I usually feel inconspicuous in the city, but recently two things happened to disabuse me of this notion:

On the subway, I was sitting next to a woman who was writing furiously in a notebook. She would often glance up, and I suspected she was taking notes. So, as discreetly as possible, I took a peek at the notebook: "a woman with a green bowling bag sitting next to me." Oh my God! That's me! What else does she say? But just then she shut the notebook and got up for her stop. (Also: I hadn't know my bag was a bowling bag.)

Another time I was going home late at night, and half the subway lines weren't working, so I had to walk about fifteen blocks in the homestretch. It was very late — past one, I think. The streets were absolutely deserted, and I was a bit scared; luckily there was a 24-hour grocery store every five blocks or so. At one point, I noticed a police car. Three blocks later I glanced back, and there it still was — it was trailing me! When I turned onto my cross-street the police car couldn't follow me, because it's a one-way street, but its siren warbled goodbye. (You know the friendly, cartoonish sound sirens can make — "blurp.")

More on Sunrise:

In a self-service café in the city, the husband is trying to win back his wife's trust: he goes off to the counter and comes back to their table with a plate piled high with pastries for her. He sets it down before her and waits, anxiously, hands clasped, for her to eat. She puts a pastry in her mouth mechanically, but before she can bite down she bursts into tears again, and soon she's sobbing, with her mouth full of cake.

That moment rang so true I thought, "Why haven't I seen that before in a movie? This is what life is all about!"

There were so many wonderful scenes and sequences like that in Sunrise, some funnier, some more tragic, none so perfectly balanced in complicated innocence.

Figures of speech:

my arthritic umbrella

in a building under demolition: the staircase sagged like a slack accordion

Something I was reading with an eighth grade class mentioned the Iliad. "What's the Iliad?" I asked. Nobody knew (they're not the best class), but one boy made some valiant attempts: "It's about the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks & the Persians!" "No." "It's about that blind old man and his daughter." "No." "Oh! I know! The war between Athens and its rival, that other Greek city..."

The other day I asked my seventh grade, "Who's a good author if you want to read about Greek mythology?" I hoped someone would mention Edith Hamilton, and was astonished when Kevin called out, "Robert Graves!" I like Kevin; he slouches and looks half asleep, but he's actually alert and curious and hard-working, and good-natured too. The other day Mrs. K, passing by, moved my seventh graders around (quite unnecessarily — they're very well-behaved), and Kevin, who had been moved to the center of a row, wailed, "The wall! I can't concentrate without the wall!" (He leans against it.)

I was impressed when Kevin mentioned Robert Graves, & was reminded of another moment with another student (whom I taught, coincidentally, in the same room). This student, a high school junior, told me that within the space of a few months he had gone from being a "hard-line anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist" to being a skinhead. Naturally I was speechless. We talked, and I mentioned Rosa Luxemburg, and the movie of her life. Joon: "I haven't seen the movie, but I've read some of Rosa Luxemburg's writings." !!! I hadn't read anything by Rosa Luxemburg!!! (Still haven't!) We ended up reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; he seemed to like it. (He later told me that he was a non-racist skinhead; in an essay he tried to explain his trajectory: he became a Marxist-Leninist when he saw how terrible working conditions were in the factories of his grandfather's friends; he didn't have much of an explanation for his subsequent transformation.)

I'm not making this up: a biophysicist has written a paper on "The physics of running in children who have just learned to walk." That must have been fun to research.

The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach made a big impression on me; it's a really gripping book. Kaplan gives Brasillach's address (among others), and since I was in Paris when I finished the book, I checked out the building. Naturally, there was nothing in its innocent and cheerful façade to suggest that a vicious fascist, winner of literary prizes, had once lived there. What did I expect? Brasillach lived with his sister and brother-in-law, and someone with his brother-in-law's last name still lives at the address Kaplan gives.

Books:

August
The Botany of Desire (Pollan)
Tintenherz (Funke)
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Kaplan)
The Mother's Recompense (Wharton)
The Language Police (Ravitch)

September
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
The Closing of the Western Mind (Freeman)
A Little History of the World (Gombrich)
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (Pawel)

The Botany of Desire was excellent, so good I wanted to read it out loud, so good I could have turned back to page one as soon as I finished it. (By the way: when I asked for this title in a bookstore, the assistant leered at me. Part of me wanted to laugh & say, "Read the back, you dummy!" But I managed to keep a solemn demeanor.)
Tintenherz was not so good. It pains me to say that, because Funke has her heart in the right place: she evokes the magic of reading very well, and the first chapter was so promising. I won't go into the details, but Tintenherz made clear why in all the great children's books adults are for the most part evil, or, if they're good, they're befuddled, oblivious, helpless. It's a capital mistake to put a strong, capable, good adult at the center of a children's book; it means that the child protagonist never comes into her own.
But I'm glad I've read it, because my students mention it, and because now I can say I've read a 550-page book in German.

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach was superb. In writing about the novels, Kaplan speaks of Brasillach's characteristic "turn of the century charm and childlike joie de vivre," with WWI as a sudden, incomprehensible parenthesis; his pet notion of "brother enemies," so useful when he wanted to be forgiven by the Resistance figures whom he had hounded and betrayed to the Germans (going so far as to publish addresses of hiding places). One of his novels even features a love triangle involving a Frenchman, a German, and a woman named Catherine. Doesn't this all sound a lot like Jules et Jim? Now I know that movie is based on a different book, but maybe Henri-Pierre Roché was recycling something by Brasillach? I found a website that spoke of Truffaut's "predilection" for literature of the extreme right, and elsewhere I read that the editor Roché worked with had signed the clemency petition. (But that doesn't mean much, since so many men of letters did.)