"The Expansive Force of Comic Laughter" is a chapter about the physical effects of humor, in an essay on laughter by Henri Bergson. (You can search and download Le Rire, essai sur la signification du comique in English translation on Google.) Bergson is famous for writing theories of time and memory that influenced Proust, but he wrote about comedy, too.
Laughter, he wrote, is preceded by
surprise.
Juno is surprising, in spite of any hype or preconceived notions that might cloud your vision; I saw it in its new wide release after over a year of anticipation about the script. Discussing her loftier goals as a screenwriter, Diablo Cody said "We need a female Holden Caulfield or a female Travis Bickle" (Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Artist of the Year"). She's working on it.
Some surprises in the movie are more touching than funny, especially in the "Spring" section that peaks while the soundtrack plays Cat Power's cover of "Sea of Love" (the song is much older than the Honeydrippers - the songwriter is Phil Phillips). The song in Juno's context disarmed me and so did the quietness of most of the movie. Laugh track-eschewing sitcoms like The Office might have cleared the way for Juno, which doesn't suffocate its audience with Mark Mothersbaugh string arrangements à la Wes Anderson. The viewer has more space, because the moviemakers don't work too hard to guide the audience towards any one reaction. Who else but Diablo Cody would depict a character, played by Jennifer Garner, interrupting herself to express impatience with this t-shirt?
In previous centuries, in urban areas, it was more frequent to hear vendors shout -- or cry -- to communicate their merchandise and prices to anyone in earshot. Imagine your fishmonger singing "New cod, new!" Such repetitive bellows were catchier than today's televised commercial jingles: some cries inspired poems and folk songs. A few criers were immortalized by artists:
Je les aporte toz fetis,
Chaudes tartes et siminiaus.
L'autres crie : chapiaus, chapiaus.
Gastel a feve orroiz crier,
Charbon le sac por i denier. [...]
One nighttime cry from London in the middle of the 17th Century granted safety and warmth:
Well to your lock. Your fire
And your light. And god
Give you good night. At
One a clock.
A curiosity: playing cards circa 1754 depicting types of criers instead of the usual kings and queens. From "The World of Playing Cards" site:
These two couldn't sing a murder ballad without transforming it into a song of tender love:
The Child ballad collection lists other recent recordings of "Henry Lee," known in the record books as "Child Ballad number 68", after the Boston-based historian Francis James Child (1825-1896). He researched and cataloged British and North American ballads, tracing their many variations at a time when the ballad was an increasingly antiquated form of storytelling. He grouped ballads by their basic story, for lyrics and narrative details differ greatly by the place and time in which they were performed: for instance, the ballad that Cave calls "Henry Lee" was often known as"Young Hunting" or "Love Henry."
Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle of California State University at Fresno edit the Folklore Home Page, a terrific reference for researchers. It includes the Ballad Index which contains a listing for Child ballad 68 ("Young Hunting," Child 68).
- My So-Called Life (Angela Chase)
Those of us who were then adolescents are now doubled in age, and to watch all 19 episodes again would be to revisit what we once took to be an evocation of complex, interesting, fulfilling teenage life. The show's singularity is in its depiction of experimentations with dream life, language, fashion and female friendships, and its attention to teenagers' ridiculous yet deeply-felt interpretations of their possibilities.
In the Sunday New York Times, Ginia Bellafante takes her appreciation of the show a few steps further: "My So-Called Life", she says, is special for representing a middle-class suburban American high school as a site of learning and mistake-making, not as a glamorous resort between childhood and college. In Angela Chase's fantasies of her future, there is no binge drinking and no randomly-chosen liberal arts degree. She's still a kid.
“My So-Called Life” appeared only 13 years ago but leaves one feeling nostalgic for a time when teenagers still communicated with pauses and half-thoughts, and were not perceived solely as an amalgam of their accomplishments. Angela was a bright girl who performed unspectacularly at school (she got a 59 on a geometry test, quit yearbook and didn’t play lacrosse or join the debate team). Even so, there was never a sense that her options for a prosperous and fulfilling adulthood would be foreclosed because of her reluctance to apply herself.
Outside of nostalgia trips with the new set of DVDs, there's hope that the upcoming movie Juno will do justice to American teenage girls, too: see the Juno trailer at Apple Quicktime. The screenplay was written by Minneapolis blogger/stripper/memoirist Diablo Cody, and the resulting movie won big at the Rome Film Festival.
After the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser murdered his wife in 1980, he didn't write
much or visit many people. He wasn't punished for the crime because he
pled insanity, and because he was a very famous professor. Though the court let him off the hook as a madman, academics judge him sane: his books and essays are required reading in most Literature, Culture Studies, and History
graduate programs in the North America and Europe. After Althusser's
death in 1990, his protégé, Etienne Balibar,
became the preëminent Marxist thinker in France.
It is likely
that Etienne Balibar's daughter, Jeanne Balibar, will be canonized first.
She has a marquee name: three syllables, the middle one tripping off the palate, ba-li-bahr.
At first, the name was intended for faculty lists and university presses: she was a
History grad student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (the "superior normal
school") in Paris. After leaving with a Masters in the early
90s, she joined the prestigious Comédie Française, the national theater housed in the Palais Royal.
On stage and screen, Jeanne Balibar moves with balletic meditation, speaks in a gravelly voice, and seems to be always thinking, intense and scarily analytical. Because she's all this and female, John Simon would say that she's "too intelligent." I say she's mannered, original and an icon for graduate students: she is an example of someone who gets the most out of an advanced degree now that she delivers her work to the public rather than a peer group.
A recently-updated book, So What Are You Going to Do With That? Finding Careers Outside Academia, indirectly touches on the Balibar situation of moving out of the Ivory Tower. The authors acknowledge facts little-discussed in academia: for one, the majority of graduate students drop out and find real-world jobs; for another, 55 to 60% of literature Ph.Ds seek jobs outside of academia instead of the traditional hunt for professorships. This book, about careers beyond academia, is a must-read even for people who never want to leave academic jobs because it informs them of what most of their peers do with their lives. The authors write wisely as they research the limitless, invigorating career ideas for people with some level of graduate-school experience:
After leaving graduate school, the lessons learned in school about organization, composition and pedagogy are perpetually vital to any career. Jeanne Balibar is in a slightly more intense kind of "eternal return": she frequently portrays graduate students or alumni in
movies, such as:
("Above all it's a matter of listening, and I just have to smile from time to time and say 'Yes.'")
Le Stade Wimbledon, directed by her former partner, Mathieu Amalric, is now on DVD in France, released by Cahiers du cinéma. It's stunning. Balibar plays a student dissertating about why a writer -- a recently deceased Italian novelist -- didn't write. She tracks down his acquaintances, trying to understand his reticence. Eventually, she overcomes her own writer's block, applying scholarly methodology to another writer's silence and procrastination.
The movie is now in wider worldwide release, though not in the United States. It's by Jacques Rivette, adapted from an 1833 Balzac novella: Ne Touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe), also titled La Duchesse de Langeais.
Who's the coolest culinary celebrity?
- Julia Child
She had force créatrice (creative force), she lived in Jetztzeit (now-time), and she was undaunted by life's cammina dura (difficult path). Kowtow to her!
Julia Child's dazzling philosophy of life is showcased by Regina Schrambling in this obituary from August 2004 from the New York Times.
Her kitchen, where all the magic happened, is in the possession of the Smithsonian. The small room was reassembled in the museum right down to the egg separator and the recipe for pain de mie (bread with a crumb, as opposed to a crusty baguette). The Smithsonian is closed for renovation until summer 2008, but the exhibit's web site continues to offer a virtual tour, annotated lovingly.
"Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many
people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of
food do to the digestive system? [...] I, for one, would much rather
swoon over a few thin slices of prime beefsteak, or one small serving
of chocolate mousse, or a sliver of foie gras than indulge to the full
on such nonentities as fat-free gelatin puddings."
- Julia Child, The Way to Cook,1989.
Audio: Share what you're listening to right now.
"Heaven, I need a hug."
- R. Kelly, in "Heaven, I Need a Hug," 2002.
I feel you, R., you unembraceable thug. Even more tender bodies among us need a hug, or at least a Happy Place: a comforting object, place, or idea. For example, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy is so consoling!
Solace, too, is tucked into each minute of Minnesota Public Radio. It airs all day and all of the night, and at times it is even finer than a cup of tea and a piece of cinnamon-sugar toast, even better than tucking into print matter by Dante or Lydia Davis for a few minutes of wonder. Those things are comforting in their constancy, while MPR varies in three ways: there are separate stations for news, alt-rock, and classical music. The last pick offers mostly European fare, yet somehow those symphonies and choral ensembles point towards the radio hosts and ultimately to their midwestern location.
MPR's streaming audio broadcast is a good option for anyone needing an aural embrace, but more generally, Minnesota is the stuff of lore which I'll exalt to anyone in earshot from Kalamazoo to the Bois de Vincennes. I've been away from my native state and hometown for five years, but my love for the Twin Cities augments in proportion to the number of miles and minutes logged away from it. The people are good, reticent and well-read. In Saint Paul suburbs, autumn begins with bright red leaves on only a couple of treetops. Then there is infinite variety in downtown Minneapolis where the fall transition is nevertheless predictable: in fashion, from short skirts to pantsuits, and in the lunch-hour activity, from loitering at the Nicollet Mall farmer's market to clacking through skyways. Also, the sculpture garden, where Jenny Holzer's granite benches will never, I hope, alter in their verbose neurosis.
When you're asked to justify your friendships, you might point to friends' intelligence and humor as reasons for loving them. Yet think of the number of hard or oblivious people you encounter daily who are, nonetheless, perfectly smart or virtuous. Before other qualities matter, kindness draws you in and makes you stay; yet kindness is abstract. There are physical manifestations of it, though: it's a person's way of paying attention that forms the friendship between you.
Attention begins in the head tilt, apparently. Think of high school yearbook photographs: a girl offers a sympathetic side-tilt, leans forward to prop up her jaw on a fist, or rests her chin on interlaced fingers and smiles maniacally: I am listening! For the same photo shoot, a boy merely presents the topmost quarter of his person and communicates vague contentment that he occupies space.
Attention has longtime been the most sought-after attribute in a leisured or educated woman: take as evidence the frequency of portraits depicting physical manifestations of the art of paying attention. These salon women and their portraitists represented concentration and sympathy:
Which runway show at New York Fashion Week do you wish you could attend?
"Although I'm not a fan of Roland Barthes, I do subscribe to his idea that language is a self-contained system of signs."
- Prof. Tim Gunn (now with his own Bravo reality show about the grammar of makeovers)
Signs denoting madness: Those specs! Those ruffles!
