Proust and possession, continued

Twenty-eight pages later, the narrator's dream of possessing the sleeping Albertine comes undone:

We imagine that love has for its object a being which can lie down before us, enclosed in a body. Alas! It is the extension of that body to every point in space and time which that being has occupied or will occupy. If we do not grasp its point of contact with a given place, a given time, then we do not possess it. But we cannot touch all these points. If at least they were indicated to us, we could stretch out to reach them. But we can only feel for them blindly.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 88

Albertine asleep is a body without sight or speech; now the narrator too is blind, unable to see that body in relation to every moment of its past and future. Possession now requires god-like omniscience.

I have a friend who found the roman d'Albertine, the Albertine novel, so disturbing that she wonders whether she'll go back to these later volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Proust's chronicle of obsession makes even Hitchcock's Vertigo seem almost healthy by comparison. (But I still love Vertigo.)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

The most disturbing passage in Proust?

I think so, and Elaine has reminded me that I had the same thought when I was reading the novel for the first time last year. The narrator's desire to possess Albertine Simonet can find its fulfillment only in the erasure of all that is individual — all that is human — in her. Barely animate, silent, blind ("There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze"), Albertine asleep becomes a thing to be looked at:

By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me in her, from the day that we first met. She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely. Her individuality did not break through at every moment, as it did when we talked, through unconfessed thoughts and unguarded looks. She had drawn back into her self all the parts of her that were normally on the outside, she had taken refuge, enclosed and summed up in her body. Watching her, holding her in my hands, I felt that I possessed her completely, in a way I never did when she was awake.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 60

Related post
Proust and Cole Porter (On "possession")

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Telephone exchange names on screen

[A Chicago "phonebook," from Nightmare Alley (1947).]

Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding) gives us Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Mike Mazurki (Moose Malloy from Murder, My Sweet), Tarot card readings, carnival geeks, and the rise and fall of a nightclub mentalist (who performs in a studio recreation of the Chicago Sherman House's Spode Room). There's some great dialogue:

"You've got a heart as big as —"

"Sure, as big as an artichoke. A leaf for everyone."

*

"These great trees in moonlight: they give the whole place a — a cathedral-like atmosphere."

As the Wikipedia article Telephone exchange names notes, Chicago first used a "3L-4N" system (three letters, four numbers). "2L-5D" (two letters, five digits) later became the standard in North America. ROGers Park and STAte were authentic Chicago exchange names, as the Telephone EXchange Name Project confirms. Checking a few of the other 21 exchange names at the TEXNP confirms that they too were Chicago exchanges.

But this page itself is from no phonebook. Or if it, the names (and addresses?) have been altered. Note Mr. Rumstad's first name in the right-hand column.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
Mike Hammer's answering machine

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Tamas in our time

Ancient texts often resonate with startling relevance. Teaching the Bhagavad-Gita for the first time in many years, I read the following passage with new eyes. The context: Krishna teaches that tamas is one of the three gunas, the movers of all action, "the bonds that bind / The undying dweller / Imprisoned in the body." Tamas binds with "bonds of delusion, / Sluggishness, torpor." When tamas prevails, one is "lost in delusion." Here I think of the folly that has given us a war in Iraq:

The act undertaken
In the hour of delusion
Without count of cost,
Squandering strength and treasure,
Heedless of harm to another,
By him who does not question
His power to perform it:
That act is of tamas.

[Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.]

Some related posts
Homer then and now
Homer's Rumsfeld
Not dead yet
Petraeus

Linsey-woolsey

Today's word at Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day brought back a bit of my elementary-school study of New York City history. I remember New Amsterdam. I remember Peter Stuyvesant and his wooden leg. And I remember linsey-woolsey. Everyone must have been wearing it back then:

linsey-woolsey (LIN-zee WOOL-zee) noun

1. A strong, coarse fabric of wool and cotton.

2. An incongruous mix.

[From Middle English linsey (linen, or from Lindsey, a village in Suffolk, UK) + woolsey (a rhyming compound of wool).]

Macs and test-drives

Thinking about a new computer? From an article in today's New York Times:

If you're the owner of a Windows PC who is looking for a replacement computer, the choices are grim. You can step into the world of hurt that is Vista, the latest version of Microsoft Windows that was released in January. Or you can seek out a new machine that still comes loaded with the comparatively ancient Windows XP.

Maybe, you might say, the moment has arrived to take a look at the Mac. You can easily order one online, of course. But if you'd like to take a test-drive before you commit, odds are that you'll have to look far and wide for a store that sells it.

Randall Stross, the author of this article and of The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Beats the Competition, seems to be telling us that a lifetime of Windows is inevitable, pointing to Apple's still tiny market share and citing a tech consultant who likens Microsoft's operating system and the hardware that runs it to a giant flywheel: "'It takes a lot of energy to spin it up, but once it gets going, it's virtually unstoppable.'" Alas, the analogy reminds me of the endless wait for Windows (XP) to finish starting up and of the dozens of times I had to hold down the power button to shut off a frozen Windows (98) machine.

I'm not persuaded that the Mac's limited retail presence is that crucial. The Mac interface can be studied at one's leisure at Apple's website. If one really wants to try before buying, Apple resellers can be found on or off campus in many college towns. A library or an obliging friend can also give the cautious consumer a chance to try a Mac. Still, the sometimes disarming simplicity of using a Mac — of, say, installing a program — is more likely discovered in ordinary use than during a test-drive.

The choices aren't grim: many people find Mac OS X ("ten," not "x") a joy to use. Having switched myself — first at work, then at home, no test-drives involved — I'd never go back.

A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close (New York Times)

Orange Crate Art turns three

Orange Crate Art is three years old today. If the average blog life-span is indeed three months, Orange Crate Art is, in human terms, some 900 years old. Which raises troubling questions as to who's been doing all this writing.

The deepest and most unpredictable rewards of keeping this blog have come in the form of comments and e-mails. The responses to posts about my friend Aldo Carrasco and my professor Jim Doyle have shown me the ways in which the Internet can bring people together, not only across space but also across time. Back in my days as a full-time Luddite, I never imagined that wonderful possibility.

Thanks (again, again) to Rachel, who thought "Orange Crate Art" would make a good name, to Rachel and Ben for showing me that I could learn a little HTML, to Elaine, my sounding board for much of what's here, and to everyone who's read (and perhaps commented). And thanks always to Van Dyke Parks, musician and mensch, who welcomed my use of his title with generous good wishes. (If you've never heard "Orange Crate Art," you can find it here and here.)

Petraeus

I find it fascinating that all questions of American strategy in Iraq are said to depend upon the observations of one man: Petraeus.

The omission of General is no sign of disrespect. It's meant to call attention to the seer-like status that seems to be associated with the name Petraeus. I'm reminded of Calchas, the seer whom the Achaean forces consult at the beginning of the Iliad:

Calchas, son of Thestor, bird-reader supreme,
Who knew what is, what will be, and what has been.

Petraeus even sounds plausibly mythic (though General Petraeus' parents are Dutch-American, not Greek or Roman): Petraeus is the name of a centaur in Hesiod's Shield of Heracles and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo.]

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

[I'm not the courageous type. I'm writing to tell you what I'd never dare say in person.]

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) is the fourth Robert Bresson film I've seen. As in the other three — Au hasard Balthazar, Journal d'un curé de campagne, and Pickpocket — someone is writing.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a story of jealousy, cruelty, and, finally, love, with a screenplay by Jean Cocteau. Some deeply Proustian moments: "There is no such thing as love, only its proofs."

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Criterion Collection)

Other Bresson posts
Notebook sighting in Pickpocket
Pocket notebook sighting

Music in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Musical Assumptions)

Thanks!

I find an item online for my dad, and what do I get?

Thanks, Dad!

[Ink and watercolor by James Leddy, 2007.]

More by James Leddy
Abe's shades
Boo!
Happy holidays
Hardy mums