Paul McCartney doesn't read or write music. Neither, he says, did John Lennon:
"Someone once told us that the Egyptian pharaohs couldn't read or write -- they had scribes to put down their thoughts. So John and I used to say, 'We're like the pharaohs!'''
From "When I'm Sixty-Four," a profile of Paul McCartney by John Colapinto (New Yorker, June 4, 2007)
Choose one:
1. If you're visiting from Joshua Sowin's website, Fire and Knowledge, welcome to Orange Crate Art. You might like browsing via one or more of the Pinboard categories in the sidebar. Or you might enjoy these posts:
The inverse power of praise (On reading and difficulty)2. If you're a regular or occasional reader of Orange Crate Art, you might want to look at Michael Leddy on Reading, an interview that I just did with Josh for his Reading Interviews series.
Richard Rorty on the value of literature
Zadie Smith on reading
George Steiner on reading
Mark Edmundson tells it like it is (Excerpt from Why Read?)
Words, mere words (Another excerpt from Why Read?)
The narrator brings us into present time at the end of Swann's Way, when he recounts taking a walk "this year" in the Bois de Boulogne, where he used to see Mme. Swann, looking "like a queen." From the novel's final paragraph:
Nature was resuming its rule over the Bois, from which the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Woman had vanished; above the artificial mill the real sky was gray; the wind wrinkled the Grand Lac with little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds swiftly crossed the Bois, like a real wood, and uttering sharp cries alighted one after another in the tall oaks under their druidical crowns and with a Dodonean majesty seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disused forest, and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed.[A note glosses Dodonean: "In Dodona, in Epirus, the priests of Zeus' sanctuary gave oracles by interpreting the sound of the wind in the sacred oaks." (463)]
From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 443-44
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
My daughter, glancing at Steve Ettlinger's Twinkie, Deconstructed (2007) in the library, pronounced it "Unreadable." She may be right. The subtitle alone is off-putting:
My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America EatsPublishers rely upon ever-lengthening subtitles to press (yes, press) content into the reader's face. But there's a clumsy dissonance between the terse, elegant title (which assumes at least a pop-culture grasp of deconstruction) and the self-promoting, astonished, grandiose tone of what follows: My Journey; Yes, Mined; What America Eats. (What America will soon be eating, at least in my house, is an Amy's California Burger.)
One could be forgiven for thinking that all one might have to do to find out what goes into a Hostess® Twinkies® "Golden Sponge Cake with Creamy Filling" is to simply ask the company that makes them. But it is not that simple."One could be forgiven": A cliché, and one that makes no sense if the reader has read the book's subtitle.
In fact, Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, which owns Hostess®, Drake's® Cakes (Yodels, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, and Ring Dings), Wonder® Bread, Home Pride®, Dolly Madison Bakery®, Butternut®, Merita®, and Cotton's® Holsum, among other familiar brands, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. However, after about twenty-four hours of contemplation, the company declined via phone, citing its preference to help writers who are merely reminiscing about their sweet childhood memories.
One might think that finding out what goes into Hostess® Twinkies® would require no more than asking the company that makes them. But it was not that simple.Looking closely at these sentences reminds me that with contemporary non-fiction, it's often smart to try (via the library), not buy.
Interstate Bakeries Corporation, one of the country's largest wholesale bakeries, was initially receptive to my requests for tours and interviews. But one day after I visited IBC headquarters, a company representative called me to decline, citing the company's preference to help writers who reminisce about childhood foods.
All "How to improve writing" posts (Pinboard)
Twinkie, Deconstructed (the website for the book)
abjureThe start of a list: 100 words that "every high school graduate should know." To the extent that such lists serve as models for writers, they're dangerous stuff. ("I would not kowtow to her loquacious acumen" -- that's the kind of sentence that can result.) To the extent that such lists make for better readers, they're helpful.
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin)
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.We never learn the narrator’s first name, though there’s a hint much later: Marcel.
From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 420
Other Mlle. Swann posts
Introducing Mlle. Swann
Love and hate in Proust
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
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)
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)
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.
