A woman in a window

[From Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). Click for a much larger view.]

Here’s the reason I wanted to watch this movie again: the eerie image of a woman (Grayce Mills) in her basement apartment, drowsing in a chair as her radio plays classical music. As she will explain to police detectives, “I always sleep here since my husband died. It seems less lonely. Music helps me.”

Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle, who won an Academy Award for his work on Laura (1944), also directed by Preminger, also starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney.

Deresiewicz on leaving academia

William Deresiewicz explains why he left academia. He begins:

If I care so much about college — about students, about teaching, about the humanities, about the transformative potential of the undergraduate experience — then why did I leave? Why, in 2008, after 10 years on the faculty at Yale, did I say goodbye not only to that institution but to the profession as a whole? A lot of people have asked me that question; a lot more have assumed they know the answer. Did I quit in disgust at the corruption of the academic enterprise? Could I no longer bear to participate in the perpetuation of the class system? If I didn’t get tenure at Yale, did I regard it as beneath my dignity to work at a less prestigious institution? No, no, and no.

Here’s why I left: I didn’t have a choice. I not only failed to get tenure at Yale — which was completely expected — I failed to land another job anywhere else. Let me explain how it works.

A cautionary tale about the academic humanities, from graduate study to the tenure track. Pairs well with William Pannapacker’s “So You Want to Go to Grad School?,” “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” and “Just Don’t Go, Part 2.”

*

If I were to choose just one OCA post that captures my sense of what’s wrong with English studies, it’d be this one: Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies.

[Deresiewicz’s essay is free for a limited time from Quillette. I suspect that this will be the first and last time I link to anything from Quillette. Pannapacker’s essays are behind the Chronicle of Higher Education firewall, but available (I think) with a free, limited-number-of-articles subscription.]

Gravity and Dan Price

In 2015 Dan Price, the chief executive of Gravity Payments, established a $70,000 minimum salary for his employees. Me, in a comment on a 2015 post: “If the Gravity story ends badly, I’ll have one more reason to be disappointed.”

And here we are: “Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women” (The New York Times ).

Abdul Wadud (1947–2022)

The cellist was seventy-five and long retired from music. The New York Times has an obituary.

I first heard Abdul Wadud on the Julius Hemphill albums ’Coon Bid’ness and Dogon A.D. Talk about waking-up music. I have the 1975 and 1977 Arista LPs — both in a secure location. Here, from ’Coon Bid’ness is “The Hard Blues,” recorded February 1972. Julius Hemphill, alto; Hamiet Bluiett, baritone; Baikida E. J. Carroll, trumpet; Abdul Wadud, cello; Philip Wilson, drums.

[Strange: Tuesday afternoon I was noodling on the guitar and began playing the cello figure that opens “Dogon A.D.” I hadn’t heard it or thought of it in a long time.]

“I always liked poetry”

Molly Bloom thinks: Her husband, a poet? Nah. But what about Stephen Dedalus? From the “Penelope” episode:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922.)

A few notes:

~ “I thought he was a poet”: Leopold Bloom has written at least two poems, one for a contest when he was a boy, another, an acrostic, for Molly, February 14, 1888:

Poets oft have sung in rhyme
Of music sweet their praise divine.
Let them hymn it nine times nine.
Dearer far than song or wine.
You are mine. The world is mine.

~ Milly: the Blooms’ daughter.

~ “what age was he then at Dillons”: Molly saw little Stephen at Mat Dillon’s years ago. Could it have been at the same party where she and Bloom first met?

~ “Im not too old for him”: Molly will be thirty-four in September 1904. Stephen is twenty-two.

~ “Eppss”: Epps’s Cocoa, “the creature cocoa.”

~ Goodwin: Professor Goodwin, a pianist, at one time Molly’s accompanist. “Dreadful old case,” as Bloom remembers him.

~ John Jameson: Irish whiskey.

~ “Europa point”: Europa Point, the southermost point of Gibraltar. Molly was born on Gibraltar.

~ “where softly sighs of love the light guitar”: from “In Old Madrid,” words by G. Clifton Bingham, music by Henry Trotère. It begins,

Long years ago, in old Madrid,
Where softly sighs of love the light guitar,
Two sparkling eyes a lattice hid,
Two eyes as darkly bright as love’s own star!

Here’s a 1908 recording. Imagine that Molly is singing. Bingham also wrote the words to “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” a song that runs through the novel.

~ Tarifa: “a Spanish municipality in the province of Cádiz, Andalusia” (Wikipedia) .

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

Digging Troy

Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews) is bored with college life: bored with classes, bored with being in a place run by thinkers, not doers. He comes from a family that does things, he says, a family that does things first. He finds in the life of a nineteenth-century amateur archaeolgist the inspiration to rob a Reno casino. From 5 Against the House (dir. Phil Karlson, 1955):

“It’s what I need in my life — a big first. You guys ever hear of a man named Schliemann?”

“Sure, played first base for the Giants and later invented a plastic breakfast food.”

“He dug up the ancient city of Troy in Greece.”

“Hey, what a cat, to dig Troy.”

“It was a first, get my point?”

Got it.

I can think of one other heist film in which a criminal mastermind invokes Troy in his scheming. Anyone know it? My answer is in the comments.

[“Criminal mastermind”: yes, I know it’s a cliché. I’ve been watching Only Murders in the Building.]

Parody? Not parody?

“The result is a cornucopia, and a fuller look at the radiant candor that is her oeuvre”: I had to check to make sure that I was reading a real review of a real book.

“All the documents”

From The New York Times:

Federal prosecutors investigating the role that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies played in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have issued a grand jury subpoena to the National Archives for all the documents the agency provided to a parallel House select committee inquiry, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The New York Times.

The subpoena, issued to the National Archives in May, made a sweeping demand for “all materials, in whatever form” that the archives had given to the Jan. 6 House committee. Those materials included records from the files of Mr. Trump’s top aides, his daily schedule and phone logs and a draft text of the president’s speech that preceded the riot.

Pocket notebook sighting

[From The Girl in Black Stockings (dir. Howard W. Koch, 1957).]

Above, a sheriff (John Dehner), a doctor (Richard H. Cutting), and a notebook. The real mystery here is what’s printed on the notebook’s cover. My guess after flipping the image: Scripto. Click on either image to pursue your own investigation.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : M : 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 : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

“Liberal elitist pizza”

[“Does Carl Bark?” Zippy, August 17, 2022. Click for a larger pie.]

Zippy is in Utah, and he’s carrying, openly — a pizza, that is, from Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Frank Pepe’s white clam pie is a joy: clams, grated cheese, olive oil, garlic, oregano. That’s all.]