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I do take note of the important events of the day, to an extent. I find it hard to get very overheated about them, when so many other people have already taken it upon themselves to be so.

This question answers itself.

Ukraine-- it is and has been since its independence an unusually weak and unstable state, large, almost unbelievably poor, its population in free fall; in short, it seems to have very little going for it. I did think, for a fleeting moment or two, in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union broke up that Ukraine and Belarus especially becoming and remaining independent countries for any substantial length of time seemed odd. As a child I had little sense of Ukrainians having a national identity separate from Russians, because as in the case of Serbs and Croatians, or Czechs and Slovaks, I don't think the differences were emphasized as being particularly important in those days, if the people I grew up around were even aware of them.

In late 1966 and early 1967, the theme of the Lennon sisters having a lot to teach President Johnson's daughters about romance achieved popularity in this type of media.

I am now aware that Ukraine has had, going back to the 1800s at least, active nationalist leaders and inclinations, though the effectiveness of these does not seem to have ever been very strong. That is to say, there has never been much of a sense afoot in the world that the Ukrainians were a coming people. They certainly do not give that impression now. My whole point is, that Ukraine strikes me as an unusually vulnerable state to begin with (though for that matter, so does Russia, at least as regards its sparsely populated far eastern territories bordering China).

I probably did give some passing thought, while watching The Battleship Potemkin or reading some reference to Chekhov's dacha in Yalta, that the Crimea, and most of the Black Sea coast, for that matter, not being part of Russia any longer and that nation's acceding to this seemed odd, but I probably assumed that the two countries must have a relation similar to that of the United States and Canada, in which I tend to assume that Canadian ports and water are essentially 'open' to American commerce and military needs, especially in the event of emergency. Perhaps this is not the case either, and I can look forward to some abuse from offended Canadians, but I note my idea as an instance of how the uninformed mind tends to fill in the blanks of its knowledge. I am a little surprised that our intelligence agencies and governmental leaders do not appear as if they had a plan of response in place in anticipation of Russia moving into the Crimea or other parts of Ukraine, which surely must have seemed a possibility or even a likelihood by experts in these matters. Of course I am sure there must have been something of the kind; our reactions to most of these international crises in the last twenty years do unfold as though we had never made any contingency for them however.

The supposed excessive fertility of the Lennon sisters was an endless object of fascination for television magazines in the 1960s, an era in which I thought the average family consisted of 3-4 children across the population. While Peggy did have 6 children, I am pretty sure the other three only had around five more between them, which does not seem extreme. I guess one or another, and sometimes two, of the sisters were pregnant continually for a few years there, and it was kind of part of their personae, so the impression stuck.

Lots of celebrities in the 1950s and 60s had a fairly large number of children (though normal for the time). Elizabeth Taylor for example I believe had four children, though no one ever thinks of her as especially fertile or maternal, for that matter.

I make note of the lack of contingency for the Ukraine situation because I note that a lot of important people in America seem rather angry about the development, saying that it affects business and trade, etc, and is basically irresponsible. So I am surprised that they don't have a devastating plan of some kind that they can coldly implement and send a forceful message to Putin to control himself going forward. But of course they probably do.

I would actually be interested to know the contents of this discussion.

Why the fascination with plane crashes? Does it have to do with the fact that upper middle class and
even higher people fly a great deal as passengers, and that that period when the plane is off the ground is one of the few times in their lives when they cannot feel that they are the absolute masters of their situations and that this in itself causes them anxiety. Or is the idea to continue to cultivate the seeds of fear in the duller middle orders, as has been done so expertly in the cases of school and workplace shootings, and compel them to submit to ever increasing security measures and so forth.

Who is the sexiest? We all know that I love Dianne, but objectively, the sexiest, or the one who most had it in her to be an animal in bed in general, was probably Kathy. As far as who was most likely to be an animal in bed with me, that is a different story, and the most likely answer is no one, though if I had to pick, I would say Janet. But that's only because I like her the least of the four (though still enough) and that seems to inspire excitement in women. The smartest? Dianne fer sherr, though Kathy may be the shrewdest in terms of cold business sense. Peggy is undeniably the sweetest, and I think she was also quite smart. She looks so to me, and I consider myself to be a good judge in this matter, at least in cases where it is not an absolutely dominant or obvious feature (I find these types of women the most lovable, when I can find them). Her husbands, a musician and a doctor, were presumably intelligent, which is in most instances a good advertisement for being so oneself.

I want to make a few comments on Roger Angell's story in the New Yorker about being 93.

I was taken aback in this story by how much emphasis there was on the desire for sex and trolling Match.com for romantic partners even among the extremely aged. I always thought, maybe even hoped, that if I should make it to that age that I would not be oppressed by those kinds of thoughts anymore. They seem increasingly ridiculous now, at age forty-four. That I should still be grasping at them deep into old age, when they can only ever more and more come to nothing, seems almost unbearable.

Roger Angell was my age in 1965. There are not many people left who were my age now before I was born.

Yes, cut it out with the babies already.

Roger Angell is famous for his baseball writing. I have of course read some of it over the years, and thought it was generally good, in a New Yorkerish way certainly, but the pieces usually captured something about the way baseball connected to and fit in with other aspects of life. This is a staple of New York and New England-based baseball writing that is often ridiculed by less self-consciously cerebral and more jockish types, but the genre developed for a reason, because one has the sensation in New York City and most of the better places in New England that there are a lot of interesting things going on, of which flow baseball, and the baseball season, are a part, at times a bigger part than others, but never in the kind of relative mental isolation in which it seems possible for even sensitive writer types to experience sports seasons in other places. I remember in the famous book Moneyball a passage about organized baseball's acceptance and even celebration of these pastoral, elegiac chroniclers of the sport, who posed no threat to its powers, which has come in the last generation with the statistical revolution spearheaded by Bill James (a writer for whom I actually have a great deal of esteem) and the more recent crop of completely hard-headed and rather pitiless analysts of data, of which Nate Silver, who has been in the news recently, is representative. I don't really like these new books very much either, and I will try to explain why, aside from the complaint that I must be too stupid to understand the math and the objective realities that they reveal, because I think at times there really is more to the matter than that, or at least I certainly hope there is.

Now we're talking. I will take odds that none of the Lennon sisters ever asked their husbands the question this magazine claims they asked them every night, however.

Yes, so the problem with the Nate Silver school of baseball writers even leaving them in the realm of pure statistical analysis is a tendency to 1) overstate their case, both in its conclusions and its ultimate importance, which is a problem across the contemporary intellectual spectrum; 2) write as if the primary, maybe even the only interest in baseball is in demonstrating one is smarter than everyone else at interpreting statistics. The atmosphere of these books is depressingly airless. This obviously speaks to the nature of elite education nowadays, that data somehow speaks for itself, and is not merely the support of thought, but in most instances serves as thought...

I am sure I will post on this again, if more thoughts on this subject occur to me. I am out of time for the week and I still have no computer at home. Maybe this weekend I will get one.

Not About Catholics and the Global Economy, Nor My Masculinity

As you can see I am not writing much anymore. I am hoping to get a new computer soon, that will 1) not be slow, and 2) not crash every ten minutes. Both of these situations cause me to write in a more anxious mood than I would like. So perhaps this will happen and I will write more often soon.

The real problem of course is that I don't have much to say about anything anymore.

A few days ago I was going to do a post on "Catholics" (meaning people, whether religious or not, who grew up in households and communities where a certain mindset and approach to the world characteristic of that where Catholicism was the dominant cultural influence) and the global economy, my theory being that people who grew up in these kinds of communities did not have the understanding of and attitude towards money that one really needs to have to thrive in the current world. I was going to use as illustration the entire French and Italian nations, which, at least according to news reports, appear to be suffering in various degrees collective nervous breakdowns at the necessity of having to compete for their livelihoods twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week with people from foreign cultures, most of them vulgar or otherwise unbearable. But this article would have seemed to be another negative lamentation from me about a world I cannot thrive in, about a group I am identifying with which would not allow that I ever had anything to do with them, and without persuasive references or numbers. So I shelved that and tried to think of something positive and interesting to write.

I couldn't do this.

I had to listen the other day to a woman who was not very interesting go on at some length about the health benefits of eating a vegan diet. I am not especially unhealthy, I don't really care about animals, and cutting into a steak or a piece of a pork chop every couple of days are among the few real pleasures I am consistently able to enjoy in my current life now that my enthusiasm and capacity for reading and learning seem to have dried up completely, but I listened politely and didn't say this, though I probably should have. I said something rather stupid about having a lot of boys and that I considered boys especially to need protein to develop physically in a way that I would could consider desirable and so on--I was only half alert to the subject, and my thoughts reverted vaguely to books I had read about people who were starving in World War II and that sort of thing who were desperate to find any kind of live animal at all (including, in some cases, humans) that by eating it they might have a temporary sensation/restoration of strength and energy. The response to this of course was "So where's all the masculinity then?" referring to me. I walked into that, I admit. I forget that that is the image I probably project to most people. I feel masculine enough most of the time, but of course I am not pressed very hard most days. I know in the back of my mind that something bad, some kind of outright humiliation or degradation might happen someday, or perhaps I will really be placed in some kind of moral dilemma that I will be unable to avoid where it will be inconvenient or fatal for me to do what I will sense to be the right action, though my judgement of what the right action will be almost wholly determined by my attitude as regards the justness and goodness of the individual parties pressing the case on me. This almost certainly means my conscience will think it proper that I aid and defend the put upon, less powerful side in the dispute.

People keep waiting for the social revolution to start, in opposition to the general degradation of economic and civil life that has overcome the country in the last ten to twelve years. I think something along these lines will happen within this decade; at the moment I sense that no one really wants to be in that first big group (or first few groups) that gets mown down by the swat team, even if they sense that such a disaster might be necessary to restore some sense of equilibrium in society. Everybody wants to be around to enjoy the good times, and possibly have a hand in dictating the parameters of the new society that they anticipate coming into being once the threats of poverty, personal obsolescence, sinister surveillance, Christian theocracy, socialism, etc, have been overcome. They are anticipating perhaps that some other angry group unrelated to them will strike the first blow to set things in motion--a band of armed Tea Partiers storming an IRS office, or some fanatical Christians or gay rights activists having a pitched battle with firearms in a major city somewhere--and get involved once everyone is society is more or less aware that it's 'on'. People today are too self aware to be content to give up their lives in a fruitless massacre that resulted in nothing. They will at least need to feel  they are in a real struggle, with dire consequences for losing.

I was also going to predict in my post on Catholics and the global economy that at least one major western European country--France seems to be the most obvious candidate, with Italy a close second--will reject the modern economy more aggressively than it has done already and try to return to its more "traditional" (as in circa 1945-1975) national life. The economists more or less claim that this is impossible, and it is impossible in the sense of growing the economy, attracting and retaining top human talent, and so on. Countries sometimes come to a point where they no longer care very much about this, for a time anyway. I don't expect this to be permanent, but I could see a period of a generation or so where it is the case.

With twenty-one pages to go in The Woman in the Dunes, I have realized that the book is essentially a metaphor about marriage, and the general resignation of men to their fate as they age in their 30s  and beyond. The plot of the book concerns a man, who is around 32, who goes to a beach for the weekend in order to collect insect samples who is unwittingly captured and placed in a hole in the sand which contains a house and a woman from which, he eventually discovers, escape is impossible. It should be said that he does develop a certain fondness for the woman and the rather pointless routine of their lives, which involves shoveling away enough sand each day to keep it from collapsing the house, but it is pretty depressing.

That's enough for today. I hope that new computer is coming soon. Putting up a blog post has begun to border on a minor ordeal. All I want to do is be able to write just a little. I ask for nothing compared to what I used to ask for, and the fates respond by giving me ever less. I must have terrible equipment. I had a much easier time getting on the internet and getting anything accomplished ten years ago.

Don't Call It a Comeback

As often happens around this time of year, I had a period of a couple of weeks where I could not get any kind of essay going. One day I was going to take up the subject of the particular types of monsters that are currently ascendant in our society and how there are things about them, in spite of their unopposable greatness and superiority, that still really are troubling, and another day I scribbled down an idea that I cannot remember or make out what it was now (it looks like "long camp" or "one camp" which signifies nothing to me). Then I was driving and in Florida for about ten days, and when I tried to log onto the site it would not let me because I was in an unusual location--evidently now you have to check in with Google when go on vacation, at least if you don't bring your own computer with you. And then while I was away a frozen pipe burst in the office requiring that room to be cleaned out. The carefully typed out manuscripts of my old attempts at writing that had been moldering there for years bundled in special gold paper clips, were finally destroyed at least.  I thought maybe I would even be permanently blocked from logging onto this site but now that I am home it is letting me in again.

It is still not my intention that the site become exclusively a record of movies I have watched. I do want to keep that record however and I have said before this is a convenient place to keep it.

That said, we are back to the 1930s now, which means I am pretty much going to like everything no matter what it is. I was not particularly amped beforehand to see any of these four I am reviewing today, yet I thought there were fine things about all of them.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

This is a real classic, for what it is--and that seems to me nothing inconsiderable--it is perfect in just about every way. I do not think it would be possible to make a movie (or write a book, or a song) like this, in this kind of spirit, now even if one wanted to, which in spite of all the powerful arguments in favor of progressivism in the culture due to technology and the increasing dominance of fact and information in every facet of human endeavor, seems to me to be a real shame.

I suppose I should try to explain why I would say this. The movie pleases a part of the brain which is not usually stimulated in such a fashion in modern life. To begin with, it has one of the best casts of all time. Having been raised in the modern era, the presence of particular stars or actors rarely has struck me as being all that important to the interest of the movie, even when they are good (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman was one exception to this that I can think of offhand). But it is unusual that I see a performance and feel that this one actor has made the role or the part really special. Claude Rains (who plays the wicked Prince John here) almost always has this effect, and by himself is usually enough to make any movie he is in a matter of cinematic interest. Basil Rathbone is also an oddly compelling actor to watch perform. This is my first time seeing Errol Flynn, who plays  Robin Hood. He holds his own among this highly distinguished company, but my overall impression is still somewhat undefined. He was a major star at this time, though today his most characteristic movies (Captain Blood, et al) do not seem to me to be well-known today. The adjective most commonly used to describe his film persona is 'swashbuckling'. Swashbuckling carries with it an implication of roguish (but adult) fun, and the successful combating with people who on paper at least are as strong as one's self, all without apparent stress or worry regarding the outcome on the part of the swashbuckler. Olivia de Havilland, another of my favorite stars of this time, is one hand as Maid Marion. She is not required to do a lot other than look good (in a 1930s idea of 12th century dress), be cold to Guy of Gisborne, and provide encouragement and a reward to Robin Hood for continuous heroic deeds, but as almost the only female character in the movie, she does this well enough. (As an aside, Olivia de Havilland is still alive, aged 97. She was 22 when Robin Hood came out).

A second strength of this is that it has a great uncomplicated understanding of what is most broadly appealing in the source material and it goes with that above any other consideration, such that nearly every scene is its own satisfaction and hits the viewer's romantic susceptibility head on. The story flows almost effortlessly from the romantic setting of the forest to the early dramatic peaks of the confrontation in the castle and the archery tournament and back and forth all the way to the anticipated climax. But getting to the end or anywhere in the future is less the point in this movie than almost anything I have ever seen.

While today this would be considered a children's project, and any attempt at an adult interpretation would have to be sexed up considerably, this 1938 version seems to be directed at an amorphous general filmgoer who is composed of childlike and adult elements at the same time. Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone approach the material in the full adult personas of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone. They aren't hamming it up for the kids or mailing it in and sneering at the earnest middlebrow American public. Even though their parts are funny and over the top and are to a certain extent meant to be, they took the execution of them most seriously.

This came with many bonus features, most of which I enjoyed, though this entailed spending a week or more considering this one movie. There was the regular commentary, which was by a film scholar named Rudy Behlmer, who had a congenial manner of talking and some sense of humor, which I liked, there was an hour long documentary on the history of technicolor which I found enjoyable (Robin Hood was not the first major technicolor movie--it was around the ninth or tenth--but it may have been the first really memorable one), there were some shorts from the 1940s, including one of Errol Flynn taking a yacht trip along the coast of Mexico and Jamaica (by way of the Panama Canal, though filming was forbidden there) with his scientist father, one of his many wives, and numerous of his colorful friends, including the archery expert who had consulted on Robin Hood. There was a (too brief) look at some scenes from the 1922 silent version of Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, which looks like a pretty good, as well as hilarious, movie in its own right. There was a blooper reel of 1938 Warner Brothers productions that was an staple at the studio's annual employee banquet. In short, quite a lot of good stuff of the sort that I have not seen before.

Apparently in the scenes where people are shot in the chest with arrows they really were shot with arrows. Of course they had on thick padding underneath, cork and other types of reinforcement, though it still seems rather dangerous to me (what if the archer was off a couple of feet and got you in the eye?) It was noted that the extras who took these arrow shots got paid an extra $50.

There were two directors credited on the film, William Keighley and Michael Curtiz, the latter of whom directed a number of famous movies, including Casablanca.

Captains Courageous (1937)

Another movie that was much more emotionally engaging than I had anticipated, and also featured a cast full of big names. Spencer Tracy appears yet again, though in a much younger incarnation than we have seen him yet, and is, as film performances go, more or less spectacular. I suspect this is the best role of his increasingly impressive career. Old Hollywood legend Lionel Barrymore is in the house as the captain of the fishing boat. Though by today's standards his management style is a series of negligence and wrongful death lawsuits waiting to be filed, we are supposed, I think, to recognize him as a serious and noble man at the end of the movie. Freddie Bartholomew, who played the kid, is genuinely obnoxious in the beginning but becomes quite affecting by the end. Mickey Rooney is also in it, though I don't think his presence adds much. But then I've never been able to like that guy.

This was directed by Victor Fleming, who is most famous for directing both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind in 1939. He was obviously an able director of studio films.

The home base of the fisherman in this movie is Gloucester, Massachusetts, another place pretty close to where I live (probably 90 minutes) which I am reminded I have never been to. I have put on my list for the upcoming spring and summer. Whatever else there is to do, we can check out the famous fisherman monument (which is in the movie) and probably there are some atmospheric places to get seafood, even if the fishing industry is effectively dead there compared to what it had been well into my lifetime. I suspect there must be a few old ship captain's houses around, too. Those kinds of kinds of towns usually have enough interest to fill a day.

The story is from a Rudyard Kipling book. I believe Kipling wrote it during the time when he was living in Brattleboro. I also believe it is his only book that has an American setting. I have not read it, though it is on at least one of my lists, so I probably will someday.

The movie romanticizes and extols the humble life devoted to hard work and simple, honest pleasures, and contrasts it with the kinds of grotesque and empty excesses of a life too much cushioned by wealth. These fishermen are rough characters, sure, but they are at bottom good men who instinctively as it were knew exactly what the boy needed to flesh out his character. I was quite taken aback at the end when the fisherman donned ties and jackets upon arriving back on land and also by the highly civilized and almost genteel  personality of the captain's household. The modern day New England fishermen don't really seem to clean up like this, not that I know that many.

Follow the Fleet (1936)

Another 30s movie carried by the presence of brilliant superstars, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in this case. It is probably my least favorite of this set; however it has some pretty good songs in it and it seems, compared to other 30s musicals I have seen, to be more full and more like a real movie all around. That is to say that the plot, such as it is, tries to resemble the form of a plot,  and develop an identifiable structural framework. The plausibility of Fred Astaire's having joined the navy to get over the breakup of his partnership/nightclub act with Ginger, of his running dancing classes on board a battleship, and of his organizing and starring in a civilian stage show during his shore leave to pay for the restoration of the sailing sloop that had belonged to the father of Ginger and her sisters, are not important.

The decline of the song and dance man (and woman) as a major component of the movie and television entertainment scene over the last 40-50 years is really one of the more astounding developments in the history of these media.

The woman in the photo above is Harriet Hilliard, who played Ginger Roger's sister. She would become best known for marrying Ozzie Nelson, fathering Ricky, and playing herself on the iconic 1950s TV show starring the family.

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

Charles Laughton is the star of this, and of course we know all about him (as an actor). He apparently had the kind of sex life, heavy on the gay side and full of breathtakingly casual and borderline respectable encounters, that shocks the living daylights out of people like me who have never touched another person's body in any kind of risky or illicit or even mildly socially disapproved manner. That is to say, I am aware that he had this kind of side to him, and was not the distinguished and respectable European gentleman he often portrays in films 24 hours a day. It is important that I note this because this sensual and artistic life with its seemingly (at the highest levels) carefree and casual creativity and wit and fun is so foreign to me that I forget that it is a serious world that is very different from that known to me. Anyway, in these four movies we have definitely seen five of the better movie actors/performances of all time (Rains, Rathbone, Tracy, Astaire, and Laughton), five big names who may or may not be at that level in other films (Flynn, de Havilland, Barrymore, Rogers, Melvyn Douglas), besides much excellent work by the supporting players.

Ruggles of Red Gap is based on a novel by Harry Leon Wilson, which I had not known beforehand. I had actually read one of Harry Leon Wilson's books, Merton of the Movies, probably 20 years ago, and I have always thought it one of those good-natured, cleverly written books that is undervalued. Besides the similarity of the alliterative title, of which the author was apparently fond, Ruggles and Merton are similar kinds of stories. In both instances a young, or at least youngish, man migrates to the American west in the early 20th century--Merton to Hollywood to try to break into the movies, Ruggles as an English butler whose lord loses him in a poker game in Paris to the uncouth scion of a mining operation (who looks and dresses rather like Mark Twain) based in Red Gap, Washington. Some fish out of water hilarity ensues as the greenhorn adapts to his new surroundings, but eventually both Merton and Ruggles find their level, embrace the freedom of men in command of their own destiny that early 20th-century America, and especially the western parts of it, offers, and get the girl (even though we know enough now to suppose that Charles Laughton probably doesn't want the girl). There is some corn in it--the scene where Ruggles recites the Gettysburg Address to a teary-eyed audience in the saloon is a bit much even for me--but on the whole it is a satisfying, feel good kind of picture. It's also not available on Netflix, so I sprang for a $1.79 VHS copy.

My wife observed during one of the early scenes in Paris where two Americans spot each other in the road in front of a cafe and being whooping and hollering and snorting like cows and riding on each others' backs, to the extreme horror of the cafe patrons, that "unfortunately only the Australians act like this now."

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.