Only Murders

I called it. I didn’t have the details, only a now-validated hunch. How about you?

The final episode of the second season of Only Murders in the Building is extremely good. It helps make up for the meta jokes and time-killing schtick that run through the season. A third season is in the works.

[Please note: Comments with spoilers will not appear on this post.]

“Trumpery insanity”

A startling phrase in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Trumpery insanity.” It applies to a man in a mackintosh, a “seedy cuss,” “once a prosperous cit,” who “thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.” The phrase, alas, is not political prophecy, and it’s not even of Joyce’s invention. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1970) to the rescue. Its definition:

a c.p [catch-phrase] directed at the frequency of this verdict in cases of suicide : ca. 1880–1900.

Partridge cites Heinrich Baumann’s Londonismen (1887).

Here’s a condensed presentation of the Oxford English Dictionary meanings for trumpery. As a noun:

1. Deceit, fraud, imposture, trickery. Obsolete.

2. “Something of less value than it seems”; hence, “something of no value; trifles” (Johnson); worthless stuff, trash, rubbish. (Usually collective singular; also, now rarely, plural.)
    a. Applied to material objects.
    b. Applied to abstract things, as beliefs, practices, discourse, writing, etc.: Nonsense, “rubbish.”
    c. Applied contemptuously to religious practices, ceremonies, ornaments, etc. regarded as idle or superstitious. (Cf. trinket.) Now rare or merged in general sense.
    d. Showy but unsubstantial apparel; worthless finery.
    e. Horticulture. Weeds or refuse, such as hinder the growth of valuable plants. Obsolete exc. dialect.
    f. Applied to a person, esp. a woman: cf. trash ? Obsolete exc. dialect.

As an adjective:

Of little or no value; trifling, paltry, insignificant; worthless, rubbishy, trashy.

There’s much more that could be said, and has been said, about the man in the mac. All I want to do here is call attention to a remarkable phrase.

[If you’re in emotional distress or suicidal crisis, ask for help. Google has a global list of resources.]

Dreaming of Paris

There we were, in a restaurant. Everyone was speaking French. How great!

I stepped outside to get our car. Someone was walking into a very large salon. Haircuts cost fifty dollars.

As we started to drive back home, I realized that we had not seen, and would not get to see, the Arc de Triomphe. It had been a very short visit.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Post title from a Van Dyke Parks song.]

Ulysses again

I first read Ulysses in 1979, finishing, not by plan, on June 16. I read the novel for a second time in 1980, and again in 1984. Coming back to the novel this summer, I find my aspirant-academic self in the marginal notes on the foxed pages, in penciled printing now so faint that I need (anyone would need) a magnifying glass to read it.

I often cringe at my earlier reading, which was informed — if that’s the word — by various commentaries and reader’s guides. Sun = son. Fetal position. Rebirth? Rebirth. Trinities everywhere. And of course the specific Homeric correspondences, some so improbable, so strained, that they now seem to me largely beside the point. Buck Mulligan = Antinous? Blazes Boylan = Eurymachus? Well, that’s what I was told.

What I missed so much of earlier on: the characters’ humanity. I missed Leopold Bloom’s utter loneliness: in his family life, in his relationships with other male Dubliners. He conducts a covert pseudonymous correspondence with “Martha Clifford” (whoever she, or he, is); he masturbates while looking at a seventeen-year-old girl (two years older than his daughter Milly, who’s now away for the summer); he’s haunted by the thought of Blazes Boylan’s afternoon visit to Molly Bloom, so much so, it seems, that he doesn’t return to his house at 7 Eccles Street until the early hours of June 17. Bloom is an outsider in the alcoholic, Catholic world of men: a (thrice-baptized!) Jew who drinks only in moderation, a figure whose kindnesses and advocacy of pacifism make him the subject of mockery. He’s haunted by losses: his father’s suicide, the death of his own infant son. With his daughter away, Bloom attempts to create a new familial triangle by proposing to bring Stephen Dedalus into his household: Molly will give Stephen singing lessons, and Stephen will instruct Molly in proper Italian pronunciation and provide intellectual companionship for Bloom.

Poor Stephen: a writer manqué who escaped to Paris only to return to Dublin, with no clear place of residence, haunted by the death of his mother (for whom he refused to pray), abandoned by his fellow carousers in his hour of extremity, the son of a hapless drunk who has ceded the role of parent to his oldest daughter. Stephen stands by silently while others plan literary gatherings; his own literary pull is no more than the means to get his boss’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease in a newspaper. On June 16, Stephen drinks heavily and eats nothing. He last bathed in October. When Stephen declines Bloom’s offer of a place to stay and leaves 7 Eccles Street in the early hours of June 17, he has, literally, no place to go. Like Mr. Duffy in “A Painful Case” (Dubliners), Stephen is alone.

And then there’s Molly Bloom. Her stream of consciousness is an amusing and often outlandish torrent of grudges, suspicions, cutting remarks, and sexual fantasies, the product of a male imagination with its own particular obsessions. But here too, I missed Molly’s humanity. I now see much more clearly that she, like her husband, like Stephen, is profoundly isolated. She is contemptuous of the crass, presumptuous Blazes Boylan, who is merely a respite from the sexual death that is her marriage. Imagining Stephen, she thinks “it’ll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk to about yourself.” Men, she thinks, “have friends they can talk to weve none.” But do men have such friends? Bloom doesn’t. But neither Molly nor Bloom recognizes the other’s isolation. I’ve swooned at Molly’s final “yes I said yes I will Yes,” and I still do. But that was in the past, as Molly and Leopold lay among the rhododendrons on Howth Head. Things are different at 7 Eccles Street.

So I now see more in Ulysses than I once did. And what I understand much better now is that the work’s value is not in its small cryptic details. Joyce famously said that he

put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.

I think that Joyce was working with the sources-and-analogues model of literary scholarship in mind: reading as a form of archaeology or genealogy, to figure out where a particular plot element comes from, what a topical reference means, what an allusion references, where a saying or proverb might first be found. All worthy efforts of course. I suspect that Dante looms large here, given the vast body of commentary on the Divine Comedy.

But are enigmas and puzzles the reason anyone reads Dante? I don’t think so. I respond to Dante’s brutal wit, his bizarre pageantry, his extraordinary similes, and the tension between what doctrine dictates and what feeling demands: “Ser Brunetto, are you here?” Nor are enigmas and puzzles the reason anyone reads Chaucer, or the Shake, or the Brontës, or Proust, or Morrison, or Frank O’Hara, or, or, or. I think of literature, always, as what Kenneth Burke called it: “equipment for living.” It deepens our understanding of our common humanity: “always meeting ourselves,” as Stephen says. It deepens our understanding of the possibilities of language and imagination, of what might be made in words. Those are good reasons to read Ulysses. I’m glad I had another chance.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

A pinned note

A note pinned to a wall in Alex Katz’s studio:

Last year in Spain a journalist asked me if I considered myself a over the hill minor talent I said I didn’t but a lot of people do. I dedicate this show to all the people who did not take me seriously. You provided the fuel for my rage.

Transcribed from a photograph in a New York Times profile of Katz: “Alex Katz Is Still Perfecting His Craft.”

A handful of Alex Katz posts
Alex Katz meets Lionel Hampton : Alex Katz’s piano : Focusing : Foods

NYPL

[New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The main branch opened on May 23, 1911. The building is now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

I like the contrast in this photograph between the dark foreground figures (at least six of whom appear to be looking right into the camera) and the library, strangely luminous in the near distance, an urban Emerald City. You can just make out Patience and Fortitude, left and right (south and north), standing guard behind the watermark.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Nancy

Olivia Jaimes, breaking that fourth wall.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Proust for all

From the journalist Cath Pound, some encouragement to read Proust: “Why the world’s most difficult novel is so rewarding” (BBC). Caution: if you’ve never read In Search of Lost Time, you’ll encounter many spoilers.

Here’s a (spoiler-free) OCA post with tips for reading Proust.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[“It is a common reading experience to get through the first 50 or 60 pages of In Search of Lost Time and then just give up”: that statement puzzles me. You need to read only fifty pages or so to hit the novel’s first big reward.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stella Zawistowski, is a true Stumper. I found an easy starting point in 14-D, five letters, “Erstwhile royalty, up and down,” and 16-A, five letters, “Good-luck pigment at Middle East weddings.” After that, I stumbled about, an answer here, an answer there. The clue that gave me the greatest trouble: 46-A, thirteen letters, “Mannered men and women.” Having that wrong made a mess of things for quite some time.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-A, nine letters, “Play along with.” I thought of humoring someone.

11-D, eight letters, and 31-D, nine letters, “Superior at many schools.” I like the repurposing of the clue.

13-D, four letters, “Calls for.” Pretty misdirective.

21-A, thirteen letters, “What Beethoven called a piano.” One of several keyboard clues in the puzzle. There’s also 8-D, six letters, “Pianist’s pinky-thumb pair,” and 51-A, six letters, “Pianist’s pinky-thumb pairs.” 21-A is tricker than I suspected.

26-A, six letters, “Bit of year-end debris.” I was thinking of confetti.

38-A, five letters, “It might get you down.” Emily Dickinson gave me the answer here.

42-D, six letters, “Article length.” I have never seen or heard this word. Merriam-Webster’s examples of recent use are unrelated to this definition.

54-D, three letters, “Not following.” A clever way to improve a bit of crosswordese.

56-A, five letters, “What jelly beans are made with.” SUGAR, right? Wrong. Not especially obvious.

59-A, nine letters, “Typical Saturday matinee cartoon.” It pays to like old movies.

My favorite in this puzzle: 45-D, five letters, “Mainly?”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A rotten sardine

“Last one there is a rotten sardine!”: that’s a line from My Little Pony: A New Generation (dir. Robert Cullen, Mark Fattibene, and José Luis Ucha, 2021).

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Hear it here.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[I’m not sure who that line is for. “Youngish” parents? It’s certainly not for the kiddos.]