Libraries and Others

I walk to eight branches of the public library and read eleven books in one day. I finish reading a novel and watch three filmed versions of the same story.

Stride and Read

I'm getting back into long walks to exorcise my toxins, as M advised Bond to do at that health retreat in Never Say Never Again. I'm gonna visit every brick-and-mortar branch of the San Francisco Public Library by foot and read at least one entire book, plucked semi-randomly from the shelves, inside of each branch. I'll also explore books from Little Free Libraries and then put them in other Little Free Libraries. Call me Flânerie O’Connor.

The other day turned into a walk of nearly fourteen and a half miles. I first walked to the Portola branch where I read Tow Truck Joe Makes a Splash, written by June Sobel and illustrated by Patrick Corrigan.

While walking through the neighborhood of Visitacion Valley in a Little Free Library at Leland and Peabody I found A House for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle, which I finished reading inside the V.V. library branch, where I also read If I Ran Your School, a Dr. Seuss-branded book "by the Cat in the Hat with a little help from Alastair Heim, illustrated by Tom Brannon."

In the Ocean View branch I found Harriet Tubman, written by Ma Isabel Sánchez Vegara and illustrated by Pili Aguado, which I figured was perfect because I had just been thinking recently that I wanted to read more about Tubman after finishing the Tiya Miles book. Then at the Ingleside branch I read Just Like My Family by Ashley Molesso and Chess Needham.

Over at the Merced library I read Griso: The One and Only by Roger Mello, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, as well as Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh.

In an LFL near Ocean and Junipero Serra I deposited the Carle book and found a tiny board book (with no credited author or illustrator) called Fall Days. Read it at the West Portal branch, in which I also read Turtle Walk by Matt Phelan.

At the Parkside branch I read the find of the day, the exquisitely-illustrated, moving, sad and resilient story of The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs by Chana Stiefel, illustrated by Susan Gal.

I figured I had just enough time to hustle-walk over to the Ortega branch before they closed up for the day. On the way I found an LFL on 37th between Taraval and Santiago in which to divest of Fall Days. I got to the Ortega library with a few minutes to spare and rushed to find something quick to read. On a display I came across the children's coffee table book Animal Portraits by the ingenious illustrator Lucie Brunellière, which I've been meaning to read anyway, and whipped through it in a few minutes. (I have a copy from a different branch at home to peruse, since Brunellière's exquisite "portraits" (full-page illustrations of animals (including a two-page spread of a whale) making eye contact with the reader) merit further scrutiny and admiration.)

Starting back east, I felt like just keeping on walking. I found myself scaling an imposing stairway into Golden Gate Heights, a stunning neighborhood I've never visited before, and as I drifted from there into Forest Hill I got out my dog-eared paperback copy of Moby-Dick, reading as I strode, striding as I read.

After I got home and cleaned up, I finished re-reading Moby-Dick. Ingenious, confounding and mercurial, as was its author. As is demonstrated by a sequence of letters from Melville to his hero/crush Hawthorne that are reprinted at the back of this edition, Melville had an expansive, probing and psychedelically-inclined mind, and I think Moby-Dick among other things was him trying to see if he could filter his incomprehensibly sublime, expansive and ecstatic philosophical and aesthetic meanderings into the format of novel. For a narrator and sometime-protagonist he created in Ishmael a characterological cypher so mysterious and contradictory that he disappears right out of his own story and becomes omniscient. Until the single-page epilogue leaves him as the sole survivor "ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE," long after Ahab, Fedallah, Starbuck, Stubb, Queequeeg and the screaming bird that Tashtego nails to the mast of the ship all "sink to hell."

I respect Moby-Dick more than I like it, and enjoy having read it more than reading it. I think I should stop re-reading it.

On three successive days I watched three filmed version of the same story, a legendary piece of classic cinema I've been meaning to check out for decades, plus two remakes. All three films tell the same story with the same setting and same narrative beats, with the remakes adding and altering some elements to keep up with the times and make different points.

The Nosferatu story is something F.W. Murnau's screenwriter Henrik Galeen stole from the estate of Bram Stoker, turning Stoker's novel Dracula into an unauthorized and loose adaptation/ripoff which Murnau and his leading man Max Schreck realized as a masterpiece of early cinema. The story of all three films is that: in 1838 in the fictional German city of Wisburg, an ambitious young real estate agent is sent on assignment over the mountains into an unfamiliar land to close a deal with the horrifying Count Orlok, who is secretly a vampire. This sets in motion a chain of events that take Orlok by water back into Wisburg, bringing plague, pestilence and predation that infects and threatens to destroy this urban center of continental modernity. The real estate agent, his beloved wife and their allies are forced to make difficult and questionable choices to neutralize the threat.

I texted a friend:

Partway through my third movie of this story in as many days, it occurs to me that it's tempting to look for the sexual meaning in the narrative, but that's to miss a point of at least equal importance about xenophobia. The Nosferatu mythos is pro-xenophobia! The Eggers version seems to interlace this with the sexuality thing most explicitly. I'm pretty confident the Murnau version has some deep-seated components of casual antisemitism (I don't mean that as a mark against the quality of the film), which I think naturally subsides by the time we get to the 2024 version. Lemme see if that thesis holds up.

He messaged back that it "felt a bit like Eggers was trying to merge the plague-Nosferatu with the seduction-Dracula."

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922. A brilliant and influential silent film classic of German expressionism that was well worth the hype. Concise storytelling, striking compositions, reasonably good acting by the standards of the day and a genuinely frightening bat/louse cosmetic conception of the Orlok/Nosferatu character that has withstood the test of time.

This was Germany between the wars; it's impossible not to read some background ambience of antisemitism in this foundational depiction of a bloodsucking, plague-spreading, vermin-commanding greedy old count with pallid skin and a huge nose who aims to pollute and corrupt the heart of Germanic modernity with his lust, real estate and obscure customs. But this is beside the point of the movie, which is much more concerned with telling a good story, displaying some cool images and cultivating a creepy atmosphere. All of which it does with aplomb.

Nosferatu the Vampyre, directed by Werner Herzog, 1979. On the other hand, I think I can see a vague comment on the Third Reich if I squint at this one. This is an early-career effort from one of the luminaries of post-War German cinema, of the generation who had to figure out what German culture could represent to the world after beginning to process the horror of what their parents had perpetrated and/or allowed. At the end of Herzog's full-color and non-silent reinterpretation of Murnau's film, some nightmarishly comical dialogue points to the fact that the plague Nosferatu has visited upon Wisburg has led to a complete breakdown of law and order; the destruction is such that no one is left in charge to run anything. So this could be read as a reversal of whatever antisemitism was nascent in Murnau's story: perhaps in Herzog's version, the Germans are reckoning with the destruction visited on them at home by the overweening ambition and hubris they showed by venturing too far beyond those bordering mountains. I'm not convinced this analysis holds up, but it's interesting to contemplate why Herzog, who was born in Germany during the War and grew up in an environment of post-Reich social anarchy, chose this pre-War film for a remake thirty-four years after the War’s end.

But there is also the simple and obvious reason that his longtime collaborator, the complete asshole and genius actor Klaus Kinski, looks incredible in the Nosferatu makeup and absolutely dominates the role, rivaling Schreck’s Nosferatu with his (Kinski’s) floating creepiness and exacting German diction, utilizing the techniques of voice that were unavailable to Schreck in the silent era.

This movie is good but overrated and finally doesn't compare with Murnau's vision. Herzog's workmanlike filmmaking is always worthy of respect even when it doesn't fully cohere, and I liked his use of nondiegetic music to imply a tense juncture between sacredness, sublimity and grotesquerie. Not strongly recommended, though Kinski's performance is remarkable. Unlike the other two versions, Herzog’s ends on a note of lingering dread and promise of more trouble to ensue.

Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, 2024. A few years ago after watching Eggers's previous film I posited that "Eggers’s next picture might be about homosexual female love," and I think I got that one very wrong. But his remake of Nosferatu definitely has some things to say about female lust and sexuality generally, and about how a phallocentric and moralistic society processes these phenomena. Nothing especially profound, as this film's reach somewhat exceeds its grasp. But the limited extent to which Eggers's straitjacketed screenplay works is largely due to the work of a good cast, led by Lily-Rose Depp who plays the wife of the real estate agent character. Eggers had the insight to position the wife character as the central protagonist, and Depp puts to riveting use the considerable onscreen talent she commands (unsurprising given her status as international industry royalty). She's really great and I'll be interested to see what kind of movie acting career she pursues.

Eggers's take on Nosferatu is a synthesis of the two previous versions and of the original Stoker source material which fleshes the premise out into a modern screenplay and adds deeply unsettling and shocking R-rated violence and sex fit for the twenty-first century. He's a master technician; this film looks great, lots of fine photography and design choices from all contributors.

Eminent horror film actor Bill Skarsgård plays Orlok/Nosferatu in this version. They gave him a mustache this time. The design of the character is cool: Skarsgård’s has a flair for weird fantasy-villain diction which pairs well with terrifying growling/purring digital effects they added to his voice work. All that and some incredible wardrobe and makeup work feeds into the synthesized version of Nosferatu as a character sanitized of his arguably bigoted roots. Eggers’s and Skarsgård’s version is a balance of the character as both

• “the Other,” a frightening foreigner from beyond the mountains who is heir to what appears to be an ancient and noble lineage but is actually an evil infection of the unholy into Christendom,

• and feminine lust and sexuality as something that old-timey proto-modern society considered shameful and was eager to repress and punish, a theme Eggers started to explore in The Witch and maps onto the Nosferatu mythos with less success here.

I loved Eggers’s first two movies. I have been impressed but also underwhelmed by his last two. Still worth watching to see what this ambitious and skilled period piece/horror filmmaker does in the future.

Next: We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Bond-obsessed programming.