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A learning experience is one of those things that say, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
For whatever reason, I don’t recall where or when I first saw Midnight Cowboy. But I do know that from that very first time, one scene and piece of dialogue has stuck with me.
 “Ratso” Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) are crossing a street in downtown New York City against a “Don’t Walk” sign. When Ratso is almost hit by a cab, he glares at the driver, pounds on the hood and yells, “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!” The next line isn’t too bad either. He says to Buck, “Actually, that ain’t a bad way to pick up insurance, you know.”
I always think of that scene — over which there is disagreement whether it was scripted or ad libbed — when I hear or think of the movie. Released in 1969, the film is its own cultural icon. The core plot is fairly simple. Buck, a Texan who thinks he’s quite the love stud, comes to New York to seduce and live off rich women. As NYC is wont to do, his dreams are crushed. He ends up being taken in (using the phrase in more than one sense) by Rizzo, a streetwise and lame homeless person. With content dealing with sex and drugs, not to mention male prostitution, the movie was originally rated “X.” Yet Midnight Cowboy became the only X-rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture. (When it was re-released in 1971, the rating was changed to “R” without a single change in the movie.)
Both Hoffman and Voight were nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor — losing to John Wayne in True Grit. My favorite line ended up 27th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best movie quotes. Hoffman ranked seventh on Premiere Magazine‘s list of 100 Greatest Performances of All Time for his portrayal of the “persevering, slumping, filthy, sweaty, rodent-like tubercular street hustler.” The appropriately named Ratso came in 33rd on the magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. The film itself was named to the National Film Registry in 1994, was 36th on the AFI’s 1998 list of America’s 100 greatest movies (but dropped to 43rd ten years later) and gets a 90 percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
But it really is the characters who make this film. Roger Ebert summed it up quite well, saying “a 1994 viewing of the film confirms my original opinion, expressed in 1969, that the movie as a whole doesn’t live up to its parts. And that Joe and Ratso rise above the material, taking on a reality of their own while the screenplay detours into the fashionable New York demimonde.” It’s how Joe and Ratso rise above the material that is enthralling.
Hoffman’s Ratso is unquestionably one of the best performances of his career. We see and understand the relationship between him and Buck as it develops and what it grows to mean to each. Buck may be naive and Ratso a seedy street hustler but both have dreams. Despite — or perhaps because — those dreams and life turn more nightmarish, their relationship becomes stronger. Even though neither achieves his dream, both characters are unforgettable.
The X on the windows means the landlord can’t collect rent, which is a convenience, on account of it’s condemned.
Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), Midnight Cowboy
Granted, it’s a compilation album. And it comes after both Sgt. Pepper’s and Abbey Road. That said, Hey Jude, a/k/a The Beatles Again, was long my favorite Beatles album — and remains among my favorites 40 years after it was released.
 Some don’t consider this an “official” Beatles album because it is a compilation. Released on February 26, 1970, the album was the first released after Allen Klein became the manager of the band. He put together a variety of singles and B-sides that had not been released on an album in the U.S. That approach also gave it a semi-greatest hits feel that spanned the band’s career to date. And I think that’s why I liked it so much when it was released.
The album opens with 1964’s “Can’t Buy Me Love” and closes with “Don’t Let Me Down” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” both recorded and released as singles in 1969 while the band was working on Let It Be. That album would not be released until May 1970. The LP was originally intended to be titled The Beatles Again. It was renamed when it was decided to include “Hey Jude,” the first single released on Apple Records and which topped the charts in 1968. The album was the only way to get that song on LP or even in stereo for several years. In fact, it was also the first time “Lady Madonna,” “Rain” and “Revolution” were released in stereo. Because they were singles, until then there had been only mono releases.
The album plainly reflects the singles nature of the tunes. For example, “Rain” was the B side for “Paperback Writer” and appears immediately after that song on Hey Jude. “Revolution” was the B side to the “Hey Jude” single but it closes the first side of the album while “Hey Jude” opens the second side due to its length (7 minutes). The only non-Lennon/McCartney song is George Harrison’s excellent “Old Brown Shoe.” It was the B side to “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which, as noted, closes the album.
Also notable about the album is that, although we didn’t know it at the time, the cover photos come from what The Beatles Anthology says was the last-ever Beatles group photo session. The front cover photo, in fact, would become somewhat of an iconic one. I, in fact, wore a t-shirt with that photo on it to our office Christmas party in 2001 in honor of George Harrison, who’d died at the end of November. Under my sport coat, George was about the only one who could be fully seen and it seemed an appropriate tribute to my favorite Beatle.
With the release of the band’s 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 compilations in 1973 and the various anthologies and other collections released in the last two decades, Hey Jude doesn’t quite retain the unique character it had at first. Perhaps that is part of the reason why, to my knowledge, the album has never been released on CD by the Beatles or Apple, not even as part of the entire remastered catalog released last year. Of course, that simply makes the piece of vinyl on my record shelves that much more important to me.
For well you know that it’s a fool
Who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder
Beatles, “Hey Jude”
Do you keep all the books you ever buy? Just the ones you love? Just collectibles? What do you do with the ones you don’t want to keep?
I wish.
For a long time, I did keep virtually every book I bought unless it was one I really disliked. For a long period of time, the largest number of boxes when I moved were those with books and LP records. Yet the realities of the quantities accumulated over decades and the space available for bookshelves in a home eventually brought my keeper habits to an end.
As I’ve indicated before, I implemented a new routine in the last couple years. Now once I’ve read a book, it is evaluated for whether it is “shelf-worthy,” i.e., whether I willing to commit my now limited shelf space to it. There’s certainly no strict guidelines. It is more intuition and gut reaction.
Any book that doesn’t make the cut goes in a box earmarked for the used book store and/or library. Each of those books has a chance for a reprieve as, before the box leaves the house, I peruse it to make sure all of them are “goners.” Yet even then, I still periodically weed through my shelves when space constraints dictate it — usually one shelf collapsing on another.
Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life.
Joshua Ferris, “Books You Can Live Without“
I’ve written several times about my increasing interest in addiction to literature in translation. More than a third of the fiction I read last year consisted of works in translation. Last week certainly contributed to it continuing.
Let me first note that I’m charter subscriber to Open Letter Books, so I automatically get 10 works in translation a year. I’ve only bought two books this year — both of them literature in translation. I read both — The Maimed and Brodeck (which I loved) — within days of purchase.
On Friday Conversational Reading mentioned an offer that proved irresistible. Archipelago Books has two of the ten finalists for this year’s Best Translated Book Award. In honor of that, it is offering both shortlisted books free with a 10-book subscription.
My PayPal payment was in within five minutes of reading of the deal. I urge you to consider the offer, too. Take a chance on perhaps reading outside your comfort zone and what you know.
By coincidence, I learned of the Archipelago offer just days after reading an essay by Hilary Plum at The Quarterly Conversation on “how we read languages we don’t read.” Plum, who works for a publisher of international lit, has some interesting questions and observations about reading literature in translation, particularly an approach I often take. She asks why we tend to approach foreign literature as some sort of “ambassador from another land, here to provide local color and help us find common ground”. That, she contends, leads us to emphasize or focus on that with which we are comfortable or familiar.
…the foreignness of foreign literature is an irreplaceable value… So perhaps we as readers … should be looking for ways to encounter “foreignness.” In other words, perhaps it’s better to think of literature in translation first as stories we can’t make our own, as truths we can’t vouch for. Otherwise we risk reading only what we already know how to read, privileging our personal taste and experience over everything the text offers—a text that, no matter where it was written and by whom, was never meant to reflect only ourselves, our readings. Otherwise we risk seeking out experiences in literature only as tourists who stay on the bus, see just the well-known sites.
I have no doubt I tend to read foreign literature with that eye toward being a tourist interested in an easy border crossing. I’d like to think I do get off the tour bus with some frequency but perhaps Plum’s essay will prompt me to do so more often.
Finally, while I’m on the topic, Words Without Borders spreads word of And Other Stories, “a fledgling independent publisher of fiction in translation with a new, community-based approach.” It evidently plans to use a couple forums at LibraryThing as a part of the process of picking its first books for publication in the Spring of 2011.
The love of books is a love which requires neither justification, apology, nor defence.
JOhn A/ Langford, The Praise of Books
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