted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant, Jean Renoir’s 1936 film Partie de campagne [A Day in the Country ] is about the male gaze, certainly: as Henriette and Mme. Dufour swing, they are watched in turn by M. Dufour (André Gabriello), Dufour’s shop assistant and future son-in-law Anatole (Paul Temps), four grinning schoolboys, a pack of nervous seminarians and their priestly keepers, Rodolphe (a young boatman on the make), and his more somber friend Henri. But the film is about so much more. The Dufours, their daughter Henriette, Mme. Dufour’s mother (Gabrielle Fontan), and Anatole have left Paris for a day in the country, fishing and picnicking. They are urban rubes: “There’s so much dirt in the country!” says Mme. Dufour. Yet they are charmed by the magic of the natural world: sunlight, a cherry tree, a nightingale, a river. Rodolphe and Henri plot to get the two younger women to themselves. What follows cannot be predicted. Yet when one watches the film a second time, the course of the action seems inevitable.

“We cannot go to the country / for the country will bring us / no peace,” William Carlos Williams wrote in “Raleigh Was Right.” So too in Renoir’s film, but for a different reason: here, going to the country stirs feelings that can find expression nowhere else. It ruins a person for the rest of life.

Partie de campagne is available from The Criterion Collection, whose designers have created, as always, a beautiful and inventive package. The restaurant’s signboard inspires the disc menu:




So beautiful. Credit goes (I think) to art director Sarah Habibi and type designer F. Ron Miller.

[A bonus: a musical score by Joseph Kosma, who wrote the music for “Les feuilles mortes” [“Autumn Leaves”]. A special added bonus: Renoir plays the proprietor of the Restaurant Poulain. His longtime partner Marguerite Houlle Renoir plays the waitress.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate The Salinger Trust has asked that the suit be dismissed.

Hermann Zapf (1918–2015)

The typographer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf has died. Here, from Quartz, is a look at his work (it includes a 1967 film of Zapf drawing letters). Hermann Zapf, as in Optima, Palatino, Zapf Dingbats, and Zapfino.

From Robert Walser

A park like this resembles a large, silent, isolated room. In fact it’s always Sunday in a park, by the way, for it’s always a bit melancholy, and the melancholy stirs up vivid memories of home, and Sunday is something that only ever existed at home, where you were a child. Sundays have something parental and childish about them.

Robert Walser, “The Park,” in Berlin Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

I know: there are many kinds of Sundays, including those with “late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” But when I read Walser, I believe him.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Ronnie Gilbert (1926–2015)

Ronnie Gilbert, singer, songwriter, and social and political activist, was one of the original Weavers. The New York Times has an obituary.

There’s more to Ronnie Gilbert’s work than the Weavers. But here is Weavers’ last song (and a little bit more).

Happy together

My turtles, like my people, have left my office for a new home. They’re living on the shelf of a Levenger study carrel. They think they’re in a library. Shh.

[This post is for Fresca, seeing as how she asked. The turtles were a gift from Elaine.]

New directions in assessment

The Chronicle of Higher Education describes one school’s plan to scan students’ brains to determine the effects of college and, more specifically, of study abroad.

A skeptical neurologist, asked to comment: “I was trying to think of something more ridiculous, but I couldn’t.”

[File under the quantification of everything.]

Scott Walker v. tenure

The New York Times reports on Scott Walker’s efforts to eliminate tenure at Wisconsin’s state universities:

A committee of lawmakers last week approved along party lines a proposal that would remove the notion of tenure in the university system from state statute, leaving the sensitive matter to the state’s Board of Regents, which oversees the system’s 13 four-year universities and some 180,000 students.

Under the proposal, the board’s 18 members — 16 of whom are appointed by the governor subject to the confirmation of the State Senate — would be permitted to set a standard by which they could fire a tenured faculty member “when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection,” not only in the case of just cause or a financial emergency, as permitted previously. Critics deemed it tenure with no actual promise of tenure.

Following those paragraphs, a comment from State Senator Sheila Harsdorf (R): “The reality is that we are not eliminating tenure.”

No, the reality is that they are eliminating tenure, or attempting to. “Program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection” could mean anything from cutting single courses to cutting whole disciplines and departments.

Here in Illinois, I anticipate a similar effort to eliminate tenure, packaged, of course, as “tenure reform.” Bruce Rauner, Illinois’s version of Scott Walker, has pronounced tenure “a flawed concept.”

My people

These people shared an office with me for years. Now they live with me at home, alongside an Eagle Verithin display case. The little guy is not pleased. He never has been.

Related posts
A face on my floor : Kubrick remake : Officemates

[I’m pretty sure that these people came to me, one by one, as gifts from my children. But it’s been a long time.]

Dead Writers Perfume®

A new (old) scent: “The Dead Writers Perfume® blend evokes the feeling of sitting in an old library chair paging through yellowed copies of Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe, and more.” The product is for real, unlike Smell of Books™, which remains but a concept.

Thanks, Zayne.

[Hemingway, Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Poe: is it Dead White Male Writers Perfume®?]