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I got the hydrogen peroxide blues
1. Behold the table of contents for Spelling the Hours, the bonus chapbook for An Alphabet of Embers. One of my contributions reprints the poem I wrote in 2011 for Christopher Morcom and Alan Turing; the other is an original poem about the classical philosopher Axiothea of Phlios. Other writers offer poems about doctors, calculators, physicists, astronomers, illustrators, mathematicians. I'm looking forward to the anthology immensely.
(It is Turing's hundred-and-third birthday. Have a paper about the contemporary applications of his work on morphogenesis.)
2. I am presently reading Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), a partly autobiographical novel about growing up in a dysfunctional Galician Jewish family in Brooklyn in the 1910's. I'm about a quarter of the way in. So far, it's great. Among other things, it's an intensely verbal, vocal novel written by someone whose first language was Yiddish and who made a fascinating choice to foreground it. I find the eye dialect hard going, but I love Roth's convention of representing Yiddish with grammatically and orthographically correct and eloquent English, while English itself is a bashed-up half-spelled pidgin that looks more alien and less comprehensible than the ostensible foreign language. Everybody sounds clumsier and more limited in English; even the kids who are adopting it as their primary language have to fumble their way through it, while some of their parents are nearly silenced. Laurence Yep did something similar in his Golden Mountain Chronicles by representing Chinese as ordinary speech and all English words and dialogue in italics, but it didn't result in this degree of estrangement. For that alone I would like Roth, but it doesn't hurt that his prose style also gives us passages like this:
They were silent. On the dock below, the brown hawsers had been slipped over the mooring posts, and the men on the lower deck now dragged them dripping from the water. Bells clanged. The ship throbbed. Startled by the hoarse bellow of her whistle, the gulls wheeling before her prow rose with slight creaking cry from the green water, and as she churned away from the stone quay skimmed across her path on indolent, scimitar wing. Behind the ship the white wake that stretched to Ellis Island grew longer, raveling wanly into melon-green. On one side curved the low drab Jersey coast-line, the spars and masts on the waterfront fringing the sky; on the other side was Brooklyn, flat, water-towered; the horns of the harbor. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and his mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.
That's from the prologue, the only section of the book not to be written from the tight third-person perspective of David Schearl, aged six when the story starts. Something else Roth is very good at depicting are the ways in which the world is desperately strange to a small child—adults most of all, but other children can be just as bewildering and inimical with their games, rituals, half-adult secrets; I don't read a lot of novels that remind me both of Phyllis Gotlieb's "Ordinary, Moving" and Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1949), all right? I shall endeavor to report back when I have read further. Right now, I'm just really impressed.
3. I learned this afternoon that James Horner died. If I want to watch a film in his memory, it turns out that my options for movies he scored include not only Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Dresser (1983), and Aliens (1986)—all of which I'd watch again in a heartbeat—but An American Tail (1986), *batteries not included (1987), The Rocketeer (1991), Apollo 13 (1995), and The New World (2005). And about a hundred other movies, not forgetting Titanic (1997), which I'd not sure I could make myself rewatch for anyone's sake. He was prolific to the point of ubiquity. I hadn't quite put it together. I am a little sorry I didn't notice while he was alive.
Last night![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and my mother and I saw Inside Out (2015) at the Capitol Theatre. It deserves the raves it's been getting. I hope to give it its own post. In the meantime, actually, you might want to see this one.
(It is Turing's hundred-and-third birthday. Have a paper about the contemporary applications of his work on morphogenesis.)
2. I am presently reading Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934), a partly autobiographical novel about growing up in a dysfunctional Galician Jewish family in Brooklyn in the 1910's. I'm about a quarter of the way in. So far, it's great. Among other things, it's an intensely verbal, vocal novel written by someone whose first language was Yiddish and who made a fascinating choice to foreground it. I find the eye dialect hard going, but I love Roth's convention of representing Yiddish with grammatically and orthographically correct and eloquent English, while English itself is a bashed-up half-spelled pidgin that looks more alien and less comprehensible than the ostensible foreign language. Everybody sounds clumsier and more limited in English; even the kids who are adopting it as their primary language have to fumble their way through it, while some of their parents are nearly silenced. Laurence Yep did something similar in his Golden Mountain Chronicles by representing Chinese as ordinary speech and all English words and dialogue in italics, but it didn't result in this degree of estrangement. For that alone I would like Roth, but it doesn't hurt that his prose style also gives us passages like this:
They were silent. On the dock below, the brown hawsers had been slipped over the mooring posts, and the men on the lower deck now dragged them dripping from the water. Bells clanged. The ship throbbed. Startled by the hoarse bellow of her whistle, the gulls wheeling before her prow rose with slight creaking cry from the green water, and as she churned away from the stone quay skimmed across her path on indolent, scimitar wing. Behind the ship the white wake that stretched to Ellis Island grew longer, raveling wanly into melon-green. On one side curved the low drab Jersey coast-line, the spars and masts on the waterfront fringing the sky; on the other side was Brooklyn, flat, water-towered; the horns of the harbor. And before them, rising on her high pedestal from the scaling swarmy brilliance of sunlit water to the west, Liberty. The spinning disk of the late afternoon sun slanted behind her, and to those on board who gazed, her features were charred with shadow, her depths exhausted, her masses ironed to one single plane. Against the luminous sky the rays of her halo were spikes of darkness roweling the air; shadow flattened the torch she bore to a black cross against flawless light—the blackened hilt of a broken sword. Liberty. The child and his mother stared again at the massive figure in wonder.
That's from the prologue, the only section of the book not to be written from the tight third-person perspective of David Schearl, aged six when the story starts. Something else Roth is very good at depicting are the ways in which the world is desperately strange to a small child—adults most of all, but other children can be just as bewildering and inimical with their games, rituals, half-adult secrets; I don't read a lot of novels that remind me both of Phyllis Gotlieb's "Ordinary, Moving" and Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1949), all right? I shall endeavor to report back when I have read further. Right now, I'm just really impressed.
3. I learned this afternoon that James Horner died. If I want to watch a film in his memory, it turns out that my options for movies he scored include not only Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), The Dresser (1983), and Aliens (1986)—all of which I'd watch again in a heartbeat—but An American Tail (1986), *batteries not included (1987), The Rocketeer (1991), Apollo 13 (1995), and The New World (2005). And about a hundred other movies, not forgetting Titanic (1997), which I'd not sure I could make myself rewatch for anyone's sake. He was prolific to the point of ubiquity. I hadn't quite put it together. I am a little sorry I didn't notice while he was alive.
Last night
derspatchel and my mother and I saw Inside Out (2015) at the Capitol Theatre. It deserves the raves it's been getting. I hope to give it its own post. In the meantime, actually, you might want to see this one.
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You were ahead of me!
If you do give Inside Out its own post, I will be glad to see it; a distraction from bits of Mary Poppins and Charlotte's Web would be welcome locally.
I'm going to try. I should also really write up Tomorrowland, because it disappointed me and mostly I talk about movies I enjoyed; I feel it would be a useful exercise.
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I really like Henry Roth! I am bummed that he published almost nothing else in his lifetime!
(I am into the second half of the novel now and it has not yet fallen off a cliff; I don't believe it will.
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Credit goes to David the projectionist, who feels the same way about the novel and correctly guessed that I would love it. (It reminds me of Phyllis Gotlieb a lot, actually. That's wonderful because I've read almost everything she's written and there will never be any more, unless I find a copy of Who Knows One? (1961) in a library or used book store someday.) I am now more than a quarter of the way in and it's still great. Any idea why it isn't better known?
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I'd speculate that it was too Jewish/immigrant for the time to make it as a classic modernist novel. It's a damn shame.
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Alas, no! It feels like the kind of book I should have discovered in my grandparents' house—it has that familiarity, so that I kept checking mentally whether I could have picked it up somehow. But I am very good at recognizing even books I glanced off as a small child, and this one is new to me. I'm glad I'm reading it now.
I'd speculate that it was too Jewish/immigrant for the time to make it as a classic modernist novel.
I was afraid that was the answer. Dammit.
These are the other two Gotlieb poems Call It Sleep makes me think of: "So Long It's Been" and "Thirty-Six Ways of Looking at Toronto Ontario." I was also reminded a little of Esther Kreytman's Deborah (Der sheydim-tants, 1936), but I'd need to re-read that novel to be sure. And someday not read it in Maurice Carr's 1946 translation, which has problems. It keeps getting reprinted, but not retranslated. This is a different conversation.
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Thank you! I should be able to get someone with Harvard library privileges to borrow the latter for me.
I hope you sleep soon, or otherwise regain coherence.
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I've always heard about Call It Sleep but didn't realize it was a Jewish/immigrant novel. For some reason it seems not to have had the same high profile as other Jewish-American works of the era.
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Give me some other examples? What I got from David was that it sank like a rock on publication and was rediscovered and reprinted to acclaim in the 1960's, but it still doesn't seem to have made its way into the public consciousness in the same way as, say, Philip Roth, who I like significantly less than his no-relation.
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OK I think it's clear that I love this novel to tiny little bits. The opening scene alone is a triumph of the kind of writing I most cherish, emotion-rich evocative mundane detail that I associate with the best in Jewish writing.
ok I'll really stop now...
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I just pulled out my old Jewish-American Stories from high school. It does have a story by Henry Roth ("The Surveyor"), but I know we weren't assigned it! I think we were assigned Isaac Bashevis Singer, Malamud, Philip Roth, maybe Grace Paley.
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I recommend it!
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Never! Wow. Please write it up if you get to it before me.
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I like the punchline to Portnoy's Complaint.
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Thank you.
Is there any use of music?
Yes, including a horrendously catchy chewing-gum jingle, but it's not a musical; there are no character songs. Is that a major component for Cal? [edit] It is a highly quotable movie, which may or may not be a draw. Like, Rob and I have already picked up Anger's "Congratulations, California! You've ruined pizza!" as an all-purpose expression of dissatisfaction.
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Seriously, if you wrote about Call It Sleep at length, I'd link it. The polyphony alone is gorgeous.
[edit] And I have finished the novel and it is great. The intercut perspectives and poetry of the last chapter were so well-written, they made me smile. I like having that reaction to art.
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Glad to. Tomorrow if you like.
Nine
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Good heavens. I had a vague idea that Call It Sleep was just another sensitive-city-boy novel. I had no idea. My bad.
Nine
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I really want my contributor's copy!
I had a vague idea that Call It Sleep was just another sensitive-city-boy novel. I had no idea.
I think you might like the way it uses languages, and different registers of them.
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Nine