Overheard

In Hyde Park, Chicago, yesterday:

"I've dealt with cadavers before."

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(Thanks, Elaine!)

Proust and the Muse of history

Here she is:

the Muse, whom we should fail to recognize for as long as possible if we want to preserve the freshness of our impressions and some creative power, but whom precisely those of us who have avoided her shall meet in the evening of our lives in the nave of some old village church, at a moment when all of a sudden they feel less touched by the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than by the diverse fates which they have suffered, as they moved into a distinguished private collection or a chapel, then into a museum, or by the feeling that we are treading on an almost sentient flagstone, composed of the last remains of Arnauld or Pascal, or quite simply by deciphering the names of the daughters of the nobleman or the commoner inscribed on the copper plate of a wooden prie-dieu, imagining perchance the fresh young faces of these village maidens, the Muse who has assumed everything rejected by the higher Muses of philosophy and art, everything unfounded in truth, everything which is merely contingent but which also reveals other laws: the Muse of history!

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 640

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Proust on the human ostrich

Reader, do you know such ostriches?

Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 551

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Joshua Foer on memory

Joshua Foer has a piece in National Geographic on people with unusual memory deficits and surpluses:

AJ remembers when she first realized that her memory was not the same as everyone else's. She was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I was not happy because I hated school," she says. Her mother was helping her with her homework, but her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started thinking about the year before, when I was in sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then I started realizing that I was remembering the exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago that day." At first she didn't think much of it. But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly one year earlier.

"Each year has a certain feeling, and then each time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of 1981 feels completely different from the winter of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the petite madeleine cake that sent Marcel Proust's mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of Things Past. Their mere mention starts her reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten levels deeper and more intense than that."

When I first glanced at this piece, I thought, Oh, Proust Was a Neuroscientist. But that book, on my to-read list, is by Jonah Lehrer.

Remember This (National Geographic, via Boing Boing)

Related reading
Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things

Talk to the face

An editorial in a college newspaper recently suggested that college faculty join Facebook as a way to show their desire "to connect with" students. The editors gamely suggest academic benefits: chances to create assignments that focus on what students are "already interested in" and chances to find "examples" (of what?) that students will recognize.

I'm always interested in showing the relevance of the works I teach, but it's a professor's responsibility to enlarge a student's understanding of reality, not to appeal to and thereby affirm the present limits of that understanding. And the idea of a grown-ass man or woman wandering about in the teenaged and young-adult voyeurdrome of Facebook is at best slightly absurd; at worst, deeply creepy. Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that many students agree. A much better way for faculty and students to "connect" is to talk, face to face, not as pseudo-friends but as members of a community devoted to teaching and learning.

Related reading
How to talk to a professor

Quicksilver plug-ins

For Mac users: Lifehacker has a very helpful post today on ten useful Quicksilver plug-ins. I've been using Quicksilver for most of 2007, and six of these plug-ins were new to me. (I wish I'd known about Shelf months ago: it's already made my Mac life better.)

For non-Mac users: Quicksilver is a free program that launches programs, opens files and folders, and simplifies countless elements of working on a computer. To my mind, Quicksilver alone might be reason enough to switch to a Mac.

Top 10 Quicksilver Plug-ins (Lifehacker)
What is Quicksilver? (Blacktree, Inc.)

Billy Strayhorn on humility and individuality

Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967), composer, arranger, pianist, and for almost thirty years, Duke Ellington's collaborator:

Why shouldn't you play a simple melody? It's a matter of being humble. All artists are humble. All great artists are humble. The ones who're not are not great artists. When a little kid comes up and says "Play O, Say, Can You See?," you play it. That does not mean that you have to play it the way thousands of other people have played it. You can give it your own individuality. But don't look down on those things, because if you look down, that's the end of you, your integrity and everything.

Stanley Dance, The World of Duke Ellington (NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), 31

Related reading
billystrayhorn.com

To-Do List

Sasha Cagen's anthology To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us has just been published. My daughter Rachel has a contribution: a list of supplies for an imaginary camping trip that she drafted when she was six or seven. (She's now in college.)

I'm not sure what I think of the book yet. Some of the lists are touching; some funny; some mysterious. Some, for me, are a matter of Too Much Information, with too great an "ick" factor. Browse the book; see what you think.

Aside from Rachel's list, my favorite list in To-Do List is from Arlene Mandrell, New Year's resolutions from 1956, when she was sixteen. No. 9: "I will not fall into bed without brushing my hair & teeth, no matter what time it is."

Related post
Whose list?

Obama e-mail improvement

I'm happy to see that Barack Obama's campaign is rethinking its e-mail strategies. From my inbox, two messages from campaign supporters:



The message from Earnest Primous (October 17) is easily mistaken for spam. (Who's Earnest Primous? And what prior conversation does "RE: Hillary's money" reference?) While the subject line of the more recent message (November 11) is more cryptic than I'd like, the association of the sender with barackobama.com is clear, even with a fixed narrow column for senders' names. (That's Hotmail for ya, but I use this account only for mailing lists.)

The false familiarity of candidate e-mails has elicited both constructive criticism and mockery. I suspect that Obama's people are listening, reading, and learning from it all.

Related posts
Campaign e-mail etiquette
Campaign e-mails (again)

Feeding times

After watching a local newscast on Thursday night, I made the mistake of leaving the television on for "warmth" (i.e., for light and noise while working in an otherwise empty house). I virtually never watch prime-time network television, so I found myself at first surprised and then appalled by the barrage of commercials exhorting the viewer to eat out or buy pre-packaged food to eat at home. Convenience and taste were the advantages touted again and again and again — as if driving to a fast-food outlet to eat is in fact convenient, as if a plastic bag of frozen meat and vegetables is in fact superior to what a modestly skilled cook could put together from scratch. I assume that these commercials were running in prime-time to capitalize upon whatever dissatisfactions and frustrations viewers might be feeling about their evening meals. I hit the remote-control after hearing "Better than what Mom makes!"

My prime-time experience is what prompted me to look closely at a four-page insert for Sara Lee brands in today's Parade magazine. Page one: Norman Rockwell's 1943 Freedom from Want, with some ingratiating text added:

Ah, the good ol' days. When there was all the time in the world to create picture-perfect holidays. And when families could enjoy every meal together, not just the big holiday feasts.

Sure isn't how things look today!

No siree, Bob. Today's world is what we see on the next two pages. Sara Lee's website gives a condensed version:


[Click for larger image.]

What I find most telling in this Photoshopped nightmare is the absence of relationships. Contrast Rockwell: people are looking at one another, acknowledging their shared joy in a ritual. In Sara Lee's world, everyone does his or her own thing. Grandma and Grandpa, the only people who can possibly be construed as looking at someone else (at Mom, perhaps, and frazzled Dad), find their smiles unreturned. It seems that they've even had to let themselves in, which (comically and unintentionally) compounds the scene's awfulness. And notice: the kitchen table, minus chairs, functions not as a gathering place but as a surface on which to display food. Sara Lee gives us not a scene of feasting but of feeding. The only hunger here, as the T-shirt at the center of this scene suggests, is in one's stomach.

Did people really have "all the time in the world" to prepare holiday meals back in the "good ol' days"? I think that they made the time, to do things that were important to them. As Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, points out, we've figured out how to make the time to spend two or three hours a day on line. I remember that my grandmother used to start the Thanksgiving cooking at six or seven in the morning.

If you're wondering who the self-satisfied young man in the T-shirt is: according to the Parade version of this scene, his name is Jake, and his hockey team is at the door, hungry for hot dogs. Note to hockey team: Go away; we have company. Note to Jake: Take off your headphones, put down your wiener, and go say hello to your grandparents. They're not going to be around forever, and they've come a long way to see you.

Related reading
No time for cooking (Michael Pollan on cooking, via Fire and Knowledge)
Total Meals On Line (Sara Lee)