Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson opens on December 28. I hope that it opens near me. Filmed in Paterson, New Jersey, it’s the story of a bus driver and poet named Paterson — just Paterson. Here’s the film’s IMDb page. And here’s the trailer.

For anyone who loves modern American poetry, Paterson is important territory. Just ask William Carlos Williams.

[In Williams’s poem, Paterson is both a city and a man — not a bus driver but a mythic man, “Dr. Paterson.”]

Sardines in translation

Spotted in Whole Foods, a jar of rather expensive sardines, with text in Spanish and English:

Las Sardinas Ortiz se elaboran en fresco. Se limpian a mano una a una y se fríen en eceite de oliva a la Antigua. Las Sardinas mejoran su sabor con los años, haciéndose más melosas y delicadas.

The Ortiz Sardines are elaborated with fresh fish. They are cleaned by hand one by one and fried in olive oil at old style. Sardines improve its taste over a period of years, making them taste unctuous and delicated.

“Unctuous and delicated”: Whatever they’re charging for these fish (it was $7.99 or $8.99 a jar), it’s apparently not enough to pay for a good translation. My try (improvements are welcome):

Ortiz Sardines begin as fresh fish. Each fish is cleaned by hand and fried in olive oil as in the old days. The sardines’ flavor improves over time, becoming more mellow and delicate.

I hesitated at “con los años,” not wanting to suggest that these sardines have been sitting around for years. But who knows? The expiration date on the jar: 2022.

I couldn’t bring myself to buy these sardines. I suspected that, as with ultra-expensive whiskey, the difference in flavor is probably not worth the difference in price. Maybe another time, if I’m giddy enough.

And while we are on the subject of sardines (or at least while I am), here is a short piece by Aaron Gilbreath: Ode to Canned Fish. Thanks to Mike at BrownStudies for passing on the link.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

[Click on the little jar for a much bigger jar.]

NO TODO ESTÁ PERDIDO

We went to a tiny Mexican restaurant for lunch — six stools, one table, one man doing everything. Our food was spectacular. A television attached to the wall played news in Spanish. A segment about the United States’ president-elect focused on his threats/promises regarding immigrants and the various obstacles in his way. I was surprised at how much I could understand.

These words on the screen, in large sans-serif capitals, stuck with me: NO TODO ESTÁ PERDIDO. All is not lost. I like that idea.

Tea mind, empty mind

Father Thomas Roth (Dana Andrews), in Edge of Doom (dir. Mark Robson, 1950):

“I always like a cup of hot tea in the afternoon, drink it slowly. It helps empty the mind. It’s a minor blessing, but not one to be sneezed at. It’s good with lemon.”

Edge of Doom is good too, even if Andrews makes an improbable priest. The movie is at YouTube.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

DFW and Illinois

A brief tour: “David Foster Wallace’s Peaceful Prairie” (The New York Times).

But I have to say: Lynn Freehill-Maye’s celebration of the American midwest’s “meditative spaces,” “down-to-earth people,” and “sincerity” does not quite ring true. That pastoral picture omits all kinds of rural bleakness — miseducation, poverty, xenophobia, among others. As for midwestern sincerity, something that Wallace’s biographer D. T. Max makes much of, I’ll quote myself: “Life in the midwest — trust me — can be full of evasions, silences, and mask-like tact.” But I don’t want to talk about it. (See?)

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All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

“This Week in Hate”

A new New York Times feature: “This Week in Hate,” tracking “hate crimes and harassment around the country since the election of Donald Trump.”

Money, mouth, literally, figuratively

In a Chronicle of Higher Education article about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s choice for education secretary, Margaret Spellings, president of the University of North Carolina, describes DeVos thusly:

“She’s been an education-reform warrior and has put her money where her mouth is, literally and figuratively, for a very long time.”

Literally and figuratively? I think I know what Spellings might mean. To put one’s money where one’s mouth is to “back up one’s opinion with action.” So Spellings might mean that DeVos has worked to shape education policy and has put money toward that end. She has backed up her opinions with action — and with money.

But money, mouth, literally, figuratively: it all sounds odd, and kinda disgusting. You should never literally put your money, or anyone else’s, where your mouth is.

Related reading
All OCA idiom and metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[Definition from The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997).]

GMEU app

Garner’s Modern English Usage is now available as an iOS app, beautifully designed and exceedingly useful. So when I’m reading The New York Times on my phone and see this editorial headline —



— I can open the app and find this entry:


[Click for a larger view.]

And then I can go back to reading the Times and thinking with ever-deepening dread about where our country is headed.

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All OCA Garner-related posts (Pinboard)

[An Android app is supposed to be available soon. The star at the bottom is for marking an entry as a favorite, a good way to keep track of anything a writer needs to check again and again (for me, if and whether). One thing I miss: full-text search, which I’m guessing would have been unwieldy with so much text. The Times uses both caldron and cauldron. Caldron appears to be the more common spelling among Times writers. AP and Reuters appear to prefer cauldron.]

VKNY

Last week we spent a happy hour browsing and buying at Three Lives & Company. Three Lives is a great small bookstore, the kind in which nearly every book is a good one. Following the store’s fortunes via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York made me want to go and buy some books.

I noticed a tall stack of Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing (2012) on a counter and asked if the book was especially popular. Yes, they sell many copies and have trouble keeping it in stock. Smart city! Several Short Sentences is one of the best books I know for learning about or teaching writing.

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All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

[After reading a draft post, I changed “one of the display counters” to “a counter.” That’s the kind of attention to sentences that Klinkenborg’s book fosters.]

Night class

I was waiting to teach a night class — my least favorite kind of teaching. The class was to start at 7:30. I waited outside the room in a narrow hallway: low ceiling, bare lightbulbs, tile walls, no windows, basement-like. The water fountain in the hallway was combined with a urinal. The drain was in the floor, right next to the fountain’s foot pedal, so that pressing to get a drink would almost certainly have meant stepping into someone’s urine. Still waiting for class, I went out to walk by the seashore with my teacher Jim Doyle. I told him how surprised I was to learn — from reading his notes and marginalia — that he loved football. He’d written to the president about it and had received a reply. Jim’s voice sounded raspy. I knew that Jim had died, but here he was. I was happy to see him.

I started teaching at 8:00. I asked the students, “How’d it get so late?” No one knew. I was teaching a Dickens novel and had notes, of some sort, with me, but I hadn’t read the novel, or at least not for a long time. Among its elements: an orphan girl at school, an adjunct instructor, an evil headmistress, a mysterious woman. I described the novel as “a vast canvas.” Instead of beginning with the orphan, the first character to appear, I began with the mysterious woman. Comparisons to Ishtar and Circe — the dangerous seducer. This woman was also a damsel in distress. I showed a clip from a French film adaptation of the novel and wanted to go back to a moment in which a great many emotions play across the character’s face: fear, confidence, doubt, longing. But I could find only commercials. At some point I noticed a colleague — one of my least favorite colleagues — sitting in the back row, smiling. He had come to observe.

Time was running out. “Next time we’ll begin by talking about the orphan,” I said. Students were already leaving. Two students in a corner had turned on a television and were watching a cowboy movie. “I need one more minute to finish what I need to say,” I yelled. “Please turn off the TV.” I asked four times before walking to the set, unplugging it, and waking.

Likely sources: a tiled hallway in Widener Library (perhaps this one), rest-stop bathrooms, manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum (including A Christmas Carol and many Charlotte Brontë items), Jim Doyle’s videotaped reading of Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” an NPR story about letters to President Barack Obama, Jean Stapleton’s expressive face in an All in the Family episode, academic politics, and who knows what else. This is the sixth classroom dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.