1. Rita is my longtime friend and, starting back in 1993, we team taught courses in English Composition and Philosophy. That project was among the most fun teaching experiences I had in my many years teaching college-level courses.
Today Rita called me to update me on her medical condition. Over the phone, yes, I could tell Rita's heart disease and other difficulties have weakened her voice, but she was mentally and intellectually as sharp as ever.
We talked for a while about her decision to put herself under hospice care.
Rita also talked about her current intellectual ponderings, her rereading of Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Listening to Rita recap the unusual tale this novel tells brought back vivid and enjoyable memories of when we assigned our students early novels by Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, Beet Queen, and Tracks. Getting at thorny philosophical questions of ethics, how we know what we know (or think we know), and the nature of reality through the events and characters of these novels was not only fun, but magical.
We talked about other things, too, including Rita's end of life planning.
We made a plan to spend as much of the day of November 5th together as is possible, but I'll call Rita when I arrive in Eugene on November 1st to see if we need to adjust that plan.
2. Around 5:00 this afternoon, Ed and Nancy picked me up and blasted straight to the Elks Club for this year's annual Pork and Apple Festival. It's a fundraiser for the Kellogg Elks Club. The heart of the the festival is a dinner consisting of slow cooked pork, tender and juicy, apples baked with cinnamon (and brown sugar?), baked beans, cole slaw, and a dinner roll.
Upon arriving at the festival, we could buy tickets for a variety of baked goods like Pina colada bread, banana bread, glazed carrot cake, and others being raffled off along with craft items like autumn welcome signs and autumn themed baskets with dried flowers and stuff. On another table, larger items including baskets of bottles of liquor, were also raffled off. About three or four times during the raffle drawing, Harley and Harley, our master and mistress of ceremonies, took a break and the children in the house rushed to the Elk Race board hanging near the Bingo board and watched as one person threw dice and another advanced the six elk on the board forward depending on the dice roll. The children won prizes and, at the end of the festival, Ms. Harley made sure that every child left with a prize in case any children were shut out at the races.
The highlight of my evening? A tall lanky guy my age approached me just before I got in the dinner line. I didn't recognize him and he introduced himself as Phil Watts. PHIL WATTS! Holy Toledo! Phil and I were teammates for three years on the Kellogg-Wallace American Legion baseball team (1970-72). I hadn't seen him since the our 1972 season ended.
Phil was a pitcher for our team. I remembered him as a chucker who liked to work the lower part of the strike zone and when Phil's stuff was working, our infielders stayed busy as our opponents hit a lot of ground balls.
Phil and I had a good talk, some about our baseball days and some about his golf game and enjoyment of fishing and how he is dividing his time, not equally, between Aloha, OR and Wallace.
3. Earlier in the day, I completed watching the Sterling Hayden double feature I'd planned for myself by flipping on the John Huston masterpiece, The Asphalt Jungle (1950).
Like the first movie of this double feature (The Killing), The Asphalt Jungle is a heist movie that tells the story of a middle aged man, Doc Erwin Riedenschnieder, played by Sam Jaffe, who wastes no time after being released from prison planning a robbery of jeweler.
And so, in a tightly constructed story, the movie introduces us to a handful of characters who Doc recruits to pull off this heist. At one point, Doc asserts that "One way or another, we all work for our vice." We come to know each of these character, in part, in terms of their central vice and, in a way that I thought was like Shakespeare, we see how each character's vice affects how this heist and its aftermath turns out.
A few examples: Doc's vice is his lust for young women; Sterling Hayden's character, Dix, is fixated on horses (and the memory of the horse farm he grew up on); a character named Cobby drinks too much; a lawyer named Emmerich's vice is living extravagantly; the character Doll can't let go of her attraction to Dix. And so on.
As the plot moves forward, as the heist is planned and carried out and as we witness its aftermath, what's inside these characters drives the story to its several conclusions, each conclusion showing us the fate of each character.
Given what I enjoy most in movies, this is one of the best movies I've ever seen.
I enhanced my enjoyment of this film after its conclusion by watching videos posted on the Criterion Channel. One featured the remarkable Eddie Mueller expressing his admiration for The Asphalt Jungle and locating it in both the heist genre and in the world of film noir.
I also watched an interview with cinematographer John Bailey who brilliantly explains the work of The Asphalt Jungle's cinematographer, Harold Rosson. I learned as much about cinematography in this 20-25 minute interview with John Bailey than from anything else I've ever encountered. I would love to have this kind of understanding of how movies are photographed and the impact the different choices made behind the camera have on how we experience movies.
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