Nancy pop corn

[Nancy, n.d.]

Today’s installment of yesterday’s Nancy prompts the question: Was popcorn once spelled as two words? Yes. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for the variety of maize and the snack with pop corn, pop-corn, and popcorn. The earliest citations with the solid spelling: 1893 for the maize, 1922 for the snack. But pop corn soldiered and soldiers on. Look:


[Life, December 25, 1950.]

Today the Jolly Time website uses both pop corn and popcorn: “He grew popcorn.” “Popcorn is the perfect snack.” “Butter, sea salt, pop corn & oil.”

Oh — popcorn machines first appeared in movie theaters in 1938. My mom and I were wondering about that recently.

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Oliver Sacks and words

In The New York Times, Bill Hayes writes about Oliver Sacks’s love of words:

Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)

If you, like me, are fumbling to articulate the difference between homonyms and homphones, not to mention homographs: look here. (Not hear.)

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“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring”

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).

Donald S. Murray’s Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) says that there is “no evidence” that the effort to illuminate cities with fishy phosphorescence was successful:

The failure of the “eccentric undertaking” described by Sebald was so great that it left little of lasting legacy. It is tempting to conclude that the author’s odd choice of names for his scientists — Herrington and Lightbown — is a quirky invention, one of his own “red herrings,” sending the reader off on every bit as much a wrong scent as the fox in that ancient practice, when that strong-smelling fish was employed to trick the hounds from following in their quarry’s tracks. For all that the practice of generating light from herring occurred in the late nineteenth century, there does not appear to be a record of the existence of any two English scientists with their names.

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Falltime

One way to know you’re now in your sixties: at a yearly physical, the first question from both nurse and doctor is “Have you fallen in the last year?”

Uh, no.

Deb Larson-Venable talks about David Foster Wallace

I found it by chance: a 2014 recording of Deb Larson-Venable talking with Christopher Lydon about David Foster Wallace. Deb is the executive director of Granada House, the halfway house where Wallace got sober. Lydon asks,

“He wrote that he did this under a death sentence — that it was either get into recovery or you’re dead in two years. That concentrates the mind, and maybe that propels you willy-nilly toward community. Are there other ways to get there?”

And Deb’s answer: “You mean from — ? No.”

Deb, a Granada House resident who stayed on, appears in Infinite Jest as Pat Montesian. Deb’s story of recovery appears at the Granada House website. As does Wallace’s, the first story on this page.

Why have I written Deb and not Larson-Venable? Because I met Deb Larson-Venable in 2010, on a trip to Boston, when Elaine and I went to Granada House to make a contribution.

A related post
DFW and Granada House

[Wallace’s history of cruelty and violence toward women was well known, at least in part, by 2014. It plays no part in the conversation.]

Pocket notebook sighting

This fellow shows up in one scene in La roue (The Wheel) (dir. Abel Gance, 1923). His newspaper is just a cover. His real work: recording the drinking habits of the trainmen.


[Click any image for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

MSNBC, sheesh

A few minutes ago: “Mueller might lay low.”

Garner’s Modern English Usage on lie low and lay low: “The latter phrase is common but loose. The two phrasings both appear in print, but the correct lying low is three times as common as laying low.”

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[This post is the kind of thing that happens when I watch the news.]

A last word from John McCain

From a letter addressed to his “fellow Americans”:

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before.

The letter echoes McCain’s 2017 speech at National Constitution Center. I hear too what I think is an echo of what Barack Obama said in 2011: “The forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.” I hope that Obama and McCain are right.

Twelve movies

[Now with stars, one to four. And four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Chavela (dir. Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi, 2017). A documentary portrait of Chavela Vargas (1919–2012), a Costa Rican-born Mexican singer who performed with an extraordinary musical and emotional intensity and turned ranchera songs into expressions of same-sex and universal desire. (As she says at one point, it doesn’t matter who it is one loves.) Comparisons to Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf abound, but the authority with which Chavela sings and speaks of life and love and suffering makes me think of what it must have been like to listen to Sappho. I’m not kidding. ★★★★

*

I Served the King of England (dir. Jiří Menzel, 2006). I had to do a “Wait, what?”: this film is by the director of Closely Watched Trains and Loves of a Blonde. The changing fortunes of Jan Dítě, a Czech everyman, as seen in a splendid past (in which he’s played by Ivan Barnev) and a dingy present (Oldrich Kaiser). Says Dítě, “It was always my luck to run into bad luck.” This hotel-centric film must have influenced Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, but Menzel’s imagination runs much deeper. ★★★★

*

Three Identical Strangers (dir. Tim Wardle, 2018). A documentary about triplets separated in infancy and reunited as young men. What begins as a feel-good human-interest story turns out to be a story of appallingly immorality — or is it amorality? — and its consequences. Don’t read a review in advance. And if you have read a review, see it anyway: there’ll still be more to learn. ★★★★

*

La roue (The Wheel) (dir. Abel Gance, 1923). A four-and-a-half-hour silent, made with a remarkably ample toolkit of storytelling devices, La roue might be the closest thing to a novel I’ve seen in film. The story focuses on Sisif, a train engineer who adopts a foundling, Norma, as a sibling to his son, Elie. Both father and son fall in love with their not-daughter, not-sister. With a great score by Robert Israel. ★★★★


[Norma (Ivy Close), Elie (Gabriel de Gravone), Sisif (Séverin-Mars). Click for a larger view.]

*

A little Fred Zinnemann festival
Eyes in the Night (1942). If you know Edward Arnold only as Jim Taylor, the political boss of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this film affords a better sense of his range. Here he plays Duncan “Mac” Maclain, a blind detective who performs card tricks and works jigsaw puzzles. With the help of his trusty dog Friday, Mac breaks up a spy ring and saves a war secret. Donna Reed gives a surprising performance as a wayward teenager crazy about — yikes — her stepmother’s no-good ex-boyfriend. ★★★☆

Kid Glove Killer (1942). Van Heflin and Marsha Hunt as police forensic investigators, solving crimes in a city rife with corruption. Also included: a love triangle, a radio show and its host, a wrongly accused diner owner, fun with microscopes and spectroscopes, and many moments of bumming and lighting cigarettes. In other words, this movie is a little too scattered. But Heflin and Hunt are a delight as they turn cigarette ignition into foreplay.
★★★☆

Act of Violence (1949). Back from the war, bombardier Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), never without coat and tie, pursues his friend and fellow vet Frank Enley (Van Heflin). You’ll have to watch to know why. Phyllis Thaxter, Janet Leigh, and Mary Astor do what they can to help bring about a peaceful resolution. With some great Los Angeles location shots. ★★★★

*

I’m So Excited! (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2013). The least satisfying Almodóvar film I’ve seen. Set almost entirely in an airplane unable to land, the film offers not a comic spectacle of fear and frenzy but an assemblage of odd, discontinuous, not especially funny bits. It doesn’t help that everyone in economy class has been sedated. More like a very long Saturday Night Live skit than an Almodóvar film. ★★☆☆

*

These Three (dir. William Wyler, 1936). A straightened (that is, heterosexualized) adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon play Misses Martha Dobie and Karen Wright as cool-headed, independent, resilient women, markedly different from the more agonized Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn of Wyler’s remake The Children’s Hour (1961). But the real star here is Bonita Granville (who’d later play Nancy Drew) as the manipulative, destructive Mary Tilford. A budding psychopath, that Mary Tilford. ★★★★

*

Made in Dagenham (dir. Nigel Cole, 2010). Based on the true story of women, or “girls,” as they’re called here, striking for equal pay at a British Ford factory. This film seems to telegraph every setback and victory with stupefying obviousness — see, for instance, George’s fate. But the acting is strong: Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James, Daniel Mays, Miranda Richardson, and the great Sally Hawkins as Rita O’Grady, who’s pressed into service as the leader of the women’s effort. I found it deeply moving to see Hawkins playing a character who speaks truth to patriarchy: “Rights, it’s not privileges: it’s that easy.” ★★★☆

*

A Lion in the Streets (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1953). Hank Martin, rural peddler — a successful businessman, we might say — turns demagogue. At the time, the movie would have suggested Huey Long; today, similarities to another political figure are unmistakable. The dialogue is sometimes cringe-worthy, and James Cagney’s performance as Martin feels too hammy, too stagey, but then again, that’s the kind of character he’s meant to be playing. Barbara Hale and Anne Francis are excellent as Martin’s wife Verity and lover Flamingo. ★★★☆

*

Middle of the Night (dir. Delbert Mann, 1959). Love against the odds in Manhattan’s garment district, with Fredric March as a clothing manufacturer, fifty-six and widowed, and Kim Novak as a receptionist and secretary, twenty-four and recently divorced. As in Marty (Paddy Chayefsky wrote both screenplays), everyone has something to say about the relationship, and there’s even some amateur psychologizing about neurosis and father figures. One can only hope that love, in all its awkwardness and fumbling, will win out. Great black-and-white shots of mid-century Manhattan streets are a bonus. ★★★☆

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Gym, yikes

In The New York Times: “How You Felt About Gym Class May Impact Your Exercise Habits Today.”

I will now consider my habit of walking (about three-and-a-half miles a day, virtually every day) a vanquishing of the past.