It's all true: Proust really can change your life. Consider this observation on habit and selfhood:
We constantly strive to give our life its form, but by copying, in spite of ourselves, like a drawing, the features of the person we are, not the person we should like to be.
From The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 181
Other posts on Proust and habit
"This is the operator speaking"
Involuntary memory, foolish things
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)
Bob Swift plays the final variation of Charles Ives' Variations on "America" (1891):
Bob Swift plays Charles Ives (YouTube)
May 25, 1929–July 2, 2007
The words of Beverly Sills' farewell song, October 27, 1980, New York:
Time has come for me to leave you.
'Tis the moment for goodbye.
Ah, my sweet, we have to part now.
Please brush your tears from those dear eyes.
We have shared so much together.
'Tis not the end but a new start.
Ah, my dear, I'll always love you.
You'll be forever in my heart.
Ah, my dear, I'll always love you.
You'll be forever in my heart.
Beverly Sills, "Tell Me Why" (YouTube)
Beverly Sills, All-American Diva, Is Dead at 78 (New York Times)
Here is a puzzling piece of paper, 3 9/16" x 4", found in a 1967 paperback, The Olympia Reader, a sampler of works published by the Olympia Press. I no longer know how I acquired this book — most likely at a library sale.
This list is almost certainly a preparation for a short trip — I can't invent another context in which these items fit. Whoever composed the list is an orderly person: five groups, checkmarks for almost all items, long lines through the groups. The red checkmarks might suggest the hand of a teacher.
The drugs and remedies on the list — more items of this sort than of any other — suggest a difficult life. These are the items the listmaker is careful to get down first and, I suspect, cannot imagine leaving home without. The first item, Unicap, might suggest what used to be called a health nut: not many packing lists begin with vitamins. It's the second item that startles: codeine. But there's a red line through it: has it been checked off, or crossed off? Is the listmaker now resolving to do without it?
Most of the medicinal items that follow suggest everyday woes: headaches, colds, stomach ills. Perhaps this traveler wants to be prepared for anything. I cannot make out the third item — xtreno? But look at the middle column: Isoniazid is used in the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis. Marax (evidently no longer available) relieves the symptoms of bronchial asthma.
The toiletries group makes me think that this list belongs to a man: razor, "foam," no makeup. (Cf. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window: "Why, a woman going anywhere but the hospital would always take makeup, perfume, and jewelry.") Scissors are a puzzling addition — to trim a mustache? to cut fingernails? Those are tasks one could take care of before a trip. Wherever the listmaker is traveling, there must be toothpaste and deodorant, which seem conspicuously missing from the list. But there won't be shaving cream.
The books — everyone packs a paperback or two, no? — suggest a listmaker familiar with literary culture, as does The Olympia Reader itself, with work by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Henry Miller. I take Vietnam to be shorthand for Norman Mailer's 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? Chaillot can only be The Madwoman of Chaillot, an English translation of Jean Giraudoux's play La folle de Chaillot. The play was made into a film in 1969, and a paperback translation was published that year. (An aside: the first English translation, from 1947, is by Maurice Valency, who taught one of my professors, Paul Memmo, at Columbia, and, much later, my wife Elaine, at Juilliard.)
The most puzzling part of this list comes last. It's conceivable that a man might wear one pair of pants for three or four days. But where are his t-shirts? Where are his boxers, or briefs? These omissions seem odd with a traveler finicky enough to pack slippers and handkerchiefs (and scissors).
For a long time I thought of this list as a hypochondriacal prelude to a summer weekend trip. But there's no suntan lotion, no tennis racket, no camera. More recently I've wondered if the writer might have been preparing for a stay in a hospital or sanitarium. But the pullover and shirts don't fit that scenario.
On the other side of this piece of paper appear three phone numbers, with letters designating their exchanges: Jef, OR, VI. Each number has a notation to its right, and together these notations suggest a life that has begun to frazzle. They also suggest to me what it feels like to pose questions about this list:
NONo one's home, or at least no one who can answer my questions.
no
reply
wrong
no.
Related posts
Blue crayon
Found
Invitation to a dance
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
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)
On a package of Choward's Scented Gum, whose design has probably changed little since the 1930s:
FRAGRANCE THAT REFRESHESAnd on the inner flap of a package of Orbit Gum:
AFTER EATING, SMOKING OR DRINKING
DIRTY MOUTH? CLEAN IT UP WITH ORBIT!
Choward's Scented Gum
Orbit Gum
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.)
All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)
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 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
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
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
