giornata, 1/9/2025

a new feature!!

One original goal of starting a Substack was to stop writing my book reviews on Goodreads. I have reasons for continuing to have a Goodreads account and not starting a Storygraph or some other tracker, but I don’t love the idea of any of my writing being on an Amazon platform, even if I feel entrenched with the archive of Goodreads reviews of genre fiction.

Instead, what has happened is my letters have gotten longer and more research-heavy, and my Goodreads reviews remain either off-cuff thoughts or scattered writings that read like notes for longer essays. I’ve enjoyed the pressure of writing (mostly) weekly Ulysses updates and I get a lot of rereading my own, in-process thoughts when I am working on longer pieces. I also have the goal in 2025 to work on writing negative reviews, both here and on Reformed Rakes.¹ So here’s my giornata.

Giornata is one of my favorite Italian words², literally “a day’s work.” I learned it in a medieval art history class, looking at Giotto frescos. Buon fresco is a method of painting that involves plastering a wall and then applying pigments on top of it. Buon fresco is incredibly durable when done correctly, which is why so many Renaissance frescos still look so good. The plaster must be wet when the paint is applied, so plaster is only applied to areas that will be finished in one work day. The result creates joints between the days, a diary of labor, sometimes hidden in lines between figures, sometimes laid bare, revealed by pigments that don’t quite match up. Giornate can be large when the painted area requires less detail, or much smaller for detailed areas, particularly figures and faces.

A giornata can be seen around the hand of Enrico Scrovegni, the donor and patron of the Scrovegni chapel in Padua. The clear level of detail and work that went into the hand can give meaning to the intention that Giotto gave the gesture. Image from Allen’s Art & Architecture Worlds

This feature will not be daily, but weekly on Thursdays and cover what I read and watched that week. But there’s no Italian word for “a week’s work.”³ Most of the words I was thinking about for this feature involved words that imply a daily record: diary, journey, journal. So I went with the most annoying one. I’m basically modeling it on Fran Magazine’s Sunday Dispatch, a feature that I love and has gotten me to remember to listen to WFMT multiple times in the years that I have read it. When I remember to listen to WFMT, those experiences will also be featured here!

The English Patient, rewatch

I’ve recommended this more times here than I can count, but this time I was specifically watching it after a rewatch of La Chimera, and after experiencing Conclave fever, which has the lingering side effect of me saying “You don’t get Ralph Fiennes like I get Ralph Fiennes.” Takes that suggested that people were discovering for the first time that Ralph Fiennes is incredibly handsome in his 60s or was once the most handsome man alive for a period between 1994-1997 stressed me out/made me feel very old.

I don’t think my connection between La Chimera and The English Patient is totally shoehorned, though I haven’t seen anyone else make it. And it extends beyond their shared Italian setting. Both protagonists are men extracting things from the earth of a borrowed home—Count Almásy and his map-making steal knowledge from North Africa and Arthur steals artifacts from Italy. La Chimera obviously has a clearer fairy tale element when it comes to how the hero’s lost love haunts him, but the filtered memories from a man who can’t remember his name or his country of origin in The English Patient pushes the realism of the non-fantastical film. In both film’s present timelines, the woman who serves as the hero’s companion is also displaced: La Chimera’s Italia is from South America (actress Carol Duarte is Brazilian and the character references Jacaranda trees in her faraway home), and Hana (Juliette Binoche) in The English Patient is Canadian.

In the Heat of the Night (1967), rewatch, The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin and “Sidney Poitier” by James Baldwin

A major portion of my film education came from working as a nanny while living with my parents in the Atlanta suburbs. I worked nearly every Saturday night, so I watched The Essentials on TCM every Saturday night. If I wasn’t working, my parents and I watched The Essentials. My sister has never been a nanny, but has become more of a movie buff in the last three years of living with me, and wanted me to make her a watchlist for 2025. So I made one, based mostly on the 16 seasons of The Essentials and stuff I think she would like.

She’s in law school and generally enjoys a procedural. I knew she had never seen a Sidney Poitier movie, so for our first watch of the list, I picked In the Heat of the Night, a movie I hadn’t seen since high school. Sidney Poitier really was great and I always love Rod Steiger’s screen presence, but my relationship to policing and liberal institutions has changed dramatically since I was a teen. Pretty quickly in the rewatch, I wanted to read some Black authors’ thoughts on it. I knew generally of Poitier’s on-the-edge-of-a-knife public persona, where he was embraced by white audiences and vigilantly advocated for civil rights, mostly from eulogizing and dissecting that happened after his death in 2022. My grandfather, a white Atlanta police officer in the 1960s, considered In the Heat of the Night one of his favorite movies, a fact that I think holds some of the tension of Poitier’s star power and persona, and the film’s racial politics. While I wasn’t surprised to find out that Baldwin wrote extensively about the film, I was surprised to see how Baldwin uses the metaphor of a Hollywood romance to critique the film.

The Devil Finds Work begins as an autobiography of Baldwin’s relationship to film and seeing whiteness and Blackness on screen and he remembers watching many films that I consider essential. He loves movies and he invests in the emotional sympathy he feels with figures on screen, even if they are all white. I was particularly affected by his recognition of himself in Bette Davis’ large eyes, a feature his father considered ugly, but was reified on screen in this Movie Star, considered beautiful in the film, and by the masses watching it.

The second part focuses on civil rights films of the 1960s, primarily those starring Sidney Poitier. The love affair between Baldwin and film sours and Baldwin borrows the visual language of sex in film to describe the ending of In the Heat of the Night. Baldwin compares the tidiness of racist Chief Bob Gillespie carrying Detective Virgil Tibbs’ luggage as he gets on the train, the quiet respect of the goodbye as they shake hands, with Ray Charles’ singing the title theme in the background, to Hollywood’s fade to black kiss. These kisses as a visual symbol “did not really speak of love, and, still less, of sex: it spoke of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possible.”

The fact that the plot must be resolved so neatly, so symmetrically to the introduction of Virgil Tibbs, arrested at the train station, without any open-ended questions betrays to Baldwin the self-serving mechanism of the film made by white Hollywood. D. Quentin Miller wrote in “The Devil Finds Work: A Hollywood Love Story (as Written by James Baldwin)” that “The cardinal American sin in Baldwin’s eyes is to replace love with happiness. Happiness is a romantic fantasy whereas actual love is a mess, involving pain and confrontation as well as quest and daring and growth. It’s not as though movies can’t be messy, but they refuse to.”⁴

I also read this essay by James Baldwin about Poitier and his star image. They were close friends and there’s a great anecdote near the end about Poitier giving Baldwin a pep talk on a walk around Harlem before a book launch party. Baldwin had been living in Europe and returns for the party, though he is nervous about the reception of the book (Another Country). Poitier calms down his friend and then leaves before the party starts. “He hadn’t come for the party at all.”

Love Me Tonight (1932)

I love the Ernst Lubitsch-Maurice Chevalier-Jeannette MacDonald pre-code musicals, but I’d never seen this one because it was directed by Rouben Maumolian. Maurice Chevalier is just a screen presence you can’t imagine in any other time period, with the uncanny effect of being a human Pepé Le Pew, but it works pretty well on me and the heroines of his films. Maybe the closest modern equivalent is Adam Sandler. All of his musical films have a fairy-tale heightened reality quality and there’s a pre-code playfulness with the staging of musical numbers and suspension of belief.

The stand out of the film is the “Isn’t It Romantic?” sequence, which is so good, that I watched it twice in a row. The song was written for the film and in the film, has much more specific lyrics than what has worked its way into the Great American Songbook. Maurice Chevalier’s character starts the sequence, singing about the romance of his profession, tailoring, preparing a man for his wedding day. Then his customer takes up the tune, passing it along to a taxi driver in the street, who gives a ride to a composer. The composer works on the tune on the train, where he is overheard by soldiers. They then sing the song marching the country fields, overheard by a peasant musician, who teaches it to his compatriots. The sounds of their music filter up to the balcony of Jeannette Macdonald, Maurice’s eventual love interest: “I've never met you, yet never doubt, dear, I can't forget you, I've thought you out, dear.” Linked by melody and movie montage magic, the couple is fated before they are ever on screen together.

Simply Unforgettable, Mary Balogh

I needed a snow day read on Monday, so I picked a Balogh that I’ve been hesitant about and ended up loving it. Simply Love, the second book in this series, has the most egregious example of “children asking forgiveness of their parents when their parents did something terrible” in a Balogh book I’ve read. Her interest in reconciling families of origin is a major issue I have with many of her books.

But Simply Unforgettable was pretty great. Frances Allard is a teacher returning to Bath from her Christmas holiday and Lucius Marshall, Viscount Sinclair, is taking the same road south to return to London. The weather turns cold and incredibly snowy, and neither has much of an option but to stay in an abandoned inn they find, along with their drivers and the one servant left to maintain the inn. The first third of the book covers their few days at the inn together, where the isolation and snow work magic on their cantankerous beginning. It’s Balogh at her angsty best, with an unsuitable class difference, secrets, and assumptions.

When the snowy sojourn ends, Frances knows Lucius won’t offer marriage, so she rejects his request for a continued relationship and he takes her at her word. But neither party really moves on, so when he visits Bath later with his ailing father and the Earl is charmed by Frances’ singing performance one night at an assembly, they are thrown back together, unable to publicly or politely refuse to interact with each other.

There are maybe one too many rounds of Frances refusing to consider Lucius’ propositions, which quickly turn into earnest proposals, just for pacing's sake. But Balogh is at her best when people are just moving between parties. No other author is better at considering the different behaviors that people have in different settings: Frances and Lucius are different people at the inn, different people in Bath, different people in London, and different people at a country estate, and the romance starts to work when they figure out how to make all those opposing personalities line up with each other.

The Count of Monte Cristo, 2024

First absolute heater of the year in theaters. I initially thought it possibly dragged a tidge, even though I had a fantastic time the whole time. But then I looked up the runtime and the movie was a full hour longer than I thought it was after it was over. So it didn’t drag at all!

This is going to be a non-romance, romance, so more to come!

1. I have written many negative Goodreads reviews and made lots of negative Tiktoks about books. But both those feel like hiding a bit.

2. Anima (spirit), chiacchiere (to chit chat), campanilismo (city pride), rimbalza (rebound) are some others.

3. Settimanta?

4. D. Quentin Miller. “The Devil Finds Work: A Hollywood Love Story (as Written by James Baldwin).” James Baldwin Review 7, 83 (2021)