Proust Was a Neuroscientist was disappointing

I'm still inspired by the passage on George Eliot from Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist that I posted last week. It's one of many passages that show Lehrer to be an engaging and graceful writer. But the enthusiasm with which I began reading his book waned as I kept going. Proust Was a Neuroscientist was a disappointment.

One problem: an exaggerated emphasis on the purported difficulty of modern art, music, and writing. Swann's Way offers "fifty-eight tedious pages" before Proust's narrator tastes the madeleine. Fifty-eight? That depends on the edition. Tedious? When I read the first fifty pages of Swann's Way (Penguin edition) in one sitting, I knew that I had found my way to the greatest reading experience of my life.

The tendency to exaggerate difficulty is most prominent in Lehrer's discussion of Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring. A sampling: "a monstrous migraine of sound," "a gunshot of chromatic bullets," "clots of sound," "sadistic newness," "epileptic rhythm," "schizophrenic babble." Granted, Lehrer is taking into account the anger and incomprehension of some of the work's first listeners. But his characterizations of Stravinsky's work are often cast in terms of a present-day "we" still pained by the music: "Our cells can sense the chaos here; we know that this particular wall of sound is irresolvable. All we can do is wait. This too must end."

Another problem: Lehrer is sometimes remarkably dismissive, most conspicuously in his chapter on Gertrude Stein and Tender Buttons. Stein's poor reader must trek on, "suffering through her sentences," which offer "one jarring misnomer after another" in a "drift toward silliness" and "literary disarray." Though Lehrer notes that Stein's sentences "continue to inspire all sorts of serious interpretations," he doesn't engage what serious readers (Marjorie Perloff, for instance) have made of Tender Buttons. And his breezy observations about Stein's "lack of influence" ("her revolution petered out, and writers went back to old-fashioned storytelling") would come as a surprise to many contemporary poets (John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, and Bernadette Mayer, for instance).

Jonah Lehrer is writing with a noble purpose: to encourage dialogue between the humanities and the sciences. I'm not sure that readers of Proust Was a Neuroscientist will be moved to read Proust or Stein or listen to Stravinsky if they haven't done so before. But I am thinking that it might be fun to read Middlemarch again — a thought I never imagined having before reading this book.

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

"WOOLCO"

The Woolworths Virtual Museum says:

At the time [the 1910s] English Needles and Sewing Accessories were recognised to be the finest in the world, so naturally Woolworths bought British not only for the shops in the UK, but also for export to the United States of America and Canada, where the items were sold for five or ten cents.

I found this "WOOLCO" item while helping to clean out an old house this morning. As you can see, just one sharp (a general purpose household needle) remains in the package, whose design is patented (no. 793608/34). It's difficult to decide how old this dowdy-looking package might be. The Woolco chain began in 1962, yet the Woolworth Virtual Museum shows British products, clearly pre-1962, bearing the Woolco name. I would guess that this package is, at the latest, from the 1950s.

Redditch began as a center of needle-making in the Middle Ages, soared to great industrial heights in the 19th century, and is now home to the Forge Mill Needle Museum, whose gift shop sells size 5/10 sharps.

A related post
Woolworths to close

On Proust's birthday

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust.

Photograph of Proust at twenty by Paul Nadar, from The World of Proust as Seen by Paul Nadar, ed. Anne-Marie Bernard (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

[Thanks, Timothy, for reminding me.]

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

In the mid-1980s, when Elaine and I lived in Brookline, MA, we patronized a corner grocery whose owner once said to us (and I wish I could remember the context), "It's good to get away from reality once in a while."

That seems as good a reason as any to see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (dir. Patricia Rozema), now in theaters. Kit (Abigail Breslin) is a ten-year-old aspiring reporter who cracks a multi-city crime spree in Depression-era Ohio. Yes, the Depression is on, but the movie presents a world in which individual acts of kindness render unnecessary any larger considerations of social justice. Be nice to that hobo! He will mark your gate with a kindly hobo sign and go back to the hobo jungle feeling better about himself (and you).

I saw this movie with Elaine and Rachel this afternoon, and for the first time in my life, I found myself the only man (and only male, for that matter) in a movie audience. And our party of three was the only group of moviegoers in which each member was over twenty-one (or over twelve, for that matter).

Unexpected pleasures: Wallace Shawn plays a cranky newspaper editor, and there's a tip of the hat (or cap) to Sullivan's Travels. Not bad for a kids' movie.

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Official site)

Parents and stars (again)

Another story of a parental encounter with a star: in the 1950s, my mom and dad found themselves in a Schrafft's, being served by Kenneth Nelson. They recognized him as Willie Baxter, from the 1951 musical Seventeen, after which, as Wikipedia notes, Nelson "found little work for the remainder of the decade." My tactful parents didn't say anything. In 1960, things began looking up for Kenneth Nelson: he originated the role of the Boy in The Fantasticks.

[From the cast list in Brooks Atkinson's review of Seventeen, New York Times, June 22, 1951.]

Related post
Parents and stars

SimplyNoise

A free white-noise generator that fits in a browser tab: SimplyNoise (found via Lifehacker).

I sometimes use the free Mac program Noise at work — it's amazing how many distractions it masks and how easy it is to forget that it's running.

[Mac users: If you find a working Universal Binary for Noise, let me know!]

How to dial a telephone

"You know what it says here? They're gonna take out all our phones and put in them kind with dials on 'em!"

For those transitioning to the New Telephony, it's YouTube to the rescue:

Dial Comes to Town (part one)
Dial Comes to Town (part two)
How to dial a rotary telephone
How to use the dial telephone

A mystery EXchange name

EXcalibur? EXcelsior? Only the operator knows for sure.

This Bell Telephone advertisement appears in the always rewarding and seemingly inexhaustible June 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics. From the same issue: Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer, "MONEY MAKING FORMULAS," and "Radios, it is."

Other EXchange name posts
Telephone exchange names
TElephone EXchange NAmes in classical music
TElephone EXchange NAmes in poetry
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 3)

And if you're switching over from the sans-dial telephone: How to dial a telephone

Chock full o'Nuts

Upon graduation from Columbia University in the early Twenties, Mr. [William] Black followed the normal routine of job hunting. Unable to find employment that suited him, he went into business for himself. He opened a nut store under a staircase in the basement of a Times Square building.

From this subterranean start the venture grew into a chain of eighteen nut stores under the name Chock Full O' Nuts [sic]. The business thrived until the depression hit. Mr. Black decided nuts were a luxury. From 1931 to 1933 he changed all the stores into quick-order luncheonettes.

The restaurants specialized, as they do today, in nutted cream cheese sandwiches and coffee. Soups and pies were added to round out the menu.

George Auerbach, "Chock Full o' Whatever It Takes," New York Times, April 14, 1956

An impulsive purchase of two cans of coffee in New Jersey has had me thinking about Chock full o'Nuts.¹ Once upon a time, Chock full o'Nuts was a New York chain whose restaurants seemed to be everywhere, with glass fronts and distinctively lettered dark-blue and white signs. I remember eating at Chock full o'Nuts as a kid, on family shopping expeditions and after trips to the orthodontist — "frankfurters" (not "hot dogs"), chocolate milk, and very strange doughnuts. I remember how good mustard and chocolate milk tasted together. I remember how quickly the fun of sitting on a stool faded into the awkwardness of legs dangling in space. I remember that there was no tipping, and I remember wondering what would happen to the money if someone were to leave a tip. I remember that it seemed that everyone working at Chock full o'Nuts was black. I remember a song that my brother and I created, inspired by an item on the menu (and the song "Everybody Loves Saturday Night"):

Navy pea bean soup, navy pea bean soup,
Everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody,
Navy pea bean soup.

The Chock full o'Nuts menu was limited, but I didn't remember how limited until I found this photograph:


[Jackie Robinson and an unidentifed employee. Robinson became vice-president of personnel for Chock full o'Nuts in 1957.]

Lobster salad and coffee, please. And a piece of lemon cream pie. William Black's idea of "food" seems to have been stuck in a time warp, a severely minimalist time warp: No Coke. No Pepsi. No fries. No chips. No wonder the restaurants began disappearing in the 1970s.

Chock full o'Nuts' Chock Cafés still offer a limited menu, including the Chock Classic ("datenut bread with cream cheese") and whole wheat donuts (not doughnuts).

Whole wheat: that's why the doughnuts were so strange.

Related posts
Chock full o'Nuts lunch hour
New York, 1964: Chock full o'Nuts

Related reading and viewing
Company history
Chock full o'Nuts' last days
William Black's philanthropy

Chock full o'Nuts (1970 photograph)
Chock full o'Nuts (1970s photograph)
Chock Full o'Nuts commercial (with Page Morton Black, the boss's wife, and a shortened version of the famous jingle)

You can find more commercials in the timeline at the company website.

¹ The capitalization and spacing are wrong, but that's the company way.

The Lincoln Bedroom

It's time to turn the page:

Asked at a town hall-style meeting in Fargo, N.D., about any decorating plans for the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama described a visit to the White House after he became a U.S. senator.

"You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there," Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.

"I thought to myself, 'Now, who stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and watches [ESPN's] 'Sports Center'? You've got your clicker. . . . That didn't seem to me to be appropriate. So I might take out the TV, I don't know.

"You should read when you're in the Lincoln Bedroom! Reread the Gettysburg Address. Don't watch TV."