Deborah Lipp

A nice day’s work, everyone!

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No difficult ones this week, apparently.

1. Dashiell Hammett, Somerset Maugham, Fyodor Dostoevsky – Peter Lorre (The Maltese Falcon, The Secret Agent, Crime & Punishment) – solved by Maurinsky
2. Jane Austen, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leo Tolstoy – Maureen O’Sullivan (Pride & Prejudice, various Tarzan movies, Anna Karenina) – solved by Melville
3. Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Lawrence Sterne – Gillian Anderson (Bleak House, House of Mirth, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) – solved by Hogan
4. Charles Dodgson, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara – Gary Cooper (Alice in Wonderland, A Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ten North Frederick) – solved by Melville
5. Steven King, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler – Lauren Bacall (Misery, The Confidential Agent, The Big Sleep) – solved by Hogan
6. Philip K. Dick, Robert Howard, August Strindberg (and Ian Fleming) – Max von Sydow (Minority Report, Conan the Barbarian, Miss Julie (and Never Say Never Again) – solved by Melville (extra credit question solved by Hogan, in a comment that got moderated out, and Melville)
7. Samuel Clemens, William Thackeray, John Steinbeck – Myrna Loy (A Connecticut Yankee, Vanity Fair, The Red Pony) – solved by Melville

Want!

Update: Getting

Not going to out anyone here, but the t-shirt is on the way and how happy is me? See? Me forgot how to write. So happy.

Psycho (1960) 10/10
Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), on the way to the bank with $40,000 her employer has given her to deposit in the bank, instead takes off, realizing the money could get her boyfriend (John Gavin) out of debt, allowing him to marry her. Stopping at a motel, she meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and everything changes. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Okay, is this a spoilery review, or not? Not, I think. Which makes it hard to write a review, of this twisty, turny movie, because part of its brilliance is in the way it skews audience expectations.

I’ve seen Psycho three or four times. At first I didn’t like it; didn’t get it. But it was a friend’s favorite movie and on his behalf I saw it again, and it was one of those “click” moments, where I was suddenly overwhelmed by everything that was happening in the film. It’s not so much the movie itself, but the way that Hitchcock makes this spare little thriller (which was criticized as nothing more than an extended episode of his TV show) wring meaning and power and tension out of every moment, every inch of film, every camera angle. From shadows to wall decor, from costume to dialogue, each component is deliberate and adds to the overall experience, while still seeming stripped-down and raw.

The acting is extraordinary. Anthony Perkins kind of ruined his career by being so brilliant. Previously a teen hearthrob, playing unassuming, sweet characters who usually get the girl (Friendly Persuasion and The Tin Star come to mind), after Psycho he was relegated to horror, because his performance was so iconic.

Janet Leigh is also great. Stunning, really; she didn’t make nearly enough movies, as far as I’m concerned. I like Martin Balsam as a private detective quite a lot; John Gavin and Vera Miles less so, but they give serviceable performances.

Psycho shows us people in isolation with their hopes and doubts, that which they’ll accept and that which they cannot accept. A crucial conversation between Marion and Norman, in a room full of looming stuffed birds, lays out the movie’s themes: People are trapped in prisons of their own devising; maybe they can escape, but probably they cannot. And the people in this film overlap without really interacting. This, too, is apparent in the conversation between Marion and Norman—they speak of themselves without truly connecting to the other—but it is reflected in virtually every conversation.

But, like many of Hitchcock’s movies, Psycho is also about movies, and about audiences. We expect certain things, we become attached, we have sympathies and fears. And Hitchcock is playing games with us; he wants us to see that our expectations are merely formulaic, that our sympathies aren’t necessarily well-placed. He manipulates us in a way that says, movies always manipulate the audience, so let’s put our cards on the tabe. And it’s brilliant.

I’m stealing this from Evn.

How it works: these are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I tag everyone. Go read.

Camera. Smells. NUMMY.

Angel: Well, he said I had to take the plunge.
Darla: Into an empty pool?
Angel: Sure. ‘Cause if you had water, you’d get all wet and miss out on all that skull-crushing.
Darla: Maybe he meant another pool.
Angel: Something in a koi pond. They’re very Zen.
…
Angel (ready to leap into the empty pool): I’m either coming back with a cure, or you’re gonna see something kinda funny.

Getting Arthur into college has been a huge leap of faith. A plunge into an empty pool. The Fool walking off a cliff. Kinda Zen. Kinda terrifying.

I couldn’t do it for myself, when I was eighteen. There was no leap of faith because I knew, I knew, that there was nothing down there but skull-crushing. The school I really wanted was in El Paso, but I couldn’t figure out how I could show up in Texas and live there, having never been anywhere. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t…I really didn’t even know that what I was supposed to do was investigate how to make it happen. I didn’t know I was supposed to ask. (And this was pre-Internet, it was a little harder…a lot harder, to do research.) When I narrowed my search to local schools, the “good” one cost twice as much as the other four I looked at. The recruiter there really wanted me. I said it was too much money, and she said Don’t worry, we’ll get the money. But I didn’t see the money. She didn’t say how. The only way to get the money was to enroll; the money was available to students, not applicants. And that was terrifying. I couldn’t do it.

Not for me, no. But for my son. I can do it for him.

It’s easier. I’m older, I’ve done many scary things. I’m more motivated. I have a little bit of money and a job. And there have been times, in choosing to leap, that I’ve been rank terrified; foul-smelling, gut-clenching, ohmygodswhathaveidone scared. It’s SO. MUCH. MONEY. It’s on-the-face-of-it crazy.

I kept looking around. The people I knew who were putting their kids through school didn’t make more (or much more) than me. Some of them had two or three kids in private colleges. If they were doing it, it must be possible for me to do it. I talked to people. I learned. I learned about grants and scholarships and loans and then, y’know, it would get scary again, and then it would be about the leap. About the cliff. And ultimately, I had to say to myself, Do I walk off a cliff for him?

And I do. I’ve spent almost thirty years jealous of the people who went to college while I lived in partnership with my fear. I won’t do it again. I won’t do it to Arthur.

This will either get him an education or you’re gonna see something kinda funny.