Yellow Triangles

The city of Marseille is making its homeless wear yellow triangles–one half of the Nazi-era Star of David–with health information. I’m guessing none of the badges are labeled “bonne santé.”

Re-labeling of a different order occurs further to the north:

French city of #Grenoble will pull its advertising panels & replace them with trees: http://t.co/6wdUrIxt15 #phealth pic.twitter.com/QXE3ZTsAjW

— urbandata (@urbandata) December 5, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.”

—A nervy twelve-year-old girl writing in 1846. Joan Didion cited it as an example of self-respect, which leads one to put fears aside and do what needs to be done. Writing in 1961, Didion observed, “people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.”

Today is Didion’s 80th birthday.

Talk about a vanished world:

Jim Jarmusch and Joe Strummer pic.twitter.com/m2hdUzn3Z7

— Le Cinéma (@lecinema_) December 4, 2014

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“Our Secret Life in the Movies” has an extraordinary structure: Co-authors Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree have assembled a list of 39 obscure art-house films as the starting point for a collection of brief, jagged improvisations on their respective youths. The result is a double-barreled bildungsroman of gothic, middle-American squalor and ruin.

More here. And for more on the theme of cinematic novels, visit Electric Lit.