Fran Magazine: Issue #89

An extended Maestro moment and a vocabulary lesson

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Housekeeping

There is a Fran Magazine today (obviously) and there will be a Sunday Dispatch on Sunday. Then there will be another Fran Magazine next Wednesday, and another Sunday Dispatch the following Sunday. And then you will not hear from me again until New Year’s Eve! I am excited to bring you the second annual best-of extravaganza, and I will need as many days as possible to put those together, and to be on “vacation” from writing my newsletter that is optional. I’ll also take the first week of January off because I’ll probably be sleepy. If there is crazy Maestro news, however, I might be tempted out of winter vacation mode.

Maestro moment

It’s getting to the point where there are almost too many Maestro moments to reckon with, but I’ll do my best.

cred: variety

Maestro and his past-Aloha co-star Emma Stone will reunite for Actors on Actors. I’m sure this will be normal. I wish I could find the tweet that said, “this is a game to him.” Well, of course it is!

Maestro is also doing the late night circuit or, at least, he is going on Colbert’s show. I have an allergy to watching Colbert do interviews so I mostly scrubbed around this to see if anything was interesting. The answer is: kind of. I’m always curious to see how and what Maestro says drew him to the project or Bernstein specifically, because usually it all comes back to the fact that Cooper was obsessed with fake-conducting as a kid. I don’t not believe that but — well, go see the movie and tell me if you believe that. Here, he really plays this personal fact off like “oh, shucks,” which is funny if only because I think his performance of Maestro is anything but oh, shucks. The other point of interest discussed at the very end of the interview is that Cooper cast his IRL-lifelong friend Brian Klugman, an only sometimes actor who hasn’t appeared in much for the past seven years, to play Aaron Copland so that they could have an established intimacy between them. If I have significant complaints about Maestro (lol), one of them is certainly that there’s not enough Copland, made more apparent by the fact that I think Klugman is great in what little he has in the film. Maybe Jake Gyllenhaal’s rival Maestro picture can be about Bernstein and Copland.

Maestro is also doing the LA Times director’s roundtable. Haven’t watched yet. Is the whole thing up? I am paywalled out of the LA Times and before you get mad at me for shilling for Fran Magazine subscriptions but not paying for the LA Times, it’s worth knowing I pay for just about everything else but I draw the line at a paper from a city in which I do not live. I imagine this will eventually be on Youtube.

Last but not least: Maestro spoke to David Remnick at The New Yorker. Lots of notable stuff in here, mostly for people who have seen the movie. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the most notable thing in here is that Maestro keeps calling him “David” in every other response in a way that is terrifying.

Word choice

Things have been a bit crunched as we approach the end of the year at Fran Magazine headquarters — blogs flying about here and there, year-end lists due, presents to buy, and so on. On top of all that, as readers of the Sunday Dispatch know, I am reading two different books right now: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot and Spare by Prince Harry. I wake up most days around 7 or 7:30 in the morning to read an hour of Daniel Deronda if I can make it work with my schedule (today was an unfortunate exception). Spare, on the other hand, I read in fits and spurts on the subway on the Libby app on my phone. Having the Libby app on my phone has been the key me 1) not playing iPhone games and 2) reading on the subway regardless of whether I have a seat. If I am going to be doing tap tap tap on phone, I might as well be doing it as I read a(n admittedly bad) book. I don’t expect these books to overlap in a significant way beyond “they both take place in England, kind of” but I was surprised to see a confluence in the use of a word I thought I knew as a different part of speech.

Daniel Deronda is about — well, the titular Daniel Deronda, of course, and a woman named Gwendolen Harleth, who briefly cross paths at a casino in Germany. Deronda is a well-educated but somewhat aimless young man. He doesn’t have to work, being the adult ward of a more wealthy man, so he mostly goes around and helps people out as best he can. Gwendolen, on the other hand, is a beautiful and “un-serious,” as we might say, young woman who is forced by circumstance to get married sooner than she’d like to protect the wellbeing of her family but also to avoid having a job as a governess. She’s immature and quite selfish — fucking around with suitors and finding out. She winds up marrying the horrible Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt — the nephew of the man to whom Deronda is the ward — and he’s routinely insane and rude to her. There is also all this proto-Zionist stuff in the book, which is why I grew interested in it. How this books ends, I have no idea.

Deronda and Grandcourt are kind of cousins, but the latter hates the former because he is hot and charming and flirty, and because he seems to always want to go off to the side to say something to Gwendolen. Consider this passage from the book’s fifth volume, Mordecai:

But Gwendolen had lingered behind to look at the kenneled bloodhounds, perhaps because she felt a little dispirited; and Grandcourt waited for her.

“You had better take my arm,” he said, in his low tone of command; and she took it.

“It’s a great bore being dragged about in this way, and no cigar,” said Grandcourt.

“I thought you would like it.”

“Like it? — one eternal chatter. And encouraging those ugly girls — inviting one to meet such monsters. How that fat Deronda can bear looking at her — “

“Why do you call him a fat?” Do you object to him so much?”

“Object? no. What do I care about his being a fat? It’s of no consequence to me. I’ll invite him to Diplow again if you like.”

“I don’t think he would come. He is too clever and learned to care about us,” said Gwendolen, thinking it useful for her husband to be told (privately) that it was possible for him to be looked down upon.

The fat in italics is the book’s own, but it’s the word I was most curious about. There was something hilariously modern about Grandcourt calling Deronda “a fat,” more or less, because it was immediately clear that whatever modern connotation I have with that word, that’s not what’s being said here. Thankfully, the copy of Daniel Deronda that I have has a little glossary in the back, and it defined the 19th century use of fat as: fop, with the implication of self-satisfied, smug. This use of fat stems from 19th century France where it was sourced back to a work by a travel writer named Frances Trollope (I wish I was making this up).

Yesterday, I sat squished and half-falling off a seat, flipping through Spare on the train to class. I am liking but not loving Spare, which mostly depresses me. The book wants to be depressing. Harry is eager to make himself out to be a victim of a number of circumstances. He is, in some cases, and in others, he is the victim of having gone to too much therapy to think about his life in a normal way. I’ve just finished the part where Harry goes on his gap year to the Outback and Lesotho — he always feels normal when he’s not in Britain and when he’s doing hard labor. Harry should try working at an artisanal ice cream shop for one summer on the Lower East Side. Anyway. When he’s working on a cattle farm in the Outback, he “writes”:

I always flinched, and chuckled, at the way George spoke to errant cattle. He harangued them, abused them, cursed them, favoring one curse word in particular, a word many people go a lifetime without using. George couldn’t go five minutes. Most people dive under a table when they hear this word, but for George it was the Swiss Army knife of language — endless applications and uses. (He also made it sound almost charming, with his Aussie accent.)

It was merely one of dozens of words in the complete George lexicon. For instance, a fat was a plump cow ready for slaughter.

Obviously Prince Harry’s friend George is not calling a cow a fop, but I was surprised to see that this word has long shown up on the Meat & Livestock of Australia site as a word that’s no longer used to describe a cow ready for slaughter due, in part, to the negative connotations with the word. (Imagine my surprise at learning there’s a different MLA that defines words, also.) I don’t imagine there will be any other cross over between Daniel Deronda and Spare beyond the fact that I think Harry probably fancies himself a “Deronda-type,” and that his “downfall” is because he is just too good of a person to succeed in any traditional means. I have no idea how Daniel Deronda ends. They all move to Tel Aviv? Anyway — what word do you think his friend George is using like a Swiss Army knife of cussing? Should we all say it at the same time?