Silver and china

Greg’s mother has taken the young couple to lunch. And now Rosemary is beginning to bend.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Is this the same Rosemary MacLane who said no to silver, not very many pages before? It is. As in a Jane Austen novel, people accommodate themselves to the institution of marriage, and it accommodates itself to them. There’s still room for books and records and pottery.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Noel Neill (1920–2016)

The New York Times has an obituary for Noel Neill, who has died at the age of ninety-five.

I spent a good chunk of my boyhood around the offices of the Daily Planet — enough to know that Noel Neill was the real Lois Lane.

Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

Secrets & Lies (dir. Mike Leigh, 1996). A young black Londoner (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) discovers that her birth mother (Brenda Blethyn) is white. More to follow. Family dysfunction and class distinctions, with many Leigh regulars. Best lines: “We’re all in pain. Why can’t we share our pain?”

*

Vi är bäst! [We Are the Best! ] (dir. Lukas Moodysson, 2013). I like the cheerful Dunning-Kruger confidence of the title. Three Stockholm girls (only one of whom can play an instrument) form a band. But — they insist — they are not a “girl group.” They are a punk band, complete with suitable haircuts. Their one song is inspired by their gym teacher: “Hate the Sport!” But in the film’s crucial scene, they show a gift for improvisation.

*

Vera Drake (dir. Mike Leigh, 2004). Working-class London in 1950. Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton of Leigh’s Another Year ) cleans houses and performs abortions (without charge) for women in need. A secondary plot concerns a wealthy young woman (played by Leigh regular Sally Hawkins) and the means by which she ends her pregnancy. The 2004 Academy Award for Best Actress should have gone to Imelda Staunton.

*

I’ll Cry Tomorrow (dir. Daniel Mann, 1955). Susan Hayward as stage and screen star Lillian Roth, who sank into alcoholism and found a way to sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous. If the name Lillian Roth is new to you (as it was to me), here are just four samples from YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4.

*

Mr. Holmes (dir. Bill Condon, 2015). Ian McKellen as a ninety-three-year-old Sherlock Holmes, living with a cranky housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her sweet son (Milo Parker), fighting memory loss as he tries to solve an old case. The plot is less than coherent, the ending dippy, but there are good meta elements: the Holmes stories are the work of John Watson, really, and Holmes finds himself measured against both print and film versions of himself. (The pipe and deerstalker cap are Watson’s embellishments, Holmes says: he prefers cigars.) The one reason to see this film: Ian McKellen.

*

Weiner (dir. Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg, 2016). Anthony Weiner, disgraced Congressman, disgraced mayoral candidate, on camera: “I still have this virtually unlimited ability to fuck things up.” Scenes from a mayoral campaign, scenes from a marriage (to Huma Abedin), and scenes from medialand, whose sanctimonious talking heads quote Pascal and Shakespeare from memory (yeah, right) as they take Weiner apart. The best (worst) moments: Weiner offering to come on MSNBC every night and kick Lawrence O’Donnell’s ass, Weiner responding (at length) to a Brooklyn man who insults him. (Here’s footage from someone on the scene.) We then see Weiner dismayed when he watches the encounter on the news, not because he made an ass of himself but because the camera caught his bald spot.

*

Dry Wood (dir. Les Blank, 1973). Louisiana Creole culture. Mardi Gras festivities, Ash Wednesday ashes, hog butchering, sausage making, children at play. Music by accordionist Alphonse “Bois Sec” Ardoin and fiddler Canray Fontenot.


[A masked reveler.]

*

Hot Pepper (dir. Les Blank, 1973). Accordionist in a landscape: a portrait of zydeco musician Clifton Chenier. Best line, from a man in a barbershop: “Whatever you is, be that.”

Dry Wood and Hot Pepper are both included in Criterion’s 5-DVD set, Les Blank: Always for Pleasure . Does Les Blank exoticize his subjects? I don’t think so. It’s those of us watching other people’s daily lives on DVD who are the strange ones.

*

On Dangerous Ground (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1951). Film noir in a snowy countryside, if such a thing is possible. A rogue cop (Robert Ryan) is sent away to help solve a murder in the sticks, where he falls in love with the killer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino). Lupino’s performance and the Bernard Herrmann score are good reasons to see this film. In 2008 Elaine wrote about Herrmann’s use of the viola d’amore in this film.

*

Sabrina (dir. Billy Wilder, 1954). Audrey Hepburn as a chauffeur’s daughter, in love with her father’s employer’s thrice-married playboy son (William Holden, hair dyed blond). But then there’s another brother, the Homburg-hatted fuddy-duddy Humphrey Bogart.

Hey, Sabrina: you’ve just spent two years in Paris, you’re a dead-ringer for Audrey Hepburn, and these guys are your only options? An unfathomable fairy tale.

*

Paris When It Sizzles (dir. Richard Quine, 1964). William Holden and Audrey Hepburn in Paris. He is Richard Benson, a hard-drinking screenwriter; she is Gabrielle Simpson, his typist. As he works out a script for The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower , we see its story play out on the screen, false starts and all, with Holden and Hepburn in the starring roles as Rick (“Monsieur Rick”) and Gaby. Many meta moments, beginning with Sabrina , the name Rick, and Holden’s previous turn as a screenwriter in Sunset Boulevard . Several cameos, unannounced in the opening credits, make for fun in the film within the film.


[Two characters in search of a screenplay. Click for a larger view.]

*

Party Girl (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1958). Prohibition days. Nightclub dancer Vicki Gaye (Cyd Charisse) falls in love with lawyer Tommy Farrell (Robert Taylor), who works for gangster Rico Angelo (Lee J. Cobb). When Tommy is no longer willing to follow orders, Rico threatens the two lovers. Party Girl looks at first like a bit of CinemaScope song-and-dance fluff. But it has moments of deliriously theatrical violence. This evidently obscure film is a true surprise.

What have you seen lately that’s worth watching?

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve

The Fourth

[“Hungarian refugee Irene Csillag pledging allegiance to new flag on first day in American school.” Photograph by Carl Mydans. Indianapolis, Indiana. December 1956. From the Life Photo Archive. This photograph appeared in a Life story, “They Pour In . . . And Family Shows Refugees Can Fit In” (January 7, 1957). The principal at the Csillag children’s school: “They’re not the first to come here, strangers to the country and to English, and soon be at home.”]

Theodor Haecker on tyranny and difficulty

Writing in Germany, 1940:

Tyrants always want a language and literature that is easily understood, for nothing so weakens thought; and what they need is an enfeebled thought, for nothing keeps them so firmly in power. When the ideal and the order is to write an easily understood style, anyone who is difficult to understand is eo ipso suspect.

Journal in the Night , trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950).

A related post
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty and simplification

[Journal in the Night is available at archive.org.]

Geoffrey Hill on difficulty and simplification

From a Paris Review interview (no. 154, Spring 2000):

I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

Related posts
Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty (more from the same interview)
Theodor Haecker on tyranny and difficulty

[Theodore Haecker’s Journal in the Night is available at Archive.org.]

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)

From Mercian Hymns (1971).

And: “What / ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad / and angry consolation”: from CXLVIII, The Triumph of Love (1998).

Long ago, as an undergrad, I figured out that the best way to read Geoffrey Hill is with an Oxford English Dictionary close by. I cannot think of another poet whose work brings me to a closer consideration of words as embodiments of history.

Here are obituaries from The Guardian and The New York Times . (Notice the volume of the OED in the portrait. Hill had the no-magnifying-glass-needed edition of the OED at home, as a photograph published with this interview shows.)

Related posts
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty
Geoffrey Hill, pencil user

[Like The Waste Land , Mercian Hymns has notes. XXV has more of them than any other poem in the sequence:

XXV: ‘the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera’. See The Works of John Ruskin, London (1903-1912), XXIX, pp. 170-180.

‘darg’: ‘a day’s work, the task of a day . . .’ (O.E.D.). Ruskin employs the word, here and elsewhere.

‘quick forge’: see W. Shakespeare, Henry V , V, Chorus, 23. The phrase requires acknowledgement but the source has no bearing on the poem.

‘wire’: I seem not to have been strictly accurate. Hand-made nails were made from rods. Wire was used for the ‘French nails’ made by machine. But: ‘wire’ = ‘metal wrought into the form of a slender rod or thread’ (O.E.D.).

Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-1884), by John Ruskin, written to be a “continual challenger to the supporters of and apologists for a capitalist economy.” Archive.org has the text. Letter LXXX (July 16, 1877), begins on page 83.]

Word of the day: tarmac

The word is — cough — in the air. But where does it come from? The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

ˈTarmac, n .
A kind of tar macadam consisting of iron slag impregnated with tar and creosote; also designating a surface made of tar macadam. Now freq. with lower-case initial. the tarmac (colloq.), the airfield or runway.

A proprietary name in the United Kingdom.

Proprietary, capitalized: huh. The Dictionary’s earliest citation is from 1903.

[Context: Bill Clinton’s confab with Loretta Lynch as their planes were parked on the you-know-what. I’m surprised to see that tarmac is missing from the list of trending words at Merriam-Webster.]

Some rock

[Nancy , July 1, 1949.]

It’s the first day of Nancy’s summer vacation, and there’s nothing to do but lean on some rock.

Fans of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy love the strip’s frequent use of the decorative device “some rocks.” You can read Bushmiller strips six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Silver or stainless steel

Rosemary MacLane has just announced to her grandmother, her mother, her sister Barbara, and Aunt Josie that she will not be choosing a silver pattern. So what will she and her husband use to eat? Stainless steel.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Remember: for Rosemary and Greg, the only important possessions are books and records. Rosemary goes on to explain that Greg knows a couple with a potter’s wheel who can make dishes for the newlyweds — “in warm earth tones.” And Rosemary will be making place mats out of burlap. The kids these days!

And speaking of the young, or the younger: this passage is a good example of how sixteen-year-old Barbara has begun to see her eighteen-year-old sister’s wedding as her own event to manage. Like the protagonists of Beverly Cleary’s other First Love novels, Barbara will move toward greater self-knowledge, and she’ll come to understand that the difference between eighteen and sixteen, like the difference between silver and stainless steel, is pretty vast.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, Rosemary is eighteen, a college freshman. Greg is twenty-four, a graduate student getting a teaching credential.]