They’re back

“Repurposed in imaginative ways, many have reappeared on city streets and village greens housing tiny cafes, cellphone repair shops or even defibrillator machines”: “The Red Phone Box, a British Icon, Stages a Comeback” (The New York Times).

Cake revision

“Congrats Jacob! Summa --- Laude.”

I’m not sure how to phrase it:

A South Carolina grocery store created a graduation cake with the —

No.

A South Carolina grocery store removed the —

No.

A South Carolina grocery store made a cake without —

No.

A South Carolina grocery store created a graduation cake with three hyphens in place of the “cum.”

That’s the best I can do.

Twelve movies

[Just two sentences each. No spoilers.]

Othello (dir. Orson Welles, 1951). A stark, swift version of the story, with Welles — who else? — as the brooding protagonist and Micheál MacLiammóir as the cipher Iago. Othello here seems like a version of Charles Foster Kane in Xanadu, growing estranged from his partner and roaming massive rooms.

*

The Skin I Live In (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2011). A bereaved surgeon decides to settle a score. Insane and insanely great, with echoes of Ovid, Beauty and the Beast, Vertigo, and Eyes Without a Face.

*

Mystery Street (dir. John Sturges, 1950). A low-budget whodunit, filmed in Boston, Cambridge, and Cape Cod, with a strong story and John Alton’s brilliant cinematography. Ricardo Montalban plays a state-police detective; Elsa Lanchester, a sly landlady; Betsy Blair, a savvy tenant.

*

The Shape of Water (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2017). Though I greatly admire Sally Hawkins, I was reluctant to see any film with an inter-species romance. But I found the story compelling enough that my disbelief walked off and hung itself up on a coat rack, no act of my will needed.

*

Crossfire (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1947). Post-war America, and as one character says, “The snakes are loose.” A dark story of a murder investigation, with three Roberts (Mitchum, Ryan, and Young), Gloria Grahame, and Paul Kelly.

*

Up the Down Staircase (dir. Robert Mulligan, 1967). Sandy Dennis as the earnest Sylvia Barrett, graduate of an elite college, teacher at a tough New York City school. I love the music (by Fred Karlin), the hallways and staircases (like those of my elementary school), and Dennis’s voice (like Mary Tyler Moore’s, as I’ve only now realized), and I must agree that “There is no frigate like a book.”

*

Elmer Gantry (dir. Richard Brooks, 1960). A true believer (Jean Simmons), a vengeful prostitute (Shirley Jones), and Burt Lancaster as “Elmer the great, Elmer the grifter.” Religion and entrepreneurship in the so-called heartland.

*

Man on the Train (dir. Patrice Leconte, 2002). A retired professor of literature (Jean Rochefort) shares his house with a small-time criminal (Johnny Hallyday). Shades of “The Secret Sharer,” of Borges, of shades.

*

Summer Hours (dir. Olivier Assayas, 2008). A mother (Édith Scob) and her three adult children (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, Jérémie Renier ) in a story about what becomes of our stuff (here, an art collection) after we’re gone. “Memories, secrets, stories that interest no one anymore.”

*

Maps to the Stars (dir. David Cronenberg, 2014). A tangle of relationships in movieland: a fading actress, a personal assistant, a teenage star, the star’s parents, and several ghosts. Funny, frightening, and truly, deeply, wonderfully strange, with overtones of All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, and, at least in my head, Nabokov’s Ada.

*

The World of Henry Orient (dir. George Roy Hill, 1964). A sweet, sad story of the imaginative life of two fourteen-year-old girls in the playground of mid-century Manhattan. This movie has long deserved to be part of the Criterion Collection.

*

The Enchanted Cottage (dir. John Cromwell, 1945). Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire as a disfigured veteran and a “homely” maid, and you can guess where they fall in love. My mom is right: “I didn’t think she was homely!”

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Imitation and parody

From the May 20, 1974 episode of Cavett, available from Hulu. Eudora Welty, responding to Dick Cavett’s question about writing in the manner of another writer:

“There are many writers that I admire. But it doesn’t occur to you to attempt to do anything someone else has done, because you can’t do anything except what you know how to do.”

Cavett goes on to tell a story of Graham Greene entering a Graham Greene parody contest and coming in second. It’s a true story.

Related posts
Against “deep reading” : A Welty self-portrait

In room 19

In a hotel, a younger Jorge Luis Borges meets an older Jorge Luis Borges, already registered in room 19. The older Borges explains that in 1979, the younger Borges will give in to the temptation to write a “great book.” It will be “a masterpiece, in the most overwhelming sense of the word.” The older Borges explains:


Jorge Luis Borges, “August 25, 1983,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998).

The older Borges adds that when he published this work, under a pseudonym, he was taken “for a clumsy imitator of Borges.”

“I’m not surprised,” says the younger Borges. “Every writer sooner or later becomes his own least intelligent disciple.”

Other Borges posts
Borges manuscript found : Borges on reading : A sentence from “The Aleph” : “Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces”

[Borges was born on August 24, 1899.]

“Entirely made-up”

From The New York Times:

The special counsel hopes to finish by Sept. 1 the investigation into whether President Trump obstructed the Russia inquiry, according to the president’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who said on Sunday that waiting any longer would risk improperly influencing voters in November’s midterm elections.

Mr. Giuliani said that the office of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, shared its timeline about two weeks ago amid negotiations over whether Mr. Trump will be questioned by investigators, adding that Mr. Mueller’s office said that the date was contingent on Mr. Trump’s sitting for an interview. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

But from Reuters:

Giuliani was quoted by the New York Times later on Sunday as saying that Mueller had said the investigation would wrap up by Sept. 1.

A source familiar with the probe called the Sept. 1 deadline “entirely made-up” and “another apparent effort to pressure the special counsel to hasten the end of his work.”

“He’ll wrap it up when he thinks he’s turned over every rock, and when that is will depend on how cooperative witnesses, persons of interest and maybe even some targets are, if any of those emerge, and on what new evidence he finds, not on some arbitrary, first-of-the-month deadline one of the president’s attorneys cooks up,” said the source, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Sunday in The Trivium

This sentence came as a surprise:

When is position in relation to the course of extrinsic events which measure the duration of a substance, for example, Sunday afternoon.

Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, ed. Marguerite McGlinn (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books 2002).

[When, or time, is one of Aristotle’s ten categories of being.]

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper crossword, by Andrew Bell Lewis, left me defeated. Defeated by a Natick, or at least what I regard as a Natick, a crossing that calls for knowledge of Florida place names, thoroughbred horses, and surfing, producing one answer that looks plausible and one that looks just plain wrong, and which I didn’t even think to try.

But a clue that I especially liked, 67-Across, ten letters: “Half a Wimbledon match-up.”

No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.

[Natick Principle, a term coined by crossword blogger “Rex Parker” (Michael Sharp): “If you include a proper noun in your grid that you cannot reasonably expect more than 1/4 of the solving public to have heard of, you must cross that noun with reasonably common words and phrases or very common names.” Natick is a town in Massachusetts.]

Words for the day

Mike Rawlings, the mayor of Dallas:

I renew my call for Congress and the president to take substantive action on the mass shooting epidemic in our country. History will not look kindly upon those elected officials who failed to act in the face of repeated mass murders of our children. Spare us your thoughts and prayers and do your job.

”Yow! It’s 1956!”

[Zippy, May 18, 2018.]

If. If only.

These are the first and second panels of today’s Zippy. The model for the third and fourth panels: a 1957 photograph from Huntington Beach, California. Notice Lester’s Variety Store on the right, with hammer.

O dowdy world, that had such stores in it.

Related reading
All OCA dowdy world posts and Zippy posts (Pinboard)