It’s not difficult to see the spider, but if you look hard you can see the web. If you stay still, you can watch the small silver weave expand and contract in the breeze before sunset.
Jim Folsom, Democratic Governor of the great State of Alabama from 1947-1951 and 1955-1959. A search of the LIFE archive shows that he had a favorite pastime. It’s good to be the king.
“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him. When he met his family at the station and brought them back to their brightly lit furnished apartment, and a footman in a white tie opened the door to a flower-be-decked entrance hall, from which they proceeded to the drawing room and the study, gasping with delight, he was very happy, showed them everywhere, drank in their praises and beamed with satisfaction. ” From The Death of Ivan Ilyich, apparently a tale of murder by middlebrow taste in interior decoration.
Downtown, last month.
“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. There were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.
The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes—they seemed—for laughter and tranquility.”
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt. 1922. Here’s some info on Google Books, which may or may not hold the copyright to all books present, past and future.
“High-school noir.” It sounds silly, like homeroom with Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, and this movie is a little silly, for about 100 frames somewhere in the middle. For the other hundred plus minutes, Brick is a journey into the dark adolescent mindcave, a place filled with drugs and slang. It’s the kind of thing that Max Fisher would love, starring the bored kids that would beat the snot out of Max Fisher.
Errol Morris is killing it. He’s asking whether reality has continuity errors, fact-checking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, asking the big questions about lying and resurrecting newspaper controversies from the thirties. He started writing about Roger Fenton two years ago, but it was dry, academic and exhausting. Now it’s better. It’s like F for Fake but b for blog with footnotes, links, diagrams, maps, interviews and constant authorial interruption. The eye above and the quote below show he’s trying to see and understand the big things that move quick.
“DAN LEVIN: Mmmn. Yeah. We’ve done research on the relationship between people’s beliefs about what they think they can see and what they actually can see. There are accidents called tractor-trailer under-rides. A semitrailer jackknifes across a highway. The trailer goes into a skid and then the trailer part of the semi runs across lanes of oncoming traffic. Cars will come down the highway and just run right into the trailer part of the semi. And people are killed. Later investigation often reveals no skid marks, no signs of evasive driving. The driver just totally ran right in to this barrier in the middle of the highway. Really grisly accidents, too, because they often involve, as you can imagine, the height of a tractor-trailer hitting someone at neck level. Death by decapitation followed by inevitable litigation that often rests on arguments about who should have seen what. There are these ad hoc assumptions about what must have been visible to a normal driver. And jurors have to make use of their lay understanding of what kinds of things are consistently visible, and they assume that pretty much everything is, unless you’re drunk or asleep. But if you really understand that our awareness of the visual world is selective, and it’s contingent on the kind of things we expect, the kinds of things that we know about, then you might better understand that someone could have run into this thing and not have been asleep.” Qtd here.
DS Even when you went to the States last, in ‘68, you went by sea?
PB Sure. I went on the Leonardo da Vinci, and came back in ‘69 on the Raffaelo. You can’t go wrong on an Italian liner out of the Mediterranean. Very good ships. Marvelous food, wonderful accommodations…in first class. I don’t know about the other accommodations, but mine were very good.
DS You always travel first class by ship?
PB Generally, yes… No, I’ve gone many times by freighter.
DS What year did you first go to Ceylon?
PB In ‘49.
DS And you owned an island there?
PB Well I didn’t own it then, I bought it later, in ‘53. I was in Madrid, when I got a cable from “Sri Lanka,” saying that the island could be bought, giving me the price, and I immediately cabled New York and bought it.
DS How much was it?
PB It was very cheap, a little over five thousand dollars, I think, with the house and all. (laughter) I think that was it, it might have been ten. Anyway it was extremely low, a fluke. It belonged to a rubber planter who lived up country in Sri Lanka, who also bred race horses and bet on them very heavily and of course the inevitable happened, he lost, and one of his assets was this little island, which he bought as a pleasure dome, you know…
DS How did you first hear about it?
PB Through David Herbert. I was staying at Wilton and David had this pile of scrap books, photo albums really, not scrap books, and one album was almost completely devoted to this marvelous looking place called Taprobane, and I said “Oh, I’d love to see that,” and he said “Oh, it’s heavenly, just marvelous,” and of course it was. He had been there with Lord and Lady Mountbatten and took pictures of them all…beaming… (laughter)
