Proust was the next president

Two nights ago I dreamed that I met Barack Obama and told him that I was reading Proust. "I respect that," he said. How curious then to find a partial sentence in Proust that seems Obama-like in its optimism:

our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 344

In 2004, in waking life, I met Barack Obama, before I began reading Proust.

[The hope-filled title of this post alludes to Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.]

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The Internet and literacy

A briefly encouraging passage from a deeply depressing piece by Caleb Crain on the future of reading. And if what follows is encouraging news — well, just read:

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

Twilight of the Books (New Yorker)

A few related posts
American reading habits
Freshmen surveyed
George Steiner on reading
To Read or Not to Read
Words, mere words
Zadie Smith on reading

Ten best "dowdy world" gifts

In time for holiday shopping, forty or fifty years or so too late:

For her	For him
1. Mink stole	New set of golf clubs
2. Fountain pen	Fountain pen
3. Blender	Electric shaver
4. Monogrammed hankies	Monogrammed hankies
5. Charm for charm bracelet	Tie
6. Monogrammed stockings	Monogrammed socks
6. Stockings	Socks
7. Dusting powder	Old Spice
8. Robe	Robe
9. Box from Emperor of Japan's house	Bowling-ball bag
10. Carton of cigarettes	Carton of cigarettes

Notes
1. The ultimate gifts, no? And why a new set of golf clubs? Because the recipient is of course already a golfer. A mink stole though would of course be a first.

2. The pen must be practical, a workhorse: a Parker 51 or 61, for instance, not a Mont Blanc. See Norman Rockwell's illustration, which I dare not reproduce here: "They gave each other a Parker 61."

6. Just kidding.

7. All I know about dusting powder: Women used it, and I brought it in as a teacher's present in elementary school.

9. Hommage à The Honeymooners. In the episode "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (broadcast December 24, 1955), Ralph gets Alice "a box to keep hairpins in," made of "2,000 matches glued together," from "the house of the Emperor of Japan." Or so he was led to believe. Alice gets Ralph a bag for his bowling ball.

10. Cigarettes? Sure. Cartons were familiar holiday presents in the dowdy world. We gave our mailman Lucky Strikes; my grandfather got Camels. Lots of people got Chesterfields.



[Chesterfield Christmas ad, 1938, from Tikigirl at Flickr.]

[No minks were harmed in the making of this post. I have never golfed. Orange Crate Art is a smoke-free zone. Your "dowdy world" gift suggestions are welcome in the comments.]

Related reading
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Related viewing, from YouTube
Kent satisfies best at Christmas (Dick Van Dyke and Rose Marie)
This Christmas, make it "Camel time"

Proust on aging

The last part of In Search of Lost Time is, among other things, an extended discourse on aging and on the ways in which we do and do not notice it, in others and in ourselves. Here the narrator is talking with Gilberte, the beautiful girl of his childhood, now a woman whom he will later mistake for her mother:

Gilberte de Saint-Loup said to me: 'Shall we go and dine, just the two of us, at a restaurant?' As I replied: 'So long as you don't think it compromising to dine alone with a young man,' I heard everybody round me laughing, and hastily added: 'or rather, with an old man.' I felt that the phrase which had caused the laughter was one that my mother might have used when speaking of me, my mother for whom I was always a child. Now I noticed that in matters of self-examination, I looked at things from the same point of view as she did. If I had finally taken in, like her, certain changes which had occurred since my early childhood, these were nevertheless now very old changes. I had stopped at the one which once made someone say, almost before it was true: 'He's almost a grown-up young man now.' I still thought this, but these days it was vastly out of date. I was not fully aware how much I had changed. But what, in fact, had those people who had just burst out laughing really noticed? I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 239-40

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Introducing Mlle. Swann (from Swann's Way)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

"Pikakirjoitusvihko" and pikakirjoitusvihko

Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect has a poem whose title sent me in search of help: "Pikakirjoitusvihko." "Pikakirjoitusvihko" is a long poem written in the spirit of what I like to call dailiness — a series of aphorisms, notations, quotations. For instance:

Courtesy is more efficient than the lack of it.

*

If I get a fatal disease, I am going to be very mad at it. I will blame it for my death.

*

"The worth of that is that which it contains, / And that is this, and this . . ." (Shakespeare, almost Gertrude Stein, Sonnet 74)

The last entry of "Pikakirjoitusvihko" notes that the word pikakirjoitusvihko is Finnish and appears on the cover of "this notebook," presumably the one in which the poet has been writing. So I suspected that the word means, simply, notebook. Google could not confirm my hunch, returning only eight results, four of which are references to Padgett's poem. I tried a Google image search, hoping to find perhaps an illustration from a Finnish stationer, with no luck. Next, Babel Fish, which, I found, doesn't do Finnish. I then e-mailed my friend Norman, linguist and translator, who worked out a possible explanation:

pika=express (like express train)
kirjoitusvihko=exercise book
vihko=notebook, booklet

express exercise book

Does that make sense?

Norman, who has some knowledge of Finnish, used an online Finnish-English dictionary (I didn't imagine that there was such a thing). As he explained though, it wouldn't have helped me:

You would have found kirjoitusvihko, but it is not easy to know where you are supposed to split a Finnish word. Knowing that kirjasto is "library," I guessed that pika must be the first element.

But Norman wanted to check with another translator, Sheryl, who pointed out that the word divides after pikakirjoitus, which means "shorthand" or "stenography" (express writing!). So pikakirjoitusvihko means "stenography notebook" or "steno pad."

Norman adds:

Icelandic, like Finnish, has a calque or loan translation . . . hraðritun, which also means "express writing" (hraðbraut means "expressway").

Kiitos, Norman and Sheryl! And kiitos, Ron Padgett, for sending me on this journey.

Now I'm going to look up stenography.

More, in an e-mail from Ron Padgett:

I had the same trouble. Thinking that I had bought the notebook in Kiev, I went to the Ukrainian Museum here in NY to ask for a translation, but of course they were puzzled by the word and said they didn't think it was Ukrainian. Some time later something made me think of asking Anselm Hollo, and of course Bingo! "Stenographer's notebook," he said. Which, in light of the poem, turned out accidentally to be the right title. Then he tried to teach me how to say it in Finnish. He's still trying.

Related reading
Calque (Wikipedia)
Anselm Hollo (Poets.org)
Ron Padgett (Poets.org)
Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook (Jean Harlow, taking dictation)
TElephone EXchange NAmes in poetry (from a poem by Ron Padgett)

Forever, a film by Heddy Honigmann

From the distributor's website:

Through a leisurely tour of the world-famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place for legendary writers, composers, painters and other artists from around the world, Forever provides an unusually poignant, emotionally powerful meditation on relations between the living and the dead, and the immortal power of art.

A film I look forward to seeing, most likely on DVD. Proust is buried in the Père-Lachaise, of course, as are Guillaume Apollinaire, Maria Callas, Jim Morrison, Francis Poulenc, and a cast of thousands.

See the trailer and read more via the links:

Forever (YouTube)
Forever (First Run Icarus Films)
Père-Lachaise Cemetery (Wikipedia)
Père-Lachaise virtual tour (in French and English)

Olive sizes

Mark Hurst at Good Experience wonders today about the words used to classify olive oil — pure, virgin, and extra virgin: "I mean, what's the difference between 'virgin' and 'extra virgin' in any other context?" Mark's conclusion: "Olive oil suffers from name inflation."

Which reminded me of the strange array of words used to size olives, something I first learned about (and still vaguely recall) from a Marshall Efron skit on The Great American Dream Machine.

You can find the Colossal — what am I saying? — the Super Colossal word-hoard of olive sizing via the link below. Colossal? Super Colossal? Brilliant? Superior? Fine? Only your extra-fancy olive-industry insider knows for sure.

Olive Sizes (Practically Edible)

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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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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Proust summarizes Proust

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