The whole world is watching

How to improve writing (no. 15 in a series)

From a sign in a Cracker Barrel parking lot (Elaine insisted that I see the inside of a Cracker Barrel):

Lock your car and remove your valuables.

If one wanted to follow this advice in earnest, it would be necessary to revise, like so:

Lock your car. Then unlock your car, remove your valuables, and lock your car again.

But there's a better way:

Remove your valuables and lock your car.

The moral of the story: think about sequence. Why these elements in this order?

This post is no. 15 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

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Cmaj7#4

Backing out of a parking space on this always grey and sometimes rainy day, I thought that if the day were a chord, it would be the one above, a major seventh with a raised fourth. It's a Monkish chord (as in Thelonious), and to my ear it suggests wet streets, bare trees, and the need for lamplight, even if it's only the early afternoon.

Thanks to Elaine for the chord's name and notation, and for thinking that it sounds good (because of the wide voicing).

[If you don't read music, the notes from bottom to top are C G F# B E.]

Jonathan Shay wins MacArthur grant

Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay has been awarded a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant. Dr. Shay works with Vietnam veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. And he's the author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, books that find in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey patterns of experience that shape the lives of Vietnam-era veterans with PTSD. These books will teach you more about the trauma of war, ancient and modern, than you might want to know.

Dr. Shay's hope is that centuries of effort will lead to the elimination of war as a human practice. As he writes in Odysseus in America,

The original Abolitionists understood that their work would take more than one lifetime. They passed it as a heritage to their children. In the words of the Talmud, "You are not expected to finish the job, but neither are you free to lay it down."

Psychiatrist treated veterans using Homer; work made him MacArthur fellow (Boston Globe)
Achilles in Vietnam (Amazon)
Odysseus in America (Amazon)

Elvis pretzels

A digression in Proust's The Prisoner on street-vendors' cries brought to mind a cry I haven't heard — or thought of — for years:

Southern-fried Elvis pretzels,
They are fresh out of the oven.

Or to add the proper emphasis:

SOUTHern fried ELVIS PRETzels,
They are FRESH OUT of the OVen.

The Elvis pretzel man was a familiar figure during my years as an undergrad and grad student at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He could be found on a short dead-end section of Belmont Avenue, a street that separated the gated campus from the classroom building Faculty Memorial Hall. The pretzel man stood in the middle of the street, which saw virtually no traffic aside from garbage trucks and an occasional university vehicle. In warm weather the pretzel man wore an apron, the kind that proprietors of newsstands wore. In the cold, a shiny ski jacket ("pewter green," I'd call it, if there is such a color). The pretzel man was rather short and fairly broad, with a huge head of hair (more or less the color of his ski jacket). A laundry basket held the pretzels, which, if memory serves, sold for 50¢. Were they really fresh out of the oven? And if so, where was the oven? I have no idea, but the pretzels were indeed warm. They were also salty and chewy. A complete food, sort of, at least to tide one over between classes. I must have eaten dozens.

This little stretch of Belmont Avenue saw at least one other commercial venture during my time at Fordham: a coffeestand, where one could get something more drinkable than what the machines in FMH dispensed. The coffeestand had a short lifespan: its proprietor was almost certainly selling more than caffeine.

*

April 26, 2012: Found online: a November 9, 1978 Fordham Ram article about Elvis Lamanna, the Elvis pretzel man, complete with grainy photo.



[The Elvis pretzel man bears no relation to the Elvis impersonator Elvis Pretzel.]

More Bronx tales
Naked Bronx
Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado

The day Louis Armstrong made noise

From today's New York Times:

Fifty years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong's concert, Mr. Lubenow's editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview.

Armstrong's frank commentary on color and American culture — "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell" — became national news. Read all about it:

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise (New York Times)

Related post
Louis Armstrong's advice
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
Louis Armstrong, collagist
Louis Armstrong's advice

[Note: the Times article is in error when it states that Sammy Davis, Jr. criticized Armstrong "for not speaking out earlier." According to Gary Giddins' Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong (2001), "Davis said Armstrong did not speak for the Negro people, called him 'a great credit to his race,' and finally conceded that he agreed with his meaning but not 'his choice of words.'"]

Some advice

From a university police department's ten-step list:

STEPS TO TAKE TO STAY SAFE
WHEN WALKING ALONE AT NIGHT

1. Avoid traveling alone at night.

Free fax

FaxZero is a free online fax service, allowing the user to send .doc or .pdf files, up to three pages each, two faxes a day. An ad goes on the cover page. (Can you live with that? I can.)

In some dealings with insurance-related bureaucracy over the past few weeks, I've been asked several times to fax necessary paperwork. (And I've wanted to ask: Is it still the 20th century?) When I explain that I don't have easy access to a fax machine and offer to scan a page and send a .pdf, the answer is No. So I'm happy to now know about FaxZero. FaxZero also offers unfree faxing, with no ads.

FaxZero ("Send a fax for free to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada")

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")

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