Archives for July 2013

Julia Flyte, is that you?

Teresa Jungman

 

Apparently… And a few other characters besides.

 

Al who now?

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First time as tragedy, second time as farce. (General grossness alert.)

How the heck did I miss this?

Miss Ellen interviews Mr. Matthew … and does crackerjack job of it.

Fleshpots

6a00d8341bfc3053ef0147e0b14b08970b-800wi Got a call from the Lansing Priest the other day.

“Hello?”

“Fleshpots.”

“Well, yes.”

“That was in the reading yesterday. I thought of you.”

The discovery of the moral universe?

Sasha Weiss reviews Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.:

We’re also shown the cruel hilarity of writing a comedy of manners in a time and place where manners have eroded: What is the proper etiquette for Nate, Waldman asks, when he’s gone on a few lacklustre dates with a woman and she becomes pregnant? They decide together that an abortion is the only solution (and it becomes clear that Nate feels no spark of romance), he dutifully accompanies her to the clinic and, after keeping her company with movies and takeout that evening, calls only once, to see how she’s doing, but not again. When Nate runs into this woman a year later, and she sputters some furious words at him, how guilty should he feel for behaving more or less straightforwardly? Should he have assumed that a successful woman, with a large social network, really needed his continued attention and ministrations?

With her eye for social folly in the streets and restaurants of New York, Waldman resembles Edith Wharton. But where the manners and hierarchies of Wharton’s world are highly codified (and the scandal in her books is the arrival of someone who tries to break them), Waldman’s characters are set adrift in a world without clear rules, and they torment themselves trying to figure out if they’ve in fact violated some ill-defined conventions of courtship and sexual etiquette.

Brideshead Transplanted

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The New York Times real estate section is currently featuring a Majorcan farm dating to the 13th century. A few of the heartbreaking details about the $5 million property:

“The 8,000-square-foot manor house is the centerpiece of the 40-acre property, which has been owned by the same family since 1790.”

“In a nook off one of the living rooms, right, is a small chapel where Mass  has been celebrated weekly for centuries.”

“[A] dwelling, used historically for baking bread, is one of several unrenovated outbuildings included in the sale.”

“An ancient reservoir helps with irrigation.”

Dorian is coming….

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She’s coming fast and hard with vengeful spite:
You’d better ready yourself now
As she prepares to sweep
The beaches bare,
Her eye
Will spy
Most anywhere
The rapey, killy creep
Who dares to scare her brood – and blow,
This mother will, with ever-loving might!

Miss Ellen requests

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“I heard one of the other people, a young woman who stood in line ahead of me, remark to him that along with Bob Dylan, Percy was her biggest hero. That got him out of his chair to give her a big hug.”

The original and the best.

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Elmer T. Lee, creator of Blanton’s Bourbon, has died.

Declining demand for bourbon, which began in the early ’70s and continued into the ’90s, was attributed to various causes, including recreational drug use, the mass marketing of beer, and the rising popularity of gin and vodka among cocktail drinkers.

With the work force at Buffalo Trace shrinking steadily — from 250 when he started in 1949, it would reach a low of 50 in the early 1990s — Mr. Lee and his staff selected their best bourbon whiskey, put it in decanters with attention-getting horse-and-jockey bottle stoppers, and shipped it for retailing at about $30 a bottle, compared with an average price of $10 to $15 for a regular bottle.

The audience gathered slowly. But once it arrived, said Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, the premium audience was devoted. “We had to have cases and cases of it every Friday, or else,” said Mr. Gregory, who as a University of Kentucky student worked part time in a liquor store in the mid-’80s.

A Jew, a WASP, and a Catholic walk into the publishing business…

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Jonathan Galassi comments on Farrar Straus & Giroux:

It all began in 1945, when Roger W. Straus Jr., a brash young New Yorker fresh out of the Navy, decided to apply his talent for public relations to starting a publishing house. Straus was the black sheep in a powerful “Our Crowd” family with a burning desire to make good on his own. Roger was no littérateur, but he loved the glamour and excitement of books. He was destined to be the last of a string of Jewish “gentleman” publishers, including Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, and Donald Klopfer, who broke into a Wasp-controlled business and ended up dominating it.

An aristocrat with powerful connections (his uncle Harry Frank Guggenheim was the publisher of Newsday; Peggy Guggenheim was a cousin), Roger was a rank newcomer to publishing and knew he needed an editor with a name to give him credibility. So he asked John Farrar, recently cashiered from the Wasp house of Farrar & Rinehart, to come in with him. But it was the arrival of Robert ­Giroux that made Farrar, Straus & ­Giroux, as it came to be called, into a significant player in the business.

So, so tickled that I got to pay a visit to those offices once. Also the offices of the Wylie agency, which is mentioned in the piece. Both on the same day! All it cost me was a couple of bottles of really good Petite Sirah and all my literary hopes and dreams. But that last part came later.

Dead to me

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The AV Club has been in something of a tailspin since most of its senior staff took off for The Dissolve. But when you give the Criterion release of Babette’s Feast a C+ and lead with a graf like this…

Anyone looking put themselves into a quick coma for some reason should consider sitting down and watching a lot of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winners from the ’80s and ’90s. Most of these films aren’t bad, by any means, but AMPAS tends to be drawn—even today, but especially back then—to blandly inspirational period pieces rather than to the truly vital work being done all over the world. Babette’s Feast, which won the award in 1988, exemplifies the kind of foreign film the Academy loves: tasteful, literary, unchallenging, faintly dull.

Guys, look at this cool old magazine I just found!

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Join the fray…

USA. New York. 1950.

Where they discuss the not-so-usual suspects – including you and you and you and you and and you and you and…!

 

Today in Kitchen Cleaning

The Seashell

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La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes. – Rimbaud

The scalloped curve of the empty seashell
Is barren and barely beauty reaching as far
As it can before all is flushed from heart and soul –
O, the covetous rush! And the cavernous lust

Becomes a mere apology for the senses,
Disengaged, amused, parsed out, abused,
Passed on, withdrawn… The whorling spires yield
A frank anatomy of bone, a fluid flesh

Itself shedding finer, more erotic robes
Once keel’s draft is drawn. Anonymity preserves
The graveyard of bowed mastheads and nude figureheads.
The shabby rag-bagged baggage of pornography

Adorns the wavering sea with weird images.
A curse of doldrums and stale maps promise nothing else.
The compass needle begins its spin, its long drawn
Curvature reminiscent of earth and sea and…

Hybrids and homunculi…Succubi and sarcophagi…
Monsters and maelstroms… Man is born threadbare,
Awash upon a beach of strange allegories,
Marooned, nearly naked, but unable to resist

The temptation to dream of footprints in the sand,
Conscious of his mind roaring in a conch’s crook.

Catholicish directors…

I feel that if I choose to believe the Perron family’s story as fact, I also feel that I have to accept the entire Catholic faith as fact, too.
Well, let me ask you: A lot of people just go along with “The Exorcist,” right? And that is an extremely faith-based movie. But even non-believers just kind of go along with it, just because they love the film. I guess what I say with this particular movie is, well, I’m not here to ask you to believe in what they believe, so to speak. But this is who the characters are and this is what makes them tick. And this is the journey they’ve gone on.

The Conversation between Eastern Westerns and Western Westerns Continues

Ford speaks to Kurosawa who speaks to Eastwood (and of course Leone) and Kurosawa also speaks to Sturges – and now Eastwood speaks to Lee Sang-il

TAC – London campus?

To think I could have gone further east – and closer to the source – if only I’d waited 25 years…