Seven Beauties

Seven Beauties is an Italian movie from 1975 with which I was heretofore unfamiliar. It was directed by Lina Wertmuller, of whom I guess I had heard, but I did not know anything about her. I had assumed she was German, to begin with (she is of aristocratic Swiss descent, but was born, and as far as I can tell primarily grew up, in Rome). Since she seemed to be admired exclusively by either self-serious intellectuals or the most impossibly with-it people, while I was aware of no humbler or duller person who had any familiarity with her work, I had a vague idea that she operated as a director on the more difficult and inaccessible end of the German New Wave. This did not deter my excitement to try to take it on, for I often like movies of this type, though I harbored little realistic hope that I would be able to understand most of what was important about it. And while my taste very often does not agree with what hip and edgy people find worth their time, I usually can find something that is appealing to me in things that real intellectuals like, even if I don't understand them. This may appear a paradox or impossibility, and I suppose it is if one admits that nothing has reality that fails to meet the most basic laws of logic; however it is clear much of conscious life, both of the social and inner varieties, takes place outside of these narrow bounds.

Seemingly everyone who writes about Seven Beauties concurs that it is outstanding, a film of the very first rank all around. I will only join in with this chorus because I do not think this enthusiasm and high opinion have penetrated very far even among the general intelligent cinephile public. In the course of this movie several hundred people are killed by firing squads, the body of a murdered man is chopped up and packed into three separate suitcases and put on three separate trains, a man in a concentration camp contrives his end by diving into a sewage pit and refusing to come up again (though the guards unload a few dozen rounds of machine gun fire into the pit just to be sure), there are a sex scene involving a sadistic 250 pound female prison guard in an office whose furnishings include a swastika rug and an enormous photograph of Hitler, a rape of a woman tied up in a bed in an insane asylum, and some of the ugliest women (contra the title) ever seen in any movie anywhere, as well as one of the clearer representations of the kinds of things a person in a concentration camp could be brought to do that I have seen, at least in a long time. Yet it is in many instances comic, at least in an absurd way. It is also serious, but the interjections of comedy and absurdity insist that this seriousness is no way the result of straining or conscientiousness. The tone and the balance of this mass of horrors juxtaposed with the underlying absurdity and the occasional flash of intelligent or pertinent observation ('How did the world get like this?") is achieved about as perfectly as could have been expected (and it had to be). It is the signature accomplishment here.

Fernando Rey is in this. It is always a delight to see him, even though here it is as a prisoner in a concentration camp. His presence had not been advertised in the brief promotional and critical summaries I had come across, and it is a rather small role. However his whole persona as an actor, especially in this period, is largely of the same animating spirit as that prevalent throughout this movie, so it is almost as if he is there for emphasis (Look! It's Fernando Rey! And he is in a striped concentration camp outfit! And he is still suave and witty and contemptuous! And you love it!)

The star was Giancarlo Giannini, whom I have not seen before. He is most famous for his parts in Lina Wertmuller movies. His performance stands out, enough that he was nominated for the regular best actor Oscar for the 1976 awards despite his movie's obviously being in a foreign language (which is not as rare of an occurrence as I thought, however). Lina Wertmuller was nominated for best director as well, which indicates to me that the film made a splash of some kind at the time. I wonder why it has become relatively forgotten. Besides still being very good, the basic story is not difficult to follow and while entertaining is not exactly the word I would use to describe it because of the nature of the content, its construction and the way it unfolds is in what I would call the entertaining style (that is, the story is always active, each little section builds up to a climax, these occur at intervals that are not too far apart, and the result hurtles you forcefully into the next scene).

Lina Wertmuller's Oscar nomination for this was the first ever for a female director. I feel like I am supposed to be overcome by trepidation and discomfort as a result of this, but as long as the direction isn't cloying or reveling in opposition to everything our male-centric traditions and civilization hold dear, which is not blatantly the case here, I don't see why I would be. Wertmuller looks to be one of those old European artist-intellectual types who always hung with the big brain boys and knows, and mainly cares about, what is and has been in the past strong and worthy in the arts and thought, who is not motivated by personal animosities or resentments or extreme self-absorption, and who finds interesting stories and things to think and write about outside of this, which is always a rare ability no matter who the group is made up of.

The opening sequence included some film footage of Hitler and Mussolini. We all know what Hitler looks like, but I had never seen much tape on Mussolini. He was really absurd.

There was an interview with Lina Wertmuller in the extras that came with the movie. It was over an hour long so I did not watch much of it, but there was one minor, prosaic item in it that caught my attention. Wertmuller's father was an important lawyer in Rome, and his idea, which he did not neglect to plant in her head, had been that she would be one too. This made an impression on me because I have noticed people are starting to ask my older two sons what they want to be when they grow up, and invariably they say "I don't know". I am sure this is an honest reply, and that they have no idea what they would like to do, because the serious work world that the people who are asking these questions have in mind can hardly have much reality for my children, mainly because it is does not have much for me. There is an immortal line in the old movie Dead Poet's Society where a heartless father barks to his son, who is overindulging in the romantic side of his personality at his exclusive boarding school, "You're going to Harvard, and you're going to be a doctor". This line has always stuck with me, because it not only sets a clear bar of what is the minimum that will be acceptable for the child going forward, but that the parent knows absolutely what he is saying, and that it is easily within his power to bring about the desired result if the child has the least capacity and will to attain it. A more humbly placed family cannot in most instances insist that their children get into and attend elite colleges and become doctors, because they simply don't have the knowledge of what is actually required to achieve those goals. Of course lower class families have pride and set bars as well--even at the bottom, Chris Rock's famous joke about keeping your daughter off the pole applies--but in the case of Lina Wertmuller and many other writers and other creative people that one reads about, even if there is some flexibility with regard to the ultimate occupation, the message was clear that anything below the education level and respectability of 'lawyer' was essentially the equivalent of 'the pole', and was not to be considered as acceptable, ever. People who come from this kind of background of expected success are not wholly conscious of this, because it is the very atmosphere they breathe; but it is real, and powerful.

But to return to my children: Where we live there are a lot of Libertarian types, people who hate taxes and worship capitalism, and due to choices we have made with regard to schools and activities in addition to the relative density of their numbers locally, we are coming into contact with them with increasing frequency. These people don't quite know what to make of me, which is understandable, as I don't know what to make of myself, but they see that my wife is an energetic and extremely resourceful person who never whines about fate or limitations or not being able to do something she wants to do, but immediately and constantly sets to making plans for how her various desires might be brought about (I would tell you some of these successful and to me marvelous schemes, but I don't think she would like being brought alive as a character in this blog to that extent) and that my sons are not complete blockheads either in academics or in practical matters, and seem to be doing at least as well as their own children, in spite of their comparatively lackluster paternal guidance and example. I have noticed a couple of times now people not only asking the two older ones what they wanted to be when they grew up, but whether they had chores at home or not, and indeed one person asked them whether they were aware that they would have to have a job someday (thankfully they answered yes to that one). I remember on several occasions when I was an adolescent adult men trying to strike up conversations with me about matters on responsible adulthood as if they suspected my father of being deficient in these areas (perhaps he was, but as he seemed to me, and still does, much more intelligent and vital than most of these other people, their efforts did not leave much of an impression on me). Some of the upright blue collar types (policemen, independent contractors, etc) who populated our neighborhood (and who really disliked my father) took it upon themselves to talk to me about the necessity of morality and work ethic and proper decency in social intercourse, which I naturally resented, enough that this in part prompted me to move to Maine (where my father actually was). When I was there I remember the father of one of my friends, who was a lawyer, and didn't know my father, but had seen enough of me to not like the impression, giving me a harangue one evening at their dinner table about how I needed to be productive in my life, and how I was not productive. Anyway I wonder if something like that is going on now with my children. Still, I think because of my wife that the bar of acceptability may be already, and for the most part unconsciously on her part, set higher than I suspect it is. I believe that certain failures of will or talent or fortune that cannot be overcome are possibilities that I do not think she believes are possibilities, because they are not an imbued part of her experience. I certainly hope that this is the dominant impression that the children will receive in these instances.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1997)                  

This is the Disney cartoon version. I want to record and leave at least a brief note on all of the highly rated movies I see. Going on twelve years of having small children, a cartoon has to have something really, really unique and appealing about it for me to take much of an interest in it. That was not the case here, though I acknowledge the greatness of the story, the elements of which were ready-made to be classic, and were only waiting to be combined into a narrative. I don't know if the execution ever lives up to the promise offered by the scenario, as I have neither read the book nor seen any of the other numerous movie versions, several of which are considered classics in their own right. All of these I am pretty sure will turn up on one or another of my various lists at some point (if I live long enough, henceforth shortened to the internet word IILLE).

Sometimes I do searches on this blog to see if I have ever, in seven and a half years, used certain words. Today I discovered that I have never used the word "spreading" in this blog (Until now).

When I was really little I thought The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a true story about football.

11:33 I Swear It's No Sooner...

...I went inside my TV and met the Honeymooners.
Ralph wanted me to bust a few rhymes
But I had my eyes on Alice's behind.

--LL Cool J

People love the Honeymooners. At the very least a lot of old New York people do--most personal reminiscences of the show that I can find recount that the reruns played at 11:30 on Channel 11 (WPIX) through most of the 70s and 80s--and their cultural weight, no matter who they are, is of course multiple times that of any ordinary person from anywhere else. I never watched the Honeymooners as an adolescent or young adult. I don't think it was on in Philadelphia. When we first got cable, around 1983 or '84, WPIX & WOR in New York were two of the channels we got, but other than watching the occasional baseball game (the first of these stations carried the Yankees, the other the Mets) I didn't take the opportunity to connect with New York life that having these channels offered. I was still pre-occupied at the time with trying to connect to Philadelphia life, which, as I lived there, must have seemed more relevant. Plus all of the real to the bone Philadelphia people, of which everyone I knew other than myself was one, hate New York City, so there was no one to try to persuade me otherwise. One of the minor consequences of this was that I made it to my forties without ever having seen the Honeymooners.

As you have probably guessed, I have been catching up with this iconic artifact of popular culture over the course of this winter. I've gone through four of the five DVDs on which the series is preserved, 32 of the famous 39 episodes. The first episode I didn't like too much. I thought it was silly and that Norton especially was more or less retarded. The second and the third were a little better, the likable or interesting aspects of the characters began to become more defined. By the fourth show, which was an Alice-centric one, I began, sort of, to see what the hype was about. It is quite poignant for a television show. Much of this has to do with the circumstance that it only ran for a year. It is absolutely frozen in a particular moment in time, not only its year of 1955-56, which itself was on the cusp of changes in society, New York City, and the economic situation of the white working classes that are of especial relevance to the themes of this program, but also in the ages and personae of the three main actors, and the rather hopeless seeming situation of the characters (fourteen years into her marriage and Alice can't even get a curtain for the window, let alone furniture, a vacuum cleaner, wallpaper, a refrigerator, a telephone, a nicer apartment, etc). Suburbanization and the abandonment of the cities by characters like this, while underway, was still far from complete in the mid-50s. My own grandparents, for example, did not make the move from Philadelphia out to Cheltenham and Elkins Park until '57 in the one case and '59 in the other. For the generations who were small children when this big break from the city occurred, or were born after it, there is often a nostalgia for aspects of the old city life, especially the idea that there was a sense of community or camaraderie, with attendant simpler pleasures, in it, that have been denied to us. I feel something of this when Ralph and Norton go to the raccoon lodge (it is widely known that The Flintstones is more or less a cartoon version of the Honeymooners, but the homage was lost on me until I saw these shows; it is notable that even by the time of the Flintstones--who were clearly resident in the suburbs, it should be added--the lodge membership was showing signs of being dated). It would be fun to drink beer and tell jokes and laugh uproariously with other grown men who have more or less the same level and kind of education, and broadly the same kind of occupation and income (probably necessarily low, however), and where no one is complaining that there is too much coriander in whatever it is people put coriander into. It is true that among this general equality of station Ralph always seems to be a few dollars worse off than everyone else--and not insignificant dollars either, but these signifiers do not seem to be the barriers to social life in this program that they are in our time, with their minute and finely shaded gradations of achievement and quality. Of course it is illusory, people were at least as miserable in the 50s as they are now, certainly my own relatives were more miserable than I am (though maybe they only seemed that way because they had more expressive personalities), most grown-ups had no more close friends or any more of a social life than people have ever had. There were gradations of rank among people on the same assembly line that were no keenly felt by all parties. Still, the idea appeals, even at the social level depicted here.

The series is often lauded for its superior writing. I wouldn't say that the writing ever approaches real literary brilliance, though some of the episodes do strike me as having more to them they look, and it is no longer a question of whether I could produce anything better; I just like to display some restraint in my praises. There is an obvious charm about the world of this program that must in some part be due to the writing though I think it is probably mostly due to the three primary stars. The characters do attain more depth over the course of the 39 (in my case, 32) episodes than most television characters ever do, but I don't know that that depth would be conveyed by the written script alone.

The poignancy of the show, of course, is that its situation is almost ludicrously sad and hopeless--Ralph and Alice have been married for fourteen years, they have no children, no furniture or new appliances or any other accoutrements of married life, Ralph's job status is never going to improve, as he seemingly lacks the qualities to rise a step above the bottom rung of the career ladder--yet there is a sense of genuine affection in their life that most programs and movies are not able to duplicate. Also Ralph's various failures are largely those of a lack of social and intellectual experience and preparation in juxtaposition to people who have more of these things, which is exaggerated for the purpose of the program, but which shortcomings and failures in crucial moments define the mass of people's existences, so you have the pain of this recognition followed, usually, by the consolation that Alice, and Norton (who one realizes as the show goes on is something of an idiot savant) too, are loyal in their affection, and (and this is the crucial point) they possess enough admirable qualities that their affection is worth having, that it means something.  

Jackie Gleason (in addition to writing the theme music for the Honeymooners) put out a number of jazz/mood music record albums, which sold remarkably well (his first ten albums all sold over a million copies!) His inspiration for this enterprise came from watching Clark Gable work on the ladies in the movies. "Gleason reasoned 'If Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate.'"

In Honor of the Super Bowl

So I've actually missed the Super Bowl. I was going to mark the occasion by posting these highlights from the broadcast of a Giants-Redskins game in 1970:

Didn't that look like it was about a hundred times more fun to watch on TV than the games are now? I think the only reason I remain something of a football fan is because I was introduced to it in the more low-key era of the 1970s. I think if I were a kid now I wouldn't like it, it would be too overwhelming. My sons, the two oldest of which are now 11 and 10, don't have the same interest in professional sports that I had at that age. They watched the Super Bowl with me, but that's because we had a party, with shrimp and crackers and chips and other snacks that they like, and they like the commercials and the halftime show probably more than the game. I think the overkill of media coverage is suffocating all of the joy out of football. One of the reasons the game was so exciting back in the glorious 70s was that the game itself (and the half-hour pregame show) was about the only media coverage you had access to. There would be the write-up in the newspaper on Monday and maybe a recap show with the local sportscaster on Monday after the evening news, but after that it really went away until the next Sunday, and everybody went on with their lives.

1970 was pre-George Allen for the Redskins, and they were not very good, yet they already had a lot of the players in this who be central on those teams--Pat Fischer, Chris Hanburger, Brig Owens (and who were still playing for them when I began watching games, around '75 or '76). I'm getting so old, and I have not really watched much football in the last 20 years, that if I am watching a game with the Cowboys or the Giants or the Redskins, I'll often see a guy wearing a certain number and automatically associate it for about five seconds with whoever had the number in 1980, before I realize, no, the guy I'm thinking of would be about 60 years old now.

We get to see Fran Tarkenton with the Giants, in that odd five-year interlude in the prime of his career where he played in New York, and was apparently good there too, but never got into the playoffs, before returning to Minnesota, where I remember him at the tail end. Doesn't it seem like there were a lot of guys who came into the league in the early 60s who lasted forever? Besides half the 1970s Redskins roster there were lots of Vikings, Marshall, Eller, Hilgenberg, Tarkenton, etc. Merlin Olsen was old, Jackie Smith the tight end. Roger Staubach was in this age group, though he started five years later due to his naval commitment.

We also see Tucker Frederickson, a white running back who was the number one pick in the entire draft in 1965 or 1966 whose selection ahead of the likes of Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus was frequently held up in the 1970s as one of the main triggers of the Giants being a putrid team during the whole of the 1964-80 period. My impression of him was that he was a colossal bust, but 1970 would have been his fifth or sixth year in the league and he was still on the roster. Moreover he had at least two big plays in this game, and looked like he actually had some speed and talent as a runner. That said, his stats were not impressive. 1970 was one of his better years, especially receiving, and he only managed about 750 yards from scrimmage. He played into the 1971 season, when his career was ended by a knee injury.  

When you are in your 20s it is beauty, and the people who possess it, who fill your dreams and seem hopelessly remote from you. In your 30s and 40s the remote ones are those who are genuinely intelligent and have managed to achieve something of substance. I don't know what possesses the entirety of the waking thoughts of failed people in their 50s, but I suspect it is money. If that is the case I am really not looking forward to my 50s

Brunetiere

"A few years ago an eminent French litterateur, Brunetiere, declared science bankrupt. This was on the eve of the discoveries of radio-activity which have opened up great vistas of possible human readjustments if we could but learn to control and utilize the inexhaustible sources of power that lie in the atom. It was on the eve of the discovery of the function of the white blood corpuscles, which clears the way for indefinite advance in medicine. Only a poor discouraged man of letters could think for a moment that science was bankrupt. No one entitled to an opinion on the subject believes that we have made more than a beginning in penetrating the secrets of the organic and inorganic worlds."--Robinson, The New History, quoted by Irwin Edman, Human Traits and Their Social Significance, 1920.

Ferdinand Brunetiere (1849-1906) was a writer, primarily a critic, and a member of the Academie Francaise, holding seat number 28. I was not aware until this particular research that the members of this body were identified by their seat numbers, and I am still not clear as to what these numbers signify, but Wikipedia and other internet sites have graphs and lists showing who has held each seat through history (the most famous occupant of # 28 from my viewpoint appears to have been the writer Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who rocked the house from 1844-1869; but then he is the only person on the list whose name I recognize). Brunetiere was noted, according to his English Wikipedia article, for his intolerance, his sledge-hammer method of (intellectual) attack, and his dry pedantry. His claim about the bankruptcy of science is not referenced in the article, though it did mention his essay "Apres une Visite au Vatican" in which he argued that 'science was incapable of providing a convincing social morality' which sounds like a more nuanced explanation of what he might have meant in calling science bankrupt. His French Wikipedia page paints him as something of a reactionary, noting that he wrote frequent articles against the likes of Flaubert, Zola and Baudelaire, and was an anti-Dreyfusard at the time of that crisis. With regard to science, it states that (trans. mine) "He was equally hostile to dominant scientism, ce qui l'a rapproche un temps d'un anarchiste comme Octave Mirbeau" (I am stumped by the grammar in the second part of this sentence. I cannot determine whether the subject is Brunetiere and the object scientism, or vice versa) and "Brunetiere upheld a theory of evolution of literary genres, inspired by the theses of Darwin." So it appears he was often congenitally wrong-headed, as well as personally obnoxious, and that he was badly out of step with the direction that knowledge and thought were headed in by the time he was elected to the academy (in 1893). That acknowledged, it doesn't appear that he was actually an idiot, or at least was not mentally and emotionally weak enough that anybody below the level of groundbreaking genius could laugh in his face and humiliate him without absorbing a few wounds of his own in the blowback. Still, if he really did think science had reached a technical (as opposed to a moral) dead end by the 1890s--which I cannot find corroborated--that would be hard for an intellectual in our society to ever really live down; though I think the French are more tolerant of outrageous or even wrong views, if you present them elegantly or dynamically enough.

Brunetiere failed the entrance exam of the Ecole Normale as a young man due to his deficiency in Greek.

Brunetiere's grave, Cimitiere du Montparnasse

Boring Movie Post

I really outdid myself this time.

These came up on my list but I had already seen them before, in some cases several times. One of them I did not even bother to watch again, due to time constraints and a second I only watched with the commentary on as a refresher. But I want to keep a full record here so I will leave a few brief notes.

Sense and Sensibility (1995)

This is the one I watched with the commentary on. It is one of those films that makes me wish I had more of the native instinct for ferocity and scorn. It is perfectly adequate of course, especially for the likes of me, and the cast is almost a who's who of fully developed and humblingly literate British acting talent. But I suspect there is more than enough room for it to be knocked down a peg or two, if you have it in you to persuasively assert that it is smug, lacks warmth, lets the actors show off too much, and all of the other things I find in it in the frame of mind I inhabit now. There were instances where the lines seemed and objectively were funny, but I did not feel entirely free or eager to laugh, and twisted my mouth into a grim smile instead. It was as if I were hesitant that doing so would give satisfaction in a quarter such as would be especially distasteful to me.

Sense & Sensibility is probably my least favorite Jane Austen book (I won't count Northanger Abbey). That is not to say it isn't better than ninety percent of even well-regarded novels, but I find the particular characters and the general situation of this one the least compelling (I've always been a big Mansfield Park fan, which I feel is underrated among us because the main female character is less feisty and more deferent to societal expectations than the other Austen heroines).  Among the Jane Austen film adaptations I do like the 1992 six hour Pride & Prejudice, which does a better job it seems to me of inhabiting the story as Jane Austen would have regarded it. It feels like a younger person's movie in general. There was a BBCish version of Mansfield Park, very low budget and pretty conservative (compared to the 2000s version that featured explicit incest and lesbianism anyway), that came out in the 80s that I also liked because it had that ruling spirit of youthfulness about it. I think that must be important to the Jane Austen formula.  

Roman Holiday (1953)

I have this listed on my profile page as one of my favorite movies. The other time I saw it was before I took a trip to Rome in 2001, so that predisposition towards excitement and the power of the association ever since have doubtless influenced my idea about it ever since. Did I like it as much after the thirteen year interval? Probably not but how could I? I don't feel about anything anymore the way I used to feel about them. I fear that if were to read War & Peace or the Pickwick Papers again I would not find that they moved me as they once did, and I should agree with modern people that long form novels and the whole idea of great books are a relic from a age comparatively starved for information and novelty, and that tech innovators and economists discover and accomplish things every few weeks of more probity and import than Dostoevsky did in the whole of his life. (Interlude--I managed to begin this posting in the morning, and sneaked in about an hour of writing. Now I have to stop, and the rest of this will probably have to be finished late at night. Note how the quality both of my mood and my coherence of thought will slip from this point forward).

(Starting again, about a week later...)

I had forgotten that the first half hour is a little slow going. However, once they get out on the streets of Rome that part really is, and probably always will be, still great. This was, famously, Audrey Hepburn's first movie, and it is one of the great debuts of all time, a stroke of great luck not only for her, but for the movie itself, for as it was pointed out in the little documentary that came with the DVD, if she had already been an established star, the film almost certainly would have been made in technicolor, had a much bigger budget, been much more serious, and not as good. All of these legendary film stars and directors and producers and writers, we are told, had dark sides that would make the average earnest workaday type of fellow shudder to encounter face to face. It is hard to imagine Audrey Hepburn, at least at the time this was made, having such an unfathomable dark side. I only mention this because I was looking for signs of it both in the movie and in the other materials, but I didn't really see anything.

It would be easy to be envious of the cheap expat life in the great capitals of Europe that was available to Americans in the 50s (though the Gregory Peck character and his friend are supposed to be behind on their rent and scrounging up money to order coffee). However this is one thing I cannot really lament this, because I was able to replicate this to a very great extent in Prague in the 90s, which I think is not possible anymore for people who are bringing the amount of money to the party that I was at the time. I have to confess I have been lucky in my timing in several of these life experiences, in fact. I only regret that I could not have made more of the opportunities, the comparative rarity of which for people in my condition I now realize.

So, is Roman Holiday still one of my all time favorite movies? About half of it definitely is, yes. I am not dissuaded enough to take it off the list and replace it with anything else.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

This is the one that I did not bother to watch again because I have seen it often enough and I just don't have the time. I watched it every year as a child when it came on television and I looked forward to it, though I was always more of a fan of the books, and as the movie departed massively from the book in pretty much every way (to my literal 9 year old brain) I never quite embraced it whole-heartedly. Of course at that time I was not in the Judy Garland cult either. This is probably her signature role in most people's minds, though I have always tended to view it as something separate from the rest of her career, because it does not seem to me to fit in with those other movies. I met Margaret Hamilton, who played the witch, at the annual Munchkin Convention (for East Coast Oz Club members--the Munchkin Country was the eastern part of Oz in the books) in Cherry Hill, New Jersey when I was nine or ten. She seemed to me a regular little old lady. She did not break into character at any point, that I can remember. We have a tape of this and my own children watch it sometimes. They don't seem to be afraid of the witch the way I and most other older people remember being afraid of her. Modern kids not terrified by witch. I don't whether the proper question is why they have no terror of this character or why older generations did have it? Obviously there was some threat hinted at in the witch character that had a reality for us that it does not have for my children. Indeed, my children do not seem to have much sense of anything more unsettling than that someone may restrain their ability to express their anger to its absolute fullest extent.

I have come, in my periodic glimpses of the movie when it is playing in the house, to appreciate the MGM production values in the black and white, really sepia-toned, scenes in Kansas. This is probably my favorite part of the film at this time. The songs are (mostly) good, and the scenes where the Wizard is exposed and then departs have a certain undeniable poignancy. It's more that I had not noticed the vintage 1939 beauty of the Kansas part earlier in my life the way that I do now. 

I Have Had Enough of This Economy (And the Society It Is Producing)

I am reading Ruskin again, his not very famous"Sesame" lecture, delivered, I believe, around 1865. Its main theme was about the value of reading, with much emphasis on how few people had any conception of what that actually meant. By way of example he broke down a couple of lines of "Lycidas" word by word, considered the roots, the relations of each word to the others, how those derived from Greek had been used in the Bible and other classical literature in different senses than their usually English meanings, and so forth (This poem was frequently extolled in my 1940s and 50s reference books as perhaps the greatest short poem in the English language; I don't think people changed their minds about this so much in recent decades as that it is not the kind of thing any significant people deeply care about anymore).  Anyway, upon doing this, Ruskin proclaimed to the assembled audience that:

"...we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called 'reading'...putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our personality....so as to be able assuredly to say, 'thus Milton thought,' not 'Thus I thought, in misreading Milton'...You will begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious importance;--that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:--in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any 'thoughts' at all; that you have no materials for them, in any serious matters...Nay, most probably all your life...you will have no legitimate right to an 'opinion' on any business, except that instantly under your hand."

That noted, I am going to unburden myself of some of the impressions that the ongoing weirdness of our economic state has produced in me.

It is become almost a proverb that lotteries are a tax on stupid people, or at least people who have no understanding of math. Is not the entire economy for the bottom half of the wealth distribution pretty much a similar tax. And 'tax' is a polite way of putting it. Working a dismal job, without full time hours, and those not at set times, with no prospects for advancement, for eight or nine dollars an hour, is scarcely less pointless and absurd than buying a lottery ticket if one's intention is to live by working. The idea that doing some kind of approved work, or at least behind forced to show up and pretend to do so, as opposed to sitting around idle, is a virtue and reward in itself, even if it is separated from any pretense of making a real living, apparently remains strong, though it does not make much sense to do something unpleasant for someone else's profit if you have no hope of even being paid enough to support yourself. Our supposed societal revulsion to slavery, or at least that of our economic leaders, consists solely in the ownership by one person of another's physical body, as if that is, and only ever was, the whole of the cruelty.

The distortion at the higher end and the widening ranges of income between various positions and fields of work have impaired my ability to perceive any kind of true value of money or the appropriate compensation for labor. My sense of value, my own or most other people's has little to do with real production or contribution to the economy, if there even is any of this. In coldly rational economic terms, yes, I probably deserve to be even poorer than I am. Indeed, I often cannot think of any compelling reason why anyone who works at anything should be paid less than I am. Yet I am still arrogant enough to think it is my birthright to live in a pleasant house in a not completely ramshackle town and for my children to go to nicer schools than other children go to even though there is nothing in the world I can do particularly well that creates any wealth. Why? Because I am taller and paler and probably would still score higher on academic exams than most people (even though I can't talk), and because the idea of having to live among people with whom I have socially and culturally nothing in common even though it is the level that my actual skills and abilities merit is just too unthinkable. I could not claim it was unfair, but I would think it very hard.

The opportunities for the already extremely wealthy to make massive amounts of additional income contrasted with the limited opportunities for ever-increasing swathes of the population to substantially improve their very modest amounts of wealth seems out of sync to me and has distorted society to the point that it needs some kind of corrective, whether via regulations, or oversight, or what have you. 'Redistribution' is an ugly word, and I don't really like that concept myself, but the access that a relative few have to absolutely immense streams of income, greater, in some individual instances, to the combined sources of income of millions of people, has to be reigned in. People were aghast that Wal-Mart was taking up collections so its employees could have Thanksgiving, but many large companies have hardship funds set up for their own low wage employees to apply to if they are in need. It is considered normal.    

I read a story about Bloomberg in New York, that when he trimmed the budget, which included cut the public funding for a number of cultural institutions, he replenished, or partially replenished, much of this lost funding out of his own fortune. The writer of the article seemed to think there was nothing bad about this, but it seems wrong to me. You can't have a strong publicly supported institution if your population of millions can't generate enough tax revenue to support it, but are dependent on wealthy individuals acting as wealthy individuals and not as part of the tax base to support it.  In his campaigns for mayor he also was able to use his personal fortune to overwhelm many times over the amount of money that the opposition party was able to raise. Is this indicative of a healthy body politic?

In light of all of the Catholic schools that are closing I recall that in my parents' day the Church maintained a standing army to run their schools and I suppose other of their enterprises, who I am guessing did not cost quite so much to maintain as regular full time employees are nowadays. They were called nuns. The economy of nuns seems like an interesting topic to look into. At one time there must have been tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of women employed and sustained in this occupation. They worked hard, lived very modestly, and were paid little, yet the position required education and seriousness, and obviously had a sense of purpose about it. The life was one that many people found to have dignity. I know that in our time the mere idea of nuns is fraught with myriad issues regarding people's intense feelings about the Catholic Church, hierarchies, gender roles, and so on, and I am not suggesting that people adapt to the economic situation by refilling our abandoned convents. I wonder if some aspects of this model for economic purposes could be revived. Modern Americans, it is widely agreed by the experts, cost too much to maintain in the manner to which they are accustomed, and the lifestyle for many has to be downgraded. Certain nun qualities, such as plainness of dress and diet, as well as self-discipline and purposefulness, has to be a more attractive alternative than much of what passes for life in this country nowadays, and these habits would not be incompatible with family life, for I am not suggesting that people would have to forgo sex and parenthood to adopt some of these habits...

3:23am, I have to go to bed. I had more on this too, but I've forgotten it...

Literary Studs II

Sir Kingsley Amis:

"There were parties at the Amises in which every woman present was invited by him to visit his greenhouse in the garden; they all knew what the invitation meant.

"The writer Al Alvarez, present at one such long, drunken evening, remembered that 'the rest of us sat around trying to make conversation and pretending not to be embarrassed.

"'Half an hour later our host and whichever lucky lady had gone with him sauntered back in, smoothing their clothes and hair but not quite able to conceal the wild furtive triumph in their eyes.'"

The story goes on to talk about how this triumph would shortly afterwards fade to misery for all involved, but I can hardly get interested in that. Almost everyone is miserable to some degree, and I don't buy that the misery that follows in the wake of triumph as a hard contrast to it is worse than the eternal low level kind of misery that knows no such release. The man who triumphs can sell his misery as more serious because he experiences the feeling as an affront, and because smaller people are trained, or have trained themselves, to think of any minor emotional affliction he may suffer as being a greater calamity in the real, social world, than the worst thing that could befall them; this does not make it so however.

All of the people involved in these stories are dead or extremely old now, and it is the people who never did anything illicit, or not more than once or twice in the whole of their faded lives, who appear ridiculous in such stories.

I gave a thought to running a parallel series about Literary Duds, featuring people like Ruskin and Lewis Carroll whose sex lives were a series of unending disasters, or who suffered any great social or intellectual humiliation, whether sexual or not, as if that perspective would make me feel less oppressed by the overwhelming feats of the studs. That would not be a very likely outcome, however.

There are a million of these anecdotes about the sexual triumphs of superior men buried in libraries (it is hard to find just the right episodes and descriptions online--these tend to be things you come across in passing that make an impression at the time but that you then cannot find again). You could easily have an entire site with this as a sole subject. To be honest I am not as stirred by these stories as I was even a few years ago. I used to take it as a grave insult, in my late 20s and early 30s especially, but even beyond that time, that I could find no woman anywhere who would flirt with or express--or even attractively feign--the least curiosity or interest in me at all. I am not claiming to be an exciting person or anything, but no one in his 20s and 30s who has any spirit wants to go through the world in that degree of total invisibility as far as these things go. In the last couple of years I have had to admit that I have gotten old, that my record in the game of life, while I still think it is around .500, if not slightly above, has not been good enough to put a claim on the attention and interest of other people, and that it would probably be embarrassing to me at this point if anybody were to behave in a flirtatious manner, since they would in all likelihood, given the nature of such things, be attributing qualities to me that I could no longer pretend to flatter myself as having any grounds; and while it is not impossible, it is doubtful that it is more likely than it was when I was more or less in my prime that people should develop a fondness for personal attributes that have been revealed to be mediocre at best...

For people who would protest that I have no business to be even speculating about these kinds of subjects, I am playing/pretending, admittedly feebly, at being a person of the type who at least moves in the kind of world that are celebrated in this and other literary-themed posts. Whatever may happen in my inner life in this way translates exactly zero percent to my actual, outer life, the only one anyone would insist counted if I tried to assert my fancies of what kind of person I was as what kind of person I really was. In the life of this blog, this general topic, translating as it so often does to high intelligence, liveliness, worldly success and achievement, is important and the consequences and causes of not being such a person are ones that I will feel compelled to think upon on a more or less continuous basis.

And believe me, these essays are not going to pique anybody's desire to get to know me better. It is at this point a dead phenomenon that I think is for my own sake worth dissecting and asking the question "why?"

Christmas Report

I ended up having a pleasant, if extremely low-key Christmas holiday.

The week before Christmas is the darkest of the year, plus I had the stomach flu, plus everyone was still in school and had a million parties and end of year activities to organize, and the combination of all this probably wore me down more than it would have even a few years ago.

I didn't eat while I had the stomach flu for four days and lost nine pounds, which put me down to 216, which is the lightest I had been in many years. Since I recovered of course I have been eating a little more regularly and am back up to 220. However I have been having smaller portions, not having seconds, not eating late at night, so hopefully I will be able to keep this up and be able to hold at this weight or even work myself down a little more. Of course the big test is when I become depressed again, which will probably be within a few weeks.

New Year's Eve is still to come, and I am looking forward to it, as I always do, as the last gasp of Christmas. It has become fashionable to dislike this day, and I suppose it has some structural flaws, but in recent years I have tried to embrace it, have a little party at home, play some games. I suppose it appears more attractive once you have resigned yourself to a modest life in which nothing spectacular or scintillating will never happen, and can sense the approach of your own death. That clinging to Christmas for another four or five hours every year comes to have some appeal.

I am ridiculous in my adaptation of technology. I got an MP3 player as my gift this year. I have finally decided to give up on playing CDs in the car because almost all the songs skip after about five plays, and I am hoping this will work better. Also I am hoping I can download some podcasts from the internet and listen to them (I think you can do this) because this is something I simply do not have time to do at home.

We went to Odiorne Point State Park near Portsmouth on Sunday. We walked along the rocks by the sea for about an hour but then it started to pour rain (if you saw highlights of the Patriots-Buffalo football game last weekend you have an idea of the weather). They have a little science center there where we we able to take refuge. It is the sort of small scale museum I like, cheap (around $20 for all seven of us to get in), simple displays, not too much to take in. I think they had six fish tanks for example. They had two blue lobsters, which are exceedingly rare, one in 500,000 I think. They are the same species as regular lobsters, just a few have this coloring, which I had not known. I also learned that there used to be vacation homes all over the point where the park is, but the Navy seized them during World War II and built fortifications to protect the nearby Naval Yard. I'm not sure why the land was not returned to the former owners after the war but it wasn't. Evidently nobody very important had a place there. After this we went to Pizza Hut in the dark, with the rain pouring down, all of which took me back to my high school days in Maine. My wife commented that the same music was playing the last time she was in Pizza Hut--in 1989.

With all of our children if we do go out we usually have to go to pizza places because you can order in bulk (the pizza) and have them share it rather than everyone having to order his own meal. This works at Chinese restaurants too, though some of the children will only eat chicken fingers.

We have snow, currently about four inches with a top coating of slush from last night's rain/snow mix that is now frozen into a crust with the drop in temperatures--currently 8 degrees, going down to -1. We had a white Christmas, which we have here 90% of the time, though last year we did not.

My writing is really in a (distraction--completely forgot the adjective I was going to put in here) state. I am muddling, muddling, muddling through. Got to go for tonight. Happy New Year!

Golden Age of Hollywood 1939-1942

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

I had seen this ten or fifteen years ago. It did not seem as good to me as I had remembered. It is very talky, and not in the way that moves the story along. It is also darker (as in shadowy), quieter--there is no music in large parts of it, if there is any at all-- and more claustrophobic than I had remembered. Also the circumstance that the film ends abruptly in the middle of the story, given that it does have a story, and that the story is not incidental to its execution, is a problem that I cannot seem to wave off as easily as I must have before. It still might have been one of the all time greats if it had been completed, though it would have been awfully long and ponderous. I am not as high on it as I used to be however.

How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Celebrated John Ford tearjerker that won the Best Picture Oscar over Citizen Kane but was so great in its own right that cinephiles do not complain much about this decision. I had never seen it before. I like it, it's very good, and several times it came close to causing the swell in my bosom and welling up in my eye that I had feared. As I often find to be the case with John Ford however, perhaps because the expectations for his films have been raised so high, I found myself thinking that as good and well laid out as the movie was, that it could have been still better, or at least could have gone for the full pathos or sentimental effect, and did not. The opening scene, for example, I felt would have made more of an impact incorporated into the ending. At other times he went for humor instead of pathos, which humor hasn't really aged well. This is my take as someone who was especially looking forward to seeing this and eager to like it. I do like it, but not as much as other people do.

It has been noted by most astute commentators that even though the characters are nominally Welsh, Ford essentially depicts them as if they are Irish, which he was by ancestry, and his parents by birth. The repressed love between Maureen O'Hara and the priest even when she was being courted by the son of the factory owner was a pleasing example of the Irish romantic sensibility. Marrying for wealth, or the potential of wealth, does not seem to be as developed an instinct among Irish girls, even pretty ones, as it is among women of other nationalities. The immortal quote "I'd rather cry in the back of a Mercedes than laugh on the back of a bicycle" that appeared in the New York Times report on the dating situation in China a few years back is not a sentiment that seems to be as widely held among Irish women. Even after marrying the wealthy man she did not love and moving into the mansion and having a taste of life with servants and other luxuries the beautiful Angharad (Maureen) is still pining for the priest, who is a good man, but is not exactly a fiery take-charge type, unless prompted heavily. Not to mention that he lives in the dingy rooms appropriate to his station. But for all that I didn't think it was an unrealistic portrayal.

How Green Was My Valley, like a lot of classic films from this time, was based upon a book that was a huge bestseller in its day that has been forgotten. This one even won the (U.S.) National Book Award in 1940. The author was Richard Llewellyn, whom I had never heard of before this. I suspect the book is not half bad, and probably better than the movie in some ways.

The Letter (1940)

William Wyler directed movie starring Bette Davis based on a story by Somerset Maugham and set in colonial era Singapore. These are all points in its favor. It's the most smoothly classical of the classic Hollywood films in this group, or at least it has the most sophisticated veneer. Murder, adultery, expat Brits, cynical, plotting natives, fairly crisp, literary dialogue, The plot is nothing spectacular but the Maughamian atmosphere is conveyed well enough to hold one's interest, the acting and direction are first-rate, and Bette Davis, who is still young here (she would have been 31 or 32) does have a kind of mesmerizing quality, especially when considering that she is playing a stone-cold murderess in this movie. She looks to have been rather small, as actresses. I had not known either that she was a New Englander (Massachusetts). She described herself as her first screen test, when fifteen men had to lie on top of her and give her a passionate kiss, as the 'most yankee-est, most modest virgin who ever walked the earth" (Wikipedia). It sounds like she was able to overcome this Yankee prudery as her career progressed however.

Take Me Back to Oklahoma (1940)

This is what I would assume is a B-movie, Saturday afternoon matinee, what have you. The production values are a shock after seeing the three above films. It is like being dragged back to the early silent period. I wanted to get into the spirit of this, which features the singing cowboy Tex Ritter, his sidekick Arkansas Slim, a singing group called the Texas Playboys who are not unversed in the use of firearms either, and some non-musical bad guys who want to take over, preferably by violent means, the only on the level coach line left in the west. It was just a little too goofy and raw for me however. It is only 60 minutes long.

Destry Rides Again (1939)

Another odd western, starring Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, who is the current old star that is all of the sudden turning up all over the place on my list. It's got some entertaining parts to it, and I thought it was mildly interesting for a while, but it kind of lost me towards the end. I think I was tired, and maybe I should have tried to watch the ending a second time. Marlene Dietrich's character, I have to confess, was more trashy than I really have a taste for, especially at this point of my life, and while I like the idea of Jimmy Stewart as an even-keeled, law-revering, use the guns only as a last resort sheriff in the midst of a world wholly composed of morally corrosive hotheads, it doesn't strike me as very plausible. The lawlessness of the town at the beginning of the movie was one of the most extreme examples of what that would mean that I have seen in a film. That was one superlative thing about it.

Post of December 23. Exercise of Ploughing Through, Frustration With Machine

I recently obtained several bags of discarded books from a school library where I live. I would be tempted not to accept these castoffs of a bygone time and way of approaching knowledge if it were at all clear to me that the new methods are in any way identical, if not superior. However, as my wife actually picked out these books, the haul was pretty good, a lot of high school classics and middle-aged novels that I have heard of but that aren't as famous as they once were. So we kept them, except for one book by the apparently disgraced Greg Mortenson that we have for the time being donated to the camp in Vermont. It is a good-looking hardcover, beautiful jacket, etc, and the idea that it is in some part a fabrication and a scam somehow makes it more interesting to me than when I thought it was about another energetic and determined overachiever accomplishing incredible things and single-handedly bringing light to places where none had penetrated for ages, which naysayers like me did not believe could be done.

The main point of interest about this set of books however is three of them came attached with warning labels that seem mildly ludicrous if one has never seen such a thing before.

On Humans and Animals, a 1980 anthology of magazine articles belonging to a series called The Reference Shelf (contributors included Sir Kenneth Clark and Richard Adams, as well as James Fallows and Nicholas Wade, whom I had not realized were so old, the reader is advised that:

"This book contains information that is between 10 and 20 years old. However it still has value, especially if it is used for comparative purposes."

There is no indication however on what exactly may be outdated, and who is making the determination that the book still has value, and on what grounds.

The next book that required a disclaimer was Franklin D Roosevelt and the Age of Action--ed. Alfred B Rollins, Jr (1960):

"This document contains dated and possibly incorrect information. However it is considered to be an important work in this field. Please use it with care."

This one is a masterpiece. "Possibly" strikes me as the vital word, but "dated" is good too. And the heartfelt urgency of the final admonishment seems almost out of place in this age. Glancing over the book it looks like pretty much a general survey of the period referenced, in the old style, by and about people who had in fact lived through the entire era. The question I guess is, can information be dated but at the same time correct?

My favorite warning was that for Colin M. Turnbull's Man In Africa: From Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope (1976):

"This is considered to be an important, seminal work within the subject area. However, you must (italics not mine) review current literature in order to have an accurate understanding of the issues."

I guess these statements are not wholly contradictory, though they would seem to indicate that Colin M. Turnbull, who was a pretty famous anthropologist, did not possess the accurate understanding of the issues that awaits the high school student who keeps up with the current research. I cannot find much information about what might be wrong with this particular book online, apart from the author's apparent belief in a power unity that binds all African cultures, 'one that may link them to Black Americans'. Turnbull was white (English-born), as well as flamboyantly gay, especially by the standards of his generation, taking part in a marriage ceremony with his partner in the 1950s. I don't know what this has to do with anything, but it is noted in most accounts of him on the internet. My guess is, his books combined a lot of interesting and important observations in the field, along with some theories that are a little too far out, or even mildly kooky by today's standards, to gain a wide acceptance.

Pretty persuasive essay about the decline of college here. The more stuff like this I read, the more I have to concede that maybe it really isn't worth getting that excited about anymore, if you aren't one of the 1,000 or so genuinely brilliant students in the country (I've seen other claims that there are less than 100 high school seniors in any given year in the entire country who are regarded as having meaningful intellectual talent by the colleges, who are of course well aware of who these students are, but even I am a little skeptical of this) or your parents don't have nine-figure net worth. I'm sure all of my children will still go to whatever version of it exists in 10-15 years, and most of them will probably finish and probably a few of them will even acquire professions or skills of some kind. I have an idea of college, and education generally, slowly being disabused, that is stuck in the 1950s or 1960s, with a few concessions to the realities of the 1980s perhaps, to which very few schools that most people attend now bear any resemblance. This includes the way that it is financed.

Now that I have a free hour to try to finish this post which should have taken twenty minutes to begin with, my machine is working slowly, my words appearing at a remove of some seconds after I have typed them.

The same author who wrote the college article above also recently wrote another article, which I cannot now find, in which he chastises supposed progressives for, primarily, not being angrier and bringing some heat to bear in the current national economic debate, or non-debate, as this writer, Frank, sees it. He referred in the piece to generational theory, which he called false, and accused many who longed for a juster order of taking a phony solace in the belief that the passage of time, rather than aggressive opposition to the powerful now, will miraculously produce solutions to our current problems. I suppose it could be said that I belong to the group that puts some stock in the generational theory, mainly because it is obvious that trends which are in some sense subject to volatility, good or bad, cannot go on forever, and especially if such a trend is the cause of widespread dissatisfaction through a society, it seems very likely that only so many years can pass before the matter is brought to some kind of head. This is not to say that a lot of hardship and terrible things will not occur when this happens, or that there is any guarantee that the end result, when the fury of the crisis will have exhausted itself, will not be even greater domination by the financial-cognitive elite and de facto serfdom for everyone else. It is, however, an opportunity for the kinds of corrections and major changes of policy that many desire to be enacted which should come if the desire for it is what it is said to be. I do agree, however, that the intellectual/rhetorical force on behalf of the common man has not been as committed or strong as that of capital, and that it will need to become so if anything is to change...

Music Videos, Depression, Christmas in the 1960s and Even Some Pat Boone!

I never thought I would become that cranky middle-aged man who dreaded the approach of Christmas as too burdensome in its expense and other obligations to be enjoyable anymore. For about three days, including most of this past weekend, I seemed to have become that person however. I was not excited about Christmas, or much else in what remained of life for that matter. I was even getting agitated at the thought that my children would likely wake up at 5:30 on Christmas day and I would not be able to go back to bed the whole long morning because that would not be in the 'spirit' of the holiday. Even this morning when I woke up I was still depressed and unenthusiastic about anything with regard to my situation or anything that loomed in the day ahead. The weather did not look any too promising for relieving ennui either, though it was the sort of day I had liked when I was younger--approximately 28 degrees and overcast with occasional snow showers, the earth covered with about a inch of snow from the previous day--however as the day went on I found I felt a little better. I read a chapter of the 19th century warhorse classic novel that I am re-reading, which always cheers me, and then I went outside and shoveled the walk and built three rows of an igloo, which was not my first choice of activities but it seemed to have a good effect on my general mood. The day was calm, and no great costs arose or had to be immediately addressed in the course of it, which I probably needed as well.

I am almost ready to play some Christmas videos.

"Silent Night"--(Deanna Durbin) 

From Lady On a Train. The attitude of the camerawork and the circumstance of her lolling on a luxurious bed singing this particular song were mildly scandalous in 1945.

"Christmas Waltz" (1968) "Silver Bells" (1959)

I haven't put up any Lennon Sisters videos since February. But I have been saving these. The above clip is from (I believe) a Bing Crosby Christmas Special. You see what could happen when they were able to get away from Lawrence Welk and work with some real Hollywood hairstylists, makeup artists and fashion experts. I think it can be admitted that they are a little ravissantes here. I've spent much of my life in places (New England; St John's) where the women are considered by the greater world to be, on average, uglier than in other places. There is a joke in New England about trying to describe your own or somebody else's girlfriend's looks in a favorable light by saying, "She's a Vermont ten, a New Hampshire nine, and a Maine three hundred". That said, there are of course plenty of women even in these places who are plenty attractive, but it is true that in most instances these do not maximize their potential for strikingness of look with regards to wardrobe, makeup, and so on not merely on a daily basis, but much more than a handful of times in their entire lives. I of course find this kind of endearing, as I can hardly identify with the kinds of people who are to some extent glammed up all the time, but I also take a certain pleasure in someone I consider to be coming from where I'm coming from in this regard to show that they can look more conventionally or glamorously beautiful.



I had wanted to put a version of this up several years ago, but it was taken down, and seems to have returned only recently. This is another non-Lawrence Welk appearance (the Welk show at this time was not in color) but still being young and in the 50s, the girls remain in character. When Dianne gives the gift-bearing man a kiss on the cheek at the end of the second song, i thought, if that were me I probably would have had a heart attack. Like other mid-20th century, secular Christmas Songs ("Christmas Waltz", "Marshmallow World"), that the Lennons do especially endearing versions of, this is one of my favorite Christmas songs, probably in part because I feel like it is not played to death, and never has been.

"Sleigh Ride" (1963)

There is another group of older songs that I don't recall ever hearing on the radio in the 70s and 80s that since sometime in the 90s have become extremely popular and are in danger of being played to death. This is one; "Santa Baby" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are two others of this class that come immediately to mind. When I was at college, there was a guy on my floor who had the Phil Spector Christmas Album and played it regularly during the revelrous few weeks of the season when you are still at school (we didn't have exams at our school, so the opportunity for parties, dinners, egg nog tastings, etc, of a universal nature was considerably expanded). Never having heard any of the songs, I declared to somebody, whether the owner of the record or someone else I don't remember, "this is great", and the other person replied, "Yes. Everybody loves the Wall of Sound". But now everybody knows this record and this year especially I sense that "Sleigh Ride" is being overplayed, which ultimately kills the pleasing effect of the song.

As you can probably tell, my idea of Christmas is, and probably always will be, rooted in the ever receding 1960s, even though I wasn't alive in that time. But most of the Christmases of my childhood, being spent mostly at my grandparents' houses, were stylistically reprisals of Christmas as it had been in 1965 with only slight changes that did not begin to become noticeable at all until the late 80s; the same artificial tree, the same ornaments, the same door decorations, the same music, the same candy dishes, etc and etc. Neither of my grandparents' households contained much in the way of books, so my idle time was passed looking endlessly through the old photo albums that were deposited in the cabinets of all the endtables, which were heavily weighted towards the legendary Christmases of the years immediately predating my birth, before the old neighborhood broke up and various of the riotous neighbors had moved away and Wild Uncle Bill had had his unfortunate coronary at age 46, and the witty, endlessly entertaining family friend who looked just like James Joyce had had his embarrassing embezzlement scandal and ceased to come around anymore. These larger than life characters had been replaced by me, a neurotic eight year old with thick glasses, and my mother, who in 1970s party people terms was kind of like Karen Carpenter without any singing or entertainment component at all. As you can imagine, things were not what they had been. But I still like to think I was able to absorb something of the flavor of the time, at second hand.  

"Love Letters in the Sand" (Pat Boone)

So we're getting away from the Christmas theme a little bit. I am not a Pat Boone fan, although I do like this song. When I was young of course, Pat Boone was widely regarded as the most awful person in the history of music, primarily because he was a soulless white guy who made millions of dollars by ripping off black geniuses, who never got to make the money that was rightfully theirs (This is an aside, but whenever I read some lament about genius musicians who are living in poverty while Pat Boone and various oleaginous record producers are the lords of financial empires looted from the work of these impoverished geniuses, I always wonder why the National Endowment of the Arts or some similar body cannot at least provide some kind of pension to these contributors to the cultural life of the nation similar to that which Samuel Johnson received from the Crown. The obvious answer is that King of England could decide arbitrarily to give one guy a pension and not another, and that was the final word on the matter, while in our system the fighting over who deserved the money and who didn't, and how much was just and so on wold be neverending. But it seems like somebody could have set up a private foundation at some point to try to address this issue that everyone indignantly complains about but are apparently impotent to resolve). Anyway, I've always been mildly fascinated with Pat Boone, for the hatred he inspires among a certain type of person for being more or less like me and 90% of the people I know. He is goofier and more discomfiting than the people I know because he is comparatively unselfconsciousness about who he is and what he represents and how repulsive that is to basically everyone who is cool, but I recognize the instinct.

One of the comments on this video--Pat Boone videos draw a lot of heated commentary, because of what he symbolizes and the emotions this produces--began "I am a 57 year old black man, and I love Pat Boone." It could be trolling, but I actually think it is real, because the guy went on to talk about being a Christian and so on. It is just funny, because it is the sort of thing the Official Narrative had always led me to believe could never happen. 

Vivien Grey II

1. Stock character of (Euro?) literature--the impish dwarf/(unintelligible word) feather ruffler. Where is this type now?

2. Loveliness of Ems noted. I like to record these things.

3. p.157. "Her features were like those conceptions of Grecian sculptors which, in moments of despondency, we sometimes believe to be ideal."

4. Not much differentiation between characters, flow (flaw?) to (unintelligible word).

5. p. 174. Raptures on outing to Nassau Castle.

6. p. 203. Grey gets off from gambling trap(?) too easily. Not convincing.

7. p. 213. This is a picnic at the end of a long hike. No wonder so many servants were necessary.

8. p.217. White Anglo-Saxons dancing in the woods. Divine.

This picture came up in a search for "white anglo saxons dancing in the woods".

9. p. 227. This book starts to get weird--in a good way--at the castle where the Duke of Johannisberger breaks out the bottle of his namesake liquor. "'And now', continued the Grand Duke, 'having introduced you to all present, sir, we will begin drinking'".

10. Whenever I am reading one of these books and lament that I haven't acted in a situation as a 19th-century German aristocrat would, my wife explains with admirable rationality why we don't need to.

11. Is this a satire on aristocratic custom generally or just Germans? (Germans a popular subject of humor at this time).

12. p. 257. "...at your age, if, in fact, we study at all, we are fond of fancying ourselves moral philosophers, and our study is mankind. Trust me, my dear sir, it is a branch of research soon exhausted; and in a few years you will be very glad, for want of something else to do, to meditate upon stones." He goes on to encourage him to take up geology. "...for the geologist is the most satisfactory of antiquarians, the most interesting of philosophers, and the most inspired of prophets; demonstrating that which has passed by discovery, that which is occurring by observation, and that which is to come by induction." I used to wonder if geology were not one of my lost careers (i.e., something requiring some intelligence that I might have been able to do competently). It seemed like something I could have done when I was young, though everything is so complex and requires so much innovative and restless thinking to be able to contribute to it now that if I had gone into it I probably would not have been able to keep pace with ongoing developments and been obsolete by this point anyway.

13. p.264. I like Beckendorff's periodic sweeps of all 'philosophers' from the royal presence.

14. Sciolist: One who exhibits a pretentious attitude of scholarliness, superficial knowledgeability. I identified with the idea of this word.

15. p. 280. Beckendorff's Italy tip: "Well, then, when either of you go, you will, of course, not miss the Lago Maggiore. Gaze on Isola Bella at sunset, and you will not view so fair a scene as this!"

I have to confess, I don't have a lot to say with regard to the passing of Mandela, whom most thinking people have felt moved to pay their respects to over the past few days. I am not being a contrarian in this instance, I simply have not followed or studied his struggles and the progression of his life enough to have the strength of feeling for him such as other people seem to have. I am certainly persuaded by the general narrative and other superficial impressions that he was a superior and historically important man. I'm suspicious of the depth of sincerity and understanding of many most of his white upper class American admirers with regard to the type of man he was, since they do not seem to me to partake any too strongly, if at all, of the great qualities of which he is supposedly representative, beginning with humility, which admittedly does not come naturally to most people who have gotten anywhere in this society; but I could very well be wrong in this, and besides it has nothing to do with Mandela himself. And I will leave it at this.

Three Brothers (1980)

Do you like this movie? Yes.

What Do You Like About It? It has the expansive, deliberate, unfrenetic, realist, novelistic style that reached its zenith in the 1970s, particularly in Europe. This depiction of consciousness, character, etc, was akin to how I used to experience life myself until I was around twenty-seven or so.

What Do You Dislike About It? Nothing stands out. It is a little unusual in that it sets out a group of characters with very serious problems or crises happening in their lives and kind of leaves it at that, as if to say, these are the pertinent facts of life, and there is no resolution for them, until you grow old and die (or are killed). But when you think about it you realize how foolish you are, not so much to want, but to expect a resolution such that a character will never be troubled by his great problem ever again.

What Do You Love About it? Nothing to that extreme. I like seeing something of the Europe of my childhood and youth that I could still get a little sense of in 1990, but as one of the themes is about how soul-crushing the modern urban lifestyle and economy were even at that time, I was not indulging in the nostalgia too much.

Who is the director? Francesco Rosi. This is the first of his films I have seen. I would say that on the whole he definitely belongs to the old camp (he was born in 1922, and began directing on his own in the 50s) that reached a kind of maturity by the late 60s and 70s. The films of this school are extremely well-made, both technically and in terms the overall coherence of story or theme. They know what they mean to say and want to show, and how they want to say and show it.

What is important about this movie? This movie is interesting because it comes near the end of an era that, unlike similar transitional periods, I don't think as many people on the creative side of the field realized was the end of an era. Or even if they had some sense of this, I don't think they grasped how different even intelligent people's attitudes towards art and artworks, and the manner by which they consumed and related to them would become. For it seems to me in this regard we are a long way from 1980. In Italian film no less than the other major national cinemas the period beginning around 1980 was a watershed time, as the older masters (Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, etc) retired, and the generation that only knew the postwar world rose to prominence. Rosi does address the theme, so prominent especially in this more recent generation, of the native but poor village one has had to leave behind to contribute economically and socially in the modern world, feeble as that contribution is. He does not fully romanticize it, and it is clear that for the most part it is hopeless for any young person to try to make a life there in 1980, but it is also clear that something serious has been lost with this breaking from tradition.

Anything Else. The sophisticated Euro-sex is kept pretty much to a minimum. There is only one of the brothers who is a threat to get it on with anybody. He does, mysteriously to me, have sex with his rather cold ex-wife (though I thought her attractive enough) after a conversation in which I could not detect any hint that she felt anything towards him other than contempt and security in her total superiority. I don't get how we are supposed to know that she still wanted it, or at least was willing to have it. And the beauty of it is, I never will. But you know why, superior reader. You have been there. And you will never forget it.

A Confession. When I was in college I would get a letter every year, or at least twice I got one, from the financial aid office or admissions office or alumni office or some other office informing me that my aid that year was in some part made possible by a very generous gift to the College from a Mr Whitebread Mayonnaise or other from the class of 1929, who was at the time still living in Baltimore, and that it would be appreciated if I would write him a letter of thanks and say something about my studies and my plans for the future and so on. Needless to say I never got around to writing any of these letters. At the time I no doubt forgot about them within fifteen minutes of leaving the mailbox, and I had thought about it once in all of the years since then, until a few weeks ago, when I remembered that I had been asked to do this one polite little thing in return for ten of thousands of money I was being given, and I had completely ignored it, as if it were beneath my contempt even to acknowledge it all. It's something I should have done, and emblematic of all the reasons why my life relative to the greater world amounted to so little as it did.

My wife has a blog now. She is a natural. Her site is for her Greek and Latin classes (substantial and purposeful) and is wholly devoid of narcissism. I can only marvel at the seriousness and restraint, two qualities I have always longed for and never come close to attaining.

No picture with tonight's posting because my computer situation is still a joke. I have two in the room, one of which is crashing every time I log onto the site, the other of which is loading pictures at 1998 speed. I will probably edit one in in a few days, when I can get something working again.