Eve Arnold, "Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses," Long Island, 1954

Looks like she’s absorbed in Molly’s soliloquy. “Yes” indeed!

By a commonplace coincidence, I just recently finished The Dalkey Archive, which would lead one to believe James Joyce was still alive and kicking when the photo above was taken. In this account, Joyce is tracked down by an admirer and found tending bar in an out-of-the-way Irish village, having faked his death to avoid serving in World War II. He tries to convince Mick (the main character) that Ulysses was a filthy hoax perpetrated by a coterie of literary pranksters, that he knows nothing of Finnegans Wake (he’s been working on a book but won’t describe it), and has been writing religious pamphlets in the years intervening between his supposed death in 1941 and the novel’s present (the 1960s? not sure). After several conversations, in which Joyce’s natural wariness gives way to full-bore confession, we learn that his heart’s desire is to be admitted into the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) and to end his days teaching at Clongowes Wood College, so vividly and painfully depicted in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. What a wicked sense of humor this Flann O’Brien (or Brian O’Nolan, or Brian Ó Nualláin, or Myles na gCopaleen …) has. Also recently read, The Third Policemen was great fun from start to finish, and At Swim-Two-Birds (which a graduate student in English at the U of C tried to foist on me years ago as the greatest of all novels) is still wondering when I will scrape away the requisite amount of time to dive into its loopy involutions.

Today’s musical tidbits revolve around the Hitchcock classic Psycho. Anyone who’s seen it cannot help but be struck by the soundtrack, composed by the acclaimed Bernard Hermann. As Wikipedia notes, “The screeching violin music heard during the famous shower scene (which Hitchcock originally suggested have no music at all) is one of the most famous moments from all film scores.” Here’s what it sounds like, in case you’ve forgotten:

Now here’s a snippet from a piece composed some forty years earlier:

I think it’s unlikely Hermann would have been unaware of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which has enjoyed enormous popularity over the years. (The clip above features Berl Senofsky with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell; my best guess is that this radio broadcast dates from the late fifties or early sixties.) Hermann’s music is quite different, both in its relentless repetition and the palette of accompanying notes. And yet one can’t help but feel he must have been inspired, consciously or not, by the Prokofiev. (If unconsciously, it would be a case of cryptomnesia—another tip of the hat to Jonathan Lethem.)

For the technically curious, I offer this Q&A about the actual notes used in the Psycho excerpt:

Q: What are the notes or note being played during “The Murder” in the famous shower scene (the violin shrieks)? (from Mr. Bunderfull in Chicago Ill. U.S.A.)

A: The highest note in the violins is an E flat, but the second violins are playing an E natural, and lower voices are playing F and G flat. So basically, the highest note is E flat, but everything from E flat to G flat is being heard. (thanks to Gizm, Texas)

If you like this sort of thing, here’s something similar.

Having just watched Syriana, which purports to show how the world really works, I can say I fully endorse the headline of Jimmy Carter’s commentary: We Need Fewer Secrets.

And having rented The Syrian Bride by mistake—it was the only DVD box on the Syriana shelf and I didn’t look at the spine label*—I can recommend that as the more enlightening, more interesting movie with “Syria” in the title.
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*At our video store, the DVDs of new releases are in plain cases placed behind the fancy illustrated cases, which stay (always empty) on the browsing shelves.