Proust gift tags and note cards

Would a reader of In Search of Lost Time be likely to use Random House's Marcel Proust gift tags and note cards? I doubt it, and not only because the pretension involved — "I know that you know that I know enough to give the gift of Proust" — is at odds with everything a reader of Proust ought to value. Pretension aside, two of the five Proust quotations displayed on these items are wrenched from context in a way that wildly distorts their meaning, and the distortions are likely to be obvious to anyone who's taken the time to do the reading.

One of the five quotations (all are unattributed) is from Pleasures and Regrets (or Pleasures and Days), in Louise Varese's 1948 translation. The other four are drawn from In Search of Lost Time, in the 1992 D.J. Enright revision of Terence Kilmartin's reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation. Here are the three quotations that cause no problems out of context:

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. ("Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies," Pleasures and Regrets)

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves. (The Guermantes Way)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. (The Captive)

And now the first of the two problem sentences:

Love is time and space measured by the heart. (The Captive)

This sentence seems to thrive out of context, even turning up in a volume called A Collection of Sexy Quotes (between Havelock Ellis and Estée Lauder). In context, this sentence is the culmination of one moment in the narrator's tormented imaginings about Albertine Simonet and other women. Here's the passage (in the Penguin translation), in which time and space become an endlessly painful internalized terrain:

This love between women was something too unknown: nothing could allow me to picture with confidence, with precision, its pleasures, its very nature. How many different people, how many places (even places not involving her directly, vague places of entertainment where she might have tasted some pleasure, places where crowds of people go, where they brush against one) Albertine — like someone who, ushering a whole group of people, all her friends, past the ticket-desk in front of her, gets them all into the theatre — had ushered in from the fringes of my imagination and my memory, where I was taking no notice of them, and installed in my heart! Now my knowledge of them was an internal thing, immediate, spasmodic, painful. Love is space and time made apprehensible to the heart.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 356

The second problem sentence seems even more astonishingly wrenched from context:

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them. (Time Regained)

Out of context, this sentence seems to defy time's power: Take that, time! Our eternal summers shall not fade! In context though, the sentence offers no such consolation. The passage in which it appears begins as the narrator refers to his recollections of the "young girls in flower" of his youth, girls who are now much older or already dead:

It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder that this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to what which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 296-97

It's not difficult to see the implication, is it? If it is, one need read only two sentences further: "I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then." Yipes.

Let's hope that those buying these tags and cards are sending them to people who also have very little idea of what goes on in Proust's fiction.

Closing irony: The bookstore in which I saw these items did not have a copy of In Search of Lost Time for sale. And there was no large gap on the Fiction shelf either.

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Fashion plate

Reading someone other than Proust this afternoon, I found this sentence, a description of a wig-maker's shop, sending me to the dictionary:

By way of decoration, it had an ancient fashion-plate stuck on one of the window-panes and a wax bust of a woman, which had yellow hair.

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 2003), 60

I haven't heard the term fashion-plate (or fashion plate) in years. It conjures up for me a lost world of vaguely moral misgivings about those who choose to dress in shiny fabrics and loud, flashy colors. In other words, the only fashion plates I've heard of have been human. So what is this "ancient fashion-plate" in the window?

The Oxford English Dictionary makes everything clear, defining fashion plate as "a pictorial design showing the prevailing style or new style of dress," and noting that the term is "also applied to other kinds of fashionable display." The term's first appearance is from 1851, and by 1891 it's being used of people: "The latest philatelic 'fashion plates' tell us that the new idea of collecting postal cards is to collect them direct from the countries issuing them." My guess (and it's only a guess) is that the French term gravure de modes came first and that English borrowed from its fashion-minded neighbor.

The University of Washington has an online collection of fashion plates for your viewing pleasure:

Fashion Plate Collection

Songs, most wanted and most unwanted

In 1996, Dave Soldier teamed up with Komar and Melamid (the minds behind the Most Wanted Painting project) to create the world's most wanted and most unwanted songs. The results make for hilarious listening, and if my taste is any guide, "The World's Most Unwanted Song" (all 21:58 of it) will in fact be lighting up hearts all over the world this holiday season: "Do all your shopping . . . at Wal-Mart!"

The songs are available as free downloads from UbuWeb.

The People's Choice Music (UbuWeb, via Design Observer)
The Most Wanted Song (.mp3)
The Most Unwanted Song (.mp3)
Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid
Dave Soldier
The Most Wanted Painting project

Milk bottles

Today's Peanuts ("today" being December 26, 1960):



In 2007, Linus might also ask "And what are milk bottles?"

Some years ago, when my children were younger, I went into elementary-school classes every so often to read poetry. I remember this small poem prompting many questions:

The imperious dawn comes
to the clink of milk bottles
and round-shouldered sparrows twittering.

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), from Rhythms II (1919)

My attention was on "clink" and "round-shouldered" and "twittering" and that mysterious word "imperious." But the kids' thoughts were elsewhere: What did the bottles look like? Where did they come from? How did the people know how much milk to bring? And — did you have to pay for it?

A related post
"It is snowing."

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Holiday Inn as blog metaphor

Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby) describes Holiday Inn:

"A simple little layout where we could do our best at the work we know without any illusions of glory."

Holiday Inn (directed by Mark Sandrich, 1942)

Holiday Inn is a musical that veers from the truly wonderful (Fred Astaire's drunk dance and firecracker dance) to the deeply, unforgivably weird (Bing Crosby in blackface). If you're ever going to see it, now's the time.

The new Blogger

I finally gave in to progress and switched to "the new Blogger" this morning. It'll take a while to get everything back in place (especially as links now need to be added to a page element one at a time). If anyone sees things looking strange in the browser, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what you see and what browser you're using. (Thanks!)

As soon as I saw what Orange Crate Art first looked like in the new (or by now, semi-new) Blogger, I wanted to switch back. Line spacing was all awry, with any text after a block quotation squashed into ugliness. It's disappointing that this problem still exists so long — a year? longer? — after the introduction of the new Blogger. I found a solution here: Spacing Changes in Blogger Beta -3. All that's involved is a quick template HTML edit, cutting a line from one section and pasting it in another.

As they say on the Internets, Hope this helps.

Pineapple and truffle salad

Odette at Reading Proust in Foxborough has been troubled, haunted even, by the pineapple and truffle salad mentioned in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: "Is it just me or does pineapple salad with truffles sound rather. . . unappetizing?"

I've searched online for pineapple and truffle, ananas and truffe, with no luck. Tonight though something prompted me to try Amazon's "Search Inside!" It was my mind, which said, "Try Amazon's 'Search Inside!'" And there was a recipe, on page 93 of Shirley King's Dining with Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2006), involving pineapple chunks and truffle strips in a vinaigrette, with chicory or endive as a garnish.

"It is pure ostentation," sniffs King, "to mix truffles with pineapple." She pronounces the resulting dish "pleasant though unusual."

Odette, I'll bring the canned pineapple.

Shirley King's Dining with Proust (Amazon)

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The Gimble

The Gimble is a nifty tool. It's not the most versatile book holder (it won't work with larger books), but it's small, modestly priced, and cleverly designed and named. I like using it to hold books open while I'm typing out passages.

Why gimble? The OED definition of gimbal helps out:

A contrivance by means of which articles for use at sea (esp. the compass and the chronometer) are suspended so as to keep a horizontal position. It usually consists of a pair of rings moving on pivots in such a way as to have a free motion in two directions at right angles, so as to counteract the motion of the vessel.

This reading tool might be understood as a metaphorical gimbal: it keeps the book open in a horizontal position and allow for easy page-turning in two directions.

Gimble Hands Free Book Holder (Barnes and Noble)
Gimble (That company called "if")

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Review of Bit Literacy

Mark Hurst. Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. New York. Good Experience Press. 2007. $22.99.

I've just gone from reading Finding Time Again — the final volume of In Search of Lost Time — to reading Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, which is, in another way, about finding time again.

Bits are 1s and 0s, binary digits, the stuff of all digital data. Bit Literacy develops the implications of two incontrovertible statements: "Bits are heavy," overloading us with ever-increasing amounts of stuff, and "Your bits are your responsibility" (i.e., no piece of software can save us). The overall strategy to attain bit literacy: "Let the bits go."

Mark Hurst unpacks this strategy in chapters devoted to managing e-mails, to-dos, files, and online reading. What does a bit-literate person do? He or she empties the in-box of its e-mails daily (but not by replying to everything), tracks to-dos online, creates files that avoid proprietary formats, names and organizes those files in a coherent system of folders and sub-folders, and reads online sources with careful discrimination. (The goal here is not to Rule the Web, but to get in and out as efficiently as possible.)

Bit Literacy is a sharply-defined alternative to David Allen's Getting Things Done. Hurst mentions neither Allen nor GTD by name, but references to folders, "next actions," and a "complex paper-based system" make the point. I can't imagine keeping David Allen's 43 folders either, but I also can't imagine agreeing with Hurst's general claim that paper is an ineffective tool for managing to-dos.¹ Hurst's to-do strategy uses his own Gootodo, an elegant web-based tool. But the great advantage of paper-based tools, or at least some paper-based tools, is their portability and immediate availability. I can enter call numbers in my datebook (Moleskine page-a-day) and have them at hand when I'm in the library. And scheduling future tasks can be simple on paper: I can write "pick up dry cleaning" (to use a to-do example from Bit Literacy) on the appropriate page in my Moleskine when I'm at the dry cleaner, instead of having to hold the thought until I'm at a computer.

About paper, Mark Hurst and I will have to disagree. But in all other respects, I found Bit Literacy persuasive and inspiring (so persuasive and inspiring that I ordered a copy within an hour or so of getting the book from the library). I recommend Bit Literacy to anyone interested in bringing clarity and sanity to life among the bits.

And now I shall contemplate the emptiness of my in-box.

Bit Literacy (Book website)

¹ Why 43 folders? 31 + 12 = 43. One folder for each day of the month, and one for each month of the year.

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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