Madeleine

From Merrian-Webster's Word of the Day:

madeleine \MAD-uh-lun\ noun
1 : a small rich shell-shaped cake
*2 : one that evokes a memory

Example sentence:
The crack of the bat and the sight of his son running the bases were madeleines for Tom, calling up memories of the great times he had playing the game in his youth.

Did you know?
The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past [À la recherche du temps perdu]. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word "madeleine" itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

The madeleine passage in Proust begins

For many years, already, everything about Combray that was not the theater and drama of my bedtime had ceased to exist for me, when one day in winter, as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 45

What was happening? You'll just have to read Swann's Way.

The Way the Cookie Crumbles, Edmund Levin reverse-engineers Proust's madeleine (from Slate)

Related posts
Other Proust posts, via Pinboard

"[L]ike oxygen"

Izzat Ghafouri Baban is a trumpeter in the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra:

"I can't practice in my house because I'm surrounded by husseiniyas," Mr. Baban, 41, said, referring to Shiite mosques that are named after the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. "Imagine if somebody hears there's a musician in my home. They'd think I'm against religion."

He squeezes in practice by arriving at the rehearsal hall two hours before his colleagues.

"The only thing that keeps us happy is when we see each other," said Mr. Baban, a stumpy man with gray hair and a grin as wide as a tuba's bell. "It's the happiest moment in our lives."

Ali Nasser is a trombonist:

Mr. Nasser, perhaps even more than others, has proved his dedication to music. A baker in the southern city of Nasiriya, he drives or takes a taxi to rehearsals. That is a four- to six-hour drive each way, and soaring gasoline prices mean the trip sucks up half of his income. Even worse, the road runs through the "Triangle of Death," an area infested with insurgents, militiamen and criminal gangs. Gunmen once shot dead passengers in a taxi just a few cars ahead of him.

"My wife says: 'Please don't go. Life is very bad in Baghdad. There's a lot of death in Baghdad,'" he said. "She tries to prevent me from coming, but I have to come. We can't survive without music. It's like oxygen.”

From a New York Times article on the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra

Link: And the Orchestra Plays On, Echoing Iraq's Stuggles

Post-it Note post

For students: twenty uses for a Post-it Note

1. Mark your place in a book. It seems so obvious, yet relatively few students seem to do it. When your professor picks up with the poem or short story or chapter of the day, you'll be on the same page.

2. Mark the beginning and ending points for a reading assignment: immediate feedback on your progress.

3. Mark selected readings in an anthology.

4. Mark the notes or glossary at the back of a book for easy repeat access.

5. Mark passages in a library book.

6. Keep several Post-its on the inside cover of a datebook, planner, or notebook: now you're prepared to leave a note anywhere.

7. When you sit down to work, make a small-scale to-do list on a Post-it and stick it to your desktop.

8. Leave a Post-it on your alarm clock or inside doorknob as a reminder.

9. Avoid fines and late fees: put Post-its with due dates on library books and DVD rentals.

10. When there's no Scotch tape, cut the sticky edge from a Post-it to use as fake tape.

11. Use the sticky edge as a temporary label for a folder.

12. Fold the sticky edge into a hinge to hold a piece of paper or a postcard on a wall.

13. Wrap the sticky edge around a cable to identify it.

14. Use the sticky edge to clean between the keys of your computer keyboard.

15. Jot down less familiar keyboard shortcuts on a Post-it to keep by your computer.

16. Which way does the envelope go when you feed it into the printer? Draw a diagram on a Post-it and stick it on your printer.

17. If you drive an older car that doesn’t remind you that you've left your headlights on, use a Post-it as a reminder. When you put your lights on in the daytime, stick a Post-it note on the driver's side window (in a spot where it won't impede your vision. When you leave your car, you'll see the note and remember why it's there.

18. Keep a Post-it on the refrigerator and jot down what you need from the supermarket.

19. When you go to the supermarket, remove the Post-it from the fridge and stick it on your wallet. At the store, stick the note to the handle of your cart and have both hands free for shopping. Toss the note when you leave the store.

20. Splurge! Use a whole pad of Post-its to make a flip book. (Thanks to my son Ben for this last tip.)

[The photograph above is of my Penguin paperback of Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time.]

Teaching, sitting, standing

For a long time I fell into the habit when teaching of sitting on the edge of the "teacher's desk" at the front of the classroom. Last semester I decided to make a change -- to honor, in a modest way, the memory of the best teacher I ever had. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was an M.A. student and graduate assistant, Jim Doyle, whom I've written about elsewhere on this blog, asked if I'd like to teach one of his classes (on "Lycidas"). I sat behind a very large and very wooden desk with Douglas Bush's edition of Milton and a cup of coffee and somehow talked about the poem. "It was very good," Jim said afterwards, but he advised me to stand: "Some people do better sitting; some people do better standing. You would do better standing." I can still hear these words as very likely exact. In "Spring" 2006 (that is, January 2006), I started standing while teaching. With the exception of a small seminar, during which I almost always sat, I've been standing while teaching ever since.

Thinking about Jim Doyle's words makes me recall how little useful guidance I received when I began teaching. The only institutional effort to address the graduate assistant's role as instructor came in the form of a workshop about writing instruction that devolved into an arch discussion among professors of what color ink to use when "marking" (that oddly primitive word) papers. One professor's suggestion was to switch colors from paper to paper, to keep students guessing -- a pretty clear indication of how seriously he took this whole business of thinking about how to teach writing. With no clear model of what I was supposed to be doing, I resolved simply to give my students their money's worth and mark their essays as fully as possible. I would mark everything, and thereby really help them with their writing. I cringe when I think of it. My students recognized, at least, my dedication.

Back in the day, I was quite grateful for Jim's plain, pragmatic advice. I'm not sure when I moved away from it and began sitting on desks. That casual-looking posture is less comfortable than it might appear -- getting down to write words on the blackboard (which is still black, not green or white) or reaching across the desk for a supplementary book can be slightly ungainly, the desktop being almost as great an impediment to easy movement as the stools upon which folksingers once perched.

So I'm standing again, with notes (which I only occasionally use) on a lectern and a book in hand, sometimes behind the lectern, sometimes moving around the front of the room. It occurs to me that instead of falling into a habit, I've made my posture when teaching intentional. Standing when I'm teaching makes me think of Jim Doyle -- not a bad idea for anyone who teaches.

Jedi Concentrate

A nice aid to concentration: Dana Hanna's Jedi Concentrate, a freeware Windows application that dims everything but the currently active window (hit Ctrl-/, F12, or Win-J). As its creator explains, "The purpose is to dim everything on all of your monitors when you need to get to work." I've been looking for a program along these lines for several months and am very happy to find it. Jedi Concentrate is one result of Hanna's An App A Day project -- writing one application a day for thirty days.

This open-source application has already been improved by another programmer, Joe Chrzanowski, who added -- within a day of the program's release -- options for screen opacity and fade speed. Keep that in mind when Microsoft warns that open-source software is an unreliable, unworkable model.

I found Jedi Concentrate via Lifehacker, always a great source for useful stuff.

[2020: This app disappeared some time ago.]

Myth and mixed metaphors

In this morning's paper:

Wildcats chip away at Trojans' Achilles heel

There are so many ways in which this high-school football headline goes wrong. Wildcats don't use chisels. (Gnaw, though gruesome, would be an apt metaphor.) The body part in question is the Achilles' heel. And there's an unintentional (I think it's unintentional, given the rest of headline) comedy in the idea of the Trojans, their city ultimately destroyed by Achilles' fellow Achaeans, having an Achilles' heel.

This headline, as we would say in the heartland, "needs revised."

Avast

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day, now featuring words related to pirates:

avast (uh-VAST) interjection

Stop (used as a command to stop or desist).

[From Dutch hou vast (hold fast), from houd vast.]

"The best part, though, is the music. It dips and swells in the game right along with the action. Avast, there's treasure here!"

Vance Jordan and Melissa L. Jones, "Madden NFL Steps Up the Play," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Aug 27, 2006.

The word avast furnishes the name of avast!, an excellent anti-virus program.

Link: A.Word.A.Day

Link: avast! Home Edition, free for home and non-commercial use

Lotusland

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:

lotusland \LOH-tus-land\ noun

*1 : a place inducing contentment especially through offering an idyllic living situation
2 : a state or an ideal marked by contentment often achieved through self-indulgence

Example sentence:
With its white sands, stunningly blue water, and beautiful sunsets, the island is a lotusland for beach lovers.

Did you know?
In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men discover a magical land of lotus-eaters. Some of the sailors eat the delicious "lotus" and forget about their homeland, pleading to stay forever in this "lotusland." (It is likely that the lotus in question was the fruit of a real plant of the buckthorn family, perhaps the jujube, whose sweet juice is used in candy making and which has given its name to a popular fruity candy.) The label "lotusland" is now applied to any place resembling such an ideal of perfection, but it also carries connotations of indolence and self-indulgence, possibly derived from the way the sailors refused to work once they reached the original lotusland. The dreamy unreality of a lotusland is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Except if you'd already eaten the lotus.

Link: Merriam Webster's Word of the Day

Yellow pages

From an essay by Suzanne Snider on the history of the legal pad:

Explaining the origins of the yellow legal pad is as difficult as explaining consumers' attraction to it. But the attraction does seem to be there: The yellow-to-white sales ratio can be as high as 2 to 1, as it is at University Stationery in New York City, near New York University and The New School University.

Link: Old Yeller: The illustrious history of the yellow legal pad (via Armand Frasco's Notebookism)

Breakfast with Pandora

Last week I discovered David Frauenfelder's blog Breakfast with Pandora ("For a Diet Rich in Myth and Logos," says the subtitle). One post that I found particularly engaging comments on a passage from Iliad 1 as translated by Stanley Lombardo and Robert Fagles. Achilles is promising Agamemnon generous compensation if he will return the captive woman Chryseis (whose father is a priest of Apollo and has asked that god to send a plague upon the Achaean forces). Here is the passage in Lombardo's translation:

All right, you give the girl back to the god. The army
Will repay you three and four times over -- when and if
Zeus allows us to rip Troy down to its foundations.

And here's Frauenfelder's comment:

Robert Fagles' translation was trumpeted when it came out in the early nineties, but it looks like a tricycle next to Lombardo's Ferrari.

Fagles cannot resist retaining just a little of that formal diction that makes readers go cold. . . :

      So return the girl to the god, at least for now.
      We Achaeans will pay you back, three, four times
            over,
      if Zeus will grant us the gift, somehow, someday,
      to raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground.

By boiling down "raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground" to "rip Troy down to its foundations," Lombardo saves only one word, but over the course of the poem these add up. Plus, who wants to read "raze" when "rip" will do just as well or better? And why would you put "massive ramparts" unless you wanted someone to read the translation in a Monty Pythonesque voice ("HUGE tracts o' land")?

I'm biased, yes. Maybe there are Fagles enthusiasts out there. I came from Richmond Lattimore's translation, which is very close to the Greek, but which, as my mentor used to say, always sounds better after you've gotten through the better part of a pitcher of beer.

These paragraphs are a great example of how to characterize tone in a persuasive way: the clichéd loftiness of "massive ramparts" becomes instantly clear.

I'd add that "somehow, someday" is a very strange (intentional? unintentional?) echo of "Somewhere" from West Side Story.

Link: Comments on Iliad Book One (from Breakfast with Pandora)