Libraries and the book

“If we change the role of libraries and librarians without preserving the centrality of the book, we risk losing something irretrievable”: Alberto Manguel, “Reinventing the Library” (The New York Times).

Related reading
All OCA library posts (Pinboard)
Cutting libraries in a recession is like  . . . .
Libraries in hard times

Abbreviated Latin expression of the day: infra dig

I just ran across infra dig in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language. I can never recall the expression’s meaning, and so looked it up again. Perhaps writing this post will help me to remember the meaning in the future, he added hopefully.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “Beneath one’s dignity; unbecoming one’s position; not consistent with dignity; undignified.” Infra dig , an adjective, is the “colloquial abbreviation of Latin infrā dignitātem beneath (one’s) dignity.” The expression, whose source the Dictionary calls “obscure,” arose in the early nineteenth century:

William Hazlitt, 1822: “If the graduates  . . . express their thoughts in English, it is understood to be infra dignitatem .”

Walter Scott, 1824: “It would be infra dig. in the Provost of this most flourishing and loyal town to associate with Redgauntlet.”

Infra dig has always sounded to me as if it must be an expression of approval from the 1960s. (Dig !) I can imagine the phrase as a bit of dialogue spoken by a Beatle in A Hard Day’s Night: “A bit infra dig , eh wot?” But no, there’s nothing to dig in infra dig .

Thanks, OED.

“Rubber soles and heels while you wait”

[Henry, October 23, 2015.]

It’s a wise shoe repairman who opens early enough to catch the going-to-school crowd.

Henry last visited a shoe repairman, in a different shop, in August 2012. That must have been a getting-ready-for-the-school-year visit. This time around we don’t get to see Henry entering a “shoe booth.” But I don’t feel cheated: the S of Shoe , the upward-curling Repair , and the sign in the window make up for the booth’s absence.

Google returns just one result for “rubber soles and heels while you wait.” Now there will be two:


[Auckland Star , May 6, 1916. “Not out”? It’s a cricket term. Meaning “not retired, still working”?]

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
Bernhard’s cat (Cat’s Paw heels and soles)

[I am tempted to write shoe repairer, but repairman fits the Henry world.]

Movie recommendation: People on Sunday

The artlessness of browsing: I was looking through the M s in the library and came across the silent movie People on Sunday, or Menschen am Sonntag (1930). It’s a beautiful, funny, sad (silent) story of hopes and disappointments in the before, during, and after of a Sunday outing. The movie’s makers, or at least their later accomplishments, are almost all instantly recognizable: co-directors Robert Siodmak (The Killers) and Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour), cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis), cinematographic assistant Fred Zinnemann (High Noon), writers Kurt (later Curt) Siodmak (The Wolf Man) and Billy (here, Billie) Wilder. (The names of producer Heinrich Nebenzahl and lighting technician Moriz Seeler, a poet who died in the Holocaust, are otherwise unknown to me.)

People on Sunday is distinguished by its cast of non-actors, five young Berliners playing versions of themselves: Brigitte Borchert (record-store saleswoman), Christl Ehlers (movie extra), Erwin Splettstößer (cab driver), Annie Schreyer (model), and Wolfgang von Waltershausen (traveling wine salesman). Christl meets Wolfgang, who invites her on a Sunday outing. She brings her best friend Brigitte. He brings his pal Erwin. (Annie, Erwin’s girlfriend, sleeps away the movie in their apartment.) The four young adults swim and splash, picnic, listen to records, ride a paddle boat, walk about. Things become complicated.


[Clownish Erwin at rest. Click any image for a larger view.]


[That’s Wolfgang’s hand caressing Christl’s face.]


[That’s Wolfgang’s other hand, simultaneously caressing Brigitte. See? Complicated.]


[Back home, Annie sleeps.]

People on Sunday is an obvious influence on Italian neorealism. But I suspect that this movie also influenced Robert Bresson (who, too, worked with non-actors), and I think it must have helped inspire Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country .



The luminous forest scene (Brigitte and Wolfgang) seems like a likely precedent for Franz Biberkopf and Mieze Karsunke’s forest scene in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).



But I would imagine that the resemblance between this fleeting image and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph Hyères, France is a matter of cameramen with equally good eyes.

What makes People on Sunday deeply affecting beyond its makers’ intentions is that the movie captures a world soon to be lost to hatred and madness. (The seeds of course were already planted.) One can only wonder what became of the countless people who appear in the movie’s scenes of city life, sweeping up, washing cars, dozing on park benches, boarding buses, looking out of windows, crossing streets, having their pictures taken.

People on Sunday is available from the Criterion Collection, dazzlingly restored, with two musical scores and many extras, including a 2000 interview with Brigitte Borchert.

Walter Benjamin on collectors

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

I read this passage with a jolt of recognition. This post is for all who read likewise.

Other Walter Benjamin posts
“Avoid haphazard writing materials”
Metaphors for writing
On readers and writers

Ada : “nice normal things”

Ada and Van have been discussing botanical names and translations:


Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969).

God knows what indeed. Ada and Van are very unusual children.

Ada is among other things a parody-history of the novel. The dowdy, stilted narrative voice that here recounts a bit of dialogue — “ interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands” — is one of the book’s many pleasures.

Elaine and I are now 400 pages in, and I suspect that Ada might displace Pale Fire as my favorite Nabokov novel.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Minor prophecy

This thought would have packed greater prophetic power if I’d posted it several weeks ago. At any rate, I’ve been thinking it for weeks:

If Joe Biden enters the presidential race, he will make his announcement while Hillary Clinton is testifying before the Select Committee on Benghazi. That way, any immediate response she might make will be reported with a reminder: “Hillary Clinton, fresh from her appearance before a committee investigating,” &c. If there is to be an announcement, it won’t be before Thursday.

[Am I too cynical?]

*

October 21: Biden announced today that he will not enter the race.

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate The case moves to New Hampshire.

Overheard

Elegant violence:

“There was only one thing to do. I grabbed the whiskey decanter and threw it at him.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[The television was on for “warmth”: the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Wayward Wife,” first broadcast January 23, 1960.]

Movie recommendation: Phoenix

Phoenix (dir. Christian Petzold, 2014) is dark, stylish, and excellent. Nelly Lenz, an Auschwitz survivor (played by Nina Hoss), returns to Berlin. Her face has been horrifically damaged by a bullet wound. She undergoes reconstructive surgery and, with new features, seeks out her husband.

Phoenix has touches of Dark Passage (dir. Delmer Daves, 1947) and Eyes Without a Face (dir. Georges Franju, 1960), and owes a large debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Like Vertigo, it has an unforgettable ending.

That’s all you should know if you plan to see this movie.