"The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects. When the light off the Reflecting Pool bounced up onto Lincoln's face, it looked as if a flashlight had been held up under his chin."

Wrote Sarah Vowell, back in 2005, in her very entertaining book "Assassination Vacation," which I recently reread. The link goes to an excerpt of the book at the NPR website. There's also audio of Vowell reading her text, which she does extremely well.

Here's more context:

"[Daniel Chester] French obsessed for years about how to sculpt Lincoln's peculiar face, fretting and reading and thinking before committing to the brooding, seated philosopher in the memorial. He received the commission in 1913. So by the time the memorial was finally dedicated nine years later, the sculptor was a little pent up worrying how his work would come off. Hoping to celebrate, French looked upon the final installation with horror. The problem with putting in a reflecting pool? The darn thing reflects.

"The next morning he arrives on set eating an egg sandwich and starts screaming that he’s not going to let me direct this film; I’m a nobody; he can cut me out at any moment."

"Oh yeah, he was a pig. He was an asshole.... He was not nice to the girls in the film and he was so f–king arrogant. I really, really disliked him."

Said Cher, about Peter Bogdanovich, the director of "Mask," quoted in "Cher blasts ‘arrogant’ director after he said she was most difficult actor to work with: 'He was a pig'" (NY Post).

Egg sandwich!

Don't get me started on the topic of egg sandwich.

I was going to discuss Cher's use of the semicolon, but the quote is not from Cher's book. It's from an interview originally published in The London Times, so it's a British approach to punctuation, about which I've got nothing to say.

Did Cher dump on Bogdanovich before he died? Even if she didn't, I can't help siding with her against a man who would eat an egg sandwich in front of people who don't have the option to walk away. And the screaming... Have you ever seen anyone scream with egg in their mouth?

At the Vampire Café...

... drink some conversation.

("Munch himself always claimed it showed nothing more than 'just a woman kissing a man on the neck.'")

"In 1988, Mr. Enger... slipped through a window at the Munch Museum in Oslo to steal a version of 'The Scream.'"

"But a hitch in their plan led them instead to snatch another Munch masterwork, 'Love and Pain,' also known as 'Vampire.' 'The disappointment lasted days,' Mr. Enger later recalled, 'but then it started to become fun.' In part, that was because he kept the painting hidden in the ceiling of a pool hall he owned that was frequented by off-duty police officers. 'They don’t know it’s hanging just one meter from them,' he added. 'That was the best feeling. We let them play for free just to have them there.'... Mr. Enger spent four years in prison for the theft.... He turned his sights back to his muse and quarry.... He and an accomplice clambered up a ladder outside the National Gallery in Oslo, smashed a window and... slipped out with the museum’s version of 'The Scream'.... The thieves left behind the ladder, their wire cutters and a note: 'A thousand thanks for your poor security.'... ... Mr. Enger was sentenced to six years and three months in prison, where he took up painting.... After his release, he established an art career of his own... In 2015, he was charged with stealing 17 paintings from an Oslo gallery."

From "Paal Enger, Who Stole Munch’s 'The Scream,' Is Dead at 57/A promising player for a storied Norwegian soccer club, he instead found infamy for stealing one of the world’s most famous artworks" (NYT).

Performance art?

"The Scream" is — I think — the only work of art for which I have a tag. My normal practice is to use the name of the artist, but I don't have an Edvard Munch tag. Only a "Scream" tag. It's useful! E.g.:

At the Melancholy Café...

... you can brood about whatever you like.

***

The image is the painting "Melancholy," by Edvard Munch. Forgive me for using my "Scream" tag, but I don't like tag proliferation, and it's the Edvard Munch tag that I already have. If Munch becomes more important, it will be like the way I used my "Apprentice" tag for all things Donald Trump until I reached a tipping point.

Feminist book cover from 1975.

This amused me:

Wikipedia tells us: 

The Female Man... was originally written in 1970 and first published in 1975 by Bantam Books. [Joanna] Russ was an avid feminist.... The novel follows the lives of four women living in parallel worlds that differ in time and place. When they cross over to each other's worlds, their different views on gender roles startle each other's preexisting notions of womanhood. In the end...

Spoiler alert!

... their encounters influence them to evaluate their lives and shape their ideas of what it means to be a woman. The character Joanna calls herself the “female man” because she believes that she must forget her identity as a woman in order to be respected (p. 5). She states that “there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective … Become it” (p. 139). Her metaphorical transformation refers to her decision to seek equality by rejecting women's dependence on men.

Metaphorical transformation. But the book cover seems to depict the physical peeling away of the female form. The browser is enticed to imagine something surgical.

Now, why was I reading that? I became interested in the word "munch" because I encountered an author who kept using the word "munch" as a replacement for "eat." I wondered if I had ever even once — in the entire 18-year history of this blog — used the word "munch." 

A search of my archive turned up 7 posts — 5 of which have "munch" in the sense of  the artist Edvard "The Scream" Munch. 

One is a stray reference to the Girl Scout cookie Thank U Berry Munch. (I'm imagining an Obama inner monologue, there's a reference to marijuana, and so there's a nudge to think about "the munchies.") 

The 7th post was part of my "Gatsby" project: "I know many of you don't like or don't get the 'Gatsby' project, in which we isolate and munch on a single, possibly turgid, sentence from 'The Great Gatsby,' more or less every day around here on the Althouse blog."

Why "munch" there? There's no actual eating. It's an eating metaphor, really a chewing metaphor. Indeed, the dictionary definition of "munch" stresses the the chewing — the mouth action — and not anything further along in the digestive process: "To eat (food) with a continuous and noticeable chewing action; to eat eagerly and audibly, or with evident enjoyment; to make a snack of." 

That's from the OED — where I go to get my definitions, mainly because I love the lists of historical examples and where I found one that ended with the title that got me to that book cover:

a1425 (▸c1385) G. Chaucer Troilus & Criseyde (1987) i. 914 Some wold monche [v.rr. muchche, mucche, muche, meche] her brede alon, lying in bed and make hem for to grone....

1600 W. Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iv. i. 31 I could mounch your good dry Oates.

1905 Baroness Orczy Scarlet Pimpernel xviii. 172 She partook of this frugal breakfast with hearty appetite. Thoughts crowded thick and fast in her mind as she munched her grapes.

1975 J. Russ Female Man 175 Munched chips, crackers, saltsticks, what-not.

"Can only have been painted by a madman."

Words by Edvard Munch in tiny letters in the most famous version of "The Scream," The Art Newspaper reports. 

Can we be sure that the artist wrote these words? Mai Britt Guleng, the curator of Old Masters and modern paintings at the National Museum of Norway, says yes. First, the handwriting matches up to other samples of Munch's handwriting. Second, the writing is tiny:

“Had this been an act of vandalism by another person, the size of the letters would probably have been larger and the whole text more striking when you stand in front of the work."

Third — though I think this is a fact that could cut either way — the words are not painted over.

“There has been strangely little attention to the inscription.... some researchers have taken it for granted that it was written by Munch, but they haven’t discussed why and when. From 2008 it has been generally accepted that the writing was made by another person, without any discussion at all."

Guleng notes that Munch heard criticism of his work and was "confronted about his mental health" on one occasion. Why would that motivate him to write on his own painting? That's more interesting than the question whether he or some vandal wrote it. Let's assume Munch wrote it. Why did he write it? Don't assume he was judging and doubting himself. There are other possibilities: he was satirizing his critics, he was inviting us to contemplate whether only madmen paint like that, or he was celebrating himself as a madman.

***

This is the 9th post with the tag "The Scream."

The oldest post with the tag is "Shimmering shining shriek/scream" from April 2005. Excerpt:

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours"...

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post [that was already] about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

"On the way to the game camera, I hear a 'hey.' Of course, me being by myself in the woods not thinking anybody else is anywhere around, it startled me, shocked me."

"I hear, 'I’m naked,' and I looked down and he’s standing there in the middle of the creek. He’s not wearing anything at all."

Said Casey Sanders, quoted in "Video goes viral after hunter finds naked man in woods" (WGN9), a story from 2014 that I ran across today.

After a couple of minutes questioning the man, trying to determine if his mental state was stable enough to approach, the man told Sanders he had been drinking creek water and eating rotten crab apples. He then asked the hunter if he had anything to drink.... For the next hour, Sanders helped the man out of the woods....

Why am I reading that today? Well, I was looking for an image — hopefully something in the high art category — that would fit the phrase "naked man in the woods." Most of the hits were about this video, though I did find this relatively nice painting by Edvard "The Scream" Munch:

But, you may wonder, why is Althouse looking for a high-art representation of a naked man in the woods. It's a long story, and, surprisingly enough, it has nothing to do with Jeffrey Toobin. It's too complicated to explain though. It has something to do with the definition of the word "fuck" that I was given by my sister when I was very young and that I lived with for a few years. A simple tableau: a man and a woman naked in the woods. That became a reference point in a discussion when we needed to make fun of a man with a name that rhymes with "fuck." 

There. Don't you love incomplete explanations?!

AND: This post is for all you commenters who are saying Althouse needs to write about Hunter — Hunter Finds Naked Man in Woods.

"Inside I’m screaming. You can’t walk around screaming, you have to find a way to process all this information and go on with your day."

"During this time I shower and I fix myself up, as my mother would say. On the Upper East Side there’s pressure to look a certain way.... If my boyfriend is here, we’ll do an early dinner at 6 or 7 at Bar Italia or J.G. Melon. If not, I’ll order in Chinese or Indian, have a big feast of food and watch reality shows like 'The Real Housewives' or 'Below Deck.'... As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more solitary. This routine isn’t the routine I had 20 years ago. I wouldn’t have exercised. I would have had a boozy brunch with friends. There’s a shift I went through in my mid-50s where I made lots of changes. There’s less neediness. I feel more settled. I’m hearing my own voice as opposed to hearing everybody else’s."

From "How Candace Bushnell, Writer, Spends Her Sundays" (NYT). Bushnell is the author of "Sex and the City," which was published in 1997. I like the photo at the link — her in bed with 2 big poodles.

By the way, is it politically correct to say "I’ll order in Chinese or Indian"? Seems like you should have to add "food." I think I'm taking a pretty moderate position here. An extreme position would be to say it's cultural appropriation to eat the food of an ethnic group that is not your own. And isn't there something dismissive about grouping "Chinese or Indian" with "The Real Housewives" or "Below Deck"? It's like I'm doing a junk night with the lower foods and the lower TV shows. In that light, it seems anti-feminist to go low quality when the boyfriend isn't there.

The other thing that interests me about the part I've excerpted is the voice inside her head. Is it "screaming" or "settled"? That idea that your reaction to the world is screaming and you've got to process it to get along in life reminded me of that article we were just talking about, "The Decline of Yelling."

Hey, remember when Trump haters did that protest of screaming at the sky?

Do I have a tag for screaming? I see I have "scream," but maybe that was a commenter I frontpaged. (I do a tag for every commenter I frontpage.) I see I have a tag for "The Scream." (How many individual paintings have their own tag? That must be the only one.)

Is there some reason why Hillary keeps doing this gaping-maw face?

Seriously. This is driving me crazy. Makes me want to...



IN THE COMMENTS: Sebastian said:

It's the face of someone still haunted by the thought that no one will ever vote for her.

I think he's invoking Bill Clinton's speech last night, which I thought centered on that idea:

She wanted his charisma in her, merged with her, giving her what without which Nobody would ever vote for me.

And it reminded me of what I was saying as I watched the long encounter between Obama and Hillary on that stage last night. I was wondering why she does that wide-open-mouth/insane-elation thing with her face, and my theory was that she's stuck making the best of doing appearances where she needs to look like the person who is intensely loved but she does not believe she is loved.

Next to Obama, the feeling must be excruciating. Obviously, he is loved. He's been loved for so long. The love he naturally attracts overwhelmed her earnestly entitled effort to become President 8 years ago. And now, here he is on the stage, doing his easygoing routine one more time, as if it's for her, and it's supposed to be a big deal for the candidate to unexpectedly hit the stage a day early, but everyone's loving on him.

 What added impact can she have? It doesn't matter. She must get out there and act the part of the person everyone's been longing to see, even though the person they love to see is already out there, owning the stage. She must pretend she's the one they want. She must!

"Andrew Breitbart's ghost said it, I didn't. don't blame the messenger."

Ken Jennings stands his ground, humor-wise, against the attack of the dreaded Twitchy.

When can it work to select an actual well-known dead person as a character in your joking about dying young? Jennings is more of a quiz-show whizz than a comedy writer, and Twitter boxes everyone in with the short format and wide dissemination, so it's hard to judge from this one example, but this is a case of selecting a dead-young person by his political position to demonstrate the truth of the opposite political position, and if the joke-teller isn't someone who has and wants the comic persona of asshole, this is a bad idea.

But I do like the standing of his ground, after he made the decision to joke about the dead man Breitbart. That takes nerve, and that can be funny. Commit to comedy and don't let the first critics scare you into taking it back and apologizing. It's at this point, when the critics step up, that you have a big opportunity to say something especially funny. Prudes will always be pushing you back. They'll always want everyone to stop laughing. A man died! No one should laugh.

But laughing at death is a good move. If you can't laugh at death, life will be nothing but crying, and that would be true idiocy.

Speaking of true idiocy and commitment to comedy, I got an assist in this post from The 3 Stooges! Bonus points to the reader who can guess what question I had, writing the text above, that led me to Google and resolved my question with help from The 3 Stooges....

... who are all dead!



Oh! No!!!

UPDATE: No one wins the bonus. Answer here. 

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.

"Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display."

"Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels."

From "Dear America, I Saw You Naked/And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent."

Strike a pose.

Another animation from Chip Ahoy. Go here to watch it with its musical inspiration.

Shimmering shining shriek/scream.

I watched the last part of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" which was playing on cable last night. I noticed this exchange, between Gilbert (Johnny Depp) and his morbidly obese mother:

Momma: You're my knight in shimmering armor. Did you know that?

Gilbert: I think you mean shining.

Momma: No shimmering. You shimmer, and you glow.

Later, I watched the DVD of "After Hours" (a longtime favorite movie of mine). This exchange -- always good -- resonated poignantly with the "Gilbert Grape" quote:

Paul [looking at Kiki's papier maché sculpture]: It reminds me of that Edvard Munch painting. What is it? "The Shriek"?

Kiki: "The Scream."

Googling for a picture for "The Scream," to illustrate this post about how things go together, I hit a Reuters story from one hour ago, saying they've just today arrested a man for the theft of "The Scream." (The painting was stolen last August.) I love that feeling of things seeming to converge. I know it's only an illusion.

I also love the way in which the two movie quotes are dissimilar. The "After Hours" quote has the central character getting something a little wrong, and the character who does the correcting flatly and contemptuously sets him right. The mistake is part of a pattern of everything going wrong, part of being swallowed up in humiliation. The "Gilbert Grape" quote has the central figure in the family, the mother, getting an expression a little wrong, and when her son gently corrects her, she reaffirms her version and turns it into a renewed expression of love for the boy. The mistake becomes a new creation, something beautiful.