The tribulations of Buddy, careless dog.

Ford Madox Ford on Henry James

Exactly what may have been his intimate conviction as to, say, what should be the proper relation of the sexes, I don't profess to know... he had a personal horror of letting his more august friends come into contact through him with anyone who might be even remotely expected of marital irregularities.... Once he had got it well fixed in his head that I was a journalist, he conceived the idea that all my friends must be illegally united with members of the opposite sex.
It happened that two extraordinarily respectable wives of two eminent editors... took it in their heads to call on James at Rye. I had hardly so much as a bowing acquaintance with them, but the next day, happening to go into Rye, I met the Old Man down by the harbor. Just at the point where we met was a coal yard whose proprietor had the same name as one of the husbands of those ladies. James stopped short and with a face working with fury, pointed his stick at the coal man's name above the gate and brought out the exasperated words: "A couple of jaded.... WANTONS!...." and nothing whatever more.

From: My School Days by E. Nesbit

I acquired many marbles, and much gingerbread, and totally eclipsed Cissy Thomas who had enjoyed the fleeting sunshine of popular favour on the insecure basis of paper dolls.

The Sound and The Fury

From the second section- June Second, 1910:
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
It was propped against the collar box and I lay listening to it. Hearing it, that is. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. Like Father said down the long and lonely light-rays you might see Jesus walking, like. And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Through the wall I heard Shreve's bed-springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing. I got up and went to the dresser and slid my hand along it and touched the watch and turned it face-down and went back to bed. But the shadow of the sash was still there and I had learned to tell almost to the minute, so I'd have to turn my back to it, feeling the eyes animals used to have in the back of their heads when it was on top, itching. It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
And so as soon as I knew I couldn't see it, I began to wonder what time it was. Father said that constant speculation regarding the position of mechanical hands on an arbitrary dial which is a symptom of mind-function. Excrement Father said like sweating. And I saying All right. Wonder. Go on and wonder.

and:

Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.

The Magic Bedknob

by Mary Norton
"The charitable attitude to adopt, Carey," said Aunt Beatrice in her precise, cutting voice, "is that you are not quite right in your head. This story about a South sea island, cannibals.... lagoons....If it were necessary to lie, a child of three could do better."
Carey swallowed.
"A magic bed..." Aunt Beatrice smiled acidly. "It might interest you to know, Carey, that I bought that bed myself in 1903, quite new, from Baring and Willow's- a most reputable firm," she added, "and not given to innovations".

Hepzibah sets up shop in "The House of Seven Gables"

"With a beating heart, she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibah's shop-window. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame, that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognising that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native squeamishness, as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief."

An Existentialist explains sleeping on a train: More from Simone de Beauvoir's American diaries

In a train's sleeping berth:
The tension and fatigue entailed in every existence originate in other, larger forms of existence; in these berths, stacked on either side of the corridor, like tombs in the galleries of the catacombs, each person achieves an absolute solitude. This nocturnal dwelling evokes the peace of the funeral chambers of Mycenae and Cerveteri; no appeal from the outside world can penetrate here. My life is no longer pulled in different directions or tied to anyone or anything; it is closed in on itself in the silence of death. I turn off the lights and shut my eyes. I feel the rhythmic movement of teh train as it rolls into the unknown; this movement also brings me peace- the peace of an alibi. Not only am I separated from everything, but I am not situated at any particular spot in the universe. I'm just passing through. the sleep that pulls me from this world is in harmony with the rolling of the train, which minute by minute denies me my unique place in it.

Simone de Beauvoir in America

From the marvelous diaries kept while in the U.S., January to May 1947....
"what makes daily life so agreeable in America is the good humor and friendliness of Americans...(but) this amiability is disconcerting. The respect granted the citizen is completely abstract; the same polite smile that assures David Brown that he is a unique individual will also gratify John William s who is unique too. Nothing is more universal than this singularity recognized with such ceremony. One suspects a hoax. Nonetheless, thanks to these considerations, the American doesn't need to strain to feel his human dignity. It may be commercial but the cordiality of salespeople is never servile. They are not bitter or stiff, and though it is encouraged by self-interest, their kindnes is no less real. We've held German soldiers responsible for the wayy they carried out orders of extreme cruelty- and in fact, man is never passive. In obeying he commits his freedom, and submitting to evil is a way of reclaiming it for himself. Most of the time he reclaims it through inventions and initiatives that make his responsibility apparent. Likewise the American citizen does not submit passively to the propaganda of the smile; on a foundation of of obligatory optimism, it is really he who freely presents himself as cordial, trusting and generous. His kindness is less suspect the less interested he is in the success of the system- he is more duped than duping. p 24

Stanley Kauffmann on Chaplin

Stanley Kauffmann on Paulette Goddard in "The Great Dictator" from Stanley Kauffmann's "A World on Film":
All the Good people are GOOD; and when they escape they settle on a storybook farm where they dine at an outdoor table under a grape arbor in a picture so itchily pretty it would give Currier the Ives.

A sunny day

I was able to finish my Chesterfield sofa. Because of the extensive tufting, painting the areas that are folded out of sight was nightmarish. I would pull the wrinkles out and run a paintbrush along them and then discover a dozen that I had overlooked. It was like painting a Shar-Pei.

From "Pragmatism"

Quoted in "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"
In Pragmatism, published a year after the quake, he wrote, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.”

and

“to anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent”—and he had done both—“the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life’s purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.”

From:

From "Naming Day in Eden" (1958) by Noah Jonathan Jacobs

"Adam's bold step towards freedom introduced new features of violence into the world and seriously disturbed the balance between the animal and plant kingdoms. His sudden departure must have been regarded by the others as a breach of loyalty on the part of a degenerate member who had lost his sound animal sense. They classified their poor relation as a zoological freak, a beast with brains, a man fallen from monkeyhood, and then they returned to their sensible round of duties. Naturally they refused to follow him to the perilous fronteir so far removed from corporeal being, except the dog....
The dog is aware of his own worthlessness. Waggish cynical, a slave to wretched odors, he is constantly sniffing about as if he had lost something irrecoverable."

Gerhardie

Gerhardie visits Edith Wharton at her chateau:
"He arrived late at night, carrying in his bag several large chunks of buttered bread, and these he secretively flushed down the toilet, putting the whole plumbing system out of order."
He misunderstood the butler's name and called him "father" all his visit.
-from R.W.B. Lewis' Edith Wharton

The ghost yeller

Something kicked my bed hard a few nights ago. How hard? It woke me, but in dream terms it was only the amount of impact that would be given if your bed was head-butted by a huge talking fish. It was a little less that when the utility that keeps the bed in one spot lifts and drops it for non-payment- more like the sensation when a small electric vehicle shaped like a hat hits the bed and the small electric man inside gets out to scratch his head. There were several options but as consciousness dawned the choices narrowed to two. Rationally, I know Seattle is rife with faults, bless its heart, but if I were allowed to select either a ghost or an earthquake, I'd prefer a ghost.
I've never really thought much about them: ghosts. I suppose they are our dependent clauses. They are our messy carbons. I could go on. Unlike angels, unclear beings who sustain poorly rationed faiths, ghosts have been created from a surfeit of identity. Ghosts exist in details. They've evolved from early mercenaries whose mission was vengeance and whose soul could be paid to rest into something more parochial and decidedly more personal. At some point the tentacles of the self reached beyond the pattern life. (I don't mean to suggest that a life's purpose must be exhausted like the flame's fuel or it rekindles some otherworldly aura. Ghosts have nothing to do with the dead on whom they are based.)
The individual does not pack a single personality. We are each mimics and we each covet what others are. To cope, we people the inanimate objects of our environment with Persona Babies. When that won't suffice we give personal narratives to actions. We assign actions personality traits. That reason the doll moved from where I left it or the door slammed is because of some anger or longing. To be haunted by these remnants of excessive egotism is to be chased by the scary faces we've just made in the mirror. If we did not psychoanalyze them, if we could just allow ourselves to be haunted by generic spirits- by the dead as a club that would be far different than having the touch put on you by the ghosts who are our contemporaries and equals. We are no longer terrified by the echoes in our bicameral brain, but by the identities we have formed ourselves.
Every ghost these days is a previous tenant which should say something of our feelings about property. My first expectation, surfacing from sleep was that the bed-kicker was just such a previous tenant. Probably killed by the asbestos and come back to warn me not to put any decorative hooks in the ceiling. I had forgotten about earthquakes. My exact half-waking thought was: "Damn! Now I have ghosts. Ter-rific. Well, they can go... I'm not moving out." It was a few moments before I thought of alternatives.
You can't blame me. There is something otherworldly about the motion of an earthquake. A fluid relation between walls and floors is not found in any living experience except in an earthquake. I don't suppose a ghost has the weight behind it to move my bed as much as it was moved. They are subtle in material- the breath of intent clothed in a sheet- diaphanous beings in velvet breeches or a wedding dress. (Why are we only haunted by jilted brides? We're never haunted by bridesmaids resentfully clomping up to our bed in their hideous mauve organza. 'Boo. I am cursed to stalk eternity. In this dress')

It might be possible that I suffered a sort of bilocation and kicked my own bed. If so, it is another talent wasted. It is a great pity that none of us can profitably occupy two distinct spots simultaneously- the best we could ever hope for is the ability to climb from our bodies, kick ourselves in the backside and get back in again.
Though it took the broadcast news nearly ten minutes to acknowledge it, what had happened was a sort of tectonic hiccup centered somewhere around Mt. Vernon. It can't have been more than a 4 point something or a 5. If Seattle were to have the spurs dug into it and to jump any significant amount, my dog and I would be buried alive in books, and if forced to read my way to freedom, I have a horrible feeling that the closest books would be Lady Murasaki's "Tale of Genji" and Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse".
I have to purge additional books. 3 boxes are on their way:

I've been more enthralled with the paper they wrap pomme frites in, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I can't like everything the canon lassos, John Dos Passos
Pity I don't grade on a curve, Saint-Beuve
Do go, Victor Hugo
LOL, Heinrich Boll

Nabokov

link to somewhat lengthy interviews with Nabokov and many others, including Warhol, de Kooning, Martha Graham and the unspeakably vile A Ginsberg
http://video.thirteen.org/series/show/88

Buddy, Etruscan

My dog, Buddy, as far as I can determine, is Etruscan. There are all sorts of remnants of lost civilizations around. Why not Buddy? Like the Etruscans, Buddy's genetic origins are unknown. The Etruscans were believed by some to be autochthonous. This means (roughly) they were indigenous to wherever they happened to be. Etruscans themselves seem unforthcoming. When pressed, they might casually drop a hint that they were displaced Lydians and apparently no one thought to say "Lydia must be lovely at this time of year" to find out anything useful, like what was wrong with Lydia. If I know ancient people (and I do know some pretty ancient people) I would bet my last dollar that there were also Etruscans who wouldn't shut up about where they were from. If you ducked behind an obelisk they would find you because they had nothing better to do than to walk around obelisks and tell you how much 'nicer' the drainage sluices were behind their old homes. There are legends of a great hardship in which the Lydian king sent half of his starving population away in ships- with mild encouragements to write when they found breakfast. Despite there being nothing left to divide between the remaining Lydians they thought it made perfect sense to have greater portions of it.
For nearly a thousand years, you could not even step into a toga without finding it lousy with Etruscans. Then just as suddenly as they arrived, they vanished, leaving Etruscan-shaped indentations in the sofa, Etruscan teeth-marks in the quiche, and Etruscan shaped holes in the doors. I'm sure their unencouraging smiles drifted through many a landlord's nightmare after that. Sometimes Buddy has just that Etruscan smile, like a gassy baby.
Afterwards it was found that they had managed to sneak a word or two into our vocabulary which we later discovered- like napkin-wrapped hors d'oeuvres behind our cushions. 'Tavern' is from them, as are 'cistern' and 'persona'. Film buffs might recall that "Persona" was a film by Ingmar Bergman, a story of two isolated women who slap each other and swap mental illnesses. It is distinguishable from the same director's "Through A Glass Darkly" in that the crazy lady in the latter film erroneously believes that she has seen God who is an enormous spider. What she has seen is a helicopter which is an easy mistake to make. One hoped when she subsequently clambered into the helicopter, she might have questioned whether God should have so many knobs and switches, but Bergman always ended his movies just when they were about to get fun. I digress.
Etruscan women were said to shave their bodies and bleach their hair. Buddy departs from the typical Etruscan in that regard. Etruscans were also said to be indiscriminate and would copulate in public with both sexes. That's a little more Buddy.
Every morning Buddy wakes me up by licking my eyeballs. I must appear dead to him. (When he holds a spoon to my nose, I'll know he's eyeing my stuff.) Similarly, when a Pope dies, the Secretary of State for Vatican City hammers on the dead pope's head three times shouting his given name. This makes sure the pope is not faking to get out of an audience with the Junior League of Weehauken or Pam Dawber. Hammering on the skull is a remnant, as is the pope's coiled staff, of the Etruscans, but when I look to my sources to find how it is Etruscan, they mumble and fidget.
Buddy likes to dig holes and coincidentally Etruscans popularized burial. The least contentious use of burial, as we know, was for the deceased. In fact the legacy of the Etruscans is in their tombs. Their civilization is the items that graverobbers considered hardly worth carrying off. This of course makes us think how we'll be defined by milky VHS cases and hairy knit caps and bottles of Christmas tree preservative. We are far too anxious about how we will be remembered. Personally, I'd like to be pounded into currency and circulated in small denominations.
To conclude, for insurance purposes Buddy is not a pit-bull. He is Etruscan.

My own damn sport

There is a time in a man's life when no recognized participatory sport will have him and he must invent his own. I am at that juncture.
I am a hobbyhorser.
"That doesn't even exist," you exclaim.
"On the contrary," I say, galloping about you upon my steed. "Hobbyhorsing is a venerable sport."
"Quit poking at me, jerk," you ask.
Yes. I will tell you the history. Of course alot has changed since the sport's inception in 1908. The hobbyhorsing uniforms of those days are laughable by todays standards, but almost everything seems funny today. Something seems to have gotten into us. At the turn of the century there was virtually no safety equipment available for the casual hobbyhorsist. Gorings were numerous... in the number narrowly averted. This haphazardness forced women to be relegated to the role of spectators, and rarely even that. Women were permitted into the sport in 1927 but were required to hobbyhorse side-saddle.
Hobby-horses were, of course, used in olden times (as we call them today) by the French (as we call people who live in France). Let's go back into history and take a look. Oh, not that far. We can imagine that cave-men might have domesticated the stick prior to domesticating horses but then we would have to ask what it was they thought they were doing when they put a stick between their legs, wouldn't we? Let's just scooch up to 15th century France. These stalwart early hobbyhorsers were self-appointed 'alongside-followers' and would attempt to 'up-hurry' laggers and fatties. Hobby-horses also show up in an early English engraving in which we see what looks to be a mob of Morris Dancers encouraging a lone hobbyhorser with decapitation.
Today's hobbyhorsers consider the racing from one's current spot to an entirely separate spot in time or space jejune. One's hobbyhorsemanship is not based on distance, competence or uninsaneness, but solely centers around one's cavorts. While it is possible for even a novice to score high marks for capriciousness and vagrancy, most newcomers quickly run out of ideas. There is nothing sadder than a limp steed gradually slipping down to some immobile, gape-mouthed hobbyhorseman or woman's ankles.
And while our loping might seem aimless.
Another thing that attracts me to this sport is that it offers little in the way of calamities and catastrophes. The worst thing a hobbyhorser can get is stomp-foot. Thigh-chap is almost unheard of these days- partially due to the fact that when the straddle-barrier was broken for lady hobbyhorsers new rules permitted the introduction of a looser seat. Purists decried what they described as the untightening of the strictures of straddling, pointing out that some people hardly touch their horse, and until they finish their horse, no dessert.
There were, for a number of years, two competing hobbyhorsing organizations- the National Hobbyhorsers International and the American Hobbyhorsing Association which for a time was sponsored by the beef spread Bovril until Bovril denied this.
The former sanctioned developments in the stick-mounts such as aluminum bodies that were said to enhance aerodynamic efficiency and rear end streamers which offset those gains. Today's steed would not recognize the primitive horse of old- they are as different as today's broom and the ridiculous brooms of yesteryear. The A.H.A. held fast against encroaching progress and eventually succumbed to the Nixon-era surge in popularity, led by notables such as (citation needed).
"But sport?" you might aver beneath your breath, "It's barely an activity."
"YOU'RE BARELY AN ACTIVITY!" I respond, winning eleventy points. And with my steed floating and flouncing between my legs I ride off, without traversing any distance whatsoever.

Purging

In my ongoing purge, I have given the Cheever oeuvre to Kyle who adores the downcast. I tried, and enjoyed his adept craft, but ultimately could not endure his mood. If I restock it will be the iconic orange/red paperback. I gave E.F. Benson's collected Lucia novels and "As I lay Dying" to Ken. "History and Its Images" to David. The rest...an enormous box of books.... well, 20 or so. .. I took to HPB for which I received $3.00 cash with which I bought a Dale Peck ("Hatchet Jobs") and Stephens' "The Crock of Gold". And who was lost and who was saved?
..
..
..
..
..
Au revoir, Simone de Beauvoir! (pictured....really)
Ta-ta, Yasunari Kawabata!
Blow, Malraux!
Scram, Michael Cunningham!
Begone, Michael Chabon!
Take a hike, John Updike!
Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Gunter Grass!

Crock

Maybe it's something of a palate cleanser. "Crock of Gold" by James Stephens (1882-1950) mainly concerns the fairies, satyrs and wee folk whose complex government seems to permit child abduction and theft. It is fey and dark simultaneously, fanciful but never twee.
From the book:
"All bodies grow around a skeleton. Life is a petticoat about death."
and
"A thought is a real thing and words are only its raiment; but a thought is as shy as a virgin; unless it is fittingly appareled, we may not look on its shadowy nakedness: it will fly from us..." (it continues thusly on p. 39)
and:
"The question naturally arises whether clothing is as unknown in nature as we have fancied? Viewed as a protective measure against atmospheric rigour, we find that many creatures grow, by their own central impulse, some kind of exterior panoply which may be regarded as their proper clothing. Bears, cats, dogs, mice, sheep and beavers are wrapped in fur, hair, fell, fleece or pelt so these creatures cannot by any means be regarded as being naked. Crabs, cockraoches, snails and cockles have ordered around them a crusty habiliment, wherein their original nakedness is only to be discovered by force... Clothing, therefore is not an art but an instinct and the fact that man is born naked and does not grow his clothing upon himself from within but collects it from various distant and haphazard sources is not any reason to call this necessity an instinct for decency." (p. 76)

My blue heaven

Joe Dallesandro

One of these things is not like the others

Ford Madox Ford, Joyce, Pound and (I believe) Galsworthy.

The answer? Only one was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Um.... Galsworthy. "Conrad said he was as hard as iron under a soft exterior and tenacious as a bulldog in spite of a carefully feigned pococurantism" (from Ford Madox Ford's delirious and wonderful "Portraits From Life"). Also "I had already recognized in him a certain queerness, a pixylike perversity" (for the melodramatic). And: "It used to seem almost a miracle that he could find his way about his own works while he was writing them, so frequently was he counseled by one person and another to change all the salient passages of his books".

Was that a car?

Don't ask

Dean Jones: He's looking for a cat-burgler
Suzanne Pleshette: That's ridiculous. Who would want to steal cats?

Pinter

"I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which remind you of others, whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion... trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows... what relief... it may give to them... who knows how they may quicken... in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel... to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No... no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy... is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life."
(Harold Pinter, No Man's Land, 1974. Words requested by the playwright to be spoken at his funeral)

I would love to do Pinter without pauses.

Fish films

The New York Times' Stanley Fish, of all people, has released his list of 10 all-time best American films. Showing remarkable restraint in not selecting a 13-minute documentary from 1924 on labor unease or "Killer of Sheep", he has instead opted to present a deliberately middle-brow list. Let's start by giving Fish a little bit of a break. We expect something idiosyncratic- something we wouldn't find in Bosley Crowther's heart of hearts. We expect that Fish will have done some judicious paring- this being the difference between a list and an inventory. We expect our tastes to be represented and suspect that we might become resentful if they are not but we are not entirely partisan. We don't expect "The Daily Worker" to gush about "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" the way we do when our more....urban friends are not supposed to be nearby. We expect that Fish has seen a large number of American films- we don't require him to have seen everything- the ability to rank films obviously would require less expertise than might be needed to... let's say... decide the ten most important developments in aeronautics.
However as we look at the list we have to wonder if Fish believes that it should require something greater than the ability to recall his own reactions.
There are so many endemic problems with establishing a hierarchy within such a vast archive of amorphous and dissimilar objects. Was "Steamboat Willie" more meaningful, more moving or more cinematic than "Long Day's Journey Into Night"? We've all tacitly (let's leave Kant out of this) agreed that there can be no objective value in art- so given the task of deciding which creative work exceeds the effects of all others- given the duty to select ten exceptional works from the entire history of this particular creative form- why does it seem that Fish abrogates all responsibility?
So Fish, we want a unique response....BUT we have expectations. "Citizen Kane" has been at the top of most such lists for decades. We expect it, or something very like it- a harbinger of modernism, the uncompromising vision of the true cinematic auteur. Fish's list is headed by "The Best Years of Our Lives", a mawkish WWII epic. This star-packed film, (if we count Dana Andrews) bested the sublime "It's a Wonderful Life" and Hitchcock's dark "Notorious" for Best Picture at the 1947 Academy Awards. Its reunion scene between Myrna Loy and Frederick March is about the only widely anthologized moment, but the film is often remembered for plucking the actor Harold Russell from obscurity, reminding us why we had obscurity in the first place. Russell, an actual double-amputee throws the film's particularly theatrical verisimilitude into disarray with his unconvincing performance as a double-amputee. Tellingly, this marks the first time a film with Teresa Wright was ruined by someone else. (Wright is the ubiquitous 40's ingenue whose excessive schoolgirlishness makes every Shirley Temple film look like "Krapp's Last Tape".) There are so many levels of required deception that one must engage to endure "The Best Years..." that watching it inexorably becomes about self-deceit.
You must ask whether Fish being moved by what could be most charitably be regarded as an unintegrated vision means that he isolates the power to manipulate viewers' emotions as the only valid effect produced by motion pictures. Well, what if emotional manipulation exists to achieve higher ends? Is it even possible to arouse the intellect without first registering upon the emotions?
What, after all, should be the aim of film? I suppose it varies from piece to piece, from artist to artist. It gets mighty complicated when you begin to dissect a particularly effective narrative and discover that it is not the result of a single design. How can we evaluate "The Third Man" when the idea came from Korda, the script from Greene, the direction Reed, the music Karas, and the speech on the ferris wheel Welles?
"The Third Man" is emotionally effective though Graham Greene considered it primarily an action film padded with dialogue. It also is a brilliant study in morality, an analysis of love, a dissection of literary celebrity, a history lesson, a detective thriller and a celebration of, and indictment of allegiance. Let's say that the result is a consistent, controlled amalgam of writing, performance, and technical skills producing a coherent narrative (within whatever logical boundaries it decides to make apparent to us). What is its value as a singular work of art? The complexity and variety of one's responses should have some sort of numerical value shouldn't it?
Not so fast! What about "Norbit"? Who can enumerate the countless levels and types of revulsion? "The Third Man" is a British film (mostly) but if the lachrymal melodramas on Fish's list, like 'Shane" eventually invite more exegesis by their ambiguities, does that give them an edge over films that have more readable emotional landscapes? Is that what he is getting at? Could someone ask him?
What else is on the list? Though Fish relies mostly on things from his tender youth, (even singling out the melodramatic moments in such lighter musical fare as "Meet Me in Saint Louis" to justify that inclusion) he has also included the Ramis/ Murray film "Groundhog Day", a light comedy based on a sort of stoner's existential concept which I won't go into. Let's just say it has more holes than Bonnie, Clyde and their goth kid Seth. Its appearance here as the sole comedy (to the exclusion of great screwball comedies "Bringing Up Baby", "The Awful Truth", "My Favorite Wife", and "His Girl Friday" or anything by Capra, Wilder Lubitsch and Sturges or even Fields, Chaplin and Allen) suggests that he expects us to regard all such lists as ephemeral, and his admiration easily given when the subject doesn't really matter much. This can only reinforce the suspicion that Fish does not respect film but enjoys it when it does what he permits it to do.
Part of the point of these lists is to put an ugly girl in with the pretty ones to teach us a lesson about surface beauty. Top Ten lists thrive on citing the inevident, it is the stock in trade of all music, art and film critics to find an obscure moment far worthier than a heralded moment. Doing so naturally implies a depth of knowledge and experience. If a critic's greater exposure has given him a larger sample from which to choose, how can the viewer of one or two films a year deny that there might be more charm in the collateral plot, the oblique emotion or the muddied dialogue? And if critics pretend to have no pre-conceptions, if they accept all finished products as contenders, they necessarily imagine that approving the well-regarded means they have not looked hard enough.
Most critics mix their lists like home-made salad dressing: 50% oil (the well-regarded) 40% vinegar (the obscure) and 10% spice (the things even their friends can't disguise their contempt for). Groundhog Day" is rocky road ice-cream in the recipe. It is not by any definition, not even by Fish's, one of the ten greatest works in American cinema. Wasn't Andie MacDowell still being dubbed by English speaking actresses then?
I do not mean to suggest that competent critics pander to their readers by offering them what they expect nor do I suggest following the above recipe (I buy Wish-bone). I also would never dream of suggesting that a body of critical response should dictate all future critical response. I've never made it through any "Godfather" nor to my knowledge any entire Scorcese film. I would never suggest to find a film superior to Citizen Kane is to dismantle the values of our forefathers. I'll be the first to argue that "Citizen Kane" has almost outlived its usefulness as the film equivalent of Ulysses or Demoiselles D'Avignon (and if pressed even that Picasso has almost outlived his usefulness as Picasso- but just leave Joyce be for now). Even though Welles' methods and manners have become familiar: the Rube Goldberg concatenation of lines, the switchback propulsion, the tonal and aural depth which define its visceral and quasi-intellectual thrills, the film still produces those thrills. It does so with a surprising economy, unlike the turgid epics of recent years. As it ages though, those pleasures are increasingly undercut by the inept performances which have become harder to ignore: the cast often bent and tremulous, clad in age-make-up so poor that it reminds one of an elementary school "Death of a Salesman"- their earnest radio drama line-readings. The film must also suffer as a paradigm of the disjointed nature of truth when its own artifice is so false- and must pall as a model of the destruction of hagiography when later study shows that -whereas Welles selected a perfectly loathsome target in Hearst, Hearst was a monster for reasons entirely ignored in the story of Kane (and the attacks on the widely admired Marion Davies were gratuitously mean-spirited.)
These are opinions that have evolved as the art-form has evolved. The art-form can never evolve enough to make "Groundhog Day" great.

"Sunset Boulevard" and "Double Indemnity" are on the list. These are both films I admire. I can just imagine what these dark, cynical but worldly romances speak to in Fish. Surely there is no more menacing affection on film than that between Stanwyck and MacMurray, but no one gets out of either of these love stories alive or sane. Possibly that's their appeal. At least they brook no chance of sequels though I'd like to think that someone pitched Max and Norma's return in "Sunset Boulevard Day Care". "Triple Indemnity" with Edward G. Robinson? ("See... I took out a policy that pays triple if these two kill each other after killing the original policy holder. I'm putting it all in Flubber"). What of the other great dark romances? Scripts from which at least one person emerges or in which both survive but in less than idyllic bliss? "Casablanca", "The Big Sleep", "The Maltese Falcon"? Even for the love of Jesus "The Philadelphia Story"?
Fish responds best to complex relationships and their complicated geometries, with his citing of "Red River", of "Raging Bull" and never more so than with his selection of "Vertigo", an easily detestable film featuring a woman named Kim Novak who appears to be constantly winded from failing to scintillate while hunching. Fish revels in the complicated "he manipulates me through her so I manipulate her" plot and singles out Novak for praise as he did Russell, the dead-eyed leaden middles that drag these long slogs down. If he likes complicated relationships why doesn't he consider "Chinatown", (was Faye Dunaway her own mother? What was that? Parthenogenesis? ) or the delightfully monstrous "The Little Foxes"?
That Fish gives us a list of movies we already know as opposed to things he wishes us to search out seems to cast aspersions upon more deliberately erudite Top Ten Film lists- lists that might rely heavily on films whose hypothetical later discussion could possibly inform areas of neglected plight: the plights of black Appalachian sommeliers or Hurricane ZsaZsa orphans (they have to use Z at some point). I'm all for giving a leg-up to the ladderless masses, but I suspect, today on the intersections of despair and degradation, you are more likely to have gaggles of ragged production assistants than orphans chase you down the street for change.
I've long believed that the more 'subversive' the publication that employs the critic the more recondite the list. It's not a perfect formula but I'm working on it. A critic in some ways is always assembling a simulacrum of himself- as automatically as he might name his 5 senses. After all, how can any man live his life without imagining the world is just himself, disassembled? The entireity contains the top ten facets of the list-maker's personality. This allows the list-maker to illuminate the aspects of his personality that are so nuanced that no one else has ever seen them. He does this by selecting films that illustrate such nuances in a manner which he presumes is invisible to nearly everyone. The small signs of heroism or despair strike some inner resonance, and the less evident they are the more acknowledging them gives hope that one's own quiet gestures can make a difference.
Fish stresses the piquant buried within the mundane. This is certainly understandable. But how uninteresting must the bulk of the thing be to make those interesting moments worthwhile? If I have been numb for 110 minutes only to find, in two fabulous minutes Mickey Rooney popping out of Victor Buono's stomach and running around the spaceship, I am not likely to forget the earlier pain I endured. But maybe that's me. I am such an ideal candidate for brainwashing, I usually consider the first 20 minutes of every film I see the greatest thing I've ever seen. "Oh my god! I love this! 'The Dukes of Hazzard' is the best mov...." and then minute 21 hits. Maybe it's my metabolism. Pauline Kael must have been built like a Galapagos turtle.
I suppose what is most provoking is how Fish discards the evolutional narrative of film by ignoring its touchstones, ignores the scope of film by wallowing within the major studio projects, and ignores the social utility of film by ranking excellence by his own responsiveness- and does this without admitting that he is doing it.
I suppose it could have been worse. Thank god they screwed Manny Farber's lid tight.

FROM: Middlemarch

As Casaubon courts Dorothea:
"Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was."

Busts

Tobacco cards- dozens more at the NY Public Library site

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The prototypical Ivy Compton-Burnett line, from Brothers and Sisters:
"No, don't dream of troubling Peter", said Sophia, as Peter ceased to dream of it.

FROM: Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability: her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine, close-cropped head was in the style of late Roman Empire but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. i had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her.

How I started Part 3

My sleeping arrangement quickly moved from the peaty bog sofa to Tim's obsessively tidy bed. If the house was chaos, the bed was strict order. Tim was a bedding afficianado. He spoke of thread count like an alchemist. He valued it more highly than pattern or color. I don't believe he ever fixed on an optimal number. Who's going to say how many angels should be allowed on a pin's head? There could not be too many threads in a sheet. After a long day of being tortured by by demonic furnishings we would kick free and convene at the bed. There Tim would tuck and smooth each layer of the bedding, the corners perfectly folded, the head turned back neatly. I would just stand and watch as each immaculate layer was made to be perfectly flat and I always looked forward to collating myself in. Nothing felt quite so good as a receptive bed, an unwrinkled, undefiant, uncomplicated bed. In my own bed I'd be forced to disentangle a knot of blankets with my feet every night, unsure whether the blankets were on lengthwise or had gotten turned to cross perpendicularly. If more than half the bedclothes had been tugged to favor one quadrant, I would always seem to sense it, subconsciously and only at an inconvenient level of awareness. There's something about an unbalanced bed that troubles sleep. My bed would always be a tangle of its elements, only 75% or less of which fit- if 3 fitted corners gripped the mattress, the 4th would always pop free. During the night my bed boils and heaves like the primeval earth. I have no idea what can be happening but the next day it looks like it was ransacked by foul-tempered dwarves.
Watching Tim make his bed was like watching a impeccable kind of origami being made by someone in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.
Though they lived just across the street, Tim's family never visited Hulga's house. Hulga only came by once. She was dressed in a heavily embellished sweater, greens and purples, a satin jacket, her voluminous wig and a sort of Peter Pan hat on top. She was cheery and seemed to be untroubled by the incomprehensible number of unusable pieces of furniture piled everywhere. She was something of a pack-rat herself, though it was hard to imagine her in the clothes that she stored in the house- the high-heeled go-go boots and mod print mini-skirts. It was easier to reconcile the gemutlich little woman with all the beer garden paraphrenaila that lay festooning the cartons of clothing, including two sets of plastic Clydesdales pulling a beer van.
When I visited Tim in Sedro we would work on several projects simultaneously- some in the enormous garage, some on the back porch, some in the driveway and many in the house. Tim tried to guide me as I refinished wood furniture but it was hopeless. I was afraid of acetone which he used liberally and my pieces were always clogged with the residues of the original finish or were freckled with numerous spots of paint in minute divots. The finishes I applied were never as well-done as his. When Tim did not like the way a piece was turning out, he would strip the piece again and start over. I could never bring myself to do that. If they weren't turning perfectly, I would just begin to resent the hypothetical shopper who would expect perfection.
Despite my own misgivings I would, nevertheless, take on things far beyond my competence. I refinished an entire Heywood-Wakefield dining set with 6 chairs. Hey-Wake was a brand notorious for the difficulty of reproducing its amber blond finish. Every mark, every misstep showed in blond furniture. I was much more comfortable with metals and metals were slightly more forgiving. I would blithely begin projects that would require days of power sanding and days of hand sanding, vented lockers being a particularly odious example. We would also reupholster chairs or padded benches with a staple gun. And when it was very sunny and dry we would steam clean sofas and upholstered chairs. What was key was drying time. If one contiguous surface dried unevenly the poor result was instantly apparent.
For the most part we enjoyed working on things together. Tim could make me laugh nearly constantly, though the hilarity soon was broken up by more and more bickering. I think our nerves would start to fray earlier and earlier each trip. Our sleep was disarranged which was certainly responsible for part of it. I found, as soon as I had moved into the big bed that as soon as he drifted off Tim began to babble in the night like a mountain stream or a decorative fountain. It gathered volume from an initial split-splat, becoming eventually a sort of moist Flight of the Bumblebee. This gave it the effect of always approaching, like a furtive waterfall. I would push him as far as I could to his edge of the bed.
I think his self-awareness kept him awake nights which allowed him to discover -with what seemed like no small amount of glee- that I sobbed disconsolately in my sleep. It was not working out. I couldn't sleep because it sounded like kittens lapping up a spill behind me; he couldn't sleep because of the hysterical weeping. It eventually occurred to me in the middle of one sleepless night to switch my direction. When Tim woke up and saw feet on the pillow next to him, he was badly startled.

How I started in the business Part 2

My visits to Sedro were always productive, even if they might have been unhealthy. I would skip the gym the 4 or 5 days I was up there and would cleave fairly closely to Tim's all starch diet. In the mornings we would clear away what we had worked on the day before and make a space to grill egg-sandwiches- Tim's unvarying breakfast. The potato bread made them doughy, the butter and American cheese made them unctuous. Bacon on the side. I'd make coffee, but Tim drank local Soda. He actually preferred generic brands to name brands and poor cuts of meat to better. He'd prepare chicken thighs in oily Thai peanut sauce mounded on a plateful of white rice. Dinner was seldom before 11 at night when we would watch the old Kilgallen/Cerf "What's My Line" with a plate on each of our laps. Sometimes we'd eat spaghetti drenched in Alfredo sauce.
The kitchen was also where new purchases were cleaned. Small parts, scrubbed, scraped and buffed. Next to the loaf of potato bread and the pizza rotisserie there would be several open cans of Howard's Restor-a-finish, which was extraordinarily noxious. Occasionally Watco oil too, as we could never seem to predict what would be effective. There was nearly always a can of Brasso as we polished plastics and removed adhesives with it. There were open squeeze bottles of lighter fluid which was a quick label-remover. Gunk-off. Goo-gone. Some of these removers would melt through fiberglass or plastic. Brasso was the safest. There were always lots of soaking brushes and hardware soaking. Lots of tacky finishes. When it was winter the final finishes had to be applied in the house or they would never dry. In summer our final coats were applied in the driveway. The tiny brackets that were scattered on pieces we finished in summer were the legs of adventurous and unlucky bugs.
We started refinishing metal barrister bookcases for the owner of the store where we consigned. He paid well but the work was not easy. Barrister bookcases were manufactured by several firms, most notably Globe-Wernicke who made both the traditional oak stacking units and industrial metal units. The metal ones went through several design changes, and each change brought us a new puzzle in disassembly. It wasn't just Globe-Wernicke cases. Each company had their own proprietary method, and each had their own irreplaceable pieces. The glass was held in place by rubber strips in some, metal flanges in others, thick rubber bumpers in most. the bumpers were particular and a bumper from one side of a pane of glass could not be swapped with one from the other side. The inner sides of the cases had to be pried away in one model, and then slid back after the refinishing without scarring the bottom surfaces.
Some of the units we would brush with sandpaper after we had stripped them and then coat them with oil and poly. They could not be touched after the original paint had been removed, so we would move them with towels. The oil on our fingers would have left ineradicable prints that would soon rust. Other units we would paint with appliance epoxy. It came in white and black only and had peculiar requirements. It could not be touched up. A second coat would begin to dissolve the first. Tim had such a steady hand that he was able to make an initial pass to get the surface tacky and then finish with the exact same amount of paint distributed evenly. We could only do this when the sun was hot enough to bake the paint on in a mirror-like finish. It is nearly impossible to resist shortening the passes with the spray can, and if you were to double back the result would be a glossy, fluid switchback distinct from the rest of the surface. I didn't have the patience to do it well. After a few sets we decided that i would disassemble them and strip them and he would paint them and assemble them.
When we weren't working on these commissioned projects, we'd spend most of each day shopping for our inventory. There were 5 or 6 second-hand stores and thrift shops that Tim would visit daily. He had an eagle eye. He could see things sitting in a undifferentiated mass in front of us that were invisible to me. Even as he pointed them out, they would generally look worthless to me and only as he began to work on them did they appear naturally to possess great quality and value. It was very nearly wizardry: seeing the prince in the frog.

Snow day!

Is it Xmas yet?

Innards

Something is awry inside me. It feels like French farce. Seductors in towels running room to room, doors slamming. It has been going on for a month at least.
Nothing particularly odd is coming out of me. But something odd is going on inside. My intestines feel like a habitrail. My ribs like cat-splayed mini-blinds. Sometimes it is like a stitch in the side. My smoking is nearly imperceptible, my cardio routine is down to the lake with Buddy on sunny days, twice a week. I found an old sample of Prevacid and have begun that. Claire, who lives next door now, is ceding the remainder of her ulcer medicine to me. That should get me through Xmas. If I die I know it will be just when I get my hair just like I like it.
My hebdomadal binges on Friday nights do not seem to affect it.

FROM Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

I liked the Bal de Chiffoniers. These pale weedy youths in shabby tight fitting suits, these heavy men with the muscles of coal heavers, these quiet white-haired elders with quavering hand and heads and the unwinking stare of the obsessed- all conveyed the message of an indomitable vitality- a quenchless psychic urge. Never had I felt the force of human desire projected with such vigor as by these single-minded devotees of the male

Walter Scott's Personality Parade

As the Sunday paper is here and is partly responsible for my terrific fire, I thought it would be relevant, as I feed it with the advertising supplements, the real estate section, travel, sports, the comics, and Parade magazine in that order to quote my very favorite question to Walter Scott's Personality Parade, a feature which has appeared on the 1st inside page of Parade magazine for as long as I can recall. I have saved the clipping from the late seventies or early eighties.
Q: I am 82 years old and have poor vision and have believed that June Havoc, sister of the late Gypsy Rose Lee, is married to Fred MacMurray. Am I wrong? I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me. -Mary Louise Covington, Lexington, Ky.
A: You are mistaking June Havoc for June Haver who is Mrs. Fred MacMurray.

The typist

I have begun to mentally piece together a new story. I had a nasty setback when I inadvertently heard short fiction being read on public radio last night. That awful combination of earnestness and nonchalance, the predictable tricks of observation, introspection, supposition and specification are lethal to my ambitions. The attenuated lives of inexpressive people. Of course, fiction should never be read aloud. Performance is an entirely separate skill whose merits are judged independent of the text and in preference to it, like color before form. Unless the thing is in some arcane argot, like Joyce's dialect in Ulysses- where essential clues to the meaning can be revealed by the informed speaker- I prefer to create my own internal reader.
What a strange mechanism it is- to silently reproduce the words one reads as though they are being heard!
Actual recitation is so tethered to the page that you become intensely aware of the ad hoc manner in which the cadences are formed- some by the difficulty of layering multiple clauses so as to leave open room for each of them, or some cadences by the intricacy of the language, alliteration or perverse antiphony. You can sense the ardent beginning and the flattening of the voice as it approaches an elegiac end in the reader's voice. You are always startled at the level to which the dialogue will be embodied and you wonder at the decision that leads to that particular level of commitment.
I still make the notes that will lead to writing another piece, but I am waiting for the circumstance, and the period details that will ignite the scene. To inspire me I have begun reading Katherine Anne Porter's essays, John Barth's essays and Mary McCarthy's essays. My friend David pointed out the general area where Mary McCarthy grew up which is just down the road from me and not very far from where Kurt Cobain killed himself, and my dear friend Rick's ashes were splooged into Lake Washington after his terrifyingly sudden, characteristically tidy death.
The story crucially involves a lady typist. Hazel, who types what the narrator cannot. I thought it might also involve numismatics and picked up a copy of History and its Images by Francis Haskell, which has quite inadvertently hypnotized me with its brilliance.
I might take the Christmas money my parents have sent and get Word installed on my Mac. Because to type the damned thing on a manual would be awful.

How I started in the business Part 1

Across the street from Tim's childhood home, where his mother and brother still live, is a rundown split-level rambler owned by a flamboyant elderly German woman. Her name is Hulga but could possibly be Helga, Ulga or Elka. I'm sure Tim knows but he is famously imprecise about names. She wears blond Eva Gabor wigs that add a foot to her lower five and she fondly recalls Hitler, when pressed even a little. She answers the phone, "That is Hulga". She does not attempt to keep up any of her properties, nor is she particularly attentive to whom she rents. One tenant of hers was later found to have filled the garage with hundreds of liter bottles of urine. Tim rented this house across from his childhood home with the condition that Hulga's piles of Beer Hall kitsch would remain stored in a couple of the several bedrooms.
Having just endured the bird/window crash of a relationship, we agreed that it would be therapeutic for me to drive up from Seattle and stay with Tim for a week. We'd shop and work on furniture together, then load the finished projects into Tim's enormous truck bed with the razor-edged canopy, and drive them down.
My first sight of the house was not promising. Ivy and pestilential vines shouldered up against the roof line. The shiny green leaves were dusted with particles of sanded paint or blurred by cobwebs that had caught billows of sawdust. The ivy crept through doorways and exterior walls and flowed over the discarded tabletops leaning six deep against the house. Around back the ground vanished beneath this sea. Saarinen bases and Eames chair frames that were left outside had become topiaries.
The inside of the house was once beautiful. There were stone floors, a masonry fireplace, handsome walnut panelling concealing built in cupboards and receding to form low window seats. But the house was damp even in summer. In the long wet winter it was freezing and the carpets moldered. It was difficult to keep warm because of the size of the main room with its enormously high ceiling. I suppose that the frugal Ulka had fitted the fireplace with a pellet stove. 50 pound bags of pellets lay nearby, but to warm one evening might take 20 pounds.
Tim had a formal dining table piled with smalls and decrystalled chandeliers with showers of mismatched crystals scattered around them. Two ten foot bank doors leaned against the paneled walls. Stacks of books and magazines were everywhere. Beneath piles of Tim's thrift store buys, most still in their plastic bags was Tim's horsehair stuffed sofa. This was supposed to be my bed, but it was like sleeping on a stiff haystack as it slowly sank into a peaty bog. It was like being gripped by the cold grave.
Tim actively worked on dozens of pieces at the same time, but there were hundreds of projects that were dissassembled, waiting for parts or inspiration. The main room held the latest inductees. Three-quarter framed prints, plugless lamps, knobless nightstands. The bigger things, like wheeled industrial racks were on the back patio. The bedrooms had famously rare Deske and Eames pieces, covered with panoramic photos, stacks of loose numbers and letters. 1 large closet was filled with light fixtures that needed work. The worst cases were in the basement. Things that had outlived their resurgence. Late Deco. You could hardly resist edging between the perilous piles. There were hundreds of pieces- some balanced on their tops if one of their legs was missing. Stray chair arms reached up. Curved ribs of table bases, flayed sofas, skeletal lampshade frames. Lit with a bare, swinging bulb, it was like furniture Guernica.
Tim was always on the search for new substances to surface irreparably scarred tables with. Once he pulled up the carpet in the bedrooms and found that the padding beneath was cork darkened with age and years of lax housekeeping. He began to peel up the cork and use it on table tops. He was amazingly inventive and would cannibalize half a dozen pieces to make one brilliant amalgam. The process looked as inscrutably mad as Doctor Frankenstein's, but the pieces would always turn out gloriously. I remember hours spent piecing together the reclaimed floor from a grocery store for a new table.
He used lethal stripper called, inexplicably, 'Aircraft Remover'. It boiled human skin with a pinpoint splatter and sent both of us running screaming to a sink many times, but it would cut through the plastic-coated metal when nothing short of a grinding tool would. The wood-patterned plastic would boil up and with a spatula we'd scoop and flip it like a fried egg and it would eat through another layer. It seemed endlessly reusable. Tim would scrape the dreck which had become thick like yoghurt from the melted paint into a coffee can, and somehow the exposed concentrated sullied mess would work even better when dumped out on something later. The fumes were unforgiving, dense, heady and toxic and would inspire us to smoke a cigarette.
We are both at the point of giving up smoking now- after many years- maybe 20 for each of us. I am also trying to give up furniture stripper.