Skip to main content

On Cary Grant, Darryl Pinckney, and Whit Stillman

Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

During the COVID confinement and afterward, I watched around sixty films starring Cary Grant. What a comfort to have him in my mind before I slept. No matter if he is comic or desperate, self-possessed or wounded, romantic or cool, he is ridiculously good-looking and seems never to know this. I love it when he puts his hands on his waist and pushes his hips forward as if about to dive or perform some acrobatic trick. His slim, athletic torso and long arms are always tanned. Sometimes he wears a fine shimmering gold medal around his neck. I love his dark eyes that have not forgotten his youthful suffering. He makes me laugh when he rolls his eyes around with his own special brand of sophisticated nonchalance. Though he isn’t aggressive, he doesn’t seem weak either. I find him buoyantly masculine. I can’t resist watching him. A few days ago, on a flight to Los Angeles, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely entertaining thriller North by Northwest again. Grant was fifty-five when he made this film and long past his box office peak in the screwball comedies that made him famous. In the Hitchcock film he wears a nice-fitting, light gray suit with a gray silk tie and cuff links. The suit gets dirty, sponged off and pressed, then dirty again. Grant’s hair is a little gray, too. I don’t wear ties anymore, but I would wear a tie worn by Cary Grant. North by Northwest appeared in 1959, around the time that he was experimenting with medical LSD and searching for more “peace of mind,” as he called it. I don’t really know what a great actor is, but I think Grant is sensational.

—Henri Cole
 Read Henri Cole’s recent essay on James Merrill here.

In a scene midway through Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, which I rewatched this week, the Spanish Marta (played by a not-so-Spanish Mira Sorvino) is explaining to patriotic American naval officer Fred why her friend Montserrat has left his also American cousin, Ted.

Ted’s romantic rival, she says—in close-up, in a possibly Catalan accent—has lectured Montserrat about the ills of American society:

And he painted a terrible picture of what it would be like for her to live the rest of her life in America, with all of its crime, consumerism, and vulgarity. All those loud, badly-dressed, fat people watching their eighty channels of television and visiting shopping malls. The plastic throw-everything-away society with its notorious violence and racism. And finally, the total lack of culture.

“It’s a problem,” agrees Fred.

—Rebecca Panovka
 Read Rebecca Panovka’s culture diary, chronicling a week of New York in June, here.

I usually start my summer by reading Sleepless Nights, mostly because of the opening sentences: “It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now.” My love for reading Elizabeth Hardwick is matched only by my love for reading about Elizabeth Hardwick, so it’s only fitting that I’m finishing the summer reading Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney. The memoir, which will be released in October, is an impressionistic recollection of Pinckney’s early years as a writer in New York City, when he was fresh out of school and trying to learn who he wanted to be by studying Hardwick, his former professor, as well as Barbara Epstein, his new editor at The New York Review of Books. I especially liked Pinckney’s anecdotes: Hardwick bringing home a cardboard box of what would become Sleepless Nights but was then called “The Cost of Living”; dinners and joints with Hardwick’s daughter Harriet; and nights spent watching the B-52s perform. It’s a portrait of a special phase in many young lives, when our relationships with the people who have the greatest influence on us can feel both fated and random.

—Haley Mlotek
 Read Haley Mlotek’s essay on the perils of the month of August here.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/AiBRKae

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more