“A royal blue background fills the screen with white words at its center: Sony Digital Classics. Close blurry glimpses of white letters resolve into words on a black background: Topic Studios.”
And we who rented the movie would spend half an hour or so trying to figure out how to turn off the voice that was telling us what we were seeing on our TV screen.
That was the unexpected start to our viewing of Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022), rented via YouTube. Was it a Roku problem? No. A problem with the YouTube settings? So it would seem, but the YouTube settings have nothing about accessibility or audio. The problem lay in the settings that were in place — how? why? — for this movie.
The solution: press the up arrow on the remote twice and move to the right — Channel, Captions, Like, Dislike, Save, Settings. In Settings, choose Audio tracks and change “English descriptive” to “English original.” Then watch the movie in peace.
[I recommend Turn Every Page with considerable enthusiasm.]
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Turn off YouTube voiceover
World of string
[Nancy, May 23, 1950.]
In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, we behold the world in which all kinds of packages were tied up with string. The grocer’s casual attitude — he’s turned his attention elsewhere, even as he replies to Nancy — changes in the strip’s final panel (what Ernie Bushmiller called “the snapper”), as the string unspools through the store window, past a hydrant, across a street, across a lawn, and into the sky, at the end of a kite.
I knew I’d seen this grocer before: he appears in the December 19, 1949 installment of Nancy, in which he obliges Nancy with some wrapping paper. (Some!) In a post about that strip, I wrote: “I hope the grocer has an enormous roll of string suspended from the ceiling with which to wrap packages.” He — and Ernie Bushmiller — haven’t let me down.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, May 17, 2023
“It’s a tall city”
Walter Dundee, engineer, and Martin Dressler, dreamer, laying plans for the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor:
Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).
Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
Some grades
[Nancy, May 22, 1950. Click for a larger view.]
In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Nancy has offered cheerful news: she got an A in history. But Aunt Fritzi wants to know about “the general result.”
Related reading
All OCA “some rocks” posts (Pinboard)
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
FSRC: annual report
The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, has finished its eighth year. The club began after I retired from teaching, so the year runs from May to May. Here’s what Elaine and I have read, in alphabetical order by writer, and chronological order by work:
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, The Passenger
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Richard Hofstadter. "The Paranoid Style in American Politics"
Dorothy B. Hughes, Ride the Pink Horse, In a Lonely Place, The Expendable Man
James Joyce, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Nella Larsen, Complete Fiction (short stories, Quicksand, Passing )
Robert McCloskey, Homer Price
Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, Portrait of a Romantic, In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus, The Barnum Museum, Little Kingdoms, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, The Knife Thrower, Enchanted Night, The King in the Tree: Three Novellas
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
The FSRC continues its SMS (Steven Millhauser Spree) with Dangerous Laughter, beginning today.
Here are the reports for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 2021, and 2022.
[I just couldn’t bring myself to separate the Millhauser titles with semicolons because of Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright.]
“The power of good penmanship”
Alexander Westerhoven, manager of the Vanderlyn Hotel, is about to offer Martin Dressler, day clerk, the position of personal secretary to the manager.
Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996).
Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts : Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
Monday, May 15, 2023
School Trip grandparents
[Don’t skip the final paragraph.]
[Jerry Craft, School Trip (2023). Click for a much larger view.]
When Drew, Jordan, and Maury meet their friend Liam’s grandparents, Geoffrey and Diana Landers, grandma’s hand goes straight for her purse. She and her husband wonder in whispers if their son and daughter-in-law are now taking in foster children. Grandpa asks how Drew, Jordan, and Maury know Liam. They all go to the same school, Drew says, Riverdale Academy Day School. “You all go there?” grandpa asks.
And when the grandparents mention that they write a big check every year for the school’s scholarship fund (get it?), Maury, child of wealth, whose father used to be Liam’s father’s boss, says, “That’s great! So do my mom and dad.”
I think that Geoffrey and Diana Landers are drawn to look unmistakably like Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron) of Succession. Am I right?
A related post
School Trip, my review
A new book from Jerry Craft
[Top to bottom: Drew, Liam, Jordan. Click for a larger view.]
Jerry Craft, School Trip. New York: HarperCollins, 2023. 250 pp. $14.99.
Drew: “You know, never really see kids like usAs our story begins, middle-schooler Jordan Banks is still without his “big-boy stink.” If his classmates are to be believed, he smells of baby powder and sunshine. He’s still torn between staying on at Riverdale Academy Day School and switching to the High School of Music, Art, and Mime, to which he’s just been accepted. And now, with the gift of a new beret from his parents, he’s off to Paris, with eight other Riverdale kids — Alexandra (“girl Alex”), Andy, Ashley, Drew, Liam, Maury, Ramon, Samira — and two teachers, Messrs. Garner and Roche.
traveling in books and movies.”
Maury: “I wonder why that is.”
Jordan: “Hmmm . . .”
School Trip brings in a wealth of cultural material: French work and play (lengthy paid vacations, slow eating), French cuisine (croissants, escargot, ratatouille), French words in English (bon voyage, rendezvous ), Black Americans in Paris (Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Ollie Harrington, Richard Wright). There are recurring comic bits about English idioms (“Stop and smell the roses”) and language quirks (Why a pair of pants? Why pork and beef, not pig and cow ?). And of course, there’s sightseeing, with visits to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and Sacré Couer, with child of wealth Maury leading the way.
But as Thomas Merton wrote, our real journey in life is interior. The kids’ room assignments lead to tension, the airing of grievances, truth-telling, apologies, and amends. The kids negotiate differences in economic status, race, and religion; ponder what it means to make a joke and what it means to be cruel; and come to understand the lasting pain of being bullied. All the kids are, as Jordan says, “new and improved kids” by the end of the trip — even obnoxious Andy.
Along the way, there’s a pre-Paris visit to a mall with a Banned Book Barn, a Jordan comic strip with a children's writer accused of having a “neo-faxo-harpo-marxo agenda” (“Lady, my book is about my puppy!” the writer replies), and a Riverdale Academy graphic-novel collection conspicuously devoid of two banned books that the librarian knows Jordan would like. As you may know, Jerry Craft’s New Kid and Class Act have been banned (really) for (supposedly) promulgating critical race theory. It’s Craft though who gets the last laugh here, as Jordan’s mom cautions her son about unrealistic art aspirations:
“Jordan Banks! You are a black kid who was born in Harlem and raised in Washington Heights . . .Yes. (See the 3:47 mark.) It’s in development.
“Do youreally think that one day you'll grow up to make some New York Times best-selling comic book that will win all the big literary awards, get translated into different languages, and then what? . . . get turned into a movie?”
A related post
New Kid and Class Act, my review
