Watching GUIDE

GUIDE, as the remote-control button calls it, is sometimes more thought-provoking than the shows themselves:

Dec 12	10:00 PM
36 WE	Hair Trauma
37 DHLTH	Trauma: Life in the ER

Van Dyke Parks and the present tense

A Twin Peaks fan has posted a short interview with Van Dyke Parks about his participation in the television series. I like this choice sentence, which follows VDP's acknowledgment that he'd seen none of David Lynch's work before getting his part:

"Generally, I stay out of the present tense."

Van Dyke Parks interview (Twin Peaks Archive)

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A new Van Dyke Parks interview
Van Dyke Parks speaks
Van Dyke Parks interviewed
Arts and science

Proust summarizes Proust

Another Proust passage of summing up. Two words: Une vocation.

Then, less dazzling no doubt than the one which had shown me that the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again, a new light dawned on me. And I understood that all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my table, I could not find a subject. So all my life up to that day could, and at the same time could not, have been summed up under the title: A vocation.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 207-8

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Monty Python and Proust
Proust summarizes Proust

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 17 in a series)

From a newspaper review of a concert:

an anchor of the famous "Hallelujah" chorus

That would be an encore. The moral of the story: when handling an unfamiliar word, don't trust intuition or a spellchecker. Use a dictionary and make sure that what you're writing is what you mean.

This post is no. 17 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

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On "pneumonic" devices
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All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Frank Sinatra's popcorn

Driving, listening to a station devoting its December air-time to "holiday music," I was delighted to hear Frank Sinatra singing "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" (words by Sammy Cahn, music by Jule Styne). I'd never heard a Sinatra version of this song.

But delight turned into doubt, for it's difficult to imagine Frank Sinatra doing what the I of the lyric claims to have done. Recall the song's start:

Oh! The weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

It doesn't show signs of stopping
And I brought some corn for popping,
The lights are turned 'way down low,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

Would Sinatra show up on a lady's doorstep with popcorn? It's difficult to imagine:

"Frank! I thought you'd never get here."

"I had to look at a swinging new arrangement with Nelson Riddle. And the roads are very bad tonight. But I brought you something I think you will like."

[Presents gift. It makes a shaking sound.]

"Popcorn?"

As I have previously stated, it's difficult to imagine.

With Dean Martin, who also recorded this song, popcorn is more plausible. A fella gets a little tipsy, he reaches for the box with the new earrings for his girl, picks up the popcorn instead, doesn't realize his mistake, gets in his car: these things happen. But Frank Sinatra and popcorn? As I have previously stated, it's difficult to imagine.

You may be wondering about the song's lyric: is it bought or brought ? Sammy Cahn's Rhyming Dictionary (2002) gives brought (and all the exclamation points!).

And now (as I have not previously stated) it's back to my double-shift at the Continental Paper Grading Co.

December 8, 1980

Yoko Ono has written a letter to John Lennon:

I miss you, John. 27 years later, I still wish I could turn back the clock to the Summer of 1980. . . .

Letter from Yoko to John (Imagine Peace)

The Sound of Jazz, fifty years ago today

[Billie Holiday listens to Lester Young, December 8, 1957.]

Fifty years ago today, CBS broadcast The Sound of Jazz as part of its series The Seven Lively Arts. Gunther Schuller: "Unquestionably the finest hour jazz has ever had on television." Here are four highlights, courtesy of YouTube:

Henry "Red" Allen, Wild Man Blues
Jimmy Giuffre, The Train and the River
Billie Holiday, Fine and Mellow (mislabeled as 1944)
Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk

Watching these clips this morning, I began to think about the number of posters that could be made from the often iconic images therein.

The Sound of Jazz (Wikipedia)
The Sound of Jazz (Amazon)

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On December 8

Proust on objects and their associations

[Welcome, kottke.org readers.]

A post at kottke.org by Adam Lisagor, Remembrance of Phones Past, has developed into a wonderful and sometimes Proustian discussion of telephones and other objects and their associations. Here's a relevant Proust passage, perhaps the relevant passage. It concerns the narrator's rediscovery of a favorite book from childhood:

Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost intangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and admiration of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity. Yes, in that sense and that sense only (but it is much the more important one), a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things — a book in its red binding, like the rest — at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 193

A related post
Out of the past (On two books from childhood)

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

From a conversation about evolution:

". . . Pope Ron Paul the Second . . ."

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Plot keyword: Proust

The International Movie Database lists 141 plot keywords for Little Miss Sunshine, including eating, eyeglasses, and fried chicken. What's missing? Proust. "French writer. Total loser," according to Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell), the movie's number-one Proust scholar in the United States.

In real life, screenwriter Michael Arndt's twin brother is a Proust scholar. Co-director Jonathan Dayton: "He's in Ankara, so he's the number-one Proust scholar in Turkey."

I added Proust to the IMDb's word-hoard this morning. Will it stick? I'll know in a few weeks.

[Update, 3.16.08: Marcel Proust is now a keyword for Little Miss Sunshine.]

Walking on Sunshine (Interview with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)