Maxwell 44: Must We Permit Mephistopheles and Beelzebub to Perform Financial and Performance Audits

[Hane]

4 hours ago, PennySycamore said:

@Hane, I read Up the Down Staircase in junior high, too.  One of the most memorable parts was the daily memo that a student of Sylvia's had died of a self-induced AB which was the school'd shorthand for abortion. 

Bel Kaufman, the author of UtDS, was the granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem, the author of the Tevye stories, and died at the age of 103 in 2014

Wow—I *must* have been naïve! That “AB” reference flew over my head, too! And I never knew Bel Kaufman was Sholem Aleichem’s granddaughter; he’s always been a favorite of mine. 

[PennySycamore]

@church_of_dog, you'd often catch me in the den sitting on the floor surrounded by volumes of the encyclopedia (World Book, to be exact.)  I'd be ready one article and then find cross references and suggested articles and I'd have to look them up.

@sparkles,  TCM has showed Up the Down Staircase several times fairly recently.  If you get TCM and download the  Watch TCM app (or log in on your desk/laptop), it might be available for viewing.  It's worth searching for anyway.  I agree Sandy Dennis is excellent.

 

[Loveday]

All this talk of what we read when we were very young makes me want to go re-read them all again. Well, except for Catcher In The Rye. I'm in @mango_fandango and @MamaJunebug's corner about Holden Caulfield. 

@sparkles, Up The Down Staircase was on TCM a couple of months ago. I remember reading the book when I was around 12 or 13, about the same time I read Braithwaite's To Sir With Love. That one shows up on TCM now and then, too, usually during a Sidney Poitier celebration day. Love Sandy Dennis in UTDS, but I don't think I've ever seen her in anything else. I need to rectify that !

I take that back, I just checked IMDb for her films, and I saw her in Splendor In The Grass. I don't recall her in it, though, so I need to see that one again. 

[kpmom]

I loved to read as a kid, but the only book I remember definitely reading at age 12 was "Flowers for Algernon".  I'm not even sure how I came about reading it.  Maybe an older sibling was reading it for high school.  I loved it and read it over several times.

I re-read it again a few years ago, and thought it was o.k., but it didn't have the same effect on me.  It also had a (mild) sex scene and I wondered what I had thought of that at age 12. 

I

[PennySycamore]

@Loveday,  Sandy Dennis was also in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  She and George Segal were the young couple, Honey and Nick.  She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role of Honey.

@kpmom,  have you ever seen the film Charly, which is the film version of Flowers for Algernon?  It's very good and Cliff Robertson won the Best Actor Oscar in 1968 for playing Charly.

 

[sparkles]

36 minutes ago, Loveday said:

All this talk of what we read when we were very young makes me want to go re-read them all again. Well, except for Catcher In The Rye. I'm in @mango_fandango and @MamaJunebug's corner about Holden Caulfield. 

@sparkles, Up The Down Staircase was on TCM a couple of months ago. I remember reading the book when I was around 12 or 13, about the same time I read Braithwaite's To Sir With Love. That one shows up on TCM now and then, too, usually during a Sidney Poitier celebration day. Love Sandy Dennis in UTDS, but I don't think I've ever seen her in anything else. I need to rectify that !

I take that back, I just checked IMDb for her films, and I saw her in Splendor In The Grass. I don't recall her in it, though, so I need to see that one again. 

Well darn, I'll have to check about TCM. I almost never watch TV (last time, I needed help turning it on so I got the cable connected) so if it's not something I can get on my iPad when the mood strikes I'm kinda SOL.

Sandy Dennis (definitely check her out in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which won her an Oscar) had a fairly brief part in Splendor in the Grass as one of Deanie's friends or classmates. I remember a scene where she's dancing with Warren Beatty. I actually watched that recently, along with They Shoot Horses, Don't They (the most depressing movie ever made) and Inside Daisy Clover (the best of the so bad it's good movies and one of the weirdest movies ever made.)

Spoiler

 

Edited November 18, 2020 by sparkles

[kpmom]

4 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

 

 

@kpmom,  have you ever seen the film Charly, which is the film version of Flowers for Algernon?  It's very good and Cliff Robertson won the Best Actor Oscar in 1968 for playing Charly.

 

You know I don't think I ever have seen it.  I'll have to look for it on Itunes.  The late 1960's is when I read the book, so maybe that's why it was popular, because of the movie?

Thanks for the heads up, I'll look for the movie.

[Lady Grass Lake]

I read anythingI could get my hands on, I loved to read so much.  One of my best kid memories was one year for Christmas, my Mom went to some Fire Sale, there really was a fire in a store, and got this whole set of biographies, it must have been destined for a school library  because all of the books had the same dark green covers, and each book had multiple stories about famous people in American History.   The books smelled like smoke and one of the books had some charred page corners.   My parents could never afford encyclopedias so if we ever when to anyone's house that had a set, I'd dive in and spend the entire visit reading  

[Loveday]

15 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

@Loveday,  Sandy Dennis was also in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  She and George Segal were the young couple, Honey and Nick.  She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role of Honey.

 

Somehow I've never caught this one on TCM or anywhere else. I'll definitely keep an eye out for it!

@sparkles, I LOVE Inside Daisy Clover! It really is bad, but it's such a good bad, isn't it? 

[Jana814]

I read both the Catcher in the Rye & Of Mice & Men in high school. I didn’t care for either book. 

[sparkles]

8 minutes ago, Loveday said:

@sparkles, I LOVE Inside Daisy Clover! It really is bad, but it's such a good bad, isn't it? 

It's mind-bogglingly bad but so, so deliciously good. And what a cast! Natalie Wood (toooootally believable as a 16 year old ?! Christopher Plummer! Ruth Gordon! Robert Redford in his first award winning role (I can't even…)! Seriously people, if you love good/bad movies, this is a must-see. ?

[PennySycamore]

I love the ending of Inside Daisy Clover where she is trying to commit suicide by turning on the gas but not lighting the pilot light, keeps getting interrupted and goes " To Hell With It!" and blows up the house instead.   

[HoneyBunny]

All this talk of reading encyclopedias...my parents could never afford encyclopedias, but at a rummage sale one day when I was about 8 or 10, my mom found a set of World Book encyclopedias (from 1952) for $5. Thinking back, that was still a lot of money for them in 1970, but somehow she bought them. The beauty was that, for historical entries, there was virtually no difference between those volumes and their contemporary sisters. I read them through, over and over, an might have even used them for homework.  

[PennySycamore]

@HoneyBunny, I think that our set night have burned up when my parents' den caught on fire,  but my mom did have her sister's set from a few years later which I got when us kids closed down the house after our mom died.  

ETA:  We also have a couple of volumes of Childcraft.  My most treasured one is Poems of Early Childhood.  I've noticed that Andy Cohen has a set of Childcraft on the shelves of the set of Watch What Happens Live  aka The Clubhouse. 

Edited November 19, 2020 by PennySycamore

[freejugar]

Ok I got it

Jesse and Anna have a  landlady who doesn't allow pets. Not even golden cream retrievers!

[Black Aliss]

On 11/16/2020 at 9:37 PM, Dominionatrix said:

 

Quote

Are you a soup maker, Cyndi?

Sorry, Cyndi, but if you don’t make soup, Teri simply does not have the time!

Is that the fundie equivalent of "Bitch, please! Do you even make soup?"

15 hours ago, Bluebirdbluebell said:

On the other hand, Sarah is trying to make English Cream Golden Retrievers happen. There is some debate, but generally they are just Golden Retrievers with a lighter colored coat. 

Technically, they are Golden Retrievers that don't meet the AKC standard for their breed. Just pointing that out. I'm no fan of the way the AKC promotes their standards for appearance over other considerations, such as health and the ability to do what they were originally bred to do (There are AKC champion Newfoundlands that can't swim). I'd love to see more color variations in some of the breeds.

Edited November 19, 2020 by Black Aliss

[PennySycamore]

@Black Aliss, Newfies that can't swim?  That is terrible!  Newfies are basically aquatic St Bernards.  I saw a video filmed at Lake Como where they were teaching water rescue to a bunch of Newfies.  It was beautiful to see these dogs plunging fearlessly into the water to rescue someone.  

[Naga Viper]

On 11/17/2020 at 2:33 PM, mango_fandango said:

I don’t actually remember what I read when I was 12! 
I tried reading Catcher I’m the Rye, but I just could not get into it. I just found Holden irritating. Most people seem to love it, though, so maybe I’m the weird one

One more for the No Holden Caulfields club! Although maybe I came to it too late, since I didn't read it until adulthood and found his dialogue/narration tics irritating. OTOH, I read Bell Jar around the same time and found it so much more interesting and relatable.

11 hours ago, Flossie said:

The Three Investigators (Read when I visited my father and I'd read my way through my step-brothers collection. Peter was my favorite.)

I was in love with Bob. He could be a snarky little thing when he wanted to be.

[church_of_dog]

34 minutes ago, Naga Viper said:

One more for the No Holden Caulfields club! Although maybe I came to it too late, since I didn't read it until adulthood and found his dialogue/narration tics irritating.

Count me in as another one!  I read it young, though not age 12 -- probably high school -- and just thought it somewhere between "meh" and "bleah".

And just last year, so 40 years later, more or less, I picked up my mom's copy of "Franny and Zooey", also by Salinger.  Mom apparently loved it as a young person (she was in her 20s when it came out) and was now trying to reread it because she had such good memories of it.  I read a few pages and had that same bleah reaction.  Not just unappealing but actually annoying, grating, to me.  Not sure what that's about.

[Black Aliss]

1 hour ago, PennySycamore said:

@Black Aliss, Newfies that can't swim?  That is terrible!  Newfies are basically aquatic St Bernards.  I saw a video filmed at Lake Como where they were teaching water rescue to a bunch of Newfies.  It was beautiful to see these dogs plunging fearlessly into the water to rescue someone.  

Water rescue competitions are really fun to watch. It's like agility for Newfies. Sad to say, there was, years ago, at least one Newfie breeder in Oregon who was deliberately breeding dogs with a specific head and neck conformation because it was a "look" that AKC conformation judges liked, and those dogs could not swim. And I would think they were prone to skeletal problems as they got older. I adore the breed, and if I had one I would have wanted to train it for water rescue.

Those big dogs, though, just don't live long enough. Well, no good dogs live long enough, but 8 years seems to be the norm for Newfies.

[IsmeWeatherwax]

I read The diary of Anne Frank and Goodnight Mister Tom when I was 12. They still live in me 30 years later, so powerful. My youngest has the middle name of Zachary after his friend.

Then the Flowers in the Attic hit and wow, so weird!

Edited November 19, 2020 by IsmeWeatherwax
spelling

[anachronistic]

I don’t understand why the drowning took place off screen. You could easily write a whole book about a young child’s death from the sisters perspective, the repercussions, funeral, etc, and still end up with her finding Jesus in a shed with her friend. I guess because Sarah has never actually witnessed anything dramatic, she can’t write about it. 
 

I was a huge reader as a kid. At 12-13, in 7th grade, for fun, a friend and I both read ‘Gone with the Wind’ and yes, the racism went *completely* over my head. In 6th grade I discovered ‘A tree Grows in Brooklyn’ and fell in deep, deep love, it’s still one of my favorite books.

 I generally disliked what we read in school. We did ‘Catcher’ in 9th grade, I also hated it,  and we had to write fake letters to Holden and mine were all basically yelling at him to shape up, take advantage of his opportunities, treat people better, etc. I absolutely despised him and didn’t understand why someone wrote a whole book about such a vile person. ‘Flowers for Algernon’ was 8th, ‘old Man and the Sea’ was 7th,- another terrible book IMHO, I hate both boats and fishing - also ‘The Pearl’ and a few Shakespeare a year. And just because I didn’t enjoy them didn’t mean I wasn’t capable of reading and understanding them, (with the exception of Shakespeare.) To say that this book is appropriate reading for a middle schooler really makes me wonder at the immensely low standards the Maxwells must have.

in 8th grade we read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and watched the movie, which was the raciest thing almost any of us had ever seen and the class reacted as such. The Maxwells would never let their kidults near such a book, much less the movie. (Oddly, the Flowers for Algernon movie was deemed inappropriate and we watched ‘Awakenings’ instead, the Robin Williams movie. We were also taken to a theater to see ‘Amistad’ to tie into our study of American slavery, and that went horribly because it was so graphically violent. I was the first kid to flee the theater and end up crying in the hallway but I definitely wasn’t the last.)

 

 

[smittykins]

18 hours ago, kpmom said:

I loved to read as a kid, but the only book I remember definitely reading at age 12 was "Flowers for Algernon".  I'm not even sure how I came about reading it.  Maybe an older sibling was reading it for high school.  I loved it and read it over several times.

I re-read it again a few years ago, and thought it was o.k., but it didn't have the same effect on me.  It also had a (mild) sex scene and I wondered what I had thought of that at age 12. 

I

I read it for school(ninth grade IIRC, which would have been 1980-81).  Just thinking about how much things have changed since it was published—in my area at least, large institutions for people with intellectual disabilities are a thing of the past, and the “R” word has been largely abandoned.  I cringe when I encounter that word, even in a context when it was considered the accepted term.

Edited November 19, 2020 by smittykins

[sparkles]

I remember some of the things I read in school, high school mostly. Being that it was the late 60s-early 70s it was still pretty much Dead White Guys and little else. We definitely read some Shakespeare; I remember Julius Caesar and MacBeth. And we read Giants in the Earth in 10th grade English Lit. I remember it as being a colossal bore but I kind of want to read it again and see if I feel differently. I also took a literary satire elective and we read Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, Gulliver's Travels and one other that I can't remember (The Pearl?) but they were all books I'd read before so it was kind of my equivalent of the classic "Rocks for Jocks" class to get an easy credit. 

I not a big fiction reader in my later years. My reading is basically all history, politics, science and social issues, although I love science fiction and dystopian fiction (highly recommend Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police). Most of the other fiction I've read was years ago, but they're books I can read over and over and over again and still find something new.

1 hour ago, anachronistic said:

In 6th grade I discovered ‘A tree Grows in Brooklyn’ and fell in deep, deep love, it’s still one of my favorite books.

ATGB Is one of those books. I adored Francie, for one thing for her love of books. As a kid, it was one of my first encounters with really strong female characters and those women stay with me to this day. My other kid role model was kick-ass Bonnie Green from Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, which was made into yet another horrendous movie where the PTB didn't trust the source material and felt they had to add all sorts of over-the-top crap to make it appeal to audiences. Note: They didn't and it didn't.

[Naga Viper]

Maybe I should give Catcher another skim, but the entire time I couldn't help thinking Holden will basically turn into Grampa Simpson: perpetually miserable, desperately lonely but also unable to forge a meaningful connection with whatever wife and children he might have, spouting extremely dated slang, eventually ends up yelling at clouds, the big phonies.

We read Romeo & Juliet in ninth grade and I understand that when one of the other teachers screened the Zeffirelli film, she would block Romeo's ass from view with her hand. Evidently I had the cool teacher, because she let us see the full moon and completely ignored whatever nervous tittering resulted.