FOHN

I do the New York Times crossword in its syndicated form, which means that today is August 10. I let my paid subscription lapse not long after TORME was clued as “Cool jazz pioneer.” Wrong, very wrong.

Anyway: the August 10 puzzle, a Wednesday puzzle, mid-week, not meant to be especially difficult, has a number of obscurities, one of which is the answer to 53-Down, “Warm Alpine wind”: FOHN (föhn ). I know that word because it makes a memorable appearance in John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Ashbery explains in a Paris Review interview:

A gag that’s probably gone unnoticed turns up in the last sentence of the novel I wrote with James Schuyler. Actually it’s my sentence. It reads: “So it was that the cliff dwellers, after bidding their cousins good night, moved off towards the parking area, while the latter bent their steps toward the partially rebuilt shopping plaza in the teeth of the freshening foehn.” Foehn is a kind of warm wind that blows in Bavaria that produces a fog. I would doubt that many people know that. I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to open the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. They'd be closing one book and opening another.

Foehn , or föhn , or FOHN, is clearly (ha) obscure. But I got it. I wish I could say the same for SQFT and TSWANA.

Related posts
Crosswords : John Ashbery : James Schuyler

“To be happy”

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

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

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : “Pencils of light” : On readers and writers : On writing materials : Smoke and ink

“Pencils of light”

A highly convoluted neighborhood, a network of streets that I had avoided for years, was disentangled at a single stroke when one day a person dear to me moved there. It was as if a searchlight set up at this person’s window dissected the area with pencils of light.

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

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials : Smoke and ink

Word of the day: eclogue

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today: eclogue . Though it’s an outdoorsy word (sort of), eclogue, like loll before it, would not have inspired effort in the brush-clearing department. Shepherds in eclogues don’t clear much brush. They talk and sing — much more fun.

Melville and Mitchell

At Dreamers Rise, Chris puts together the opening passages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel.” Yes!

Twelve more movies

[Or nine movies and three television series, really. But is it television if it streams on Netflix? Anyway, no spoilers.]

Making a Murderer (dir. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, 2015). Small-town America at its worst: an outsider family, vengeful localites, crooked police. If you don’t know the name Steven Avery, watch this documentary series with no further introduction.

*

To Catch a Thief (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1955). No early-Hitchcock miniatures here, only gloriously real scenery: Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, and the French Riveria, the last often seen from the sky.

*

Don’t Bother to Knock (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1952). Marilyn Monroe as a fragile, just-released-from-an-institution babysitter, Anne Bancroft as a lounge singer, Richard Widmark as the man in the middle. Bonus: Elisha Cook Jr. as Monroe’s uncle. Bonus: Bancroft singing “There’s a Lull in My Life.”

*

The Short & Curlies (dir. Mike Leigh, 1988). Hairstyles, courtship, and jokes. “What’s round and really violent? A vicious circle.” With Brenda Blethyn, Wendy Nottingham, and David Thewlis. It’s at YouTube.

*

Five-Minute Films (dir. Mike Leigh, 1982). The Birth of the Goalie of the 2001 F. A. Cup Final , Old Chums , Probation , A Light Snack , Afternoon . Small slices of life, with glottal stops. I’m running out of things to say about Mike Leigh films. I just like them. At YouTube.

*

The Zen of Bennett (dir. Unjoo Moon, 2012). Tony Bennett, singing and talking, with emphasis on the making of an album of duets. We see, among others, Amy Winehouse (tragically insecure and self-abasing), Lady Gaga (vivacious — and that’s a deliberately old-fashioned description), John Mayer (a jerk). The best moment: a spellbinding partial chorus of “The Way You Look Tonight,” just Bennett and his quartet. More of that, please.

*

Grown-Ups (dir. Mike Leigh, 1980). With Phil Davis, Lesley Manville, and Brenda Blethyn. Lunacy and tea.

*

Home Sweet Home (dir. Mike Leigh, 1982). Postmen, domestic relations, unhappiness. “Stop treading on the rug — you’re squashing it.” With Timothy Spall and many others.

*

O. Henry’s Full House (dir. Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, Henry King, Henry Koster, Jean Negulesco, 1952). A very mixed bag. Hawks’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” (Fred Allen, Oscar Levant) is a dud. Negulesco’s “The Last Leaf” (Anne Baxter, Jean Peters) is haunting. John Steinbeck introduces each film, but there isn’t a Blackwing, Blaisdell Calculator, or Mongol pencil in sight on his desk.

*

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2015). Robert Durst, the son of a wealthy real-estate developer, is a casual, confident, curmudgeonly liar who blinks and twitches after almost every utterance. The final minutes of this documentary series are unforgettable. If you don’t know the name Robert Durst, watch with no further introduction.

*

Stranger Things (dir. Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, 2016). Reason enough to stream Netflix. It should appeal to the twelve-year-old boy in everyone, former boy or no. A small town, supernatural realities, banana-seat bicycles, walkie-talkies, Christmas lights, and waffles. And tropes. Many, many tropes. Ghostwriter meets E.T. A total delight.

*

Wheel of Time (dir. Werner Herzog, 2003). Documenting great Buddhist gatherings in Bodh Gaya, India, and, more briefly, in Graz, Austria, with the director’s narration. Crowd scenes of staggering human variety, solitary pilgrims traveling prostration by prostration, the making and unmaking of a mandala. I found a scene with the distribution of gifts (trinkets) most revealing: it turns into a scene of looting. Everyone wants!

What would you recommend?

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

Word of the Day: loll

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is loll :

Loll has origins similar to those of another soothing verb, lull , which means “to cause to rest or sleep.” Both words can be traced back to 14th-century Middle English and probably originated as imitations of the soft sounds people make when resting or trying to soothe someone else to sleep. Loll has also been used in English as a noun meaning “the act of lolling” or “a relaxed posture,” but that use is now considered archaic. In its “recline” or “lean” sense, loll shares synonyms with a number of “l” verbs, including loaf , lounge , and laze .

Had I known about today’s word earlier in the day, I perhaps wouldn’t have been as willing to spend much of the day clearing brush from the edge of our property (with Elaine). But if I had known about today’s word earlier in the day, Elaine would have convinced me that if we didn’t do this work today, we’d just have to do it some other day (like tomorrow). And who knows what the Word of the Day might be then: ache ? scrape ? poison ivy ? We got a lot done today — no lolling, loafing, lounging, lazing. No poison ivy either.

One more from The Writer’s Almanac

One more poem made from a week’s worth of poems from The Writer’s Almanac . This one is made of seven opening lines, Sunday through Saturday. I have taken small liberties with punctuation at the ends of lines, and I have joined two lines to make the poem’s second line.

“It is possible that things will not get better”: too true. Today The Writer’s Almanac has a poem by William Carlos Williams. And alas: the anecdotalism that pervades the website’s poetry choices and Keillor’s pious recitation make even Williams sound mundane: “There were some dirty plates / and a glass of milk / beside her on a small table.” I wish that there were a recording of Williams reading the poem for comparison.

More along these lines
“Last Words” : “Poem” : “Upside Down“

[PennSound has a great many recordings of Williams, just not of this poem.]

“In the dark like ourselves”

Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Mark Penn, “senior strategist”

Oh New York Times , you can be so decorous:

During the 2008 Democratic contest, Mrs. Clinton’s senior strategist at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from many Americans’. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, neither Mrs. Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship or birthplace, in Hawaii.

Credit where it’s due: the unnamed “senior strategist” was Mark Penn. And Penn didn’t merely ponder ways in which Barack Obama’s background “differed.” (Doesn’t everyone’s?) In a memo to Hillary Clinton (March 19, 2007), Penn wrote about what he called “a very strong weakness” for Obama, his “lack of American roots”:

his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.

True, nothing in those sentences questions Barack Obama’s birthplace. But the charge is clear: according to Penn, Obama was “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

I loathe Mark Penn. I loathe too the Times ’s unwillingless to acknowledge facts that are awkward and embarrassing for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

[How did I get to that memo so quickly? I made a post about it in 2008. And if there’s any doubt: I loathe Donald Trump.]