“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouv
Archives for March 2005
TT: In case you didn’t notice
The right-hand column has been extensively freshened in recent days, with an all-new set of Top Fives and updated links in the “Teachout in Commentary” and “Second City” modules.
Explore. Enjoy.
TT: One more once
This is your last warning: I’m giving two lectures next week in Washington, D.C., and you’re cordially invited to attend either or both.
– On Monday, March 7, at 5:30, I’ll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. The topic is “The Problem of Political Art.” (C-SPAN will be videotaping this lecture for broadcast on a later date.) For more information, go here.
– On Wednesday, March 9, at 6:30, I’ll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at the Women’s National Democratic Club. The topic is “Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips,” and five prints from the Teachout Museum (by Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver) will be on display. Advance reservations are required. For more information, go here.
Come up and see me some time!
P.S. I won’t be toting my iBook to and from Washington, so my presence on the blog next week is likely to be sketchy at best.
OGIC: Quotetastic
Whee–I have been inundated with five-packs of movie quotes. From readers, from bloggers, from commenters on other blogs. It’s fun! It’s fantastic! It’s full of stars!* Aw…I love you guys. I love my gay dead son.**
I can’t resist–I’m busily compiling a master list alphabetized by movie title, the better to form some impressionistic observations on the exercise. It’s fascinating to see which lines are cited most frequently, which movies are cited most variously, and simply to rediscover many, many killer lines I had completely forgotten about. More Monday. In the meantime, keep ’em coming.
*Close Encounters of the Third Kind, cited by Rasputin.***
**Heathers, cited by nobody.
***No, 2010. You know what I look forward to in life? Being able to read.
TT: Hostages to fortune
While we’re on the subject of movies, Ed posted a copy of the AFI’s list of the top 100 American films. To look at it, go here. It is, to say the least, a most peculiar list, but it does contain a reasonably high percentage of good movies. Ed has seen ninety-six of them. I’ve seen seventy (I told Ed sixty-nine, but I’d forgotten one).
I shall now octuple the ante by posting the films on the list that I haven’t seen. Kindly keep your smartass remarks to yourselves:
– Lawrence of Arabia
– Schindler’s List
– One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
– Raging Bull
– Apocalypse Now
– Midnight Cowboy
– The Best Years of Our Lives (I’ve seen the first 15 minutes and listened to all of Hugo Friedhofer’s score)
– Doctor Zhivago
– King Kong (I’ve seen a snippet or two)
– The Birth of a Nation (one of these days…)
– A Clockwork Orange
– All Quiet on the Western Front (hey, I read the book)
– The Sound of Music (not in this lifetime, baby)
– Rebel Without a Cause
– Raiders of the Lost Ark (I taped it but never watched it)
– Close Encounters of the Third Kind
– The Manchurian Candidate
– Wuthering Heights (and no, I haven’t even read the book!)
– Dances With Wolves (puh-leeze–life’s too short)
– American Graffiti
– Rocky
– The Deer Hunter
– Modern Times (I’ve seen most of it)
– Giant
– Platoon
– Frankenstein (I’ve seen part of it)
– The Jazz Singer (I’ve seen the part with sound)
– A Place in the Sun (I read the book, alas)
– Pulp Fiction (I know, I know, lay off already)
– Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (I’ve seen part of it)
Ooh, that was fun. Now, anybody for a round of Humiliation?
OGIC: The new new meme
You’ll forgive me for taking a pass on the “Ten Things I’ve Done that You Haven’t” meme–it’s just that all of mine have already been taken. But I have a fresh one for you, from Sheila O’Malley by way of Llama Butchers.
What are the first five movie quotes that pop into your head? They must be from different movies. Mine go something like this:
1. “Oh Michael, you are blind.” (The Godfather, Part 2)
2. “Evelyn Waugh was a man.” (Lost in Translation)
3. “It’s not a game. It’s not something you play.” (Out of Sight)
4. “There’s something sexy about Scrooge McDuck.” (The Last Days of Disco)
5. “It’s okay with me.” (The Long Goodbye)
I like this one because it requires you not to think. So have at it–but no thinking!
TT: Almanac
“Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in
OGIC: Devourable
I’m tired, and it’s Kelly Braffet’s fault. Her winningly creepy first novel, Josie and Jack, kept me up until 5:00 last Sunday morning, when I reached its perfect last sentence, dropped my head, and drifted off into dreams that were comparatively mundane.
This is how the book begins:
The worst hangovers come on the sunniest days. Even at sixteen I knew enough to expect that. The day when Jack drove me into town to buy aspirin, the sun was shining and the sky was the brilliant blue of a crayon drawing.
That’s Josie narrating. She and her brother Jack live nearly alone in an isolated, sprawling old house in industrial Pennsylvania; their father teaches physics at a college some hours away, where he spends his weekdays. Josie has only Jack in the world; though Jack is also devoted to her, he is ferociously charming and relishes the easy work of bending others to his will. The two don’t go to school and, up to the point where the novel begins, they don’t otherwise interact with anyone outside their magic circle. When they first do bring an outsider halfway in, the trouble starts. When they sally forth into the world together, it compounds.
While the sly Braffet keeps her cards close to the vest, her narrator Josie is a na