Évelyne Bloch-Dano on Mme Proust

Biographer Évelyne Bloch-Dano spoke yesterday at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Jeanne Weil Proust, Marcel's mother. Bloch-Dano is an engaging speaker; her affection for Mme Proust and her son was especially evident in the passages from family correspondence and In Search of Lost Time that served as stopping points in her talk.

Here's one such stopping point, a note in which Marcel gives his mother instructions for the next day's work on translating John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture. I love the final sentence:

My dearest Mama,

From midnight to 12:15 I stood guard at the door, hearing papa blow his nose but not reading the paper, so I didn't dare come in.

Tomorrow morning, will you be good enough to translate for me on the large format paper I've left you, without writing on the back; without leaving any blank space, tightening up what I showed you from Seven Lamps . . .

Also, I'd appreciate it if you could copy the attached page circled in blue pencil (I started to circle the back of it in blue pencil, but that doesn't count). Start with the first word (which is: in our view), finish with the last word (which is: to find you, for) without worrying that the meaning is cut off; don't copy anything from the back. But keep your copy as well as the attached page for me, which I will need to consult.

I have the feeling I'm doing better and in any case I'm smoking a good deal less. I'm getting to sleep without taking anything. I'm the one who opened the bottle of Vichy water.

A thousand tender kisses,

Marcel

[October 1899 (?), quoted in Madame Proust: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 207-208. Translation by Alice Kaplan.]

Something that surprised me in this talk: the details of a notebook in which Jeanne Proust chronicled the deaths of her mother, father, and husband. In a 1912 letter, Marcel mentions his finding the notebook. Philip Kolb, who edited Proust's correspondence while teaching at Illinois, made reference to the notebook in 1953, and one of its pages was reproduced at some later point in the catalogue of a Proust exhibition. The notebook is now lost.

Évelyne Bloch-Dano is visiting several American cities to talk about Madame Proust. I can't find a full schedule, not even at the author's website. But via Google, I've found announcements of talks at Berkeley (October 23) , Duke (October 25), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (October 27).

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Madame Proust

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The Met's shark

From a New York Times article on a shark in formaldehyde, on display for the next three years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

How does it look? Weird.

Will the shark attract a new audience to the Met? Maybe.

Is it worth the trip? Definitely.

Is the article worth reading? Kinda. But thinking about this sculpture makes me recall what someone in The World of Henry Orient asks: If this is music, what's that stuff Cole Porter writes?

Just When You Thought It Was Safe (New York Times)

Madame Proust

From Evelyne Bloch-Dano's biography of Jeanne Weil Proust, Marcel's mother:

For the young mother Jeanne, the stages in her sons' upbringing were well laid out. Children had their place in the life of a bourgeois family, but their situation was governed by rules and customs that went unquestioned. Indeed, the children's development could be measured by codified benchmarks: swaddling clothes for the infants, then a gown that made changing diapers easier; bottles, then pureed baby food; around age seven, a boy began to wear short pants instead of dresses, as if to differentiate him from babies and little girls. Before that, his curls would have been cut, another important rite of passage. A boy acquired his individuality by distinguishing himself from all that was feminine. Jeanne saw these stages as progress. Yet her optimism was occasionally mixed with the feeling that she was somehow losing her babies, that in growing older her sons were growing away from her. And while Robert went through his first stages energetically, hastening, like many younger brothers, to catch up with an older male sibling, things were very different for Marcel.

Madame Proust: A Biography, translated by Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 69-70

Madame Proust is a meticulously documented portrait of its subject and of Proustian family life. The relationship of mother and son is both touching and frightening in its mutual dependence. Evelyne Bloch-Dano visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tomorrow to talk about Madame Proust:

Author to lecture about Proust's mother (UIUC)
Madame Proust: A Biography (Amazon)
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

(Thanks, Odette!)

Bill and Virginia Youngren's house

Skimming a book this morning, with the television on for "warmth," I glanced up at This Old House to see a house that was instantly recognizable. The color, dark green, looked right. The size and shape looked right. The driveway was in its proper place. Seeing the kitchen's windows and cabinets and wallpaper confirmed my intuition: this old house was a house I once knew.

The house is in West Newton, Massachusetts, and once belonged to William and Virginia Youngren. Bill was a professor of mine when I was a graduate student at Boston College in the early 1980s. ("It's Bill!" he once wrote, replying to a deferential note I had addressed to "Dr. Youngren.") Like every professor I've ever admired, Bill negotiated university life on his own terms, refusing to limit his horizons, intellectual or social, to "the department." He was as knowledgeable about music (classical and early jazz) as he was about 18th-century literature and aesthetics. And he seemed to know, or have known, everyone, not as a collector and dropper of names, but as one who pursued his interests with such dedication that they inevitably led him to the appropriate people.

I spent many hours at Bill and Virginia's house when I was a graduate student. My visits would begin on a practical note — picking up a paper from a previous semester (Bill never graded work in a timely manner), dropping off a chunk of my dissertation. But conversation always took over, sometimes on the house's enormous porch, sometimes in the kitchen or a front sitting room. There would be Earl Grey tea (Twinings, loose) and ice cream (Breyers, vanilla). And often there'd be music, on reel-to-reel transfers of 78s. I remember sitting and listening to "After You've Gone" (James P. Johnson's Blue Note Jazzmen, 1944) and realizing that when you owned a house, you could play records as loudly as you wanted. Who would stop you?

Bill died in 2006, of an undiagnosed neurological disease, and with children grown, Virginia must have decided to sell the house. So here it is on television, a ceiling pulled down, a floor pulled up, a wall — in front of which the kitchen table once stood — knocked out. The difficulties of later life can be read in a detail on the screen: a handrail along the length of the front walk, which must have made it easier for Bill to get around. "It does nothing for the house," the landscaper is saying.

Newton Shingle-Style House Project (This Old House)

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P.S. 131

"Local Norms" and "'organic' attribution"

The report of the faculty panel investigating charges of plagiarism against Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, offers a remarkable picture of life in a Department of Higher Education. Among the revealing bits:

1. When Poshard wrote his dissertation in SIUC's Department of Higher Education in 1984, the department did not require students to follow a standard style for documentation. "The citation style," says a member of Poshard's dissertation committee, "was agreed upon by the chair and the candidate, and accepted by the remainder of the committee."

2. Poshard claims not to have used a style manual for documentation and says that he would have done so "if anyone had said to do that." The faculty panel acknowledges though that Poshard's dissertation seems to follow Turabian style (what we now know as Chicago style, found in the Chicago Manual of Style).

3. Poshard claims to have followed what the panel calls "the common practices in his department" in citing and documenting sources. And here's where things get good:

4. The faculty panel reports that in the Department of Higher Education "at least one informal style" of documentation was in use. The panel explains that this style was a matter of "Local Norms" and dubs it the "'organic' attribution/citation style." The "informal style" involved presenting other people's words verbatim without benefit of quotation marks (i.e., the little thingamajigs I've been using in these sentences).

I don't think Glenn Poshard meant to deceive anyone when he wrote his dissertation. But I do think that he was content to do his work in a department whose standards of scholarship were frightfully low.

The report is worth reading in full:

Report of Review Committee to Investigate Plagiarism (.pdf, Southern Illinois University)

And for a sample of Poshard's dissertation and its sources:

Document comparison (.pdf, Daily Egyptian, SIUC)

Baron de Charlus, out of control

M. de Charlus, in five similes:

He was as boring as a scholar who can see nothing beyond his own subject, irritating as an insider who prides himself on the secrets he knows and cannot wait to give away, disagreeable as those who, in the matter of their own faults, let themselves go without realizing what offence they are giving, obsessive as a maniac and fatally rash as one who knows himself guilty.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 281-82

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Jeremy Wagstaff on Burma

From Jakarta, Jeremy Wagstaff writes about technology for the Wall Street Journal:

I would love to think that technology could somehow pry open a regime whether it pulls the plug or not. But Burma has, in recent weeks and in recent years, actually shown the opposite: that it's quite possible to seal a country off and to commit whatever atrocities you like and no amount of technology can prevent it.

By holding the recent uprising as an example of citizen journalism and a turning point in the age of telecommunications we not only risk misunderstanding its true lesson, but we also risk playing down the real story here: the individual bravery and longtime suffering of the Burmese people who had, for a few heady days, a flickering of hope that their nightmare was over.

Read it all:

The Real, Sad Lesson of Burma 2007 (Loose Wire Blog)

Type terms

Is there a difference between a font and a typeface? Between a type designer and a typographer? Answers here:

Ask Hoefler & Frere-Jones (typography.com)

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Helvetica
Typographic walking tour (Flickr)

Helvetica

[Helvetica film poster.]

A chance I didn't think I'd have: I got to see the documentary film Helvetica (2007) last night, a one-time screening at a nearby community college. Helvetica is of course the ubiquitous modern typeface. Helvetica a wonderful film: a chance to hear type designers talk about their work, their ideas of beauty, the history of post-WW2 type design, and Helvetica itself (some love it; some loathe it). Many shots of workspaces and work, with pencils, erasers, coffee cups, and Macs. (Not a single Windows machine in the film.)

Coming out of the theater, I saw Helvetica everywhere: signs on walls, announcements on a television monitor. Helvetica: we're soaking in it.

My favorite moments in the film: Matthew Carter's explanation of how he begins thinking through a type design, Michael Bierut's commentaries on corporate letterheads and Coca-Cola ads, and Erik Spiekermann's confession:

I'm obviously a typomaniac, which is an incurable if not mortal disease. I can't explain it; I just like looking at type. I just get totally out of it. They are my friends, you know. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls' bottoms. I get kicks out of looking at type. It's a little worrying, I must admit. It's a very nerdish thing to do.

The film's site has several short clips, including one with Erik Spiekermann. The DVD arrives on November 6.

Helvetica (A documentary film by Gary Hustwit)

Related posts
Font haiku : Type terms : Typographic walking tour

["We're soaking in it": Readers of a certain age will recognize a reference to "You're soaking in it," from television commercials for Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid.]

24/7, 25/8

"24/7" and its noisier sibling "24/7/365" bother me. When used to describe individual activity, these expressions are ludicrous hyperbole: "24/7, I never slow down"; "I am thinking about my work 24/7/365." "24/7" may well apply to services that are always available, but in those cases, the dowdier "around the clock" might serve as well. "Around the clock" has the added advantage of placing us in an analog reality, governed by a 12-hour timekeeper.

There's worse though than "24/7." A couple of days ago, with CNN playing in the background, I heard someone refer to "25/8." More bigger! "25/8" doesn't seem to be in widespread use yet: only one of Google's first ten results is relevant, for a computer repair company with the awkward name "onCALL 25/8."

But what if one wants to press further? If one lives 25/8, what number ought to replace 365? If an ordinary person's year is made of 52 seven-day weeks and an extra day, the year of the eight-days-a-week achiever might be calculated like so: 52 × 8 = 416 days. Add an extra day, and one is busy 25/8/417. But since the 25/8 person's days and weeks are already longer than those of ordinary people, more elaborate calculations might be appropriate: 25 × 8 = 200 hours (one week). 52 × 200 = 10,400 hours in a year. Add one more day: 10,425 hours. And to translate those hours into ordinary days: 10,425 ÷ 24 = 434.375. So there it is.

I am thinking about stuff for my blog 25/8/434.375.