I can relate
by chuckofish
“I’ve been around, well – all right, I might not have been around, but, I’ve been nearby.”
–Mary Richards
dual personalities
Tag: quotes
June 4, 2013
May 31, 2013
You can see it in the trees; You can smell it in the breeze
by chuckofish
June is bustin’ out all over!
Look around! Look around! Look around!
The feelin’ is gettin’ so intense,
That the young Virginia creepers
Hev been huggin’ the bejeepers
Outa all the mornin’ glories on the fence!
This may be true in New England, where Carousel takes place, but sadly, things have been bustin’ out all over our flyover state for a month already. Indeed, everything starts to droop here in June. The peonies have gone by as have the irises. They were lovely.
We put off as long as we can turning on the old AC, but finally the heat gets to be too much for us, and we seal off the house. Sigh. It won’t be long now.
Oh well. I have a new calendar page for the new month–with sparkly fishes!
I have roses inside.
And roses outside.
Plus…
It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside. (Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, 1941)
Have a good weekend! A dear friend is visiting our flyover town from the east coast this weekend and my old man is celebrating his 40th high school reunion, so this introvert will be working overtime.
Happy Birthday to Clint Eastwood who turns 83 today! I do not think I own one of his movies (except a VHS copy of Paint Your Wagon!), but if I did, I’d watch one! Here he is singing “I Talk to the Trees”. I spent a good deal of 8th grade daydreaming about him. Can you blame me?
May 30, 2013
Tout va bien
by chuckofish
“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.”
–William F. Buckley
May 29, 2013
Dissolved into something complete and great
by chuckofish
I have gushed previously about Willa Cather on this blog here. I am about to do so again.
My dual personality gave me the newly published Selected Letters of Willa Cather for my birthday last month. Cather had left adamant instructions to her executors that her private correspondence not be published or quoted. “The editors of the new collection, Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, acknowledge in the introduction that this publication flies in the face of Cather’s instructions, as set forth by a will that partially expired in 2011. Still, they believe that publication of her letters will prove invaluable for her legacy, arguing that ‘these lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation.'” (Melville House)
Oh well, I have been enthusiastically reading them. (Personally I think she was very depressed at the end of her life, and that is why she put those particular orders into effect.) I already knew from her fiction, that she was wonderfully talented and deep, but from her letters we get a real sense of Willa as a person. We see what gets her excited and the things that annoy her. We see her feelings hurt by mean-spirited reviewers and her confidence boosted by the encouraging words of worthy people.
“Weeks ago I got such a heart-warming letter from a former president of the Missouri Pacific, Edwin Winter, who as a young man helped to carry the U.P. across Nebraska, and who built the bridge over Dale Creek canyon–the first bridge, which was of timber! He asked if he could come to see me, and on Friday he came. Such a man! all that one’s proudest of in one’s country. He picked the book [My Antonia] up in his club and sat right down and wrote me the most beautiful of letters. I would rather have the admiration of one man like that than sell a thousand books…”
–from a letter to her brother Roscoe Cather, 1919
She loved her family and friends. She never married, and despite what some people who look at everything through the “queer lens” imagine, I think she would have liked to. But she was a passionate artist first and foremost. Had she married and had children, we might not have the wonderful books which are her legacy.
I also read Death Comes for the Archbishop, which she considered to be her best work. It is awesome. It tells the story of two well-meaning and devout French priests who encounter an entrenched Spanish-Mexican clergy whom they are sent to supplant after the United States acquired New Mexico in the Mexican-American War. She is very respectful of the Catholic Church (more so probably than a Catholic would be), and I am happy to say, she is a big fan of our old family friend Kit Carson, who plays a minor role in the novel.
“This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him. Out of the hardships of his boyhood–from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and desperate characters–he had preserved a clean sense of honour and a compassionate heart.”
Through the 1910s and 1920s, Cather was firmly established as a major American writer, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours. By the 1930s, however, critics began to dismiss her as a “romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present.” Critics such as Granville Hicks accused Cather of failing to confront “contemporary life as it is.” The same thing happened to Thornton Wilder, you may recall, and many other writers who are still read today (whereas Granville Hicks is long forgotten). It is good to see Willa Cather appreciated again. I agree with Wallace Stevens who wrote toward the end of her life: “We have nothing better than she is. She takes so much pains to conceal her sophistication that it is easy to miss her quality.” I am so grateful to have finally discovered her!
On a personal note, I was interested to read that one of her favorite nieces graduated from Smith College. I was gratified to learn that the college bestowed an honorary degree on Willa, the year her niece graduated.
Someday I would like to visit her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
WILLA CATHER
December 7, 1873-April 24, 1947
THE TRUTH AND CHARITY OF HER GREAT
SPIRIT WILL LIVE ON IN THE WORK
WHICH IS HER ENDURING GIFT TO HER
COUNTRY AND ALL ITS PEOPLE.
“…that is happiness; to be dissolved
into something complete and great.”
From My Antonia
May 24, 2013
The toughest man south of the Picketwire
by chuckofish
Sunday is John Wayne’s birthday–so you know what I’ll be doing to celebrate!
Marion Mitchell Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979) was born in Winterset, Iowa, but his family relocated to California when he was four years old.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him “Little Duke” because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred “Duke” to “Marion”, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.
He attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. He played football for the 1924 champion Glendale High School team. I think I read somewhere that he was president of his senior class. Of course he was. According to Wikipedia, he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted. Well, their loss. Instead he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities.
He found work at local film studios when he lost his football scholarship to USC as a result of a bodysurfing accident. Initially working for the Fox Film Corporation, he mostly appeared in small bit parts. His first leading role came in the widescreen epic The Big Trail (1930).
A star is born. Hello, John Wayne.
His career rose to further heights in 1939, with John Ford’s Stagecoach making him an instant superstar.
Wayne would go on to star in 142 pictures.
My “Top Ten”–make that Eleven–Best Films of John Wayne would include:
Stagecoach (1939)
3 Godfathers (1948)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
Rio Grande (1950)
The Quiet Man (1952)
The Searchers (1956)
Rio Bravo (1959)
The Horse Soldiers (1959)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
El Dorado (1966)
True Grit (1969)
Eight of these were directed by John Ford. What a great team! Has there been another like it in film history? I think not.
Three of these would be on my “Ten Best Movies of All Time” List.
There are so many other really good movies which do not make the top eleven, but are eminently entertaining. Consider:
Tall in the Saddle (1944)
Fort Apache (1948)
Red River (1948)
Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
Hondo (1953)
Blood Alley (1955)
Legend of the Lost (1957)
The Comancheros (1961
Hatari (1962)
How the West Was Won (1962)
Donovan’s Reef (1963)
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)
The War Wagon (1967)
The Cowboys (1972)
The Shootist (1976)
John Wayne is great at all ages, in all decades of his stardom. I contend that even a bad movie with John Wayne is entertaining and worth watching. And I always feel better after I’ve watched one.
I grew up watching John Wayne Theater on Saturday/Sunday afternoons. My parents were both John Wayne fans so we always went to the movies to see his newest film. The first “new” John Wayne movie I went to see at the movies was El Dorado. My mother was back east visiting her dying mother, so our father took my dual personality and me to see it. I’m sure if my mother had been home, we would have been deemed “too young”, but my father wanted to go, so he took us along. It was the summer after fifth grade (second grade for my sister!). It was so great. When I went home I looked up the poem “El Dorado” by Edgar Allan Poe and memorized it. I still know it by heart. Quelle nerd, I know.
When I was a graduate student at the College of William and Mary, John Wayne came to town to tape an appearance on the Perry Como Christmas Special. It was late in 1978. Completely out of character, I went down to Colonial Williamsburg, armed with my Kodak Instamatic, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Great Man. My guardian angel was with me that day. I ran into my hero coming out of one of the colonial shops. A small crowd was forming but people were respectful. I snapped a picture (where is it?!)–he was standing a few feet away. I started to cry. I could cry now writing about it. It’s silly, but it was just so great. He was very tall. He was kind and patient and smiled at everyone, even though he clearly was not well. He died the following June.
John Wayne’s enduring status as an iconic American was formally recognized by the U.S. government by awarding him the two highest civilian decorations. He was recognized by the United States Congress on May 26, 1979, when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Hollywood figures and American leaders from across the political spectrum, including Maureen O’Hara, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Mike Frankovich, Katharine Hepburn, General and Mrs. Omar Bradley, Gregory Peck, Robert Stack, James Arness, and Kirk Douglas, testified to Congress of the merit and deservedness of this award.
On June 9, 1980, Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter, at whose inaugural ball Wayne had appeared “as a member of the loyal opposition,” as Wayne described it in his speech to the gathering.
So I know what I’ll be doing on Sunday–honoring old John Wayne by watching some of his movies. What is your favorite John Wayne movie?
Here’s a nice tribute TCM did with Harry Carey, Jr. (By the way, they are showing a whole slew of John Wayne films on Sunday starting at 6:45 a.m.–all war movies.)
May 22, 2013
“Maybe you’re right, pal.” “Oh, I’m eternally right. But what good does it do me?”
by chuckofish
Oh, Leslie Howard. I still love you after all these years.
Did you see The Petrified Forest (1936) last night? It was on TCM*. I have been a fan of LH since high school when I first saw this movie on TV. One of the quotes on my senior page was from this play/movie:
“I had a vague idea that I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean and perhaps drown in it. But that depends.”
Boy, if you put that on your senior page these days, you’d be sent to the guidance counselor’s office for sure. But back then, if they even noticed, no one thought twice about it. Just an angst-y teenager, whatever.
* Full disclosure: I recorded it, because DWTS finale was on.
P.S. Kellie Pickler won the mirror ball on Dancing With the Stars! This made my day. My week. What is wrong with me?
Hat tip to daughter #1’s instagram feed. Hello, Cynthia McFadden.
May 21, 2013
What the hell happened?*
by chuckofish
I am closing in on the final pages of The Sand Pebbles. This 597-page novel is really wonderful and I highly recommend it. Written by Richard McKenna, it centers on an American gunboat on the Yangtze River in 1926. The author completed it in May, 1962, just in time to enter it in the 1963 Harper Prize Novel Contest. Not only was it picked over 544 other entries for the $10,000 first prize and accepted for publication by Harper & Row, but it was also chosen as the following January’s Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It was also serialized in the Saturday Evening Post for the three issues from November 17, 1962 through December 1, 1962.
The author’s life story is not the usual back-of-the-book blurb. Enlisting in the Navy in 1931 at the age of 18, he served until 1953 when he retired after 22 years of service as a machinist’s mate. He then entered the University of North Carolina. He received his degree in English in 1956, married one of the university librarians and settled down to write. Sadly, he died in 1964 at the age of 51, but one feels that to have written his magnus opus and seen it published to acclaim is a great thing. He must have been an extraordinary man.
I am reminded of what John Steineck said about his own East of Eden: “I put everything I knew into that book.” One feels this is the case with Richard McKenna. The Sand Pebbles is full of truth. The author pours everything he has into this well-crafted, well-written story of a man struggling to understand himself and the world he finds himself in.
Jake Holman, the hero of the story, is a great character with whom many can relate:
They could command you what you had to do, he thought, but they could not command you how you had to feel about it, although they tried. So you did things their way and you felt about them your own way, and you did not let them know how you felt. That way you kept the two things separate and you could stand it.
One imagines that there is a whole lot of Richard McKenna in Jake. Toward the end of the book he describes Jake’s thoughts about Shirley, the missionary teacher: “He kept her deliberately on the edge of his dream. He would get books from her and read them and later they would talk about them. They would be friends, but she would still be just a teacher.” One can’t help thinking of the author’s courtship of the UNC librarian.
The movie, which was released in 1966, is one of my favorites and Steve McQueen is perfectly cast as Jake Holman.
Any excuse to insert a picture of Steve McQueen in the blog is a good one.
The screenwriter did take many liberties with the story, however, which is a necessity I suppose with such a long, detailed book. In the book the sailors (the “sand pebbles”) are good guys deep down and not all are the low-lifes portrayed in the movie. The captain, also, is a good guy and not the duty-obsessed, blinders-wearing martinet portrayed in the film.
Perhaps it is better that Richard McKenna never saw it.
*P.S. No one says this in the book. Instead, Jake says, “Go to hell, you bastards!” The book is always better.
May 16, 2013
Now learn
by chuckofish
“Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.” And she was filled with happiness like a girl at this new proof that the traits she lived for were everywhere, that the world was ready.”
–Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
May 15, 2013
He said it
by chuckofish
“The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity; others for the sake of lucre or gain.”
–Martin Luther, Table Talk (1569)
Sadly, four hundred and fifty years later, this is still the case. I can hardly bear to go into a big bookstore these days. It is too depressing to see the mess that is produced.
However, there are still some bright lights out there. I see that there is a new Fred Vargas mystery coming out in June.
I do love Commissaire Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris’s seventh arrondissement!
And there is a new Alexander McCall Smith #1 Ladies Detective Agency book coming out in November.
I like the title of this new one!
Hilary Mantel is working feverishly to finish the third and final installment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy–one fears before she is too ill to write. Ugh.
Anything else I can look forward to?
May 10, 2013
The citadel of the family*
by chuckofish
Mother’s Day approaches. This is a bittersweet holiday for me, since it has been 25 years since I had a mother with whom to celebrate.
But the blogosphere has been a-buzz with “What has your mother taught you?” posts, and I think it is still a valuable exercise to consider this question. And, of course, I do love lists. So here are some of the things that my mother taught me:
Keep it simple.
Holidays call for parties. Parties are always best when there are favors.
When you act like a lady, people treat you like a lady.
Going out for lunch is the best.
Going for a drive can help you take your mind off your problems.
Talk to children like adults.
Children like routine and boundaries, but try to be spontaneous once in awhile.
Furniture should not “match” and “suites” of furniture are indeed tacky. If you have antiques, they will not all be from the same period. It is okay to mix it up a little!
Hugging is good.
Children owe their parents nothing. They did not ask to be born. (She was the opposite of a Jewish mother.) Of course, this attitude makes you realize you owe your parents everything.
She was a bit of a snob, but she hated the expression “white trash”. No person is trash.
You never really know a person until you’ve walked around in their shoes for awhile.
Be Kind. Be kind. Be kind.
She must have been disappointed by my mean-girl persona at times, but I think she understood that it was a jungle at my private school. I remember once I complained about the girl who sat in the assigned desk in front of me (in first grade no less), who would turn around and put her “fat arm” on my desk. My mother said, “My heart bleeds for her.” I was surprised. There was no sympathy for me who had to put up with this unappealing girl. Of course, I immediately felt ashamed of my intolerance and I still cringe at the memory. I never liked that girl though.
My mother was not perfect and she taught me a few things which I had to un-learn over the years as well. But on the whole, she was a truly wonderful mother and I miss her every day.
What did you learn from your mother?
Here’s a lovely last-minute gift idea list from La Dolce Vita blog. Good ideas, but, no, I do not want to go see Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby with Leo.
Happy Mother’s Day and read this quote–It kind of says it all:
*”She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
dual personalities 