Words from Eduardo Galeano

Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers (2021) ends with words from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano on a black background, translated in the subtitles below:

No hay historia muda. Por mucho que la quemen, por mucho que la rompan, por mucho que la mientan, la historia humana se niega a callarse la boca.

No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth.

Elaine and I saw Parallel Mothers not long ago, and I finally tracked down the source of these sentences: Galeano’s Patas arriba: Escuela del mundo al revés (1998), translated by Mark Fried as Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (2000).

What’s really strange: an English version of the Parallel Mothers screenplay is available as a PDF from Sony Classics. The English translation of Galeano’s sentences therein follows Fried. (I’ve added a comma before and, missing from the PDF, to match Fried.)

If you have the opportunity to see Parallel Mothers safely, go. It’s a strange, heartbreaking movie, mixing melodrama and history. It’s the best Almodóvar movie yet, I’d say. Elaine and I went to a weekday matinee with friends who assured us that we would be the only people in the theater. And we were.

In search of Tylenol

I was walking with my mom in upper Manhattan. We had to get back to the Port Authority, and then to New Jersey, but first we had to do some shopping. So we split up.

I found my mom in a drugstore. She had a headache and wanted to buy Tylenol. I started looking.

The drugstore was a maze of small rooms, some with short aisles of consumer goods, others with wall shelves holding what appeared to be prescription drugs. Still other rooms had hospital beds, with patients in them. I couldn’t understand why I was allowed to walk through these rooms.

I found someone to ask about Tylenol. She was young, smartly dressed, carrying a clipboard, looking like someone from cable news. I followed her as she walked through several rooms. “I found a bed where my mom can rest,” I said. “But I need to buy some Tylenol.”

She walked to another room, sat down on a sofa, and looked at her clipboard. “I thought you were showing me where the Tylenol is!” I said. She looked at me angrily. A timer in my pocket beeped.

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Whither the gatekeepers?

No wonder I couldn’t figure out last week’s Weekend Edition Sunday puzzle: the solution, revealed this morning, required that you hear the names Aaron and Erin as soundalikes. For some people they are, just as marry, Mary, and merry are soundalikes. But not for everyone.

Will Shortz apologized this morning (with a slight laugh) to anyone for whom the names are not soundalikes. Does he test the Sunday puzzles on human subjects before using? Does anyone approve the puzzles for use? O whither respect for regional differences in pronunciation? O whither the gatekeepers?

A further complication that Elaine would like me to point out: solving the puzzle also required that you accept Aaron in reverse as yielding Nora. Uh, no.

And, I’ll add, solving the puzzle also required you to think — as Shortz does — that Aaron and Nora share a short e as a vowel sound. (That’s what he said.) Again, no — Nora ends in a schwa: ə.

[Can names be considered homophones? I have dodged that question while writing this post. I‘ve e-mailed NPR about this puzzle and am wondering if I’ll hear back.]

Outtakes (3)

[Outtakes from the WPA’s New York City tax photographs, c. 1939–1941, available from 1940s NYC. Click any image for a larger view.]

More outtakes to come.

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Outtakes (1) : Outtakes (2) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski, a constructor known for difficult puzzles. (Her website: Tough As Nails.) This puzzle was easier fun, with a number of surprising answers. I missed by one letter, for what I think is a good reason. An explanation will follow in the comments.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, four letters, “Like in a trattoria.” I like.

12-A, ten letters, “‘Fruity’ earth tone.” One of my favorite colors.

18-A, fifteen letters, “Cold-weather wear from the Shetlands.” Cozy and unusual.

28-D, five letters, “Ones’ places.” My first thought was of columns in arithmetic.

30-D, five letters, “Pseudonym that its owner pronounced to rhyme with ‘choice.’” No idea — I got it from crosses.

31-A, eleven letters, “Modern words of anticipation.” Well, contemporary words, though I’m not sure they’re words of anticipation. Maybe the kids today can verify.

32-D, six letters, “Go at it casually.” Clever.

47-A, fifteen letters, “Source of the Suwannee.” So this fifteen-letter source is real.

55-D, three letters, “Literally, ‘stir-fried mixture.’” Yes, please.

58-A, four letters, “One attending a ball.” My favorite clue in this puzzle.

The cross that messed me up: 1-A, three letters, “Letters seen on medicine cabinet tubes” and 2-D, four letters, “East Timor's capital.” I don’t think Zawistowski assumes that capital to be common knowlege. It’s supposed to be gettable from 1-A. My problem was with the medicine cabinet. No, not medicine cabinet tubes.

No spoilers; answers and further explanation of 1-A may be found in the comments.

Pfft

Melania Trump’s NFTs (non-fungible tokens) of photographs from a defeated former president’s mad reign seem to be not exactly NFTs. The lady with the hat is selling 10,000 NFTs of photographs at $50 a pop. But wait: those 10,000 photographs aren’t 10,000 unique photographs (taken by taxpayer-paid White House photographers?). They’re copies of ten photographs, 250 to 1500 copies of each.

Forbes says that NFTs are “generally one of a kind, or at least one of a very limited run.” I think I know enough to know that 1000 copies is a rather large number for an NFT. The number of suckers in the world is larger still.

And multiple purchases are possible for anyone who wants to own the set of ten. A thought: would it be beyond this grifting helpmeet’s helpers to purchase all 250 copies of the “rarest” of these faux-NFTs to resell (greyly, greyly) at higher prices? 250 × $50 = $12,500. A mere bag of shells. Think of the possible return on investment.

She’s already bought back her hat.

[Pfft : “used to signify sarcasm or disagreement.”]

“A dustbin of scraps”

Organist and choirmaster Humphrey Cobbler has figured out something about Hector Mackilwraith, teacher of mathematics.

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (1951).

Tempest-Tost is the first novel of Davies’s Salterton Trilogy.

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Counting on Brooklyn

I was walking down an avenue in Manhattan, past a Woolworth’s. And old woman (kerchief, gloves) sidled up to me and said, “They rely on Brooklyn for everything, don’t they? They count on Brooklyn to buy all the candy.”

I agreed. And I added, “I love Brooklyn.”

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[Inspired, no doubt, by thinking about the candy stores of my youth. For instance.]

Two books by Jerry Craft

[Jordan and Drew. Click either image for a larger view.]

Jerry Craft, New Kid (New York: Harper, 2019) and Class Act (New York: HarperAlley, 2020).

               “Oh, Jordan, graphic novels aren’t real books!”

                           Miss Brickner, librarian,                            Riverdale Academy Day School

Jordan is Jordan Banks, from Washington Heights, an artist/cartoonist and new kid starting “first form” (seventh grade) at Riverdale. He has his heart set on the High School of Art, Music, and Mime, but, well, parents. Jordan’s mom Ellice, who works in publishing, dotes on her twelve-year-old son (her “little sweet potato”) and wants him to attend an academically elite school. Jordan’s dad Chuck, who runs a community center, is willing to give Riverdale a try. The family is Black, and Jordan will be one of a handful of students of color at Riverdale, a school, he tells us, that’s “in a section of the city that’s so fancy, its residents refuse to admit that it’s actually a part of the Bronx.” And yes, there’s an Archie Comics joke along the way, in one of the two-page sketchbook comics in Jordan’s hand that punctuate the narrative.

New Kid and Class Act are stories of school, friendship, misunderstandings, adjustments, and learning, graphic novels sharply and wittily drawn and written. Jordan’s first tentative friendship at his new school is with his guide, Liam Landers, a white kid from Riverdale whose family has a long history with the school, family-name-on-a-building long. And there’s Drew Ellis, another Black kid (from Co-op City, living with his grandmother). As Jordan and Drew discover, teachers often call them by the names of other Black students. There’s even a math teacher, Black, at the school for fourteen years, who other teachers still assume is a coach. And here’s an example of Jerry Craft’s sharp sense of humor and his characters’ resilience: Jordan and Drew turn their teachers’ mistakes into a private game, saying hello and goodbye to each other with an endless array of names: Jerome and Demetrius, Joakim and DeMarcus, Jaylen and D’Aren.

Things between Jordan and Drew and Liam are more fraught. The Landers family’s wealth is conspicuous: “Is this just one house?” Chuck wonders when he drops his son off for a visit. “Is his [Liam’s] dad a rapper?” Drew asks. No, he’s in business, and he’s always away on it. Liam is self-conscious about his family’s wealth: “Try not to, you know, judge, okay?” The family’s driver, Mr. Pierre, is in the States earning money for his family back in Haiti. There’s also a maid, which puzzles Jordan and Drew, as Liam’s mom (“You can call me Zoe”) doesn’t work. When Zoe Mrs. Landers serves takeout pizza, Drew dreams of a cheesy, dripping mess and finds instead a choice between two sauceless pies, one of which Mrs. Landers calls “the white pizza,” made with mozzarella and ricotta: “Thus its name. And that’s the only reason . . . I swear!” Visiting Jordan in Washington Heights, Liam gets to enjoy the unfraught pleasures of mac and cheese, cornbread, collard greens, and, post-basketball and lacrosse, a chopped cheese sandwich. And in the Heights, Liam gets his own joke name: Liam Neeson.

There are many kinds of comic cluelessness in these stories. Ashley, a white girl who likes Drew, touches his hair without permission and makes him one sweet potato pie after another. There’s a running joke about The Mean Streets of South Uptown, an awful YA novel (with, of course, a white author) and movie — about gritty (yes, gritty) urban life. (I flashed on the satire of Robert Townsend’s movie Hollywood Shuffle.) An ill-conceived effort to bridge an academic and economic divide has kids visit Riverdale from a South Bronx school, Cardinal De Bard, aka Cardi De Academy. (I flashed on the This American Life episode “Three Miles.”) At Riverdale and beyond, the hapless name of the National Organization of Cultural Liaisons Understanding Equality speaks for itself.

School is always school, with jerks (Andy), eccentrics (Alexandra, who speaks through a hand puppet), athletes, gossips, theater kids, and a cafeteria hierarchy. And it’s always difficult to manage friendships from the block when going to a school farther from home. Another complication: puberty is in the air, literally, with Jordan wondering, as Class Act ends, about when he will get the “big-boy stink” that Drew and Liam and everyone else has already acquired. In a third volume? I loved these books, and I hope Jordan’s story continues, maybe even at the High School of Art, Music, and Mime.

*

I learned about New Kid from the This American Life episode “Talking While Black.” Act Two, “The Farce Awakens,” by Chana Joffe-Walt, is about efforts to ban New Kid and disinvite Jerry Craft from a Zoom appearance for students at a school in Texas. What a country we live in.

You can learn more about Jerry Craft’s work at his website.

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Fourth panel, fourth wall

[Nancy, May 7, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

It’s hot and stuffy in the first two panels, and Aunt Fritzi won’t let Nancy open a window: “I said NO.”

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy. Today’s Nancy is also today’s Nancy — with robots!

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