“The innervation of commanding fingers”

Walter Benjamin on handwriting and the typewriter:

The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.

“Teaching Aid,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Commanding fingers: more prescient than Benjamin could have imagined. ⌘P.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Benjamin on collectors : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials

Footnotes

Barbara has agreed to type a few pages of Rosemary’s paper “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” There are lots of footnotes, because professors like footnotes, Rosemary explains, especially if they’re in French or German. Rosemary’s, alas, are in English.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

A show of hands: who remembers working out footnotes with a typewriter? I did it with at least one undergrad paper, after making the mistake of asking the professor whether he preferred endnotes or footnotes. The trick, as I remember it, was to count the number of characters and spaces in the text of the note, turn that number into lines, and measure up from the bottom margin. It was all very approximate. I must have ended up retyping one or more pages.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Don’t boo me: I was out in the hallway when I asked the question, not in class. There was never a directive to the class, and I never again made the mistake of asking.]

Typography terms, A–Z

The A–Z of typographic terms, by Phil Garnham, is available as a free PDF from Fontsmith. Did you know gadzook as a typography term? Me neither.

Related reading
All OCA typography posts (Pinboard)

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.]