Willa Cather on light and shade

The sky for the past few days has been grey or white. This morning it’s blue, with sharp low sun, as if a desk lamp were shining on the streets. The only grey and white today are faint clouds on the horizon, the prairie version of mountains. Out on a walk, I thought of Willa Cather:

Nobody can paint the sun, or sunlight. He can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade — he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight — a conception of clouds over distant mesas (or over the towers of St. Sulpice) that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve — the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and colour, as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue.

“Light on Adobe Walls,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies of Writing as an Art . 1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. First published 1920.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

William Maxwell on his habit of work

From his 1982 Paris Review interview:

I like to work in my bathrobe and pajamas, after breakfast, until I suddenly perceive, from what’s on the page in the typewriter, that I’ve lost my judgment. And then I stop. It’s usually about twelve thirty. But I hate getting dressed. The cleaning woman (who may not approve of it, though she’s never said), my family, the elevator men, the delivery boy from Gristedes — all of them are used to seeing me in this unkempt condition. What it means to me is probably symbolic — you can have me after I’ve got my trousers on, but not before. When I retired from The New Yorker they offered me an office, which was very generous of them because they’re shy on space, but I thought, “What would I do with an office at The New Yorker ? I would have to put my trousers on and ride the subway downtown to my typewriter. No good.”

Other William Maxwell posts
On childhood and familiar objects : On “the greatest pleasure there is” : On Melville and Cather : On sentences

[Gristedes: a New York supermarket chain.]

Trump, go home

In today’s New York Times, a reporter travels to Donald Trump’s old neighborhood in Queens :

“People always ask, ‘Where are the moderate Muslims?’” Ali Najmi, 31, a defense lawyer and a co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, said during a discussion after prayers at the Arafa Islamic Center. “We’re right here; we’re right in Donald Trump’s neighborhood. He needs to come back home.”

In a little corner of my imagination, I sometimes wonder whether Trump’s candidacy is an elaborate thought-experiment, something like Jane Elliott’s blue eyes–brown eyes classroom exercise. But I know I’m just imagining things.

The pompous style in Nancy

[Nancy , April 18, 1966. Via Random Acts of Nancy .]

He must be an Honors student.

“The pompous style” is a key term in Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013):

So accustomed are we to the pompous style as the voice of authority that students can’t be blamed for thinking it the way they should write in school. Indeed, our educational institutions — ahem, schools — do much to encourage this belief. Children learn to read and write short, plain sentences — “See Spot run” — then grow older and begin to write as if “Observe Spot in the process of running” were somehow an improvement. By the time they arrive at college, almost all revere formality in and of itself as the mark of good writing. And by and large they learn to write like George Eliot’s self-important man of business, Borthrop Trumbull, talked: “Things never began with Mr. Trumbull: they always commenced.”

A related post
A wrongheaded “dead words” movement

[The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing was my favorite book for teaching college writing: small, inexpensive, beautifully written, sane. I recommend it to all students and teachers.]

I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries

[A plucky young mom is about to be evicted, or fired, or something. ]

“But it’s Christmas Eve!”

Of course it’s Christmas Eve, you fool. But what were you expecting — a drop of human kindness? Forget it: you’re on the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel. But all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, in another ninety minutes or so.

I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, and I’m not proud of it. The blame though rests with my daughter Rachel: it was her enthusiasm that got me started. We both love the awfulness.

HMM: for those times when you don’t want to think very hard. Or at all.

[With apologies to Julian of Norwich.]

Comics synchronicity

“Breaking news”: Mutts and, more darkly, Oscar’s Portrait .

And here’s another recent installment of Oscar’s Portrait about watching the news. That’s how I feel when I put the news on.

A baker’s dozen

Thirteen films I recommend with enthusiasm, more or less in the order of viewing:

Berlin Alexanderplatz (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980) The fifteen-and-a-half-hour-long story of the fall and fall of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lambrecht), a Weimar everyman, by turns brutish and tender. His release from prison (the story’s beginning) is a reëntry into another prison. Fassbinder’s epilogue (“My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin, An Epilogue”) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a film.

*

Black Angel (dir. Roy William Neill, 1946). Amateur sleuths Catherine Bennett (June Vincent) and Martin Blair (Dan Duryea) attempt to clear Bennett’s husband of a murder charge before he is executed. With Peter Lorre as a sinister nightclub owner.

*

Der Anständige [The decent one] (dir. Vanessa Papa, 2014). A portrait of Heinrich Himmler that draws upon diaries, letters, memoranda, and photographs. Himmler’s letters to his wife sound like those of a husband traveling on business. But this husband is traveling to ghettos and death camps. In a conversation with the director (included on the DVD), Errol Morris calls Der Anständige “one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen.”

*

Duke Ellington: Love You Madly (dir. Ralph J. Gleason, 1965). Ellington in public and in private — playing a club and a festival, visiting Grace Cathedral (the site for the first of his three Sacred Concerts), lying down in a bathrobe backstage, playing a tape of work in progress. With a glimpse of Ellington walking through a hotel lobby with a woman I’m almost certain is Beatrice Ellis (aka Evie Ellington), his many-years, rarely photographed partner.

*

For Your Consideration (dir. Christopher Guest, 2006). We saw it when it came out and were unimpressed. We gave it a second chance and loved it, perhaps because we now know a little more about “the business.” With Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, and other Guest players.

*

Love and Mercy (dir. Bill Pohlad, 2014). Paul Dano and John Cusack are persuasive Brian Wilsons. Elizabeth Banks is a compassionate and gentle Melinda Ledbetter (later Wilson). Paul Giamatti is a terrifying Eugene Landy. Not a bad film, as I feared it would be. An aside: given the YouTube clips of recent live shows, I think that love and mercy for Brian Wilson right now would mean an end to touring.

*

The Man Who Never Was (dir. Ronald Neame, 1956). What might be called a military procedural, tracing the development of Operation Mincemeat, whose goal was to mislead German forces about the Allied invasion of Sicily. Perhaps Clifton Webb’s finest 103 minutes.

*

The Mortal Storm (dir. Frank Borzage, 1940). Family ties and friendships dissolve in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power. With Frank Morgan, James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Young, and a memorable turn by Maria Ouspenskaya.

*

Possessed (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Joan Crawford as an obsessive rejected lover. That is all ye need to know.

*

True Story (dir. Rupert Goold, 2015). The relationship between a journalist and a man accused of murder who (briefly) assumed the reporter’s identity. The relationship is a mutual exploitation society: a reporter in search of a great story and a defendant in search of — what? Based on a memoir by the former New York Times writer Michael Finkel, with Jonah Hill as Finkel and James Franco as Christian Longo.

*

Spotlight (dir. Thomas McCarthy, 2015). The effort of Boston Globe journalists to determine the full extent of priestly abuse and Church coverup is inspiring. This film reminded Elaine and me of The Wire : like that series, this film focuses on institutions and a small band of investigators. I think Spotlight is a good bet to win Best Picture.

*

Beyond the Mat (dir. Barry W. Blaustein, 1999). A documentary about professional wrestlers, in and out of the squared circle. Funny, grotesque, and often deeply moving. A reader named Frank recommended this film in a comment on a 2014 post about documentaries. I’m glad I watched. (And I will admit to having watched Andre the Giant, Pedro Morales, George “The Animal” Steele, Chief Jay Strongbow and all the rest on UHF television in my teenaged years. I loved it.)

*

The Daytrippers (dir. Greg Mottola, 1996). A woman finds what appears to be a love letter to her husband. She travels with her family from Long Island to Manhattan to ask him about it. With Hope Davis, Pat McNamara, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, and Stanley Tucci. Great writing (by Mottola): “Would you like some Entenmann’s?” Yes, that’s the way we roll, or rolled. According to the New York Times review, this film was shot in sixteen days. It would appear to be a largely unknown treasure.

Reader, what have you found that’s worth watching?

A related post
A baker’s dozen, plus one

Leaving empty-handed

I dropped Elaine at her Nutcracker and drove through an end-of-Casablanca fog to browse in a chain bookstore, the one I (perversely) call Barnes and Nobles. No Mrs. Dalloway . No William Maxwell. No gaps to suggest that they’d recently left the shelves. No Robert Walser’s Looking at Pictures . That one I just wanted to see in a store.

If the book scene is sad, the music scene is sadder still. No Ellington. No Miles Smiles — an arbitrary absence, I admit. (There were just two Miles Davis CDs.) No Concert by the Sea . That one, too, I just wanted to see in a store.

It’s sad when leaving a bookstore empty-handed becomes routine.

The New York Times : “End the Gun Epidemic in America”

The New York Times has a front-page editorial today, the first since 1920: “End the Gun Epidemic in America.” An excerpt:

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

I have just discovered, via this helpful website, that my representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), has in the course of his political career received $31,050 from the NRA. Representative Shimkus is up for reëlection in 2016. He may be best known for saying that we don’t need to worry about rising sea levels, because “God said the earth would not be destroyed by a flood.” In my household, Shimkus is also known for unwittingly likening Bruce Rauner to Benito Mussolini. I have called Representative Shimkus’s office before; I will be calling again on Monday.

On a brighter note, Illinois senator Mark Kirk was the only Senate Republican to vote this week to prohibit people on the F.B.I.’s terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives. I will be calling Senator Kirk’s office on Monday, too.

Repurposeful art deco

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day: Ruth Gerth’s 1931 “Glow Lamp,” a beautiful piece of repurposeful art deco. (Click through: I’m keeping its secret.)

My dad liked to repurpose: sardine tins as stamp holders, shaving-cream caps as paper-clip cups. Our household likes to repurpose, too, in all sorts of ways: bakeware as a laptop stand, a cardboard box as a blog post (really), a cork and a doorstop as iPad stands, a dish drainer as a file tray, tea tins as index-card holders, a thermostat as a paperweight.

Reader, what household objects have you repurposed?