Chicken strips and fries

Having provided the financial backing for countless chicken-strip plates when my daughter and son were younger, I had to smile at this article about efforts to bring greater sophistication to children's menus:

Perhaps no chef has taken the mission more to heart than Tony Miller of Latitude 41, the restaurant of the Renaissance Columbus in Ohio. (Renaissance, like Ritz-Carlton, falls under the Marriott International corporate umbrella.) "We do not have a chicken finger in this restaurant," Mr. Miller said. The father of a 4-year-old girl, he constructed his "Fun Menu" to appeal to children without pandering to them.

"It features zero fried foods on it," he said. "We do grilled organic chicken teriyaki, a seared fillet of whatever fish is in season, and a four-once fillet of natural beef with smashed potatoes. I have not received a single negative reaction from adults or kids. Not one. The kids say 'Man, that's the best steak I’ve ever eaten!'"

Don’t Point That Menu at My Child, Please (New York Times)

Ideology v. values

[S]ometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have trouble seeing the obvious. Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spend their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of the state.

Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk (a version of the bill would later pass). But my fellow legislator's speech helps underscore one of the differences between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 59

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts
Barack Obama on race

Proust: imagination and desire

Today's Proust sentence concerns the workings of imagination and desire. Swann, in love, has been shifting between two ideas of Odette: Odette as a "perfidious woman," manipulative and faithless, and "the other Odette," gentle, gracious, "shining softly":

Now that, after this oscillation, Odette had naturally returned to the place from which Swann's jealousy had for a time removed her, to the angle from which he found her charming, he pictured her as full of tenderness, with a look of consent, and so pretty thus that he could not help offering her his lips as if she had been there and he had been able to kiss her; and he felt as strong a gratitude toward her for this enchanting, kindly glance as if she had really given it to him, as if it were not merely his imagination that had just portrayed it in order to satisfy his desire.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 314

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Swann’s jealousy

What is Odette doing when she is not with M. Swann? What is she doing at, say, five o’clock? Swann wonders. And wonders:

His jealousy, like an octopus that casts a first, then a second, then a third mooring, attached itself solidly first to that time, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to yet another.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 294

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Remembering my friend Aldo

On March 14, 1981, my friend Aldo Carrasco wrote:

I for one keep all my friends’ letters for a time; one usually knows when the time comes to throw them away, if ever of course. I always wait because I have never regretted throwing anything out when it was done at the right time, so I trust my instincts there where I do usually nowhere else. That’s a real frightening thought — my letters roaming Boston (et, le monde!) for all eyes to see. I have a responsibility now to all those voyeurs out there; I just can’t give them anything to read. . . .

Last year I made a portrait of sorts of Aldo through the letters I have from him. I think he’d be pleased:

Letters from Aldo

Memorial Day 2007

A professor at Mme. Verdurin’s

A professor from the Sorbonne, Brichot is a visitor among the “faithful” who gather at Mme. Verdurin’s:

At Mme. Verdurin’s, he made a point of seeking his illustrations in whatever was most up-to-date when he spoke of philosophy and history, principally because he thought such subjects were only a preparation for real life and he imagined he would find the little clan putting into practice what he had known before now only from books, and then perhaps also because, having had instilled in him in the past, and having preserved without knowing it, a respect for certain subjects, he believed he was casting off his academic tendencies by taking liberties with them which, on the contrary, appeared such to him only because he had remained an academic.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 261

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Vegan cupcakes

They were chocolate with vanilla frosting. Now they’re gone. My daughter made them, following a recipe in Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero's book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Thanks, Rachel!

An awful lot of people reading Proust

At Reading Proust in Foxborough, "Odette" is reading Proust and writing about Proust and collecting links to other people who are reading Proust and writing about Proust and collecting links to other people who are . . . . Here are links to three of her posts:

Memorial Day
Is there enough time to search for lost time?
The Whole World Is Blogging Proust

And all in one place:

All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[With apologies to Bob Hilliard and Richard Miles' "The Coffee Song" ("They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil").]

Odette and Zipporah

[Above, Zipporah, a detail from Sandro Botticelli, Scenes from the Life of Moses (1481-82)]

M. Swann is in the habit of seeing resemblances between people whom he knows and faces in paintings, a habit that allows him to associate the lovely Odette with the words "Florentine painting," making her thus more interesting to him:

Standing next to him, allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks, bending one leg somewhat in the position of a dancer so that without getting tired she could lean over the engraving, which she looked at, inclining her head, with those large eyes of hers, so tired and sullen when she was not animated, she struck Swann by her resemblance to the figure of Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 230-31

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