Proust: names and eros

Proust's narrator dwells upon names, of places and of people. Words, for him, are generally representative, giving "little pictures of things," "like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill." But names represent individuals. Thus the thrill of hearing Gilberte Swann speak his first name:

And remembering later what I had felt then, I could distinguish within it the impression that I had been held for a moment in her mouth, I myself, naked, without any of the social terms and conditions that also belonged, either to her other friends, or, when she said my family name, to my parents, and of which her lips -- in the effort she made, rather like her father, to articulate the words she wanted to emphasize -- seemed to strip me, undress me, as one removes the skin from a fruit of which only the pulp can be eaten, while her gaze, adopting the same new degree of intimacy as her words, reached me more directly also, while at the same time showing its awareness of this, its pleasure and even its gratitude, by accompanying itself with a smile.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 420

We never learn the narrator’s first name, though there’s a hint much later: Marcel.

Other Mlle. Swann posts
Introducing Mlle. Swann
Love and hate in Proust

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Gould's Goldberg Variations online

Wow: most of the out-of-print 1981 film of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations can be found online. The Google Video file contains everything but a few minutes of introductory conversation and the Aria da Capo. Move ahead to 5:48 in the YouTube file, and you can pick up with the restatement of the Aria.

The quality of image and sound is not great. But it'll have to do, Until the Real Thing Comes Along.

Aria and Variations 1-30 (Google Video)
Variations 26-30 and Aria da Capo (YouTube)

Proust on love and jealousy

They are digital, not analog:

For what we believe to be our love, our jealousy, is not one single passion, continuous and indivisible. They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, which are ephemeral but by their uninterrupted multitude give the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 385-86

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Sgt. Pepper mono and stereo

While Sgt. Pepper is in the air, it's worth asking: Why haven't the Beatles and their executors given us a mono-stereo CD of the album? The two mixes are markedly different, and many listeners (including me) prefer the mono. A disc with both mixes would be a wonderful and appropriate way to honor the album.

Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys album that inspired Paul McCartney in the Beach Boys-Beatles production duel, has received the mono-stereo treatment. There, to my ears, stereo wins. (Sorry, Mr. Wilson.) Sgt. Pepper -- after forty years! -- is due, I think, the same treatment.

I remember Sgt. Pepper

It was twenty years ago today that it was twenty years ago today that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in the U.K. (it was June 2 here in the States). Sgt. Pepper was my third Beatles album -- I already owned Something New and Help! (the latter of which I still have). I was not yet eleven when Sgt. Pepper was released, and I have a handful of specific memories of the album that I'm recording here.

I remember my dad buying the record for me and bringing it home with him from work.

I remember recognizing Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel on the cover, and Edgar Allan Poe (my then-favorite writer), and probably no one else.

I remember thinking that Dr. David Livingstone was Adolf Hitler. (Strange -- John Lennon did ask that Hitler be included in the cover scene.)

I remember that the doll's WMCA Good Guys sweater confirmed my sense that WMCA was a lot better than WABC.

I remember how tall Paul looked on the back cover. Was that really Paul?

I remember "A splendid time is guaranteed for all" in the bottom-right corner of the back cover. I remember that there was no period after all, even though the word ended a complete sentence. I liked that. This sentence later got me into trouble when I was asked (as an earnest grad student) to design an announcement for a faculty cocktail bash. I typed "A splendid time is guaranteed for all" at the bottom, and people thought I was being sarcastic. They knew more about academic life than I did.

I remember cutting out the cutouts that came with the record. (Yes, where are the snows of yesteryear?)

I remember "A Little Help from My Friends," as the song was mistitled on the back cover.

I remember not being sure whether the words "Billy Shears!" were supposed to be the end of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or the start of "With a Little Help from My Friends."

I remember how interesting Paul's bass-playing sounded on "With a Little Help from My Friends," though I don't think I knew that it was Paul's bass I was hearing.

I remember understanding how sad "She's Leaving Home" was, even though the music picked up when the departing daughter was "meeting a man from the motor trade."

I remember the two moments on Side One that most struck me musically: 1:01-1:03 in "Fixing a Hole" and 1:56-1:58 in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite."

I remember how grown-up and serious "Within You Without You" felt.

I remember sitting on the edge of my parents' bed reading the lyrics of "Good Morning, Good Morning" and imagining that the song was going to be very decorous, something like a waltz, or something Elizabethan. I have no idea what suggested these possibilities to me -- meter? (Good MORNing, good MORNing.)

I remember associating "Good Morning, Good Morning" with 86th Street, a major Brooklyn shopping street, where I once went in the evening with my parents to get a briefcase for school (yes, kids, at least city kids, carried their books in briefcases then).

I remember listening next to the phonograph speaker at the end of "A Day in the Life" -- the famed "40-second bass note," as it was then called. The surface noise became stronger as the music became fainter.

I remember thinking that "A Day in the Life" must have been the greatest song ever. (It's still my favorite Beatles song, if I have to pick only one, even if I'm not ten.)

I remember the two moments on Side Two that most struck me musically: the clarinet harmonizing with Paul's voice in the last chorus of "When I'm Sixty-Four" and 2:26-2:28 in "A Day in the Life."

I remember standing in a department store (Korvette's?) while my parents looked with dismay at the cover of the follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, which I was proposing to buy. "They're all on drugs," my parents always said. That observation was often followed by "You can see it in their eyes." Here though you couldn't, because the Beatles were wearing animal masks. Further proof that my parents were right, right? But I did get the okay to buy Magical Mystery Tour. (Thank you, Mom and Dad.)

My model for this post is Joe Brainard's I Remember, a book with a simple and brilliant premise that by now you understand.



[$2.99 at Sam Goody's, June 1967.]

Thanks to my son Ben for suggesting a much more interesting start than "It was forty years ago today." (The kid's smart.)

Another strike against Sony

As I just discovered, Sony has allowed the DVD Glenn Gould Plays Bach: The Goldberg Variations to go out of print. This film of a 1981 studio performance is a rare chance to see Gould at work -- a picture of absolute dedication and genius. Watching several years ago made me vow to learn to read the bass clef (I did) so as to be able to play simple Bach pieces (I can, at least a few).

Amazon has three copies of the DVD for sale, starting at $138.59.

Sony, give us our Gould back.

Related post
3 strikes against Sony

Proust: the "little phrase" again

More than a year after he first heard it, Swann understands the "little phrase" better:

He knew that even the memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of the music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable scale of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard still almost entirely unknown on which, here and there only, separated by shadows thick and unexplored, a few of the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity which compose it, each as different from the others as one universe from another universe, have been found by a few great artists who do us the service, by awakening in us something corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety, is hidden unbeknowst to us within that great unpenetrated and disheartening darkness of our soul which we take for emptiness and nothingness.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 362-63

The music that gives me the best chance to come close to the response Proust describes is Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. And I'm not alone: I just watched Bruno Monsaingeon's 2005 documentary Glenn Gould Hereafter, in which several people talk about Gould's Bach recordings in these terms.

Related posts
Proust: "one phrase rising"
Swann's little phrase
Classical music for beginners (Start with the Goldberg Variations)
Three records (One is the Goldberg Variations)

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Pragmatism in lawn care

Elaine said:

"That's okay; if it looked perfect, it wouldn't blend in with the rest of our lawn."

My son, having fun

My son Ben and his friend Dan made this film-trailer film earlier this week. Ben is doing voices; Dan is wearing the beard. I especially like the dangerous liquids:

Candice (YouTube)

Proust and the finger-snapping bit

At a social gathering, the Princesse des Laumes listens to a pianist play Liszt. She also watches Mme. de Cambremer, who is both listening and keeping time, "her head transformed into the arm of a metronome." Mme. de Cambremer sways with such force that her jewels become caught in the straps of her bodice, and she must again and again adjust the "black grapes" in her hair. Watching "the pantomime of her music-loving neighbor," the Princesse has much to consider:

She began to wonder if this gesticulation was not perhaps a necessary response to the piece being played, which did not come quite within the scope of the music she had heard up to now, if to refrain was not to give proof of incomprehension with respect to the work and impropriety toward the lady of the house: so that, in order to express both of her contradictory inclinations by a compromise, she first merely straightened up her shoulder straps or put a hand to her blond hair to secure the little balls of diamond-flecked coral or pink enamel which formed her simple and charming coiffure, while at the same time examining her ardent neighbor with cold curiosity, then with her fan she beat time for a moment, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, on the offbeat.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 343-44

The Princesse's effort to feign appreciation reminds me of the instructions in Duke Ellington's "finger-snapping bit," a wonderfully parodic discourse with which Ellington often ended performances. Here's one version of it, from Manchester, England, in 1969:

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. You're very beautiful, very sweet, very gracious, very generous. And this is "Satin Doll." We use it now for the purpose of giving background to this finger-snapping bit. And you are all invited to join the finger-snapping. Crazy. I see I don't have to tell you that one never snaps one's fingers on the beat. It's considered aggressive. Don't push it; just let it fall. And if you would like to be conservatively hip, then at the same time tilt the left earlobe. Establish a state of nonchalance. And if you would like to be respectably cool, then tilt the left earlobe on the beat and snap the finger on the afterbeat. And so by routining one's finger-snapping and choreographing one's earlobe-tilting, one discovers that one can become as cool as one wishes to be.

From Duke Ellington's 70th Birthday Concert (Solid State Records)

Of course, only a poseur (Mme. de Cambremer) or a square (Mme. des Laumes) would think to adopt such a mechanical set of gestures.