49th Mailing
This old guy watched in wonder last weekend as his seven year old granddaughter looked at a print of the Mona Lisa for the first time and remembered his first look at a similar print of that masterpiece at a similar age. Like for so many others, that first viewing drew him in to a lifelong, unchanged set of assumptions about the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci. Imagine his surprise then, when he read the following essay!
Charles Hope · Lilies in the Lion: The Leonardo Industry
It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is...
The Summer of 1959 is memorable for this old guy. In summer school in Ann Arbor to take missing credits so that he could begin graduate school that fall, he spent frequent evenings in one of the two downtown movie theaters. The problem he encountered was that the Hitchcock film, North by Northwest, opened early in the summer and, then, due to its popularity, never left. Hence, he watched it a number of times.
One of the courses he took that summer was Principles of Literary Criticism. Summer school in those days attracted a large number of Catholic nuns, maintaining their teaching credentials. He distinctly remembers the discomfort of the nuns, when the very old and distinguished professor, attempting to explain why Plato wanted to ban artists from his ideal republic, brought up the bed switching that was a distinctive feature of North by Northwest. Humorously teasing his students, the professor asserted that this was a perfect illustration of how artists created discontent by regularly suggesting unimaginable behavior to audiences.
Why did these memories of golden college days come back to this old guy this particular week? This was the week that Eva Marie Saint—along with Cary Grant, one of the two North by Northwest bed switchers—died this week at the remarkable age of 102. Here is an interesting appreciation of the social impact of Saint’s performance in that film, an appreciation that rings very true to this old man as he recalls those very different times.
