Hearing or reading “Yarmouth”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Pretty Proustian.

Yarmouth : David :: Combray : Marcel.

Em’ly : David :: Gilberte : Marcel.

Related reading
All OCA Dickens posts (Pinboard)

[“It seems that Proust did not discover Dickens before, possibly, the age of 35, when his friend René Peter lent him a copy of David Copperfield ”: Christine Huguet, “Dickens in France: Major Writers,” in The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, ed. Michael Hollington (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Though Proust’s initial response was negative, his friend never got the book back. More here.]

Columns

[At a red light, somewhere outside Boston, a few weeks ago.]

Click for a larger view. Look closely.

Canned Heat and Dante

In the Hand of Dante (dir. Julian Schnabel, 2025) is making me want to cry zio . Zio!  But this movie is now being partly redeemed by the non-diegetic arrival of Canned Heat’s “Poor Moon.” Must keep watching. (Must?)

A related post
“Poor Moon”

Nothing to show

Michael Steele, former RNC chair, on NSNOW just now:

“You’ve got nothing to show for the last two years except a reflecting pool full of algae, and an Arc de Trump being proposed, and Kennedy Center names, and all — it's just not public policy. You win elections on how you address the pain of the people. You win elections on what you offer to solve their problems.”

“He saw David”

Adam Krug, philosopher, thinks of his eight-year-old son David.

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947).

In a 1964 introduction to the novel, Nabokov writes that “it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read.”

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

A sad retronym

It occurred to me yesterday that “the open Internet” is a retronym for what once was “the Internet.”

W2 on the screen

[From More Than a Secretary (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1936). Click for a larger view.]

Maizie West (Dorothea Kent) to Carol Baldwin (Jean Arthur): “Miss Baldwin, are there two v s in liver ?”

That’s a Webster’s New International Dictionary , second edition, often called the W2. You can see one in color, marbled edges and all, here.

Other Merriam-Webster sightings
A Webster’s Collegiate used as a weapon : Timmy and Lassie and an W2

“Before paper and scissors”

From The Far Side : “Before paper and scissors.”

Pleasure-domes

A clue in the Newsday Saturday Stumper — “Less-than-stately pleasure dome” — gave me a new way to think about Citizen Kane . The answer, SNOWGLOBE, made me realize that Charles Foster Kane’s snow globe is something of a pleasure-dome within a pleasure-dome, one enclosed world within another, a Xanadu within a Xanadu. And just as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s full vision of Xanadu is beyond recovery, so too is the world represented by Kane’s snow globe.

If I were a certain kind of person, and I guess I am, I might go further and suggest that the pleasure-dome of Kane’s snow globe is a substitute for what might be called the primal pleasure-dome: not the maternal breast (which doesn’t enclose) but the all-providing world of the amniotic sac. When the water breaks, that world is lost. No wonder Kane’s snow globe breaks when it falls to the floor of his bedroom.

I couldn’t leave this idea sitting in a comment, could I?

[Coleridge’s prose introduction to “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream,” an almost certainly apocryphal account of the poem’s composition, may be found here. It should accompany any printing of the poem. And in case anyone needs to see, the snow globe appears at two other points in Citizen Kane .]

Domestic comedy

[Two pairs of reading glasses, mine, were on the sofa. Elaine noticed.]

“You know what those are? Twin frames.”

[Context: we binged the twin Amazon and Netflix series, Escaping Twin Flames and Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe. Multi-level-marketing madness.]