Signs of Life - 1st Edition/1st Printing

by Alfred Appel

Thee popular culture of America from the late 30's through five radically different decades, projected through a surprising collage of photographs and words.

Genres: Nonfiction

201 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Alfred Appel Jr. was an American professor, author and journal editor noted for his investigations into the works of Vladimir Nabokov, modern art, and jazz modernism. He edited The Annotated Lolita, an edition of Nabokov's Lolita. He also authored four other books about Nabokov, literature and music.

As a student at Cornell University, Appel took a course from Nabokov. His education was interrupted by a stint in the Army, after which he completed his undergraduate education and PhD in English Literature at Columbia University in 1963.

After teaching at Columbia for a few years, he joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he taught until his retirement in 2000. He died of heart failure. Appel was married until his death to Nina Appel, dean of Loyola University Chicago's law school from 1983 to 2004. They had two children, Karen Oshman and television writer and producer Richard Appel.

Reviews

[Jess Bae]

I picked this up at an antiquarian book sale for $1. The pictures are great. The prose reminded me of my Nabokovian ex-boyfriend. I was not surprised to see it was penned by a Nabokovian.

[Petergiaquinta]

I read this a long, long time ago, back at Northwestern taking Film and Lit from Professor Appel, who had us all buy the book and then never once referred to it in class, as far as I can recall today, nearly forty years later. And of course he did because that's the way that kind of thing used to work back then and probably still does today, although the profit margin for professors must be a lot less if all you're doing is downloading a text to a device.

But I don't resent Appel for it. His film class was crucial in my development as a student, a teacher, and a human being, and I can distinctly remember how I evolved in that course from a dumbass who liked going to the movies to an informed viewer of film who discovered thanks to Appel that a movie can be analyzed and interpreted like any other creative medium. And you'd think I would have known that by time I went to college, but I didn't.

Maybe it was Appel discussing the establishing shot at the beginning of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt that helped me turn that corner. I don't specifically remember the details now, but I do still recall him talking about the smoke from the train in the overhead industrial scene at the beginning setting us up for the moral rot and pollution at the core of this film. And that simple observation opened the door to a lot of other epiphanies. I just remember watching a ton of great films for the class, and listening closely to him as he read his scripts for his lectures at the lectern in Tech Auditorium. Like Nabokov (and Appel is a former student of the man and maybe still his foremost scholar), Appel would write out each lecture and leave nothing to chance, a style of teaching I respected him for but entirely eschewed in my own life. And I recall writing one of my favorite papers of my undergrad experience for his course comparing a scene near the end of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to its parallel scene in Apocalypse Now.

I think I got an A from Appel in that class. I sure hope so, because it had a profound impact on my young life. And the book is pretty good, too, lots of images of Walker Evans photographs and movie stills and billboards and whatnot, along with Appel's sniffy commentary. It's all lost to me now, but I still have the book in a box down in the basement and maybe one day I'll take it out and read it again. Sure, it's prolly not really a five-star book, but I'm writing this review today to help balance out the only other one on GoodReads, a short two-star toss-off, which is pretty darn funny if you take a look at it.