. . . 2000-10-09 . . .

Current Report - Topical Search - Annals   Responses welcomed

Juliet Clark forwards a familiar analysis from "The Problem of Living In New York," by Junius Henri Browne, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November, 1882:

Why is it, may naturally be asked, that people should continually pour into New York when there is not room enough for half of those already here? Why should they persistently seek to live in a city where, with hosts on hosts of houses, there are no homes save for the prosperous? There is abundant space in most of the towns a hundred miles distant. Why do not people swell the census there instead of crowding into an overcrowded capital where the chances of success, of competence even, are ten thousand to one against them? They come in such numbers because so many have come before them, because New York is the commercial center of the republic, because it is immensely rich and strong, because, in short, it does not need or want them....

Thousands and thousands of men who have no regular employment, and no special prospects, who are materially and mentally out at elbows, whose whole life has been a spiritual tragedy, could not be persuaded to-day to leave the city where they have been so constantly baffled and tormented, where they have suffered so intensely, were they assured of a regular and respectable livelihood in some quiet town of the interior. Myriads of inmates of the squalid, distressing tenement-houses, in which morality is as impossible as happiness, would not give them up, despite their horrors, for clean, orderly, wholesome habitations in the suburbs, could they be transported there and back free of charge. They are in some unaccountable way terribly in love with their own wretchedness.

The American, like the Russian, has undertaken too much. He does more than anyone else ever did, but he does not keep up with the machine. New York promises to become a first-class tragedy. Life there is a tour-de-force. Rents are fantastic, prices are absurd, conditions are chaotic, but the trouble has hardly begun.

"And Salmon begat Booz...."

The homily of the week comes from poet Anselm Dovetonsils, who seems to have been put into an unusually devotional mood by yesterday's entry:

. . . 2000-10-10

Errata Tom Glynn brings our earlier erratum to an even higher gloss: "Whoa guys! Thomas Bernhard is at one and the same time our most comic and our most depressing writer. I should say was, since as you know he is dead. Who cares about his political involvement? Look at his writing. Is there anything funnier than Old Masters or more depressing than Yes? And has anyone pointed out the connection between Kierkegaard and Bernhard?" + + + Speaking of hot literary disputes, I ain't George Steiner and I ain't George Steiner's son, but I can be George Steiner till George Steiner comes: James Wood's attack is vicious and exhaustive enough that most of us can probably wrest at least a couple nicks out of it.... "Steiner is like someone who, seeing a blind man in the street, says: 'I would rather be deaf than blind.'"

. . . 2000-10-12

Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is a charming zine in the proto-Web tradition, but I didn't expect to find the two best short stories I've read this year tucked up its slender cuff. What a "coup," as they say in the editor's native Scotland!

With frighteningly typical aplomb, Karen Joy Fowler's "Heartland" demonstrates the equation: Tropical resorts Fantasy lands Ground meat = = Club Med MGM McDonalds Brightly colored plastic and happy little people, as maintained and portrayed by grim Oompa-Loompas -- pay no attention to the sentimentalizing whip-wielders behind the curtain.... Oh, it's barely possible that you or I might, given sufficient prompting, work out that premise, but neither of us would be able to incarnate it in so convincingly organic a form. This is politics drawn from life and returned to living flesh. And Kelly Link's "The Glass Slipper" is the most interesting modern take I've seen on Cinderella. Of course I would be interested, being as it directs the spotlight off the girl and onto the Prince, whose motivations have always been rather shadowy. What would drive a nice guy (because, after all, we'd really prefer him to be nice) to go around fitting shoes? Is fitting shoes really a good way to meet Ms. Right? (I can't tell you myself, 'cause I got fired from my shoe store clerk job after just two weeks, thus condemning me to life in the software industry.) If it is, mightn't you meet Ms. Right through the process itself, even without an official win on the foot? I mean, you can probably get to know someone as well by fitting their shoes as by dancing with them, right? And so we find ourselves pratfalling over the tangled, by no means strictly causal, relations of fetish and love, attraction and consummation.... It's what fairy tales were made for: to warn us about real life.

So the next time some deadbeat stoner asks you how come you don't subscribe to Conjunctions or the New Yorker, you look 'em right in their beady bloodshot eyes and say "Fuck you, buddy! I subscribe to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet!"

. . . 2000-10-13

Progress Report

These are unsettled times, and there's nothing more unsettling than the question of Hotsy Totsy's new brand identity.

So far, our visitors' suggestions for a new logo include: a guy fishing for compliments Angry Housewife dead horse propped up behind a checkerboard something to do with el dorado? Thank you!

And among the suggestions for a new title: Iron Cuticle of Samizdat Quack-a-Doodle Do My Mother the Card Hokey Pokey Club Wow! Right on! Thank you again! Keep 'em coming!

Long-time Berkeleyist Juliet Clark issues these gentle errata: Did you notice that the address for the "Towne Dandies" is in Saint Helena? That's not even in the East Bay! These guys are tourists. They have no right to be hanging out on our street. Also by the way, I actually don't think Club Mallard is a good idea; tho it too has a lovely sign, it has been thoroughly colonized by the scooter set. I suggest the Mel-O-Dee Lounge instead.

. . . 2000-10-15

Movie Comment: American Beauty

Credit where credit's due. Over the past couple years, most critically acclaimed crappy movies have just been vinyl-veneer knock-offs of Frank Perry, or Martin Scorsese, or Robert Altman, or David Lynch, or John Cassavetes. But only the makers of American Beauty have had sufficient vision to produce a vinyl-veneer knock-off of Norman Lear.

. . . 2000-10-17

Everything Is True; Nothing Is Permitted I first encountered the attempt to pit the dim light of quantum mechanics against the deepest fogs of cognitive neuroscience in a paper sponsored by the Vatican and authored by soul-searcher Sir John C. Eccles. What mostly struck me was the incongruous disproportion between the two-thousand-years-tall edifice of Catholic theology and the subparticular results on which Sir John had wasted such strenuous ingenuity. It all seemed as fascinating, hilarious, and sad as a Buster Keaton routine. I was reminded of Sir John when I read Henry Adams's 1882 response to William James on receipt of some early essays on religious psychology and societal evolution:

Alas, James seems to have chosen not to pursue the correspondence at that time, although thirty years later he wrote, "I ask you whether an old man soon about to meet his Maker can hope to save himself from the consequences of his life by pointing to the wit and learning he has shown in treating a tragic subject."

. . . 2000-10-20

The ultimate performance is the one that achieves survival.

. . . 2000-10-21

A nightmare is a stupid wish your heart makes Movie books ogle Jayne Mansfield's maternal qualifications, rock histories clip the spasms of Little Richard and perfectly cast Gene Vincent, but The Girl Can't Help It truly peaks with Julie London's rendition of "Cry Me a River," wherein our nasty little hero is whipped reeling from room to room by the sheer glamour of her apparition. So now sit yourself down in front of a Cinemascope print, pour yourself a tumbler of gin, and do what comes natural: she cried a river over you. (singalong link thanks to Dumbmonkey)

. . . 2000-10-23

Addendum

David Auerbach forwards an introduction to George Steiner that's "funnier than James Wood" -- and before this goes any further I should warn the research-inclined reader that, like presidential primaries, the Wood-Steiner fight is useful as a source of invective rather than of truth. Wood's pontifications may be more polished than Steiner's but they're no more alive; few inquiries can afford the handicap of blinders like:

"Since fiction is itself a kind of magic, the novel should not be magical."

. . . 2000-10-24

Redneck Narcissus When George Jones sings For the first time Tonight I saw me his articulation leaves carefully ambiguous whether this particular night was the first time ever he saw he saw his face, or whether he goes through this every night and he's just talking about the evening's first encounter.

Wanna see a monkey?

. . . 2000-10-25

[sic], [sic], [sic]

Plucky gal reporter "Torchy" Clark forwards a choice example (lead paragraph of a front-page feature story!) of the San Francisco ChronEx's ineffable wordcraft ("No Sentence Left Unbruised"). Watch out for those dangerously small parents.

. . . 2000-10-26

The 100 Super Movies au maximum: The Big Combo

	We have lots of reasons to be grateful for low-budget specialist Joseph H. Lewis's work, but Peter Bogdonovich's book of interviews is what made me grateful for Joseph H. Lewis's existence. In a field full of insecure egotists, Lewis comes across as happy, gracious, and busting with healthy pride in everything he ever did (except for the Custer movie: "I became terribly confused because I found out what a horrible man Colonel Custer was. Jiminy Cricket!"). It's just nice to know that it's even possible to be someone like that, you know? 'Cause sometimes you look around, and.... Anyway, here's Lewis on The Big Combo: You know, Cornel Wilde and Jean Wallace are married, and they're a charming couple. I asked Jean why her character -- a society girl looking like herself -- would throw herself at a character like Richard Conte's gangster, a known murderer. And she couldn't come up with an answer.... I said, "Jean, when this man takes you in his arms, he doesn't stop at kissing you on the lips, he doesn't stop at your earlobe, he doesn't stop at your neck, he doesn't stop at your tummy. He covers you all...." I actually wanted to show -- again by impression only -- a man making love to a girl in this delightfully unique fashion that we have all dreamt about or experienced. Now, how do you show it on film? Well, I had an idea: as you saw the two of them, mixed with kissing her on the lips and then on the ear, the camera moved closer and closer and closer and, as you came into a huge close-up of Nick Conte and Jean Wallace, gradually Nick's head disappeared: first kissing her neck, then lower and lower and then, at the precise moment, Jean, who was icy -- I think she was afraid to betray herself for fear Cornel would raise hell with her -- but at that precise moment I envisioned, I went "uh-uh-uh" off-scene, and that was recorded. Cornel never forgave me for it. Which makes the scene sound like fun. It isn't. It begins with a nasty quarrel and ends with whispered dialogue: "What do you want, Susan? Tell me. I'll give anything you want." "Nothing." "Anything at all." "Nothing, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing...." over an unflattering close-up of a woman's face struggling to become as inexpressive as possible, one tear-track drying. It's Ingmar Bergman sadism 11 years early. And if Bergman had been capable of integrating it with a fast-paced cop thriller, Bergman might've been as good as Joseph H. Lewis.

... an' anotha thing ...

... then again ...