More Jeopardy jeopardy

Now that the fairly despicable Mike Richards is out as a Jeopardy host, Mayim Bialik’s anti-science is coming in for more attention (The Washington Post ).

A related post
Jeopardy and Neuriva

[That video embedded in the second article: is it just me, or does Mayim Bialik seem like a demonic parody of Rachel Maddow?]

Grammar in the movies

From Some Came Running (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1958). Newly married Ginny (Shirley MacLaine) wants to impress her husband Dave (Frank Sinatra):

“Haven’t you noticed I’ve been talking lately much better?”

“Hmm? Yes, much.”

“I got one of them, them grammar books from the library. I got it from that teacher who — whom. Whom is the objective.”

“Whom says so?”

More who and whom
Mooch : Shirley Temple : Lucy van Pelt

Terre Haute, no limit

From Some Came Running (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1958). Accomplished gambler Bama Dillert (Dean Martin) proposes a road trip:

“You know, the boys in Terre Haute, they don't set no limit. We could do ourselves a little good.”

Terre Haute, the Queen City of the Wabash, was long known as a heartland center of vice. Life (September 1, 1958) ran a feature on gambling in the city: “The Big Bettors Hide, Hide and Hide.” Featuring Zeppo Marx!

A chapter-saving device

From the first novel Jane Austen completed for publication, one of many meta moments.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

Related reading
All OCA Austen posts (Pinboard)

The Histories in LA

“A multimedia installation examining the relationships between culture, geography, and colonial histories in the Americas in the 19th century”: The Histories (Old Black Joe), a collaboration between David Hartt and Van Dyke Parks, is now at the Hammer Museum.

Here’s an interview with Van Dyke about the quadraphonic soundtrack he created for the installation.

Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom

A short film from The New York Times about American attitudes toward vaccination for COVID-19. It’s strong stuff. Proceed with caution.

[Dying in the Name of Freedom. August 2021.]

The vaccination rate in Baxter County, Arkansas, when this film was made: 36%. It’s now 38%.

The vaccination rate in my Illinois county: 35%. The attitudes present in this film are the attitudes present here.

A terrible translation of Musil

Robert Musil. Intimate Ties. Translated from the German by Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2019. 207 pages. $16.

Peter Wortsman, in an afterword to his translation:

I took up the challenge, in part as a project to propose to the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Literatur to land a fellowship in Vienna.

I got the fellowship and fumbled through the translation.

“Fumbled”: I’ll say.

I thought I was in trouble on the first page of “The Culmination of Love,” the first of two novellas that form Vereinigungen (1911), or Intimate Ties. Tea is served. “They” are shutters:

Like a pair of dark, serenely lowered eyelids, they hid the glimmer of this room in which the tea now trickled from the matte silver pot into two cups, flung open with a quiet clang and then holding still in the shaft of light like a twisted, transparent column of soft brown topaz.

The cups are flung open? No, it must be the pot. But who flings a teapot open to pour? And what kind of teapot clangs — and clangs quietly? Is it the pot that’s holding still in “the shaft of light” like a topaz column? No, that must be the tea. And about “the” shaft of light: what shaft?

I struggled through this book — I was interested. The depiction of psychological extremity made me wonder whether Musil might have influenced Djuna Barnes, whose Nightwood ends with a woman and a dog in a scene reminiscent of what’s suggested in this volume’s “The Temptation of Saint Veronica.” So I struggled.

I was grateful to find, after reading, a review by the translator Michael Hoffman, “Musil’s Infinities” (New York Review of Books, March 26, 2020). Now I know why I was in trouble from the first page:

Everybody makes mistakes occasionally, and, no question, this is a difficult book — but these are elementary mistakes. They are the sort of misunderstandings that bespeak a translator not equably accompanying an author on their way together so much as looking around and wondering in a blind panic where he can have got to. They are mistakes that make of German — where many short, everyday words exist in more than one sense — a sort of German roulette. In the opening scene of the first story, Claudine pours tea. “Aufschlug,” given as the perplexing “flung open” (like a door?), is the sound made by the tea being poured; “Strahl ” is a column of liquid, not a “shaft of light.”

And so on. And so on. Hoffman tallies many mistakes in translation and faults Wortsman for Instinktlosigkeit — a lack of instinct. Hoffman also takes Wortsman to task for cheesy alliteration and awkward anachronisms: “Then Claudine got antsy.” I’d call it a lack of sprachgefühl, a lack of feeling for words. Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance, as David Foster Wallace wrote.

I’ll point to two other kinds of error in Wortsman’s prose. One is the consistent use of like for as. From Garner’s Modern English Usage:

In traditional usage, like is a preposition that governs nouns and noun phrases, not a conjunction that governs verbs or clauses. Its function is adjectival, not adverbial.

From Intimate Ties:

She looked up to find her fellow passengers joking around cheerfully and harmlessly, like when you see a light and decipher the shapes of small figures at the end of a dark tunnel.

And:

She felt it stirring something up in her, like when you walk by the seashore, unable to fully fathom the roar of every action and every thought torn in the fabric of the moment.

I could go on. Seeing these sentences in such an elegantly designed book (Archipelago books always look elegant) is a small adventure in cognitive dissonance, like when you see someone wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes.

Seeing spelling errors is worse. Intimate Ties gives us at least two homophone mistakes: “the great painstakingly plated [plaited ] emotional braid of her being” and “an amiable mean [mien ].” There’s also swopping for swapping, as in “swopping empty niceties,” and, yes, swopping is a British spelling of swapping, but this translation is by an American writer, and the publisher is in Brooklyn. Sheesh. They’ll get no pass from me.

I go along with Michael Hoffman, whose translations of Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and other writers have given me much pleasure:

Intimate Ties is one of those regrettable publications that hurts the reputations of everyone connected with it: Musil’s own, the translator’s, and even the luckless publisher, Archipelago.

And our household is out $32, having bought two copies for our very exclusive reading club. Elaine, who can read German, was beside herself when reading Wortsman’s Musil alongside the original. The sad thing: this translation is the lone translation of ‌Vereinigungen into English. I doubt there’ll be another anytime soon. But I’d like to read one by Michael Hoffman. His review already proposes an alternative title: Conjunctions or Associations.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

[The Oxford English Dictionary dates antsy to 1950. “Like when you see someone wearing a tuxedo and tennis shoes”: if there’s any doubt, the like here is for comic effect. We’re really out $64, as we also bought two copies of Wortsman’s translation of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Maybe it’s a better job.]

Charlie Watts (1941–2021)

End of an era. The New York Times has an obituary.

An EXchange name sighting

[From Escape in the Fog (dir. Oscar Boetticher Jr., 1945). Click for a larger view.]

FLanders? FLeetwood? Only the operator knows for sure.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

New Yorker humor — and I’m out

[From an e-mail promoting the August 30 issue of The New Yorker.]

I’ve been wavering about whether to let our subscription to The New Yorker lapse. I think this comedy bit has decided it for me. No wavering from Elaine: she’s already said we should let it go.

Now that we’re supposed to listen compassionately to disaffected rural folk opposed to vaccination, older people might be the only group still safe to target for comic purposes. A sample from this New Yorker piece:

Right now, your mom could be holding up the grocery-store checkout line with a long, boring monologue about how much she loves “that Billy Eyelash — such a talented young man.”

I’m old enough — but also young enough — to find this kind of stuff painfully dumb.

[The average age of a New Yorker reader, according to Wikipedia: forty-three in 1980; forty-six in 1990, forty-seven in 2009. A more recent (?) estimate: fifty-four. I’d say the magazine is pitching not to the readers they have but to the readers they hope to acquire, which is one way to lose readers they have, or had.]