Willa Cather on adapting novels

From a 1943 letter to the playwright Zoë Akins:

Novels of action can be dramatized. Novels of feeling, even if it is only feeling for a city or a historic period, cannot be.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather , ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout (New York: Knopf, 2013).

I learned from this volume that Cather’s 1923 novel A Lost Lady was twice adapted for the screen, in 1924 and 1934 (with Barbara Stanwyck). The editors of the Letters note that it was around the time of the second adaptation that “Cather’s views on adaptation began to harden . . . , and she forbade dramatic adaptation of her works for the rest of her life and in her will.”

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Proust at auction Now there’s a catalogue.

From The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915).

Elaine has written a piece inspired by the novel.

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[“Next their skin”: not a typo.]

FSRC: annual report

Our household’s two-person adventure in reading, the Four Seasons Reading Club (formerly the Summer Reading Club, formerly the Vacation Reading Club) has now run for about a year. Nearly every day, Elaine and I sit down and read, twenty or twenty-five pages of a book — the same book, which means two copies of everything. (The library comes in handy.) Here’s what we’ve read in the past twelve months:

Herman Meville, Moby-Dick

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady , Death Comes for the Archbishop , The Old Beauty and Others

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory ; Ada

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis , trans. Susan Bernofsky

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Robert Walser, Fairy Tales , trans. Daniele Pantano and James Reidel

Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark , Lucy Gayheart , Alexander’s Bridge , Shadows on the Rock

Books abandoned:

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (after a few pages)

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (midway)

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (almost immediately)

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (somewhere in the second chapter)

The Cather-ness of the list was unpremeditated. We love Willa Cather and will probably end up reading everything. If, though, I had to choose one of our books as the book, it would be the mind-bendingly brilliant Ada . That’s one we each had to own.

Elaine too has written an annual report. But neither of us has figured out how to do hanging indents that will display properly on a variety of devices. Here’s an easy way.

Thesaurus Linguae Latinae

Work on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae began in 1894. The projected finishing date: 2050. The dictionary is the subject of a wonderful story from NPR, The Ultimate Latin Dictionary, with photographs of handwritten dictionary slips. I like the account of working on res , which might be for this dictionary what the verb make is for the OED.

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A Henry scooter

[Henry , May 14, 2016.]

Sigh. Kids really did ride around on scooters made from produce crates and roller skates. I remember teenagers and near-teenagers using them in street games in Brooklyn, games of combat, I think. By the time I might have been old enough, scooters had passed.


[“Young boy playing w. his fruit crate scooter which he made by nailing the wheel parts fr. an old roller skate to a wooden plank & adding the crate.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. New York, New York. June 1947. From the Life Photo Archive.]

In 2014 a Kickstarter project produced a pre-fab simulacrum with screen-printed graphics, the Skate Crate (starting at $179). I prefer that chalked 2 .

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Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois , May 14, 2016.]

Lois has reminded Hi that he promised “to do some work around here today.” “Around here” must mean at some distance from the house. Perhaps Hi is painting a tree. White.

I thought at first that the Hi-Lo color stylists had forgotten to make some of the grass green. But I think the grey area below the front step signifies sidewalk. Awkward sidewalk.

And yes, the ladder’s lower rung is bisecting Hi’s pants.

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Garner's Usage Tip of the Day: mischievous

Bryan Garner on mischievous:

mischievous /MIS-chә-vәs/ is so spelled. *Mischievious is an impishly common misspelling and mispronunciation /mis-CHEE-vee-әs/.

I always thought my eight-grade teacher was mispronouncing the word. She also mispronounced comfortable as /kәm-FORT-ә-bәl/. These mispronunciations came during spelling tests.

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[I’ve substituted capitals for Garner’s bold.]

Back to school

I am standing in the bedroom of my childhood. I reach under the bed and pull out books and notebooks, all for a new class I am taking. I will be studying Latin and French and learning to read so as to “extract information.” Extracting information: what fun.

This is the fourth school-related dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching, and the first in which I’ve been a student.

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Frank Stella, here and now

From a To the Best of Our Knowledge interview with the artist Frank Stella. Steve Paulson has asked Stella what it’s like to be an artist nearing the age of eighty:

Stella: There’s no future in it. And so when you’re young, you still have an idea of something other than the here and now. There is the future. But now I’m stuck with, as the physicists like to say, here and now, and that's it.

Paulson: Do you feel the clock ticking?

Stella: No, I don’t feel it like that. But I feel that there’s nothing other than the moment though. So you have to do it now.

Frank Stella turns eighty today. Happy birthday to him.