6 / Invocation

Thank you for checking in! Thank you for being a friend!

Despite what feels like a thawing, our meditations on the "cold world" from the last newsletter repeat in my mind. Blame it on the blizzards that racked the Northeast, or the continued, shameful brutality against our country's most vulnerable people, or my recent reading of The Left Hand of Darkness set in a planet named Winter. Punxsutawney Phil told us what it was, and now it is.

One of my first appreciations of antithesis as a literary device was around '97-98, when I heard Common rap, "It's a cold world, and [people] need summer." It's not a wildly clever lyric, sure. But I imagine young Eric brought his hands to his head and ran out the room open-mouthed, then slid back in on his knees and pounded the carpet with a fist to enunciate each word, "That's. Called. Motherfucking. Bars!" You could say it left an impression.

I kept a fondness for similar lines throughout the years. Steinbeck wrote, "What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness," and I took those words to heart. Redman spit, "It's a cold world, better pack your own heat," and I nodded my head as if his advice applied to my circumstances.

And in An Affair to Remember?? When Deborah Kerr lamented to a sighing Cary Grant, "Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories. We've already missed the spring"??? That's. Called. Motherfucking. Bars.

I know these messages to you come with an abundance, some would complain a glut, of rap quotations. It's just I feel called to share more powerful arrangements of text than what I can produce on my own, and these are the verses I have at my disposal. Young Eric did not have an ear for poetry, for Mary Oliver or Audre Lorde, but he could appreciate hip-hop in those determinative years. So my memory tends to pull from rhymes Yasiin Bey or Pac penned decades ago.

But since we mentioned the GOAT, let us take in Mary Oliver's "Cold Poem":

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

Are her words that much more different than Redman's line? Whether an Ohio poet or a Jersey lyricist, do we not all face seasons of cruelty and honesty, of immeasurable cold? Seasons when we'll turn to anything -- a warm memory, the reassurance of a weapon in reach, the promise of a needed summer -- as a source of comfort to make it through another day, to survive until spring.

A few dope things that kept me warm this winter:

1. Joel's maroon wool cap with a tan suede brim in Northern Exposure - I wouldn't consider Joel Fleischman a fashionable or aspirational figure, a throwback character to include in modern menswear mood boards alongside George Costanza. And to be honest, I try to not cover my head too much out of deep respect for my barber's work crafting what many agree is an immaculate fade.

Nevertheless, when Alexis and I marathoned Northern Exposure, I clocked Joel's hat as an ideal chapeau for colder months. The degree of difficulty in identifying and acquiring an unbranded hat someone sometimes wore in a TV show aired ~35 years ago (I believe he mixed it up between a Timberland cap and a near-identical J. Crew version depending on the episode) was remarkable. So here I am remarking on it.

2. De Bonne Facture's overcoat - I will refrain from linking this outerwear because its price will only distract, in the way the thickness of a book can draw discussions away from its content. I love an oversized, belted garment, and I coveted this one long enough to justify the expenditure. Just know I copped it on final sale with a wild amount of consignment credit, like a child cashing in twisted spools of red tickets from a day's worth of skee-ball games. The coat, its navy houndstooth wool handwoven in the Scottish Isles, strikes a dramatic silhouette in Aldi's aisles while I grab a box of flax-enriched oatmeal. I do the most, as is my wont.

3. Cavalier cedar hope chest - I have collected so many wool sweaters in my quest to stay knitted up, so the next natural acquisition was a cedar chest from Facebook Marketplace to house this accumulation. The gentleman who sold it to me said his departed mother received the chest as a wedding present. Rummaging through the box each January and February morning to find a forgotten piece to wear, to brave this cold world in, was a gift for me, too. I still find stray hairs from Hemingway, our dearest companion and beloved cat who passed last July, tangled in the fibers of these sweaters. It fills me with love to know he's still close.

♫ It's almost the end of the show ♫

Deborah Kerr got in her bag for this scene with the eye-work, every glance, subtle brow, and faraway gaze a yearning, a regret. Leo McCarey directed An Affair to Remember and the original Love Affair film based on the same story he worked on with Mildred Cram twenty years prior. This scene plays out in both renditions, though the coats are less voluminous and the entire exchange rewritten in the remake. McCarey often rewrote scenes just before shooting, and none of these words even appeared in the final script.

"Every night, I stayed awake trying to improve the film," McCarey told Cahiers du Cinéma in a 1965 interview. "I wrote nearly a third with new dialogue. And I shall always remember the time I met Deborah Kerr in Madrid and she said to me, 'Do you remember the dialogue in the scene on the bridge: Winter must be very cold for those who have no memories to keep them warm, and we have already missed spring... do you remember that, Leo?' I answered her, 'Of course, I stayed up a whole night writing that…' I wanted, incessantly, to surpass the McCarey of twenty years before."

The joke in my head is that critics at the time proclaimed something like, "Now McCarey's Love Affair was brilliant work, but this... This! This is An Affair to Remember!"

6 / Invocation

Credits: The title comes from the Common song I quoted, "Invocation," off the Chicago rapper's album One Day It'll All Make Sense. In my youth, I repeated its opening line and decided, "Yes, that's exactly who I want to be, how I want to approach life." I wanted to become someone who moved about this world "envisioning the hereafter, listening to Steve Wonder."

I took the screenshot of Irene Dunn waiting on the ship deck for Charles Boyer from Love Affair, which you can watch on Youtube or the Criterion Collection release. Look at that coat! I found the GIF from An Affair To Remember on this Pale Writer blog, but I suspect in originally appeared on Tumblr, likely in this now-image-stripped @mdsrk post.