The Wednesday Quiz I:11 -- Found In Translation

The Wednesday Quiz -- Season I -- Quiz 11

Found In Translation

The Wednesday Quiz is a test of knowledge and intuition. Looking up answers or asking your buddy is unconscionable. Questions about the rules are answered here.

This week's Quiz asks for two pieces of information about several books that, despite having been written in languages other than English, have become popular among some English-speaking intellectual types:

Who wrote it? and What language was it originally written in?

Five points for each correct answer. There are eleven books, making a gross score of 105 or 110 possible. Such a score would be saluted for its total awesomeness, and then rounded down to 100.

1. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
2. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude
4. Anna Karenina
5. The House of the Spirits
6. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
7. The Trial
8. The Tin Drum
9. Like Water for Chocolate
10. The History of the Siege of Lisbon
11. Snow

Submit your answers in the comments. (And incidentally, I've only read four of them, myself. )

The Great Movies: "Psycho"

Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960

Previous Contact: I saw Psycho once before, sometime in the late 90s.

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Psycho is a strange kind of entertainment, and almost certainly a surprise to any first-time viewer. Now, as a person capable of reading the English language, you almost certainly know that it involves a woman who stays at a creepy hotel with a creepy proprietor, and that she's eventually going to get stabbed in a shower while jerky, piercing music plays. But the narrative arc that you would expect, starting out with that information, is not the narrative arc you're gonna get.

[spoilers from here on out]

The first half hour of the movie, for instance, has nothing to do with motels. It's about a petty embezzlement scam pulled off by a Phoenix real estate administrative assistant. After twenty minutes and no motels, you might well think you'd somehow grabbed the wrong movie. But no, at 0:26 she finally finds the famous Bates Motel, and you settle in for what you figure must be a long series of increasingly disturbing episodes leading up to the famous shower scene. But no, the shower scene happens almost immediately. With more than half the movie still to go, you've lost the heroine who was the entire focus of the first reel, and a very different sort of movie -- a doomed search to find the missing person -- takes over.

Psycho was almost universally considered the most shocking movie of all time at its release, despite that it is not particularly graphic. For all of the tightly-wound music and human vulnerability of the shower scene, you never really see wounds. Instead, there's just shots of the knife, shots of the victim screaming in terror, and a modest amount of blood. What really made it a horrifying scene -- at the original release, people would apparently often trip over each other scrambling for the exits -- is its unexpectedness, its appearence out of nowhere from within a plot frame which would ordinarily guarantee us that the heroine would be alive and redeemed by the end credits.

Take away that big surprise, and you're left with an unremarkable plot, albeit one carried along by strong performances and strong direction. And before you get too excited about the innovative pacing of Psycho, you have to consider a long, pedantic speech that a psychiatrist makes at the end of the movie to explain what has been going on in the killer's mind. This speech would be deadening under any circumstances, but since the killer's mind is pretty much an open book by this point, it is an especially regrettable send-off to the movie.

Plot: Woman checks into the wrong hotel and is attacked by its manager, the titular Psycho. Then her friends come and look for her.

Visuals: Sharp, moody black and white. Excellent representation of familiar things, like the experience of driving at night when you're too tired, and of the unreal, like the final discovery of the hotel keeper's mother. The juxtaposition of the fantastical Bates residence looming up over the prosaic motel isn't especially subtle, but it is pretty nifty.

Dialog: Largely solid and amusing. Anthony Perkins does a supurb job of creating his character just through the slightly off-kilter delivery of his lines. Character actor Simon Oakland does about as good a job as anyone could as the psychologist, but there's just no selling that speech.

Prognosis: If you like Alfred Hitchcock, you'll like Psycho. If the idea of the shower scene scares you, just close your eyes when the shower starts.

Coffee Table Book Party: "Joys of Jello"

Joys of Jello, 3rd Edition

Many of you will have seen copies of this little cookbook floating around the bookshelves of your older relatives. I inherited my copy from the kitchen of my late grandmother.

It is important to understand that, well into living memory, such dishes as "Molded Chef's Salad" were made and served with no sense of irony whatsoever -- even outside of the MidWest.

I challenge you, L&TM5K reader, to make Ring-Around-the-Tuna, serve it without warning to your family or guests, and report back.


Jell-O Gelatin, the introduction begins, first grandly shimmered its way into American dining rooms in 1897. Just how many brands in your kitchen go back 65 years?

Jell-O Gelatin's long-time popularity comes from many good things. Its lightness is one -- a big one. Jell-O Gelatin is so light it seems to make any meal sit a little lighter. Its fresh fruit taste, so much like the fruit that inspired it, is utterly satisfying. And it's easy to fix in all kinds of ways -- some we'll wager that have never entered your mind.


Specific recipes available on request.

The Reading List: The Quiet American

The Quiet American

Graham Greene

1955

Last Summer, I read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and had this to say about it:

The novel is told in a highly fractured narrative than weaves freely backward and forward through time, mixing straight first-person retelling of events, the narrator’s ruminations, and textual material read by the narrator.... The effect is fairly engrossing and entirely natural; it is much like hearing a friend tell a long and complex story in the typically shuffled way that stories are told.

Did I like the novel? Well, I admire its craftsmanship and am sympathetic to its attempt to plumb the nature of faith. It is also a fascinating look at the texture of life in London during the 1940s. The characters, unfortunately, are all in their separate ways rather shallow and unlikable. This made it hard for me to get too concerned about the state of their souls, which in turn rendered the book rather academic.

In reading The Quiet American, I find not surprisingly that Graham Greene seems to have been a fairly consistent writer. Here again, what I admire most about the book is its craftsmanship, the way that we are guided gently forward and backward in time almost without noticing. In the opening scene, we learn about the death of the title character -- the only quiet American being, in Graham's snooty inuendo, a dead one -- and we might reasonably expect that the story will deal with the repercussions of or investigation into his demise. But no, we spend most of the book at earlier points in time, gradually learning of the political and personal complexities that led to his unhappy end. All of this technical business is handled with enormous mastery.

Too, Greene captures a time and place -- this time, the dying years of French Indochina -- with a great deal of colorful verisimilitude. The Quiet American is not overtly a book about religion, though; it is a book about politics. In particular, it is more or less about the covert imperialism of the United States at mid-century. Greene is agin' it, which is fair enough but also a bit rich for a citizen of the United Kingdom in 1955.


To give Greene his due, however, he makes the old-fashioned imperialism of the European powers nearly as unflattering as the optimistic, technocratic meddling of the Americans. The soon-to-be-quieted American, Pyle, is a hopeful, idealistic, naive Boy Scout, earnestly trying to make Vietnam a better place. It is beyond his imagination that it is real people who are being killed and maimed for the sake of his good intentions. Yet the figure representing Europe is the dissolute narrator, Fowler, a British newspaper correspondent who burns through the tail end of his prime smoking opium, stringing along a Vietnamese mistress, slouching through Saigon living high on his hard currency, and letting his East Indian subordinate, a character he can barely bring himself even to focus on, do all of the work. So although American-style imperialism is pretty awful, as the Vietnamese would continue to discover over the next two decades, European-style imperialism is not so glamorous either.

There is what you might very inclusively call a "love story" at the heart of The Quiet American. Pyle falls in love at first sight with Fowler's mistress, and the two men launch the most passive-aggressive campaign for a woman's hand in all of literature. The mistress herself barely cares which of the two she ends up with, caring only for safety and security in her radically unstable world. Is she, perhaps, representative of all Vietnam, unable to make it on her own, forced to choose between the stifling protection of Europe or of the United States? Is she an unattainable prize, that the world powers can only superficially possess, but never really know? Is she evidence of a mild misogynist streak on Greene's behalf? Or merely a prop on which to hang the plot? All of the above, I think. If The Quiet American has a flaw, it is that this very central character is such an undeveloped shadow. Or, perhaps to fully include her in the story would be to write a different book. I dunno. It's safe to say that Graham Greene knew more about literary craftsmanship than I do.

As in The End of the Affair, you would not care to spend much time with any of the primary characters of The Quiet American. In this book, however, the lack of anyone likeable in the cast didn't much bother me. Where the characters in Affair dedicated most of their time to stoking the tempest in their personal teapot, Pyle and Fowler are at least engaging with the world outside of their personal bubble. They are deeply flawed people, but they are flawed in the ways that we are all flawed. Everyone (present company excluded, of course) occasionally makes the world worse through their naive good intentions, and occasionally through their knowing cynicism. We are Pyles and Fowlers all.


The Reading List Marches On!

Last weekend, I asked Blog Dork Eversaved and Vice-Dork Jenners to nominate the next few books for me to read off of The Reading List. So here, with their kind cooperation, is the road map for, well, probably the rest of the year:

1) Rowling, Harry Potter Book Three (this one was actually my own choice)

2) Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

3) Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

4) Voltaire, Candide

5) Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

6) Blume, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

Then, we're going to get down to some serious business and read the Iliad, the Odyssey, and James Joyce's Ulysses. The theme song for this stretch of the list will be the Mountain Goats' "This Year." As in: "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me."

Peace.

February's Element of the Month: Xenon!

February's Element of the Month:
Xenon!
Xe
54

Atomic Mass: 131.29 amu
Melting Point: -111.7 °C
Boiling Point: -108.1 °C

An awful lot of elements turn out to be silverish metals, but at anything like room temperature, or for that matter any natural temperature to be found on this planet, Xenon is a colorless gas.

The Centerfold!

Being a very stable element, it doesn't really combine into very many compounds. It's also very rare, making up only .09 parts per million of the Earth's atmosphere -- meaning that there is only about a third as much of it in natural air as there is of nitrous oxide, laughing gas.

Here's a neat trick you can play with Xenon: you know how you can inhale helium and then talk in that squeaky chipmunk voice? If you inhale Xenon, you'll speak in a very deep voice. True story. But be careful not to inhale too deeply, because Xenon functions as a general anesthetic, and incapacitating yourself really kills the joke. And quite possibly the joker. Xenon is, incidentally, probably the best substance available for general anesthesia, in theory. Unfortunately it costs ten bucks per liter, and that adds up to a ton of cash over the course of your typical surgery, even by medical standards.

Xenon is best known, I suppose, as one of the elements that you can make glow when you run current through it. Xenon lights are very bright and emit a spectrum of light reasonably close to regular daylight, so they are used in flashbulbs and film projectors along with things like car lights and a lot of what you might casually call "neon signs." If it's using xenon, though, it's not a neon sign. It's a xenon sign.

The Wednesday Quiz I:10 -- Rockers

The Wednesday Quiz -- Season I -- Quiz 10

Rockers

The Wednesday Quiz is a test of knowledge and intuition. Looking up answers or asking your buddy is lame. Questions about the rules are answered here.

This week's Quiz is a identification game. For each image,

Name the Rocker(s)

Here are fifteen images of people and bands who regularly appear on lists of the most influential rock artists of all time. Identify them for 6 2/3 points apiece. If there's more than one person in the photo, give the band name for full credit. [clarification: no, you don't have to list individual band members, unless there is a definite band leader (e.g. "Prince and the New Power Generation").]


1:


2:


3:


4:


5:


6:


7:


8:


9:


10:


11.


12.


13.


14.


15.


Submit your answers in the comments!

The Great Movies: "Pulp Fiction"

Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino, 1994.

I watched Pulp Fiction at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas, during its original release. During the first round of killin', my then-girlfriend burst into tears and fled out of the theater. Assuming that she had gone to the restroom to regain her composure, I resolved to keep mental notes to bring her back up to speed once she returned. At some point much later in the movie, I noticed that she had never returned. After the show, I caught up with her at her apartment. You're flying first class all the way with michael5000, baby!

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There is a contingent among you, Gentle Readers -- include one of you who is married to me -- who will find Pulp Fiction objectionable because, first, it is graphically violent, and that, second, the violence is to an extent pitched as madcap fun. I don't have a good answer to this, and I can't really argue that this is a movie to nurture to the better angels of our nature. But on this rewatching, I once again found Pulp Fiction wildly entertaining.


Plot: None. The movie consists of five remarkable episodes in the lives of some unsavory but colorful Los Angeles criminal types. The episodes are closely related but, famously, shown out of order, and one is split between the beginning and end of the movie. Pulp Fiction is hardly the first movie to have played with the flow of time, of course, but it went asynchronous with a cheerful gusto that influenced movie making for at least a decade afterwards.

Nothing that takes place in the movie is remotely plausible. It is all a sensationalized, glamourized, self-consciously cinematic vision of what criminal life might be like in an alternative, cartoon-like reality. But then we are told this from the get-go: the title of the movie, after all, is "Pulp Fiction." For all of its ironic pose, it actually delivers exactly what it offers: a hard-edged but foolish criminal fantasy.

Visuals: Sunsoaked, sleek, a little garish, and crafted with loving attention to detail in set and costume design. Tarantino's camera is so intentional -- showing us details in precise sequences, lingering on telling details, wandering among the characters -- that it is almost a character in its own right, an implicit narrator who follows along and makes visual comment on the action.

Dialog: There is almost no expository speech in Pulp Fiction whatsoever. The dialog, intelligent and witty even when the conversations are banal, develops the characters and provides a wry counterpoint to the action, but rarely has much to do with the action. Mostly, the dialog just entertains.

Now this is where we can make a fine distinction, because Pulp Fiction really isn't a movie where violence is presented as funny or entertaining. What is funny and entertaining is the dialog that surrounds the violence. The violence, in and of itself, is as shocking as violence in any other intelligent violent movie. In fact, it has to be in order for the movie to work. It's the horror of the violence that sets up the extreme bathos of the ensuing dialogue. We don't laugh at the shootings, in other words; we laugh at the strange, stylized responses to the shootings. These are funny not only because they deviate from real behavior but because they deviate from how we've been conditioned to expect fictional and cinema characters to respond to violence.

Still, this kind of humor is not for everybody. I wouldn't want to watch it with my mom.

Prognosis: This is an important stop on the History of Film tour, certainly one of the top two or three most important movies of the 1990s. Not recommended for anyone who objects to brief but moderately graphic portrayals of human lives being gruesomely snuffed out in hails of gunfire. But you know what? Highly recommended for everybody else.