Very British

A World War II poster, returning as a poster for these times.

Reproduction of World War II Poster (Barter Books)

Freshman reading

An incoming college freshman, commenting on a program requiring incoming freshmen to read a book during the summer:

"When I first heard we were supposed to read a book, I think the general consensus of the group, including myself, was somewhat disappointed."

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Proust: "the profound life of 'still life'"

The narrator has been looking at the work of the painter Elstir. If you've been reading Proust, here's something to ponder: M. Swann, we're told several times, sees reality in terms of paintings. As does, in this passage, the narrator. Exactly how does the narrator's seeing differ from Swann's? What relationship between painting and reality holds for each?

Since seeing such things in the watercolors of Elstir, I enjoyed noticing them in reality, glimpses of poetry as they seemed: knives lying askew in halted gestures; the tent of a used napkin, within which the sun has secreted its yellow velvet; the half-emptied glass showing better the noble widening of its lines, the undrunk wine darkening it, but glinting with lights, inside the translucent glaze seemingly made from condensed daylight; volumes displaced, and liquids transmuted, by angles of illumination; the deterioration of plums, green to blue, blue to gold, in the fruit dish already half plundered; the wandering of the old-fashioned chairs, which twice a day take their places again around the cloth draping the table as though it is an altar for the celebration of the sanctity of appetite, with a few drops of lustral water left in oyster shells like little stone fonts; I tried to find beauty where I had never thought it might be found, in the most ordinary things, in the profound life of "still life."

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 448-49

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Five tips for reading Proust

Google searches for tips for reading Proust are pointing to Orange Crate Art (which thus far contains nothing of the sort), so I think it's appropriate to oblige. Here are five:

1. Buy In Search of Lost Time, all of it, up front. Making the investment will increase the likelihood that you'll finish. (Imagine the ignominy of bringing the unread volumes to a used-book store!)

2. Read a set number of pages a day. I may be a slow reader: reading 25 pages of Proust takes me between 75 minutes and 2 hours. But Proust's prose requires one to go slowly. The unit of thought is the sentence, and often a sentence will need several rereadings for its shape to become clear. Breaks are good too: taking a day off after finishing a volume allows for a feeling of accomplishment before beginning again.

3. Make notes. Mark whatever seems important, funny, revealing, obscure. If you're reluctant to mark up the books, try Post-it Notes. Jotting down some of the details of relatedness will help keep Proust's aristocrats from blurring into one another. Who, for instance, is the Princesse de Guermantes? The wife of the Duc de Guermantes' cousin. That, in itself, is not very useful to know, but without such info, your reading will be unnecessarily muddled.

4. Look past the social world. In Search of Lost Time is about the growth of a human being. As in, say, a Jane Austen novel, fancy clothes and big houses are not the point. They are merely the props with which the novelist has furnished the world in which the real story takes place.

5. Persevere. One way to do so: calculate the date on which you're likely to finish. Reminding yourself of that date once in a while can add some incentive to keep going through slower stretches (for me, they're in The Guermantes Way). I've never read another novel that's prompted me to wonder about the date on which I'd be finishing. But there's really nothing else like Proust.

*

August 20, 2022: Not a tip but an encouragement: you need to read only fifty pages or so to hit the novel’s first big reward. That’s a promise.

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The kitchen shink¹

The July 2 New Yorker has a poetry item in its "Talk of the Town": Rebecca Mead's account of Harold Bloom's response to Barack Obama's undergraduate poetry poems "Pop" and "Underground," published in 1981 in the Occidental College literary magazine Feast. Here is a curious excerpt:

Of the two Obama poems, Bloom said, "Pop" was "not bad — a good enough folk poem with some pathos and humor and affection." He went on, "It is not wholly unlike Langston Hughes, who tended to imitate Carl Sandburg." Bloom was fascinated by Obama's use of an unusual verb, "shink" ("He . . . Stands, shouts, and asks / For a hug, as I shink, my / Arms barely reaching around / His thick, oily neck"), a word that does not appear in any of the dictionaries that Bloom consulted but which is defined in an online slang dictionary as "an evasive sinking maneuver."²

"It undoubtedly was a word that was in common usage, having to do with feeling very strong emotion, in this case a very strong need for comfort," Bloom said.

I think that Bloom and Mead have missed a better and simpler explanation: shink, I would suggest, is very likely a typo for shrink, a word that fits the context, with the poet's arms "barely reaching around" Pop's neck. Twelve lines earlier, the poet laughs as Pop "grows small, / A spot in my brain": now, it's the poet's turn to shrink. (How could Bloom, immersed in Freud, overlook shrink?)

The poems, I'd say, lie somewhere between "not bad" and "pretty good." You can find them, and Bloom's encounter with them, by following the links:

Barack Obama: Two Poems (New Yorker)
Obama, Poet (New Yorker)

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On ideology v. values
On facts
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¹ Yes, the title of this post contains a typo.

² The online slang dictionary is Urban Dictionary, which hosts a variety of fanciful and vulgar definitions for shink and other words. The contributor who proferred the definition of shink cited in the New Yorker added a second definition: "aggressive facial expression of dwarf child stars."

Joseph Cornell on collecting

Joseph Cornell liked to collect things:

At the 1939 World's Fair, he saw some fanciful Dutch clay pipes, the stems of which were claws, a hand holding a cup or a twig with an acorn bowl. Cornell bought a gross of them. "I collect anything of human interest. There are no elite kinds of things in my work." Though he stores up for future needs he dislikes being called a squirrel. "Something may catch your interest but you'll pass it up," he explains. "But when you want it, it won't be there. Sometimes you go back and even the shop is gone."

From a portrait of Joseph Cornell by David Bourdon, "Enigmatic Bachelor of Utopia Parkway," published in Life, December 15, 1967

There's currently a spectacular exhibition of Cornell's work in Salem, Massachusetts:

Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination (Peabody Essex Museum)

Dana Gioia's message to graduates

Dana Gioia is a poet and critic, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and graduate of Stanford, where he recently gave the commencement address:

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?

Read it all:

Dana Gioia's commencement address (Stanford News, via Arts and Letters Daily)

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Pocket notebook sighting

From Robert Bresson's 1951 film Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne). Here the unnamed protagonist, the priest of Ambricourt (played by Claude Laydu), holds a pocket notebook. He is often shown writing with a dip pen in a larger journal.

The film is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection:

Diary of a Country Priest

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Minimalist word processors

There's a nice post at Web Worker Daily listing ten free alternatives to Microsoft Word. The comments point to a few more.

Having switched over to Macintosh and OS X, I've been delighted by TextEdit (which comes with a Mac), Bean (a free download), and Pages (part of iWork, not free). I've listed these applications in order of increasingly complexity: Pages is the choice if, for instance, you need to create columns. I'm also very happy with Smultron, a free text-editor with tabs. And I'm even happier to be working on a computer without Microsoft Word.

10 Free Minimalist Word Processors for Greater Productivity (Web Worker Daily)

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Proust: "I only ever saw her wearing a hat"

Here's a short story from Proust, illustrating the narrator's contention that "our own contribution to our love — even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity — is greater than that of the person we love." This contention harmonizes with what Proust's narrator elsewhere says of love: that it is a matter of projecting onto another "a state of our own self." Thus love (on these terms) might develop and flourish no matter how limited the acquaintance with its object:

A former drawing teacher of my grandmother's had had a daughter with an obscure mistress. The latter died soon after the death of the child; and this was such a heartbreak to the drawing teacher that he did not long survive her. During the final months of his life, my grandmother and some ladies from Combray, who had never so much as wished to refer in his presence to the woman, with whom he had never officially lived and who had occupied little space in his life, decided to contribute to a fund that would give the little girl a life annuity. It was my grandmother's proposal; but some ladies proved reluctant: Was the child really worth it? Was she actually the daughter of the man who believed he was her father? One can never be sure, with women like her mother. . . . However, it was decided; and the child came to thank them: she was ugly and bore a marked resemblance to the old drawing teacher, thus dispelling all doubts. Her hair being her best feature, one of the ladies said to the father, who had brought the child, "What lovely hair!" My grandmother added, thinking that, the fallen woman being now dead and the drawing teacher almost dead, there could be no harm in alluding to past events of which everyone had feigned ignorance at the time, "It must run in the family. Did her mother have such lovely hair?" To which the father gave a guileless reply: "I don't know — I only ever saw her wearing a hat."

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 438-39

Like so much of Proust, this passage is both comic and poignant, with a range of motives and responses to consider: the guarded reluctance of proper ladies; the effort, on someone's part, to find something nice to say; and framing those more genteel responses, the narrator's grandmother's unhesitating generosity (she embodies all that is best in Combray) and her pragmatic choice (seeing as the drawing teacher is "almost dead") to speak openly of the past. And finally, the poor teacher's response. "I only ever saw her wearing a hat": meaning what? That she kept it on in — a carriage perhaps?

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