In an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth, Clare Muireann Murphy, storyteller, tells Michael Rosen where she finds stories:
“That’s the life’s work, isn’t it? It’s to walk through the world and keep my eyes and ears and heart open all the time for where the next story is coming from. So I read a lot, I talk to a lot of people, and I listen carefully.”Related reading
Karin Falcone Krieger tells the story of Dover Books: “This Is a Permanent Book” (Contingent Magazine).
Dover editions are permanent indeed. I just took down a Dover reprint of Richard Réti’s Modern Ideas in Chess, which I bought almost fifty years ago as a young chess fanatic. Signatures tight, pages unyellowed. It is a permanent book.
Another Dover reprint has been sitting out for everyday use, the scores of the Beethoven string quartets. A little beat up (in the manner of a well-used telephone directory), but it too is a permanent book.
Dover Thrift Editions of course are another story: cheap, cheap paper.
Now where is my Dover copy of Flatland?
Related reading
Dover Publications (All the books)
[Pain and Glory (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2019). Click for a larger view.]
Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas) is using a Staedtler Noris to mark a passage in a Spanish translation of Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego [The book of disquiet]. Here’s the English translation provided in the subtitles:
Life disgusts me as a useless medicine. It is then when I clearly feel how easy it would be to get away from this tediousness if I had the simple strength to want to really push it away.Here, in Spanish, is a commentary on the books Mallo reads in the film. And here is Google Translate’s best shot at a translation into English, one that turns “acotaciones a lápiz” into “pencil dimensions.” DeepL does a better job (“pencil marks”) if you’re willing to copy and paste the Spanish text in two parts.
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970).
Yes, it was water.
Also from this novel
“Fellows of the first importance” : “Visible branch establishments”
Why is Mike Pence in charge of coronavirus messaging? The New York Times explains:
The decision to put Mr. Pence in charge was made on Wednesday after the president told some people that the vice president didn’t “have anything else to do,” according to people familiar with the president’s comments.But as the Times also notes (with a straight face), Pence is “one of three people designated as the administration’s primary coronavirus official.” Pence has appointed Dr. Deborah L. Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. And Alex M. Azar II chairs a coronavirus task force.
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]
The Big Night (dir. Joseph Losey, 1951). John Drew Barrymore as George La Main, a son who seeks to avenge his father’s humiliation at the hands of a sadistic sportswriter. The depiction of night people — an alcoholic professor (Philip Bourneuf), his mistress (Dorothy Comingore), her sister (Joan Lorring), a Billie Holiday-like singer (Mauri Leighton) — gives the film something of a noir element. George’s torment looks ahead to Jim Stark and Plato in Rebel Without a Cause. George, holding a revolver: “Think I’m a kid now?” ★★★★
*
Mike Wallace Is Here (dir. Avi Belkin, 2019). A documentary built with many great clips of Wallace as interviewer and interviewee, aggressive, skeptical, but also painfully honesty about his failures as a father and his struggles with depression (nothing though about the toxic environment for women at 60 Minutes). What I didn’t know before watching this film: Wallace was everywhere in 1950s television: as actor, pitchman, interviewer, and game-show host. You’ll have to watch to learn what changed him. The film would benefit from captions identifying interview participants, some of whom are far from recognizable; showing their faces with their names in the closing credits (and no other information) does little to enhance the viewer’s experience (Emile-Zola-Berman-who?). ★★★
*
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). “Her” is “the Paris region,” among other things, and the film offers an unromanticized image of the city and environs, nothing but highway construction and brutalist architecture. Scenes from the life of Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady), wife, mother, and part-time prostitute, recall Godard’s Vivre sa vie — as in that film a man in a café plays pinball as people chat. There’s a strong element of Wittgenstein in the narration and several conversations that evoke the idea of a language game. Those are three things I know about this film, which baffled and fascinated me. ★★★★
*
Edge of the City (dir. Martin Ritt, 1957). Strong overtones of On the Waterfront in this story of friendship and violence on the Manhattan docks. What’s distinctive about the film is its depiction of a friendship that crosses the color line, as longshoreman Tommy Tyler (Sidney Poitier) befriends new-hire Axel Nordmann (John Cassavetes). Tommy is a happy family man (with Ruby Dee making brief appearances as his wife); moody Axel harbors some terrible secrets. Supervisor Charlie Malick (Jack Warden) makes Axel’s life hell, with consequences both predictable and unexpected. ★★★★
*
Try and Get Me, aka The Sound of Fury (dir. Cy Endfield, 1950). “Unrelentingly grim,” said TCM’s Eddie Muller, as an unemployed husband and father (Frank Lovejoy) takes up work as a getaway driver for a preening and increasingly vicious criminal (Lloyd Bridges). But it’s not just a crime story: the film dwells at length on the role of journalists in stoking populist rage. Two highlights: Renzo Cesana as Dr. Vido Simone, a stiffly serious philosophical scientist, and Katherine Locke as Hazel Weatherwax, a desperately lonely manicurist. And one more: the final extended sequence, utterly gripping. ★★★★
*
Pain and Glory (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2019). A work not of strict autobiography but of self-revealing humanity, as Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a movie director in the twilight of his career, struggles with past success, present inertia, and chronic pain. Proustian moments of involuntary memory (beginning with a pianist in a restaurant) and two extraordinary coincidences lead to scenes of childhood and sexual awakening, to a meeting with an old lover, and to memories of Salvador’s adult relationship with his mother Jacinta (Penelope Cruz/Julieta Serrano). (It’s no coincidence that a file name beginning “Auster” appears on Salvador’s Mac: Paul Auster has much to say about chance and coincidence as legitimate devices in fiction.) The most moving scenes: the lovers’ reunion, and Salvador with his mother in her old age. ★★★★
*
Judy (dir. Rupert Goold, 2019). Judy Garland in 1968, booked for five weeks in London, with brief flashbacks to her life as a teenager in the studio system that did much to destroy her life. Not so much a movie as a sometimes thrilling, sometimes harrowing one-woman show, with Renée Zellweger channeling Garland’s fragile, tough presence with what seems to me eerie fidelity. As a singer, Zellweger is hardly Garland’s equal —but how could she be? The best moments: omelets, a cake, and a final performance. ★★★★
*
Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001). We’d never seen it, so it seemed the appropriate follow-up to Judy. As Bridget Jones, Renée Zellweger is a charming, attractive mess of a human being. So why are the only men on her romantic horizon a pair of self-regarding twits, one without scruples (Hugh Grant), the other (Colin Firth) so emotionally constipated that he struggles to say “I like you”? As Elaine says, it’s a Bizarro World Hallmark movie, with cigarettes, vodka, sex, and strained overtones of Pride and Prejudice. ★★
*
The File on Thelma Jordon (dir. Robert Siodmark, 1949). YouTube comes through again, with a satisfyingly noirish film we’d never heard of. It gives little away to reveal that the story is a variation on an earlier Barbara Stanwyck film, with Stanwyck as Thelma Jordon, Wendell Corey as an assistant DA, and Paul Kelly as Corey’s boss. A little too much comedy, but also genuine suspense and mystery, particularly when old Aunt Vera wanders the house at night. My favorite line: “Maybe I like being picked up by a guy on a binge.” ★★★
*
He Ran All the Way (dir. John Berry, 1951). John Berry’s other films include Claudine and The Bad News Bears Go to Japan — marking him, surely, as a jack of many trades, at least. Here Nick Robey (John Garfield, in his last film appearance) and Peg Dobbs (Shelley Winters) make an awkward pair thrown together by circumstance and criminal desperation. Nice work by Wallace Ford as Peg’s father, Gladys George as Nick’s mother, and James Wong Howe as cinematographer, working in stark black and white. “Get a good car, baby, a nice car.” ★★★★
*
Two by Yasujiro Ozu
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). This film, a silent, tells a story of betrayal, jealousy, and revenge among members of a traveling Kabuki troupe, as one player discovers the Master’s secret life, both past and present. The actors are understated, with the smallest gestures and changes in expression saying everything, and the cinematography is striking, with the camera stationary, and often at floor level, in what I now know is called a tatami shot, but which suggests to me the perspective of an audience sitting at the very edge of a stage. As the Gilgamesh poet says, there is no permanence: tobacco smoke drifts through the air, a lost wallet floats down a river, and players travel by train from town to town. A caution: “Don’t get mixed up with a traveling player like me.” ★★★★
Floating Weeds (1959). Which film to prefer and why: questions that must be the stuff of hundreds of film-studies assignments. The 1934 film has a concentrated intensity that’s missing from this more diffuse story, in which broad comedy with theater men and local women takes up too much screentime. Things improve when, with about an hour to go, the film begins to closely follow 1934. But the Master here seems hard-headed and self-righteous rather than agonized, and his mistress lacks the eerie blank expression we see in 1934. ★★★
[Madame Michel in Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog is devoted to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, so it seemed only right to see a couple after reading. ]
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
[“Truck Proximity.” xkcd, February 26, 2020.]
A related post
Kids and garbage trucks
Chris Matthews asks Elizabeth Warren why she believes a female employee who sued Mike Bloomberg for telling her "kill it" when she was pregnant over Bloomberg.
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) February 26, 2020
"You believe he's lying? ...Why would he lie? Just to protect himself? ...You’re confident of your accusation?" pic.twitter.com/hVkkQhhXtz
“This world is not what it’s cracked up to be”: Sonny Rollins, interviewed for The New York Times. The interview dwells mostly on matters of life and death, with many deeply Buddhist observations.
On an unrelated note, Rollins confesses that he never cottoned to the Rolling Stones, thinking them merely derivative of black music. He then tells this story:
“I do remember once I was in the supermarket up in Hudson, New York, and they were playing Top 40 records. I heard this song and thought, Who’s that guy? His playing struck a chord in me. Then I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s me!’ It was my playing on one of those Rolling Stones records.”Trivia: I noticed Rollins again invoking ice cream and sex as examples of fleeting, inconsequential pleasure.
[Nancy, February 26, 2020.]
Bookstores too, Sluggo. See Jack Cella: “If you’re in a decent bookstore, you can look at any shelf and realize how little you know.”
Here’s all of today’s Nancy.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
