Proust: items in series

Proust has a fondness for listing items in series. These collocations are always surprising and exciting in their inventiveness, their heterogeneity, and their precision.

A gesture of Françoise's: "modest, furtive, and delighted."

A group of noblemen: "obscure, clerical, and narrow-minded."

A marquis in a metaphorical aquarium: "venerable, wheezy, and moss-covered."

The elements holding together the "ephemeral panorama" of aristocrats at the theater: "attentiveness, heat, dizziness, dust, elegance, and boredom."

Quotations from Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 13, 26, 37, 48

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Gum, then, now

On a package of Choward's Scented Gum, whose design has probably changed little since the 1930s:

       FRAGRANCE THAT REFRESHES
AFTER EATING, SMOKING OR DRINKING

And on the inner flap of a package of Orbit Gum:

DIRTY MOUTH? CLEAN IT UP WITH ORBIT!

Choward's Scented Gum
Orbit Gum

Overheard

The scene: an outlet mall. A young family is exiting a store. The paterfamilias speaks:

"Man, I got new tennis shoes, new shoes, new blacks, new browns; I'm all set up!"

Elaine thinks he was trying to get his kids to laugh. (It worked for us.)

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Charles Mingus in Norway

I'm always puzzled when people characterize jazz as "laid-back" or "relaxing." May I present some evidence to the contrary? Here is perhaps the greatest Mingus group, courtesy of YouTube. Watch before it's gone:

So Long Eric (Goodbye Eric Dolphy, Hurry Back) (Mingus)
Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk (Mingus)
Parkeriana (Mingus)
Take the "A" Train (Billy Strayhorn)

Charles Mingus, bass
Johnny Coles, trumpet
Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone
Jaki Byard, piano
Dannie Richmond, drums

Recorded at University Aula
Oslo, Norway
April 12, 1964

On June 29, 1964, Eric Dolphy, who had stayed on in Europe after the tour ended (hence the title "So Long Eric"), died in a diabetic coma in Berlin.

Charles Mingus in Norway: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (YouTube)

Proust summarizes Proust

Proust himself would have fared well in Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition, whose goal is to summarize À la recherche du temps perdu in fifteen seconds. Here's one sentence that does the job pretty well (with, in this translation, at least a second to spare):

A novelist could shape the whole life of his hero by depicting his consecutive loves in more or less the same terms, giving thereby the impression, not of being self-repetitive, but of being creative, there being less power in an artificial innovation than in a reiteration designed to convey a hitherto unrevealed truth.

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 473

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The iWorld

Walk through any airport in the United States these days and you will see person after person gliding through the social ether as if on autopilot. Get on a subway and you're surrounded by a bunch of Stepford commuters staring into mid-space as if anaesthetised by technology. Don't ask, don't tell, don't overhear, don't observe. Just tune in and tune out.

Andrew Sullivan's 2005 essay on "the iWorld" is worth looking at on iPhone day:

Andrew Sullivan on the iWorld

iPhone alternative

Bigger!
iPhone: 2.4" x 4.5" x .46"
Moleskine: 3 1/2" x 5 1/2" x 9/16"

Heavier!
iPhone: 4.8 ounces
Moleskine: 10 ounces

Cheaper!
iPhone minimum annual cost: $1218.88 + tax ($499 iPhone with lowest-cost AT&T plan, $59.99 a month)
Moleskine minimum annual cost: $15.99 + tax, ink, and lead

The Moleskine Daily Planner does not make phone calls, play mp3s, or browse the Internet. But it contains a secret compartment — well, a manila pocket — to store receipts, coded messages, and what not.

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."

Related posts
American reading habits
Freshmen surveyed

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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