Zolapalooza!

When Uncle Dave gives me money for my birthday, he says it's an investment in his future, meaning that Stinky will be less likely to murder him in his sleep with a rusty machete. Oh, Uncle Dave, you're so amusing. Actually, Uncle Dave is a pretty nice guy who is relatively low on the list of people that Stinky is likely to horribly mutilate.

Ha. "Horribly mutilate". Is there another way to do it? But Stinky digresses.

For an adult, Uncle Dave is fairly tolerable, except when, Stinky assumes, he is trying to be funny. Like when he says stuff like, "Roseanne, bar the door" and "Do you know why exorcisms are legal? Because possession is nine-tenths of the law." Hilarious*. But Stinky is certain that Uncle Dave reads Stinky's blog, which is more than Stinky can say about his other friends and fambly members. In fact, Uncle Dave gave Stinky his first opportunity in the blogosphere, undoubtedly the finest piece of writing ever to grace Uncle Dave's blog, Born Under Pants, or whatever it is called.

So after reading Stinky's last blog entry, Uncle Dave said, "Nice to see you are finally reading The Classics, little man, and not wasting your time with the graphic novels and the hippity-hop music, or whatever people of your ilk and generation cotton to these days. By the bye, the passages you quoted seem to me a precursor to the final paragraph in Zola's Nana."

Well, that's Uncle Dave for you, using made-up words like "precursor" to make himself sound smart. He also said that Nana was a novel about a Parisian courtesan who meets a frighteningly nasty and disfiguring demise from smallpox, following a life of dissipation and moral turpitude. Yes, Uncle Dave tends to talk that way. But this made Stinky eager to read the book, especially after he looked up the word "courtesan".

For those of you who wish to commit yourselves to the preceding 400 pages, go right ahead. For those of you with busy schedules, like Stinky, the rest of the novel can wait. Here is the final paragraph describing the beautiful Nana's grisly end, which does not disappoint:

                     Nana was left alone with  upturned face in the light cast by the  candle. She was the fruit
                   of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood,  a shovelful  of  corrupted flesh thrown
                   down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched
                   its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed  the grayish  hue of mud;  and  on  that
                   formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some
                   decaying damp  from  the grave.  One eye, the left eye,  had completely foundered  among 
                   bubbling purulence,  and the other,  which remained half open,  looked like a deep,  black
                   ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crust was peeling from  one 
                   of the cheeks,  which it  distorted  into a horrible grin.  And over this loathsome  and  gro-
                   tesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed down
                   in rippling gold.   Venus was rotting.  It seemed as though the  poison she had  assimilated 
                   in the gutters and on the carrion  tolerated by the roadside,  the leaven with which  she had 
                   poisoned a whole people,  had but  now  remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.

Most awesome paragraph of all times? Probably.

Thanks, Uncle Dave.


*Sarcasm

Nana. But Uncle Dave says it's A Classic, Mom.

         

J'accuse...! Emile Zola of Being Pretty Awesome!

Stinky's tired, so he's gonna let someone else do all the heavy lifting this time.

Here's another pretty good writer called Emile Zola. Stinky was impressed with these passages from Therese Raquin, published in 1867. Lazy horndog Laurent croaks his lover's husband by tossing him in the Seine. Then Laurent visits the Paris Morgue for several weeks, hoping to identify the discovered corpse:

        One morning, he was seized with real terror. For some moments, he had been looking 
          at a corpse, taken from the water, that was small in build  and  atrociously  disfigured.
          The flesh of  the  drowned  person  was so  soft and  broken-up that  the running water 
          washing it, carried it away bit by bit. The jet falling on the face bored a hole to the left
          of the nose. And abruptly, the nose became flat,  the  lips  were  detached, showing the
          white teeth. The head of the drowning man burst out laughing. 

Several days later, Laurent sees Camille, the man he murdered:

        Camille was hideous. He had been a fortnight in the water. His face still appeared firm
          and rigid; the features were preserved, but the skin had taken a  yellowish,  muddy tint.
          The thin, bony, and slightly tumefied head wore a  grimace. It was a  trifle  inclined on
          one side, with the hair  sticking to the  temples, and the  lids raised, displaying the dull
          globes of  the eyes. The  twisted lips  were drawn to  a corner of the mouth in an atro-
          cious grin; and a piece of blackish tongue appeared between the white teeth. This head,
          which looked tan and drawn out  lengthwise,  while  preserving  a  human  appearance,
          had remained all the more frightful with pain and terror.

But wait, there's more:

         The body seemed a mass of ruptured flesh; it had suffered horribly. You could feel that
          the arms no longer held to their sockets; and the clavicles were piercing the skin of the
          shoulders. The ribs formed black bands on the greenish chest; the left side, ripped open,
          was gaping amidst dark red shreds. All the torso was in a state of putrefaction. The ex-
          tended legs, although firmer, were daubed with dirty patches. The feet dangled down.

Imagine opening up whatever people used for Kindles back then, and reading this!

And please don't tell Stinky's mom he is reading this. She is overly-protective after Stinky was diagnosed with something called "walking night-terrors", and she considers Stinky enough of a danger when he is awake.

Reasonable facsimile of Emile Zola.

F**ck Glenn Ford! We'll replace HIM!*

Stinky's heart soared when he recently discovered the glorious Eleanor Powell, and his heart sank even more rapidly when he discovered she was married 15 years to the soul-sucking barnacle known as Glenn Ford. So naturally Stinky was eager to read Peter Ford's biography of his famous philandering father, Mr. Glenn Ford, ready for a great big plate of steamy, creamy, salacious dirt.

Stinky was fairly disappointed. Peter Ford threw Stinky a curve and wrote, if not a dutiful, a respectful and measured biography of his aloof and frequently estranged pappy.  Not what Stinky had in mind. As Stinky's old man says, "If you can't deliver the goods, don't get off the pot." And very little goods were delivered.

Plugging his book in a television interview, Peter Ford said, rather proudly, according to his dad's diary, he counted 143 affairs.  Pretty good by Stinky standards, but not exactly earth-shattering by world-renown celebrity millionaire heartthrob standards, especially over a sixty year span. Stinky's calculator is not working now, but if one could do the math, that comes out to fewer than two a month.

Apparently, Glenn Ford started off as a not-very-good ladies man. First, he declined the advances of Jack London's seventy-something-year old widow (which would have made for an impressive entry in the ol' diary, if you ask Stinky) and he resisted the charms of Bette Davis, even after she presented her copious bosoms. He pleaded fidelity to his loving wife. Stinky's guessing that's the only time that happened.

Only twice does Glenn Ford win Stinky's sympathy: Hope Lange and her sister ridicule Ford as being hopelessly old-fashioned because he once wore a dressing gown with padded shoulders, and those final 15 years of pills, alcohol, illnesses, jealousies, suspicions, and thieving "caregivers" are very sad. Not a way Stinky wants to go. Except maybe for the pills.

Perhaps because Glenn Ford was so enigmatic to his son the biography seems rather superficial. Stinky gathered some mildly interesting trivia, but not much more. Actor Louis Calhern was a lifetime friend, dating back to Glenn's teenage theater days. Ford once tried LSD, but was not especially impressed in a therapeutic way. He hosted parties with intellectuals Isherwood, Huxley, and such. He was a Roosevelt Democrat who morphed into a Nixon Republican. And director Richard Brooks was responsible for Ford's extremely unflattering hairstyle, perhaps the worst of any major Hollywood star.

Ford was a major Hollywood star, probably underappreciated, with half a dozen, maybe more, excellent performances on his resume. And that ain't nothing at which to sneeze.

Which would not be easy for Stinky to admit, were it not for Stinky's magnanimous and generous nature, considering Ford's careless and repeated infidelities to the angelic Eleanor Powell.

And then, thinking he could not love her more, Stinky discovers Eleanor Powell was a huge Fats Waller fan.

I know this post is about Glenn Ford, but who cares?

*What Frank Capra reportedly said when he learned that Ford wanted to replace leading lady Shirley Jones with then-girlfriend Hope Lange.