In the News – Page 15

From the Outside In: the Golden Treasury‘s Endpapers

August 8, 2013 by John 3 Comments

[See the previous entry in this series here.]

Adult readers know unambiguously what it means to “read a book.” They have an image of someone — most often themselves? — sitting somewhere in a comfortable chair, on a commuter train or in an airport terminal, good lighting from over the shoulder… The book lies open in their hands or lap, somewhere in the middle, with a sheaf of pages pinned in place behind each thumb. Because, y’know, whether the book in question is a potboiler or a metaphysical treatise, that’s where all the action is — in the middle. It’s the heart of the book.

But just inside the front and back covers? Those “pages,” the endpapers, serve a purely physical function; they’re where the dynamic stresses are greatest, where the tension between spine and glued contents would most likely result in tearing and/or separation. In a book, they’re the analogue of a painting’s picture frame: they physically hold it all together, hence are important, but they have no real point otherwise. They’re to be gotten through.

But kids harbor fewer clearcut preconceptions. From their perspective, the very first spread of paper and the very last might well be places to expect the most drama, the most meaning. And in a book or elsewhere, when faced with a large two-page spread of blank paper, few kids could resist the temptation to scribble, to color, to fill. Leaving them empty would be such a waste, no?

I don’t know, but can guess, that artists and illustrators love having the freedom to fill whole tabloid-sized sheets of whitespace, too, free from the constraints of story and the rigid geography of text on the page. Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, hated the tedium of the daily strip format: day after day, year after year, working within the same narrow rectangle. (It especially had to frustrate him as the creator of such an undisciplined protagonist.) If I remember correctly, he stipulated in his contracts that if you wanted the daily strip, you had to give him a half-page on Sunday, to fill with whatever layout he wanted. His Sunday strips dazzled, even before you’d read any of the text in the speech balloons.

The publishers of kids’ books, especially illustrated ones, know all this. And the publishers of great kids’ books pull out all the stops.

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Be Sure to Get Arrested Before You Get Shot

July 22, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

The Biograph and John Dillinger - image found at the FBI site [Edit to add: would help if I’d included a title the first time around…]

Interesting: on this day, July 22, notorious bank robber (etc.) John Dillinger was shot dead outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago. You can read the New York Times account of it here.

…as I did. And there I learned a couple of new names: Mrs. Etta Natalsky and Miss Theresa Paulus. They’re mentioned in passing, of interest because they were both wounded in the left leg in the hail of law-enforcement gunfire which erupted when Dillinger reached for his gun. I’d never even wondered about that before — if bystanders were struck — so off I went to see if I could dig up more information about the two ladies.

Haven’t yet found anything on Theresa Paulus. But I had to stop looking anyway, because I got totally sidetracked by a little detail: Etta Natalsky petitioned the US Government for reimbursement for her hospital expenses, and was turned down.

You can read the decision of the US Comptroller General here, at the Web site of the General Accounting Office, which includes background such as details of the cost. It also details three other vouchers, filed by a couple of guys who were bystanders injured in the “raid of the Little Bohemia Lodge, in connection with the investigation leading to the apprehension of John Dillinger.” As near as I can tell, the reason the Comptroller General’s office denied compensation to them all was: the victims were not — not — prisoners of and had not been arrested by the US government:

The necessary expense of medical or surgical treatment of persons who have been arrested by officers of the United States and are held as prisoners of the United States is an expense incident to the arrest which, if incurred under proper conditions and with due authority, is a lawful charge against the United States… There is, however, no authority for the payment of such expenses where the injuries were caused by a government officer and the injured person has not been arrested and charged with a crime against the United States.

Huh. Comment probably superfluous.

[Edit to add (2): this post has nothing to do with recent hot-button issues in the US. Please do not interpret it that way. It’s rather appalling that this possibility even occurred to me.]

A Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon

July 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

'Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon' banner I don’t know Aubyn Eli and am not sure how I got to her blog, The Girl with the White Parasol, as I did for the first time back in May or June. But I know what attracted me there: her planned week-long celebration of Barbara Stanwyck’s 106th birthday. Later today I’ll add my own contribution to the blogathon: a review of Crime of Passion, from 1956.

Interested in “golden era” Hollywood films or, of course, in Stanwyck herself? You could do far worse this weekend than to set aside some time to browse Aubyn’s schedule of what’s already been posted by the forty-plus bloggers contributing — and to mark your calendars for what’s coming. Not all of Stanwyck’s eighty-plus films are covered (hmm: a foreshadowing of a 107th-birthday celebration in 2014?), but it’s a pretty impressive list nonetheless. And it covers not just her films, either. You’ll find essays on her TV work, her career, the blonde wig she donned for Double Indemnity, the gown (pictured at right) which inflamed Gary Cooper (and not a few male moviegoers) in Ball of Fire…

(Wikipedia says of that film’s wardrobe: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.”)

As for Aubyn herself, as I said, I know her only (and only very recently) through her blog, which focuses on “Classic Cinema, 1930-1965.” (Her Twitter profile identifies her as a “Full-time fantasist.” I want that job!)

But I do know what the blog’s title alludes to: an anecdote related by Everett Sloane’s character, named Bernstein, in Citizen Kane. He’s being interviewed by a reporter, Thompson, about his memories of Charles Foster Kane (Bernstein having been Kane’s long-time assistant). Thompson asks for Bernstein’s guess about the famous last word, “Rosebud,” and Bernstein suggests maybe it was a girl. Thompson scoffs — anyone so powerful could hardly have had just a girl on his mind at the very end — but Bernstein cuts him off with this story:

It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, actually in any film — one of the favorites of a lot of people, indeed. Of course Aubyn Eli isn’t suggesting a connection specifically with Stanwyck in her blog title, and I never saw a film in which Stanwyck was costumed in exactly this way. But I can confidently say that if I’d ever seen her as a young woman in a white dress with a white parasol over her shoulder, in any setting at all, yeah: I’d remember the moment at least once a month, too.

Anyway, I’ll be back later today with my writeup on Crime of Passion. [Edit to add: the review is here.]

________________

About the blogathon banner image: Wikipedia says of it only, “Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld girl (c. 1924).”

Aside: I’m so sorry that the video’s uploader didn’t get the memo about properly sizing a clip’s aspect ratio on YouTube. This squashed look drives me crazy.

Not So Very Empty

July 19, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Empty Space Is NOT Empty,” from Veritasium (Derek Muller’s “science video blog from atoms to astrophysics!”). To my knowledge there’s no plain-old Web page to point you to, but here’s the YouTube channel, and here’s the Facebook page for those of you who are all Facebooked up.]

From whiskey river:

The Moth, the Mountains, the Rivers

Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so
briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone
longing to be ground down, to be part again of
something livelier? Who can imagine in what
heaviness the rivers remember their original
clarity?

Strange questions, yet I have spent worthwhile
time with them. And I suggest them to you also,
that your spirit grow in curiosity, that your life
be richer than it is, that we — so clever, and
ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained — are only
one design of the moving, the vivacious many.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Many people are afraid to empty their own minds lest they plunge into the Void. Ha! What they don’t realize is that their own Mind is the Void.

(Huang-po [source])

…and:

When Tesshu, the famous Japanese samurai master, was young and headstrong, he visited Master Dokuon and triumphantly announced to him the classic Buddhist teaching that all that exists is empty, and how there is really no you or me. The master listened to this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu’s head with it. This infuriated the young swordsman, and then Dokuon said calmly, “Emptiness is sure quick to show anger, is it not?”

(unattributed [but see here, among many other sources, in more or less these words])

[Read more…]

Gobsmacked by Natural History

July 16, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[Image: Cover of The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. Colors tinkered with a little to match its present look as closely as possible.]

A holiday, a small bedroom in a small house, The Boy, The Book…

I don’t know what triggered the recent obsession, but something must have. Not that I’ve ever really forgotten its object; years ago, I started referring to it this way: possibly the best book anyone ever gave me. I’m not kidding myself, or you: it may not be the best-written, the book I most wish I myself had written, even my favorite book. My original copy got swallowed up into Book Heaven long ago, and I had not (until recently) laid eyes on another copy for maybe forty or more years. But for its long-term impact on me — its staying power in my head — nothing else comes close.

It came to me as a Christmas present when I must have been, oh, maybe nine or ten years old. (It certainly feels like I’ve known it that long.) Dad had always held blue-collar jobs, and Mom — when she eventually went to work (as opposed to, haha, the sheer non-working pleasure of raising four kids) — held secretarial and clerical positions. So we never had anything you could call superficially “privileged.” But at Christmas, they annually went overboard. We got so much stuff.

In retrospect, I wonder if at that time of year they might have been just throwing things at the walls of our minds to see what would stick. I know they loved us — never once doubted it, even — but they’d had little if anything like training or orientation as parents. We were like four aliens deposited in their household: total strangers, maybe even only nominally of the same species. How could they entertain us? Would we like music, maybe? (Get them an LP!) Would we want to become homemakers, or mechanics? (Get them a toy oven, or a garage — made of finger-slashing tin in case they want to become surgeons!) Artists? (A Play-Do factory! a watercolor paints set! colored pencils! crayons and coloring books! heck, throw in a jigsaw puzzle! All in the same year!)

So this one year — again, I think somewhere between third and fifth grade — I found (among the rubble of childhood avarice) two books for me: both non-fiction, both about science. One was a large-format hardcover book, maybe 9″ x 12″, maybe fifty pages long,, entirely about astronomy. I don’t remember many specifics about that book — certainly not the title. It had no paper dust cover. The front, spine, and back were of some ultra-high-gloss material; the predominant color was deep navy blue, scattered with stars. Of all the sciences, astronomy has held my attention the most, and I think to that book must belong a great deal of the credit.

But the other book: ah, the other book. That was the unforgettable one.

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(Belated, But Timely) Midweek Music Break: Fifes and Drums

July 4, 2013 by John 3 Comments

'Yankee Doodle,' a/k/a 'Spirit of '76'

It can be hard to take the music of fifes and drums seriously. Unlike Sousa marches, which I wrote of last year at this time, these marches have never had one single person’s name — a pop-culture champion, if you will — associated with them. They never even constituted a uniquely American genre: the form sprang from the battlefields of 17th- and 18th-century Continental Europe. Yet you almost never hear it played at other times of the year, only around July 4th*.

In the logbook of human civilization, the United States hasn’t even existed that long. Nevertheless, what we commonly refer to as the Revolutionary War feels like ancient history to us. Anyone who lived through it is long dead, and the manner in which it was conducted scarcely feels like warfare. In some engagements you could probably almost count the shots fired as they were fired. Total deaths on both sides together (considering battles only, not illness, starvation, and other war-related deaths) apparently numbered “only” in four figures. It almost feels like… well, like a toy war.

The sound of fife-and-drum music, to ears accustomed to the window-rattling brass of martial celebrations, itself feels like the perfect music for a toy war. Given enough schoolchildren who know how to whistle, and given enough empty picnic tables to slap their hands on, you could pretty convincingly recreate the sound (if not the discipline) of a fife-and-drum band. Wikipedia says that the flute “sounds an octave above the written music”; even someone musically unsophisticated can see a hint of, well, unseriousness in the instrument so described.

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Invisible, Unknowable, Outside and In

June 28, 2013 by John 1 Comment

'Glass Ichthyosaur,' by Amanda Heath

[Image: “Glass Icthyosaur,” by Amanda Heath. I first
learned of this project at Scientific American‘s “Symbiartic” blog.]

From whiskey river:

A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.

(Jostein Gaarder [source])

…and:

It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the connections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect.

(Robert Musil [source])

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The Waking Moment

June 14, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Because of childhood associations, all I can think of when I see this is something like, “Come ON. It’s Saturday morning! Can I watch cartoons yet? Can I can I can I?!?”]

From whiskey river:

The Gate

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This — holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

Annunciation

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does —
And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,
as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me
only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

(Marie Howe [source])

…and:

A lifetime may not be long enough to attune ourselves fully to the harmony of the universe. But just to become aware that we can resonate with it — that alone can be like waking up from a dream.

(David Steindl-Rast [source])

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In the Right Light, Nothing Is Not Worth Looking At

May 31, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: small portion of an infographic of intersecting timelines from films and television shows which feature time travel. (Click to enlarge.) The bright yellow line is that of time itself, and the lines which crisscross it represent the individual movies and shows. (No Dr. Who, though: presumably it would complicate things too much.) Lines are color-coded according to the means of time travel: bright blue for alien technology, red for time machine, and so on. The gray line terminating at a red dot, roughly in the center, is labeled “ULTRA PARADOX! Marty McFly meets the Star Trek crew and they both battle The Terminator.”
For more information, see the Information Is Beautiful site — especially, follow the link there to the
“how we made this image” page.]

From whiskey river:

You can’t understand, change, or improve something if you don’t even see it.

Start with looking. Open! Open! Open!

Then tilt your head and look again. Deeper…

Look from every angle. Don’t let one view satisfy your curiosity.

There is a beautiful wisdom found in seeing from a universal point of view.

(Danielle Marie Crume (“Dani”) [source])

…and:

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act — there’s a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

(James Turrell [source])

…and:

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure —
your life —
what would do for you?

(Mary Oliver [source])

[Read more…]

Story Up My Sleeve #22 / Midweek Music Break: “Stan,” by Eminem

May 22, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background post. It’s also the third weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]

I admit it: I know almost nothing about rap. So much of the content seems to be about issues I can’t connect to, for one reason or another, and I’ve possibly just spent too much time listening to melody to care that much about rhythm exclusively. (After a moment’s pause, I realize that you can lump these two “reasons” together as the Geezer Defense.)

Anyhow, as little as I know about rap in general, so much less do I know about any given rap performer. Eminem has certainly made himself hard to ignore, though. And as I worked through various online lists of story songs (it’s a popular blog and Q-and-A forum topic), I kept coming across references to this number. The title character is not just a fan of the narrator, Eminem, but a fan ultimately obsessed to the point of danger: to himself, to his girlfriend, to his baby she’s carrying. From his room, wallpapered with Eminem’s concert and publicity photos, he keeps composing rambling bipolar letters to his idol, growing ever more frustrated that he never gets a reply. The tale ends (as story songs tend to) in tragedy and irony, as Eminem finally sits down to write a return letter — only to realize that the guy he’s writing to is the very fan who’d recently driven off a bridge (with his pregnant girlfriend locked screaming in the trunk of the car), leaving behind for Eminem a melodramatic, delusional taped message.

Omitting some of the more violent imagery and language, this sanitized version of the song and video clocks in at around 25% shorter than the full eight-minute epic. (That version is also on YouTube; I haven’t watched it, but apparently — judging from the comments there — the audio in the longer one, too, is bleeped no less heavy-handedly than this one.) The lyrics I’ve linked to below, though, are as far as I know the full and unedited ones. Favorite moment: when Stan, speaking into the tape recorder while he drives, suddenly realizes that if he dies in a crash he won’t be able to mail the thing to Eminem. (To me, this hints that he doesn’t really mean to kill himself and his girlfriend, and maybe just drives off the bridge in panicky indecision rather than deliberation.)

The video takes the tell-the-story-literally approach, with some artful touches in photography, lighting, and effects, but nothing very much like moody symbolism or implication. Actor Devon Sawa plays the Stan character; British singer-songwriter Dido, whose song “Thank You” is sampled for the chorus, takes the role of Stan’s girlfriend.

[Lyrics] (explicit)