Jacques Derrida’s home library, Ris Orange, France
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Argosy Book Shop, in Vertigo. When Scottie and the wonderful, fabulous, incomparable Midge go snooping for information, like a couple of teenage sleuths, on the beauteous and mysterious Carlotta Valdes, they wind up at the fictional Argosy Book Shop. It’s your standard-brand dream bookstore with paintings and tchotchkes and overflowing wooden shelves and glassed cases and piles of jewel-toned tomes. The Argosy proprietor, Pop Leibel, recalls that the McKittrick Hotel was built by a rich married man for a young girl named Carlotta. They had a child who he took in, but he turned Carlotta out. She slowly lost her mind and finally took her life …. “by her own hand” (i love this movie so much it makes me sick).
The book shop was NOT REAL. It was built as a set and filmed in the Paramount Pictures studios using a projected street scene for the window view.
According to ‘Footsteps In The Fog’, a fantastic book of Hitchcock locations, the interiors of the Argosy Book Shop were modeled after a real San Francisco bookstore, the Argonaut Book Shop, a family owned shop still in business, that opened in 1941. According to legend, upon visiting the Argonaut, Hitchcock declared, “This is what a book shop should look like”. I think we all agree. The shop was at 336 Kearny Street when Vertigo was filmed and since 1969 has been at 786 Sutter. The location of the shop is inferred from the view which included passing cable cars, and the stores across the street (the east side of the 200 block of Powell Street).
These photos taken in the original Argonaut location share similar features to the fictional Argosy, namely the arch over the doorway and the mezzanine at the rear of the store.
Pop Liebel, the fictional book store owner of the Argosy, was based in part on Robert Haines, Sr., the proprietor of the Argonaut, a real bookstore.
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It’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. I don’t know which of his 20+ novels is my favorite. When I think about it, I am overwhelmed. Maybe it’s Bleak House, a tangle of disputed wills and disrupted inheritance, orphans and mysterious benefactors and country estates. The heroine, an orphan named Esther Summerson, is prissy and meek and painfully self-deprecating and gets smallpox and goes blind. Characters like Tulkinghorn, Detective Bucket and Lady Deadlock populate the world, an entire society really, in all its class divisions from the aristocracy down to the filthy street urchin, in one amazingly efficient, 900-page novel.
the dancing school, from "bleak house"
In words written on his customary, late night insomniac walks through London, amongst the city’s homeless and hopeless, Dickens described the building that would become his burial place as being “fine gloomy society” for quarter of an hour. Westminster Abbey suggested to him a procession of the dead with “each century more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries going before”. Instead, 200 years after his birth, Charles Dickens continues to have an enduring relevance, with unmatched wisdom and powers of expression. A chronicler of a world of urban inequality, he was one of the first writers to depict the modern industrial city, a place where many of us still live. He was an influential participant in the social reform of Victorian England with an unparalleld level of eloquence. While the outward manifestation of the grotesque worlds Dickens often described may have changed, the underlying causes remain. He made withering observations of the venal rich and the pathos of the poor, corrupt financiers, child labor, economic disparity and the need for educational reform. It was his moral purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens “the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century” in his obituary.
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What fiction writer – if any – could have conceived of Sarah Palin without completely blowing the boundaries of reality? Dickens? Shakespeare? Ruth Rendell? In children’s fiction, maybe, where a parodic lunatic still has its place. It’s not really in grown-up literatures nature to have stone cold villains, coal-black embodiments of evil. Serious literature has no shortage of killers, molesters, kidnappers, cannibals, misanthropes, black widows, bloodsuckers, pederasts and politicans…and there are plenty of literary counterparts to modern assholes (change Italy to Iraq in Catch-22, and Milo is Dick Cheney and Colonel Cathcart is George W), but of the snidleliest whiplashes ever to have bound sweet damsel to train track, has any serious writer of novels ever conjured up a sub-literate rube from a weird, frozen tundra, a vicious “hockey mom” to 5 terrible children who shoots wolves from helicopters? Or a character as farcical as “Anne Coulter”, or as grotesque as Roger Ailes?
Roger Chillingworth from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn, and Newt Gingrich.
Roger Chillingworth is a creepy, insular, quasi-intellectual of enormous social ineptitude, unable to fit in with the physical world. Married to a much younger woman, Chillingworth is a man deficient in human warmth, unable to engage in equitable relationships, who inspires respect for his knowledge but fear for his weird, bitter moods. His crippling resentments twist his soul, mutating him into a true madman, a “…mortal who has taken a fiend’s office”. His twisted stoop, deformed shoulders that contort into a grotesque state of irregularity, his eyes burning with fiendish determination, Roger’s worth is beyond repair. Abandoning any hope of finding happiness, Chillingworth becomes incapable of feeling anything but rage, spite and revenge, seeking the deliberate destruction of others rather than a redress of wrongs. Fat, deformed Newt Gingrich traffics in resentment against elites, exploiting race-based resentment toward poor Americans and the peculiar rage of white males. So consumed with resentment and hate towards the president, Newt attacks the very concept of happiness, “even in victory, the candidate of gloom”. His ashen wife – 23 years his junior – at his side and wearing the A of adultery, nods Stepfordianally as her husband’s rage spews forth. “Happiness in the 18th century meant wisdom and virtue, not hedonism,” Gingrich says without a scintilla of irony. His all consuming hatred towards Obama literally deforms Newt’s already hideous self into a grotesque heaving mountain of rage. Gingrich doesn’t just oppose Obama, he resents the fact of his existence.
Chillingworth is sabotaged when the object of his rage is gone. Having lost the body on which he has preyed, and having lost his own soul in the process, his potency is vanquished and he dies, unsaved.
Brevet Brigadeer General John A.B.C. Smith from “The Man That Was Used Up” by Edgar Allan Poe, and Mitt Romney
There’s something really weird about Brigadier Brevet General John A.B.C. Smith. He’s an impressive physical specimen, 6 feet tall with jet black hair that “would have done honor to a Brutus”, lustrous hazel eyes, strong shoulders, brilliantly white teeth and the “ne plus ultra of good legs”. He also has an air distingue – an unusual, precise way of moving, and a tinge of coldness that is construed as aristocratic aloofness. He boasts of his triumphs, and babbles about the advancements of the age like parachutes and steamboats. What is it that makes him seem…”off”? What is the secret behind his chiseled exterior? Answer: Half the General’s body is composed of shiny new prostheses, which must be put in or on every morning before he appears in public. Limbs are screwed on, a wig, glass eye, and false teeth, and a tongue, until the man himself stands “whole”. He’s a freaking cyborg. Central Casting couldn’t have coughed up a more presidential looking candidate then Quadrennial White House wannabe Mitt Romney: tall, sharply cut jaw, gleaming chompers, a shellacked head of black hair and carefully manicured sideburns. Yet there’s something unsettling. He inexplicably disturbs and repulses despite looking like the perfect candidate. It’s how we are skeeved out by automatons that – but for a slight imperfection – mimic humans. Mitt’s grinning persona gives way to awkward, robotic stumbling, like he is auditioning for a role of regular human, or for the part of the perfect hostess in Stepford Wives who gets her wires crossed and starts babbling about recipes. An almost unbelievably shameless panderer, Romney once was passionately pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-universal healthcare only to about-face for 2012 audiences. He believes in nothing. He claimed to be an avid hunter to appeal to rednecks, then fessed up to only having been hunting once -“small game” like…”rats”. You can run the information through the Mormonian Computron 9000 that stands in for a brain and point him in any direction and he’d do exactly what you programed him to do. He’s supremely stupid, a walking malaprop; putting Castro’s words in Hugo Chavez’ mouth; calling to “double” Guantanamo; referring to Ann coulter as a “moderate”; strapping his dog to the roof of his car; claiming his sons are serving their country by working for his presidential campaign; openly admitting no concern for the very poor because they have safety nets – which he has every intention on destroying; slashing Medicaid and SNAP; endorsing Rep Paul Ryan’s budget which gets two-thirds of its $4.5 trillion in cuts from low-income programs (using the cuts to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy); saying poor people are just envious of rich people and that tax policies ought to only be talked about in quiet rooms. He’s not a living sentient being.
The final spectacle of the cyborg’s reconstruction gives acceptance to the General’s mechanical half, forgotten in favor of a pretense of humanity. Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith was the man – the man that was used up.
Mr Hyde From Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R.L. Stevenson, and Rush Limbaugh.
A “nondescript yet oddly hideous little man” who leaves a “powerful impression of deformity”, Mr. Hyde establishes his evil by stamping on a little girl and caning a man to death “in a great flame of anger”. He is addicted to an illicit drug that offers him the “moral freedom” to indulge in his hideous impulses. His power grows with the more drugs he takes until he doesn’t need to rely on the drugs to unleash his raging alter ego. Eventually, Dr Jekyll becomes reliant on the drug to remain himself. When the drugs run out, Hyde makes a final recourse to pharmacology, going on nightly forays of a “lustful” nature, “abhorrent to religious morality”. Nondescript and hideous disc jockey Rush Limbaugh, is a fat, draft dodging, college flunkee. It’s become impossible to know when he’s on drugs, or when the black president is causing him to literally lose his mind. A banally blustering powder keg bloviating that Obama has a “Messiah fixation”, that slavery had “its merits”, that volcanoes harm the ozone layer more than man-made chemicals, that environmentalists are “prophets of doom”, that low tax rates are “biblical in nature and in root”, that nicotine isn’t addictive and does not cause disease, that Dioxin isn’t harmful and that condoms do not protect against AIDS. He called a 12 year old Chelsea Clinton the “Whitehouse Dog”, and his statement likening NFL players to Crips and Bloods had him banned from buying a team. No sober human could be this inhuman. Limbaugh was arrested for purchasing prescription pills from a black-market ring, using his housekeeper as a drug mule, for 4 years of clandestine handoffs in a Denny’s parking lot. When his supply was cut off in 1999, Limbaugh allegedly went ballistic and paranoidal, patting down the housekeeper for recording devices, and hiding his stash from his wife under his mattress. Without cochlear implants, he is stone cold deaf, the probable causal effect 0f Vicodin and Lorcet abuse. The Fox xenophobia-fest (Shirley Sherrod, Ground Zero mosque, liberation theology, birther shit), would just be fringe curiosity without the psycho loop of his racially charged hysteria. And yeah, he is more than likely engaging in activities that fly in the face of his politics and “principles”, with something young and not necessarily female.
When Dr Jeckyll’s potion eventually begins to run out, he writes that even as he composes his letter he knows that he will soon become Hyde permanently, and he wonders if Hyde will face execution for his crimes or choose to kill himself….
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I just read:
Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship by Emily Rapp via The Rumpus
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In the novel Lord Jim, a rusty old ship carrying 800 Muslim pilgrims across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, to the promise of salvation, the reward of eternal life, collides with a ‘floating derelict” during a “silent black squall. Terror possesses the captain and several of his officers, who jump from the ship, wantonly abandoning the sleeping passengers. In the safety of their life-boat, dishonor trumps death. The disgraced captain is put on trial and degraded, exiled from his family.He has escaped with his dishonor without being able to forgive himself for his own mistakes. Recurringly Jim envisions himself as “always an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.”
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I have really slacked off updating this blog. It’s not that haven’t been reading, I have. In September I sentenced myself to 6 months of self-imposed poverty. I’ve been reading about poverty. I have suffered through; the Catholic orders run Industrial Schools in post-independence conservative Catholic Ireland; the Magdalen asylum; Britain’s child migrant scandal; the impact of political factionalism and economic exploitation in Appalachia; the 1854 Orphan Train; the New York Labor Movement targeting the end of child labor in cigar making in New York City tenements, and the story of how the SPCA saved a teensy girl named Mary Ellen Wilson, whose horrific plight led to the founding of The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Next up, the Irish Potato Famine.
this piece of loveliness was sent to me by @OBrennaO
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As a kid, “Christmas Present” was my favorite of all the Scrooge ghosts, because I thought - of course - that he was “the ghost of Christmas Presents“. And a ghost of Christmas Presents had to be the best of all possible ghosts. Dickens describes him thusly: [click to continue…]
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