A poem for the day

The WPIX Yule Log

[The WPIX Yule Log in action.]

The WPIX Yule Log is a New York tradition. In the world's greatest city, people tune in to watch a tape loop of a fireplace, as Christmas music plays in the background. The Yule Log runs for hours. I speak from experience.

You can learn more via the Wikipedia article (which calls the Log "both a critical and ratings success"). Portable Yule Logs are available from the mothership.

Yule Log (Wikipedia)
Portable Yule Log (WPIX)

Christmas Eve reprise

"You know something, sweetheart? Christmas is — well, it's about the best time of the whole year."

It's the night before Christmas, and once again we join The Honeymooners, already in progress:

Ralph Kramden talks about Christmas (December 24, 1955)

Oscar Peterson (1925-2007)

August 15, 1925 - December 23, 2007

Among the performances available on YouTube, there's a brilliant solo version of Willard Robison and Dedette Lee Hill's "Old Folks."

"Old Folks" (YouTube)

Jazz piano legend Oscar Peterson dead at 82 (Ottawa Citizen)
Oscar Peterson (Official website)
Oscar Peterson: A Jazz Sensation (Library and Archives Canada)

William Wordsworth rap

M.C. Nuts is in the house:

Must have been ten thousand I saw in my retina
No more than a glance then I registered they're beautiful
     et cetera

William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," rap-style. Check it.

M.C. Nuts, William Wordsworth rap (YouTube, via New Music reBlog)
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (Wordsworth's poem)

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.

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

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.