There is no fashionable party, if one takes a cross-section of it at sufficient depth, that is not like those parties to which doctors invite their patients; the patients talk very sensibly, display excellent manners, and would give no sign of being mad if they did not whisper in your ear as an old gentleman passes, "Do you see him? That's Joan of Arc."Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 223
Anthony Tommasini remembers:
Older record collectors have memories of wonderful, quirky independent stores run by managers who were passionate, if opinionated, about the music they sold. I remember when Pamela Dellal, a good mezzo-soprano based in Boston, worked as a saleswoman at the Harvard Coop in Cambridge in the early 1980’s. I used to call her the czarina of classical music at the Coop because she was so informed, efficient and forceful in her recommendations.Requiem for a Store’s Dying Classical Department (New York Times, registration required)
For many years Tower Records at Lincoln Center has been the closest New Yorkers have had to those small shops of earlier times. This is a paradox, I know, since the company, which opened its first store in 1960 in Sacramento, grew into a bullying retail chain that pushed out independents. Still, because of its location, Tower Records at Lincoln Center was a mingling place for classical aficionados. There, music students, opera buffs, contemporary-music devotees, everyday concertgoers and, now and then, well-known artists would bump into one another and talk shop.
Q. How did you work on the translations?Robert Fitzgerald, "The Art of Translation," interview with Edwin Frank and Andrew McCord, Paris Review (Winter 1984). Reprinted in The Third Kind of Knowledge: Memoirs and Selected Writings, ed. Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald (New York: New Directions, 1993).
A. I had this whole routine worked out while doing the Homer. I wrote out every line of Greek in my own hand, book by book, a big notebook for each book. One line to two blank lines. As I went through the Greek and copied it out in my own hand, I would face the difficulties -- any crux that turned up, questions of interpretation -- and try to work them out. I accumulated editions with notes and so on as I went along. So before I was through, I had acquired some of the scholarship that was relevant to my problems. But always, in the end, it was simply the Greek facing me, in my own hand, in my own notebook.
Here's a link to a recipe for something that tastes much better than smoked chicken water. Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the host of The Post Punk Kitchen and the author of Vegan with a Vengeance. Her recipes rule.
My wife Elaine wants me to mention that fenugreek (which the recipe calls for) might be most easily found in an Indian grocery store. The word fenugreek derives from the Latin fenum Graecum, "Greek hay."
Ethiopian Spicy Tomato Lentil Stew, from The Post Punk Kitchen
Or perhaps anyone's nightmare. I was standing in the supermarket, reading the ingredient list on a carton of Silk soymilk:
INGREDIENTS: SMOKED CHICKEN WATER,and that's as far as I got. Silk really is the soymilk of my dreams -- and nightmares.
I've been thinking about Homeric blindness today -- not the legendary blindness of the perhaps non-existent poet nor the literal blindness of the Cyclops Polyphemus but the figurative blindness of Homer's egomaniacs.
Odysseus is one such egomaniac. When he makes his escape from Polyphemus in Odyssey 9, he shouts back to the Cyclops to let him know just who has blinded him and stolen his animals:
"Cyclops, if anyone, any mortal man,That's a wonderful moment for thinking about Odyssean strength and weakness: having made his tricky escape from the Cyclops' cave, which involved the anonymity of being "Noman," Odysseus can't resist the desire to tie his name and line to his deeds. His desire to be known blinds him to the practical necessity to get away; he's like a pickpocket who stops to announce that he's lifted your wallet.
Asks how you got your eye put out,
Tell him that Odysseus the marauder did it,
Son of Laertes, whose home is on Ithaca."
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7. Here's a link worth clicking on before using the program:
http://www.ie7.com
Jokes aside, Firefox is a far better browser.
Firefox 1.5, free download
I sometimes amuse myself by pondering the odd names attached to the day's spam mails. (I'm easily amused.) I've even made imaginary lives for some of these "people." But today I received a spam mail from a "writer" for whom I can imagine no real-world existence. I find it easy though to imagine him as a character on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Yes, his name is Rickey Antipasto.
I can hear the voice of William Conrad (the Rocky and Bullwinkle announcer) so clearly: "But for Rickey Antipasto and our friends, time was running out!"
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (Wikipedia)
Related posts
The folks who live in the mail
The poetry of spam
The appearance of any work by J. Harris Miller is a major event in literary and cultural studies.Blurb from the back cover of Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James, by J. Hillis Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005)
For my students (or anyone reading Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God), here are some links concerning the hurricane of 1928. One excerpt, from "The Florida Flood":
In 1928, thousands stayed in the interior. People asked many times, "Why didn’t they flee?" Now people are asking the same questions about New Orleans. The answer in both cases is the same. For many people, fleeing just wasn’t an option.The Florida Flood (History News Network)
As in Katrina, many of the victims were poor -– in this case, poor migrant workers. While Katrina’s targets had the option of an Interstate highway system, those along Lake Okeechobee had the option of following a winding 2-lane road north or taking the road to the coast – the last place anyone would want to go with a hurricane bearing down. And the vast majority didn’t have access to a car, much less own one.
