Sappho is not pleased

Kinda remarkable that The New York Times can publish a review of a novel entitled Sweetbitter that fails to gloss the title. Sweetbitter is Sappho’s γλυκύπικρον , glukúpikron , a word that (famously) describes eros . The novel has lines from Sappho (trans. Anne Carson) as one of two epigraphs.

Related reading
All OCA Sappho posts (Pinboard)

“Digital Data”

From xkcd: “Digital Data.” Every picture tells a story.

Movie trouble

“You were looking for trouble, but it was a good kind of trouble”: Antonia “Toni” Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) to Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1946).

Years ago, this movie, out-of-copyright, ran on a local station, again and again. And now, again. It’s good to be reacquainted with this bit of dialogue.

Aware for Mac

Aware is a nifty (and free) Mac app that sits in the menu bar and shows how long you’ve been using your computer. Aware might serve as a useful check against the experience of drift. See? I’ve been sitting at the computer for forty-seven minutes already. Enough!

A new Vinegar Flies song

“Carroll County Blues,” a new (old) song by the Vinegar Flies. That’s our son Ben on the five-string banjo.

Narmour and Smith (William “Willie” T. Narmour and Shellie “Shell” W. Smith) recorded “Carroll County Blues” in 1929. Narmour and Smith have been filed away in my head for a long time: they’re the musicians who recommended Mississippi John Hurt to Okeh Records.

Buster Cooper (1929–2016)

Buster Cooper, trombonist, Ellingtonian, has died at the age of eighty-seven. Here is perhaps his finest moment with the Ellington band: “Trombonio-Bustoso-Issimo.”

A related post
Buster Cooper in Florida

Ruins v. reconstructions

Joseph Joubert:

Antiquity. I prefer ruins to reconstructions.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Joubert’s observation acquires an odd poignance when we see the architecture and art of antiquity destroyed by fanatics.

See also Robert Walser on “former beauty.”

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Lives and writings : New books, old books : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

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.”

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

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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.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[“Next their skin”: not a typo.]