Boarding School Stories
I love books and movies about boarding school, especially British boarding school. I re-visited George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” this weekend. The title is ironic and the essay is far from nostalgic— abuse, deprivation, and humiliation characterized Orwell’s boarding school experience. Amid the trauma, though, he recalls a few moments of grace. I thought this passage was particularly nice, and, especially on this cold day, it made me wish for summer.
I have good memories of St Cyprian’s, among a horde of bad ones. Sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the Downs to a village called Birling Gap, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously among the boulders and came home covered with cuts. And there were still more wonderful mid-summer evenings when, as a special treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual but allowed to wander about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge into the swimming bathe at about nine o’clock. There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour’s undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one’s third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies.
Mr. Goodstuff
I was fortunate enough to happen by the “Sexy Soul Oldies” tent on the east side this weekend. The tent’s proprietor is none other than Mr. Goodstuff (pictured below). Apparently, Mr. Goodstuff spins his mix CDs in street fairs and flea markets all around New York, and on Saturday he was in fine form: blaring groove after groove and busting moves for the (completely into it) crowd (including me) gathered in front of his display. His mixes, ranging in title from the prosaic (“Memories,” “Looking Back”) to the gauche (“Slow Grind”) to the sort of delightful (“Oh No He Didn’t”), are excellent. I know this because I bought two of them, and I also took a handout which outlines the playlists for more than a dozen of his mixtapes (which thrilled me, then slightly concerned me for Mr. Goodstuff: doesn’t he know we’ll all take his playlists and re-create them on Spotify or Grooveshark or whatever?).
(Not my photo! via)
Anyway, here’s a selection from Mix 8: “Chillin’ with a Feelin’.” That’s what I’m talking about.
We made a trip up to the Newport Folk Festival last weekend in Rhode Island. NPR has the whole thing streaming right now, but my favorite set was NC’s own Carolina Chocolate Drops, linked above (although I also have Dawes and Middle Brother on constant rotation this week). The CCDs gave a history history lesson with every song… and also awesomely covered Blu Cantrell. Pictures from the weekend below!
5/6 of the crew
Newport harbor
Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes/Middle Brother) and M. Ward
At the Festival
Just one of the cottages
Earlier this week, I saw an old movie at Lincoln Center called The Clock. I was excited to see it on the big screen, mainly because it’s an immensely comforting movie to me and secondly because it covers a lot of ground in New York City (OK, NYC via soundstage).
My favorite part of the movie starts in the above clip around 6:05, when Joe (Robert Walker) slides over on the other side of Alice (Judy Garland) to act as a buffer between her and this drunk stranger. It’s a sweet moment, I think, because we see that this guy isn’t out to bed her or impress her or even, primarily, win her over… he wants to protect, to take care of her. I like the way Alice then glances at the drunk, and next at Joe, processing what he’s just done and thinking to herself, “Now that was nice.” (Judy really is wonderful and sensitive and absorbing throughout the movie.)
The Clock is a fairy tale, of course, and the historian who introduced the movie told us that, throughout the filming, Robert Walker was dealing with a highly-publicized divorce and battling depression and alcoholism. Walker died from a toxic mix of alcohol and barbituates six years after the movie was released.
And Judy, five times married by the end of her life,
… often didn’t even have enough money for food to eat, and there was no pension forthcoming from MGM, a studio that made millions off of her movies. In those last years, her voice started to fray and she physically aged until she resembled a careworn little old lady who had been felled by some drastic illness.
[from Dan Callahan’s must-read retrospective essay in Alt Screen]
Friday Ephemera
The US in 1920s-30s… in color
Lorrie Moore’s opening paragraphs in her piece on ”Friday Night Lights”
For my cube: this mousepad?
All of Russian Lit Scholar Elif Batuman’s Amazon reviews… including a particularly effusive write-up of a book called “A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag”
Word-hoard from “The Shipping News”:
waterweed, crenshaw, ruched, excoriation, saucisson, gyred, unguent, dolman, slovenly, tetter, doddering, atavistic, babushka, papillose, tuckamore, pumiced…
AN ICE CREAM SANDWICH SLIDE SHOW
