Archives for 2004

– Cinetrix has great links today on movie taglines
and The Triplets of Belleville.

– The notorious
Jennifer Howard is guest-blogging this week at Bookslut.

– Chicha blogged the Oscars.

– Finally, BuzzMachine has some really interesting new stats on blog use (plus a link to the original Pew Internet study from which they came).

“‘He brought it on himself. After all, he’s only got what he deserved.’

“‘I think on the whole we all get what we deserve,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t prevent its being rather horrible.'”

W. Somerset Maugham, “The Lotus Eater”

“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. Someone who is translating into English a German novel, the hero of which is named Heinrich, will leave the name as is; he will not Anglicize it into Henry.

“The early epic poets, composing for an audience with the same mythology, heroic legends, topography as themselves, had half their poetic work done for them. Later, when the poet’s audience became a cultured elite, their cultural background was still the same as his own: Milton, for example, could assume that any name taken from Greek and Roman mythology or from the Bible would be familiar to his readers. A modern poet, on the other hand, can hardly use a single proper name without wondering whether he ought not to footnote it. In 1933 I wrote a poem in which the name Garbo appeared, assuming, I think rightly, that at that time her name was a household word. When, after the War, Mr. Richard Hoggart included the poem in a selection he had made from my work, he felt it necessary to gloss the name.”

W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

The New Republic has reprinted Delmore Schwartz’s colorful and moving remembrance of Wallace Stevens, first published in the magazine in August 1955, a few weeks after Stevens’ death.

In 1936 Stevens read his poems for the first time at Harvard–it was probably the first time he had ever read his poetry in public–and the occasion was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event: precious because he had been an undergraduate and a poet at Harvard some thirty-seven years before and had not returned since then, in his own person, although he had often gone to the Yale-Harvard games incognito. Before and after reading each poem, Stevens spoke of the nature of poetry, a subject which naturally obsessed him: the least sound counts, he said, the least sound and the least syllable. His illustration of this observation was wholly characteristic: he told of how he had wakened that week after midnight and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house. He was listening, as in his lifelong vigil of awareness, for such phrases as this one, describing autumn leaves: “The skreak and skritter of evening gone”; no single one of thousands of such inventions is enough to suggest his genius for experience and language.

After his comment, Stevens returned to his typescript, prepared and bound for the occasion with a fabulous elegance which also was characteristic: but an old Cambrdige lady, holding an ear trumpet aloft, and dressed in a style which must have been chic at Rutherford Hayes’ inauguration, shouted out, hoarse and peremptory as crows, that she must ask Mr. Stevens to speak loudly and clearly, loudly and clearly, if you please. She might just as well have been shouting at President Hayes. Stevens continued in a very low voice, reading poems which were written in that bravura style, that extravagant, luxurious, misunderstood rhetoric which is as passionate as the most excited Elizabethan blank verse. And throughout the reading, although Stevens was extremely nervous and constrained, this showed only as a rigid impassivity which, since it might have expressed a very different state of mind, made his feeling invisible; nevertheless, as such readings became more frequent in recent years, it was impossible to persuade Stevens that no one save himself perceived his overwhelming nervousness, just as, when the first reading ended, Stevens said to the teacher who had introduced him: “I wonder what the boys at the office would think of this?” The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the boys were those who knew him as a vice-president, lawyer, and the most solid of citizens.

No one who thought a poet looked pale, distracted, unkempt and unbarbered was likely to recognize Stevens: he was a physical giant, robust, red-faced, and his large round head suggested not only a banker and judge, but Jupiter. He said then and after that the boys would hardly be more shocked to discover him the secret head of an opium ring–and although I would guess that in this instance he may have mistaken tact for ignorance–the important point is that he felt sure that this was how others regarded a poet. He had written poetry for many years a kind of “secret vice;” and he told many stories about himself of the same kind, resorting to that self-irony which often marks his poetic style.

Where many commentators simply register Stevens’ insurance gig as a gross incongruity and leave it at that, Schwartz does a nice job of showing how Stevens’ unpoetlike bearing and work life, necessitating his cultivation of a separate solitude for his writing, were actually essential to his greatness as a poet.

If you’re interested in more on Stevens, see this excerpt from a Helen Vendler lecture, where she works the Keats-Stevens angle. Vendler shows that Keats is more than just an influence on “Sunday Morning”–his great ode on death, “To Autumn,” lives in Stevens’ poem in ghostlike form.

Vendler pulls these lines from the last stanza of “Sunday Morning”:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;

And, in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

Ambiguous undulations as they sink

Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Compare, from Keats:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats wrote his poem after a Sunday morning walk in September 1819.

For those of you who’ve been wondering what the orange “XML” button in the top module of the right-hand column is for, go here to read an AP wire story in which all is made manifest.

“Promise is the capacity for letting people down.”

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

I’m not going to be watching the Oscars tonight. I rarely do–awards ceremonies bore me stiff, though I’m sometimes interested in the results–and in any case I expect to resume work on my Balanchine book as soon as I get home from an off-Broadway matinee. No doubt various actors will say and do stupid things, and no doubt I’ll read about them tomorrow.

I expect to be working on the Balanchine book very intensely for most of this week and next (as well as entertaining Our Girl this coming weekend, about which you will read in this space). Please don’t be vexed if I don’t blog as much as usual, or am slow in answering your mail. Which reminds me to tell you that we got a lot of e-mail in response to our “Reading Habits” survey, and I’m looking forward to going through it as soon as I get a couple more chapters wrapped up.

Apropos of the Oscars, I watched a movie yesterday that I hadn’t seen for years, Annie Hall, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies (which is broadcasting all of the best-picture Oscar winners) and my trusty digital video recorder. I saw Annie Hall in the theater in 1977, back when I was in college, and found it fresh and disarming. I saw it again on TV in 1985 or so, by which time I’d already started to have second thoughts about Woody Allen (Stardust Memories brought me to my senses), and was startled by how poorly it had aged. In light of the fuss that my recent throwaway posting about Allen kicked up, I thought it might be worth revisiting a film I once loved, in order to see whether and how two decades’ worth of additional hindsight had changed my mind.

Alas, I found even less to like about Annie Hall this time around. Such innovations as the subtextual subtitles, the animated sequence, even the cameo by Marshall McLuhan now strike me as cutesy. Far more exasperating, though, is Allen’s both-sides-of-the-street portrayal of his neuroses, which he pretends to mock while actually reveling in them, proving as they do that he is not as other men. On the surface, Annie Hall purports to tell the tale of how his peculiarities alienate the woman he loves, but its true subject matter is how their relationship actually makes Diane Keaton a better person. I suppose this must have been the first on-screen manifestation of Allen’s Pygmalion complex, which in Manhattan would explicitly reveal itself as an obsession with malleable young women. The trouble with such fixations, of course, is that even though the obsessed one grows inexorably older, the objects of his affection stay the same age–and we all know where that leads.

David Thomson is usually so insightful that I was surprised to see that he excepted Annie Hall from the scathing criticism of Allen’s work found in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

In his films he seems so averse to acting yet so skittish about real confession that he risks dealing in self-glorification by neurosis…. Allen’s development in the eighties, his rate of work, and the sophistication of narrative were all seemingly devoted to ideas and attitudes against the gain of that decade. Yet Allen’s audience relied on urban yuppies, and his films only fostered that group’s self-satisfaction….He has been a Chaplin hero for the chattering classes, yet he is trapped by something like Chaplin’s neurotic vanity. No director works so hard to appear at a loss.

That’s Woody Allen in a nutshell–and it’s all foreshadowed in Annie Hall.

Infinitely more to my liking was the hair-raisingly sociopathic Ripley’s Game, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. I saw it because of Anthony Lane’s review in a recent issue of The New Yorker, and I agree with every word:

“Ripley’s Game,” directed by Liliana Cavani, sees the welcome return of Tom Ripley. On his previous visit to our screen, he was played by Matt Damon, but that milky substitute can now be put behind us. Ladies and gentlemen, the award for Best Ripley–the deathless bringer of death, a man with a mine shaft where his moral sense should be, and a hero so beloved of Highsmith that she gave him five books to himself–goes to Mr. John Malkovich. The moment that he appears onscreen, you think, Of course: that is Ripley. Highsmith groupies might find him too old, but I see Ripley as being of any age–no less devilish at eighty than he was at twenty-one, and as comfortable in the eighteenth century, perhaps, as he is in the twenty-first. I have no family tree to hand, but, were Malkovich’s Ripley proved to be a direct descendant of his Vicomte de Valmont, in “Dangerous Liaisons,” I would not be remotely surprised. The blood of both characters is rich in the patient scorn of the cultivated; consider our first sight of Malkovich, in Cavani’s film, as he stands perfectly still in a Berlin square and gives the impression, as he has done throughout his movie career, of posing for an invisible sculptor.

Ripley is in Germany to sell some Old Master drawings. He is not a dealer but a persuasive go-between, and his outfit–long dark coat and beret–is the uniform of a modern centaur, with the body of an entrepreneur and the head of an artist. The sale does not go well, and Ripley interrupts his courteous discussion of Guercino to pick up a poker from the fireplace and beat a man to death. This is the only shocking, as opposed to gruelling or mock-glamorous, act of violence that I have witnessed onscreen in the past year, because it flashes out of nowhere, like lightning across a clear sky. Ripley has the same frustrations as you and I, but deals with them quite differently, and in so doing rebukes our inhibitions. Where you or I would say, “God, I could have killed him,” because some guy cut in and took our parking space, Ripley really would kill him, and call it a job well done. But that is not the strangest thing about him. The oddity of Ripley is that he likes to see others do harm as well. He leads them into temptation and, in a parody of human companionship, lends them a helping hand. Although he would never admit as much, he is bored and even lonely, and that is why “Ripley’s Game,” which could have been a freak show, seems more like a portrait of evil making friends….

Alas, this superb film will not be released theatrically in the United States, but it’s coming out on DVD next month, and it also pops up from time to time on the Independent Film Channel, which is where I saw it the other day. One way or another, catch it as soon as you can.

Gotta go. Have a nice week. I’ll poke my head in as often as possible.

“Half the controversies in the world are verbal ones; and could they be brought to a plain issue, they would be brought to a prompt termination. Parties engaged in them would then perceive, either that in substance they agreed together, or that their difference was one of first principles.”

John Henry Newman, “Faith and Reason,
Contrasted as Habits of Mind”