Cigarettes and similes

Love is like a cigarette. You know you held my heart aglow between your fingertips. And just like a cigarette, I never knew the thrill of life until I touched your lips. Then just like a cigarette, love seemed to fade away and leave behind ashes of regret. Then with a flip of your fingertip, it was easy for you to forget. Oh, love is like a cigarette.

"Love Is Like a Cigarette," Richard Jerome and Walter Kent, 1936 (transcribed from the 1936 Duke Ellington recording, with singer Ivie Anderson)

Seventeen years ago today, I smoked my last cigarette.

Related posts
Cigarettes and similes (David Sedaris on Kools)
No smoking
Thank you for not smoking

Proust: "People never cease to change"

People never cease to change position in relation to ourselves. In the world's imperceptible but everlasting march, we think of them as motionless, in a moment of vision, too brief for us to perceive the motion that is bearing them along. But we need only choose from our memory two pictures of them taken at different times, yet sufficiently close together for them not to have changed in themselves, perceptibly at least, and the difference between the two pictures measures the displacement they have effected relative to ourselves.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 409

Reality trumps satire

During the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, a Texas parent filed a "Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials" seeking the removal of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 from a high school's curriculum:

"It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451. "The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class."

He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain.

Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which the reading of books is prohibited and books themselves are burned.

Parent criticizes book Fahrenheit 451 (The Courier, via Boing Boing)

Related posts
Reality trumps academic satire
Reality trumps The Onion

A night at the opera

This past weekend I had the wonderful experience of attending a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at Indiana University. My experience of opera is rather slight, my musical interests having been almost entirely elsewhere, so I went to the opera as one might travel to another country, with unguarded curiosity as to what it's like over there. It was delightful over there. Tito Capobianco's direction added some smart bits of stage business as the story moved from sexual comedy to the darkly supernatural close. The orchestra, conducted by David Effron, had a beautiful sound, particularly the strings. And the singers ranged from very good to excellent. The three performances that most impressed me: Austin Kness' Don Giovanni, a cocky narcissist sans qualms; Alan Dunbar's Leporello, a servant living through his master's conquests; and Siân Davies' Donna Anna, one of the Furies who pursue DG for his wrongdoing.

If you're lucky enough to live near a university with a music program, try a student opera. You too might like it over there.

(Thanks, Martha and Gary!)

Don Giovanni, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Words from Robert Fitzgerald

Why care about an old work in a dead language that no one reads, or at least no one of those who, glancing at their Rolex watches, guide us into the future? Well, I love the future myself and expect everything of it: better artists than Homer, better works of art than The Odyssey. The prospect of looking back at our planet from the moon seems to me to promise a marvelous enlargement of our views.¹ But let us hold fast to what is good, hoping that if we do anything any good those who come after us will pay us the same compliment. If the world was given to us to explore and master, here is a tale, a play, a song about that endeavor long ago, by no means neglecting self-mastery, which in a sense is the whole point. Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts -- cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace -- these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of hearing a story in words has quite gone out. Even movies and TV make use of words. The Odyssey at all events was made for your pleasure, in Homer’s words and in mine.

¹ This enlargement has now occurred, making everyone realize with a new pang not only the beauty of our blue planet but, by contrast with lunar and extra-lunar desolations, its bounty and fantasy of life.

That's the final paragraph of Robert Fitzgerald’s 1962 postscript to his translation of The Odyssey. The footnote is from 1969.

I wish Fitzgerald had written "the versatile brave man and woman," as Penelope too is both versatile and brave (as Fitzgerald of course knew). Replace the Rolex watches with Blackberries, substitute "the Internet" for "movies and TV," and Fitzgerald’s words seem as timely now as when he wrote them. This paragraph is for me a good explanation of why one might value and learn from ancient works of the imagination.

Deep purple

Purple blankets, purple cloaks: A student asked a good question. Why, in the Odyssey, is it always purple? The word in Homer's Greek is πορφύρεος, porphureos. Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins explain:

Vegetable dyes were common, but the highly prized and expensive purple dye came from two species of sea snail (purpura and murex brandaris), which were native to the coasts of Syria and Phoenicia. (Handbook to Life in Ancient Greece, Oxford UP, 1997)

Purple was the color of majesty. Thus the expression "born to the purple" and the phrase "purple mountain majesties" in "America the Beautiful" (which I've heard, since grade school, as "purple mountains' majesty"). And it's fitting that purple should be the favorite color of the artist once again known as Prince.

Jackass

Greg Boardman, owner of the Lorraine Theatre in Hoopeston, Illinois, shut down for two weeks rather than show Jackass 2:

"The movies are so bad and I don't need the money . . . I just didn't think I should use my high-quality facilities to show people vomiting on screen," said Boardman, whose theaters boast a high-tech, eight-channel digital sound system. . . .

"There are enough theaters carrying movies like Jackass that if people want to see them they can . . . The problem now is that there are too few good movies, movies that transplant you to another place," Boardman said in a telephone interview.

Greg Boardman also owns Boardman's Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois, the best place to see a movie (or film) that I know.

Links
U.S. theater owner shuts down rather than screening "drivel" (International Herald Tribune)
Boardman's Art Theatre
Lorraine Theatre

Telegram

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