Vet

I finally thought to look up a word that’s long puzzled me: the verb vet. I had anticipated some weirdness in its past — perhaps a Latin phrase about trustworthiness for which it’s a one-syllable stand-in? Alas, the origin is disappointingly obvious, though not so obvious that I would have guessed it. Merriam-Webster explains:

When we vet a statement for accuracy or vet a candidate for a position, what are we doing, literally? Does the verb have something to do with veteran “a person with long experience,” perhaps indicating that the thing or person vetted is proved to be tried and true?

Interestingly, the word is not related to veteran at all, but rather to veterinarian “an animal doctor.” That noun was shortened to vet by the mid-19th century and, within decades, gave rise to a verb vet meaning “to subject (an animal) to medical examination.” The verb was soon applied to human beings as well, broadening in sense to “to perform a medical checkup on.” By the early 20th century, this word took on the figurative meaning that is now most familiar: “to subject a person or thing to scrutiny; to examine for flaws.”

This post has been fully vetted. Now I’m thinking about why dictionaries omit a comma between a word and its definition: “veteran ‘a person with long experience.’” A space-saving measure over hundreds and thousands of pages of text, I would guess.

Sam Potts’s five-point plan

From Sam Potts, graphic designer, “My Five-Point Plan for Doing Projects.” I especially like no. 3: “Heed the wisdom of Mickey Rivers,” who said this:

“Ain’t no sense worrying about things you got no control over because if you got no control, ain’t no sense worrying. And there ain’t no sense worrying about things you got control over, because if you got control, ain’t no sense worrying.”

Mickey Rivers played center field for for the California Angels, the New York Yankees, and the Texas Rangers.

Some years ago, Sam Potts created Infinite Jest : A Diagram, mapping the relations of the novel’s characters. I still have my copy, 2′× 3′.

Six movies, six seasons

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM.]

Network (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976). Startlingly prescient, as the fading anchorman of a fourth-network’s nightly news moves from the reporting of events to tirades. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” shouts Howard Beale (Peter Finch), in an unscripted rage that is soon beyond anyone’s control. I’m not as taken with this movie as I think I’m supposed to be: I find the dialogue, particularly in scenes with William Holden and Faye Dunaway (news vs. entertainment) and Holden and Beatrice Straight (husband vs. wife) labored and artificial. But as prophecy, Network deserves all the stars. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Two more seasons of Nathan for You

Third season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2015). Unsettling schemes: a soundproof playbox to hold a child (so that parents can have sex in a hotel room while on vacation), a clothing company promoting Holocaust awareness (with ghastly in-store displays), a highwire act with Nathan posing as a man who’ll be honored for raising money for breast-cancer research. With the highwire act and other schemes, Fielder appears to take ample advantage of media willingness to air stories without scrutiny. My favorite bit from this season now looks like a rehearsal for The Rehearsal, with actors studying the gestures and movements of bar patrons and replicating them as a play (all in a dizzying effort to get around a no-smoking-in-bars rule). The increasingly convoluted promotional schemes take on a greater and greater element of Zeno’s paradox: before I can do z , I have to do y ; before I y , I have to do x ; but somehow it all gets done. ★★★★ (HBO)

Fourth season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2017). The highlight of the season and the series: “Finding Frances,” in which Nathan travels from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas with William Heath, a “professional Bill Gates impersonator” (no, he isn’t one) to find the woman Heath didn’t marry fifty years earlier. Heath is an enigma: he has the manner of a con artist, a bit of a Robert Durst vibe, and it’s never clear who he is or what he was doing all those years after coming to Hollywood and failing to make it as an actor or singer. As Nathan asks him, “Can you figure out you?” When Heath and an actor playing Frances run through what might happen in a real meeting, the story moves into the strange territory that we now know as The Rehearsal. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

Room at the Top (dir. Jack Clayton, 1958). Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), young accountant, leaves a provincial English town to take a job in a less provincial English town and finds diversion in amateur theatricals and musical beds. His intention is to rise, but at what cost? Heather Sears and Simone Signoret play his conquests, Susan and Alice, the one the mill owner’s daughter, the other a wealthy philanderer’s neglected wife. Joe is all about what he wants to do , but I watched wondering what was going to happen to him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Life at the Top (dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1965). Joe Lampton again (still Laurence Harvey), with a life not really his own, stuck in a loveless marriage to Susan (a markedly different Susan, played by Jean Simmons), under his father-in-law’s thumb at work and in politics. Adulterous liaisons for both partners; Susan with a friend of Joe’s, Joe with a television personality (Honor Blackman). Joe’s intention is to escape, but at what cost? Susan’s mother (Ambrosine Phillpotts) has it right: “You say you want a better life, and then when you step up a peg or two, you hate yourself for it.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

A Place in the Sun (dir. George Stevens, 1951). From Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. With different leads, the story might be insufferable, but Montgomery Clift’s shiftiness, Elizabeth Taylor’s breathiness, and Shelley Winters’s neediness make for compelling drama — or, well, melodrama. Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America,” and by America, I think he meant class. Would pair well with Joe Lampton’s story or Strangers on a Train. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Myrna Loy feature

‌Stamboul Quest (dir. Sam Wood, 1934). It is 1915, and Myrna Loy is a glamorous German spy known as Annemarie, aka Fräulein Doktor, aka Helena Bohlen (based on the real-life Fräulein Doktor, Elsbeth Schragmüller). Annemarie’s mission in Turkey is complicated by a sudden romance with a cheerful American medical student (George Brent). The fun in this movie comes from seeing Loy’s character banter with Brent, banter with her spymaster (Lionel Atwill), and match wits with her Turkish prey (C. Henry Gordon). The luminous opening and closing scenes are good examples of James Wong Howe’s art. ★★★★

*

The Rehearsal (created by Nathan Fielder, 2022). I’ve already written about this series, so I’ll quote myself: “The Rehearsal doesn’t blur the line between what’s fictional and what’s real: it removes the line with an industrial sander and then draws a new line (or lines?) elsewhere. But where?” This series, a pilot with its own story and five episodes with one overarching story, is best watched with no preparation. Headspinning and heartbreaking — or is it just headspinning? ★★★★ (HBO)

*

The American Friend (dir. Wim Wenders, 1977). A loose adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is an eccentric American, living in Germany, affiliated with an international art-forgery enterprise, moved by a single unfortunate event to conscript an unassuming picture framer, Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), as a hit man for the enterprise. There’s considerable suspense in the long, silent scene of Zimmerman stalking one victim (homage to Jules Dassin’s Rififi?), and considerable comedy in the long, nearly silent scene of Zimmerman and Ripley dispatching a second victim on a train. Another movie that would pair well with Strangers on a Train, with Zimmerman, like Guy Haines, pulled into a deadly scheme by way of a chance encounter. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Two seasons of How To with John Wilson

First season (created by John Wilson, 2020). The title made me curious, and after one sample I was hooked. The ostensible premise of each documentary-style episode is that Wilson is figuring out how to make or do something, but each episode goes off on tangent after tangent before making its way back, somehow, to its start. The tangents are the point, along with visual puns, Wilson’s nebbishy narrration (he’s almost never seen), the willingness of strangers to speak unguardedly to a camera, and one of the most dystopian depictions of New York City I’ve ever seen (rats, rats, and more rats). The first season’s final episode, “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” filmed as COVID-19 began to descend on the city, is an extraordinary thing. ★★★★ (HBO)

Second season (created by John Wilson, 2021). More of the same, but the same is a matter of endless variety, and along the way, one might lose track of what Wilson is trying to learn. (I’m still not sure why “How to Remember Your Dreams” required a trip to New York’s all-news radio station WINS 1010.) I especially enjoyed “How to Throw Out Your Batteries,” which opens into a consideration of the many things people are unable to part with. As with Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, plain weirdness turns into an exploration of deep emotion. ★★★★ (HBO)

[No surprise to see that Nathan Fielder is an executive producer.]

*

Only Murders in the Building, second season (created by John Hoffman and Steve Martin, 2022). It’s been many years since I last associated a particular day with a television show, but Only Murders now signifies Tuesday. This second season was not as terrific as the first: too many meta jokes about second seasons, too much schtick to run down the clock, too many loose ends. But I was happy to have guessed the identity of the killer (several episodes back) and to have anticipated the Andrea Martin storyline. The hokey name Glitter Guy and the introduction of a much younger cast member, Charles’s daughter Lucy (Zoe Margaret Colletti), made me remember (fondly) the PBS series Ghostwriter. ★★★ (Hulu)

Related reading
All film posts (Pinboard)

35 Perry Street

In February 1939, Thomas Merton rented an apartment. From The Seven Storey Mountain (1948):

I went to Greenwich Village and signed a lease for a one-room apartment and started work on my Ph.D. I suppose the apartment on Perry Street was part of the atmosphere appropriate to an intellectual such as I imagined myself to be and, as a matter of fact, I felt much more important in this large room with a bath and a fireplace and French windows leading out on to a rickety balcony than I had felt in the little place ten feet wide behind the Columbia Library. Besides, I now had a shiny new telephone all my own which rang with a deep, discreet, murmuring sort of a bell as if to invite me suavely to expensive and sophisticated pursuits.

Merton was on the balcony when his friend Robert Lax called with the news of a new pope:

I had been sitting on the balcony in a pair of blue dungarees, drinking Coca-Cola, and getting the sun. When I say sitting on the balcony, I mean sitting on the good boards and letting my feet dangle through the place where the boards had broken. This was what I did a great deal of the time, in the mornings, that spring: surveying Perry Street from the east, where it ran up short against a block of brick apartments, to the west, where it ended at the river, and you could see the black funnels of the Anchor liners.

By September 1940, Merton was living and teaching at St. Bonaventure University in southwestern New York State. In December 1941, he left for the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

I found Thomas Merton’s telephone number some years ago, when the New York Public Library put the 1940 directories online. Here’s 35 Perry Street, complete with balcony:

[35 Perry Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The building went up in 1852 as a one-family residence. In the 1890s it became a rooming house. If you look at the larger view carefully and, perhaps, enlarge it a little more, you can see the gaps in the balcony boards. Really.

Was Merton living in this apartment when the WPA fellows took this photograph? I’d like to think that he was inside typing.

Related reading
All OCA Thomas Merton posts (Pinboard) : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

[You don’t have to be a theist to love Thomas Merton. Or at least I don’t.]

Sheesh

An MSNBC host: “a massive cachet of classified documents.”

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Hatless in Bedminster

The photograph that accompanies Andrew Weissman’s New York Times commentary on the redacted affidavit says it all: the defeated former president, hatless, bronzerless, uncoiffed, at his New Jersey golf-club-cum-cemetery.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Steve Mossberg, a constructor whose crosswords have at times given me fits. In today’s puzzle, take, for instance, 1-A, five letters, “Above what is orally correct.” What? Or better — wut? But solve we must, and I was both happy and surprised when I finished this puzzle. And 1-A was one of the last answers I filled in.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

5-D, twelve letters, “Parlor game experts.” Twelve letters? CHESSMASTERS, of course. No? Oh. Moral: read the clue carefully.

8-D, nine letters, “Elemental.” Pairs well with 27-D.

10-D, eleven letters, “Unthinkingly.” Pretty novel.

11-D, ten letters, “F. Scott Fitzgerald, by birth.” My starting point. I have no idea how I know that. But I don’t know that. It just seemed right.

17-A, ten letters, “Pre-quitting comment.” Was someone watching me attempt to relight the water heater?

25-A, six letters, “They’re left in London.” I was thinking traffic.

27-D, ten letters, “8 Down entertainment.” Heh.

30-A, nine letters, “Olympiad game.” If you say so. I’d prefer a less lofty nine-letter answer.

30-D, nine letters, “Part of a small breakfast.” Like 10-D, a novel and amusing answer.

36-A, nine letters, “Turning points.” I don’t think so.

54-A, four letters, “Take on a page.” Nicely opaque.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

The redacted affidavit

I’m happy to share it via a gift link to The Washington Post : the redacted Mar-a-Lago search affidavit. And five takeaways.

And from The New York Times, via another gift link, a continuing stream of updates.

My takeaway: 67 + 92 + 25 = 184. It’s all unbelievably criminal, and unbelievably dangerous.

[And now I know, for sure, how to spell affidavit.]

E. Bryant Crutchfield (1937–2022)

He invented the Trapper Keeper. The New York Times has an obituary.

Trapper Keepers were prohibited at my children’s schools, and we never knew why. One fambly member’s suggestion is that the authorities wanted to keep out a status symbol. It turns out that there’s a world of discourse about this question. A 2001 Washington Post column for young readers quotes teachers who say that Trapper Keepers are too large and lead to disorganization.

Here’s much more about this venerable school supply: The History of the Trapper Keeper (Mental Floss).

Teachers, take warning: the Times reports that Trapper Keepers are once again on the market.

Siren eyes

New directions in makeup: siren eyes. (JSTOR Daily). Good grief.

It’s worth pointing out that in the Odyssey, the seduction of the Sirens has little to do with sexual allure. What the Sirens promise is the full truth of the Trojan War. They claim to know “everything / that the Greeks and Trojans / Suffered in wide Troy.”

Jonathan Shay, in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002):

In the language of metaphor, Homer shows us that returning veterans face a characteristic peril, a risk of dying from the obsession to know the complete and final truth of what they and the enemy did and suffered in their war and why. In part, this may be another expression of the visceral commandment to keep faith with the dead. Complete and final truth is an unachievable, toxic quest, which is different from the quest to create meaning for one's experience in a coherent narrative. Veterans can and do achieve the latter.

And:

The "voice“ of the Sirens, scholars tell us, is the "voice“ of the Iliad, the voice of a wartime past experienced as more real and meaningful than the present.

And to be captured by that song is to lose one’s homecoming.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[The lines from Homer are in Stanley Lombardo’s translation.]