Proust in the news

From an article in the London Sunday paper The Observer, "Bread sells like hot cakes":

Psychologists are putting it down to nostalgia, while pragmatists say it's the credit crunch. But whatever the reason, sales of part-baked bread have doubled in the past year.

Tesco says its part-baked bread sales have risen 47 per cent, while Asda has seen a 60 per increase. Asda attributes the rise to the increased trend for staying in to save money. 'People are cooking for themselves more and cooking for friends. Part-baked is a cheat's way to serve piping hot, fresh bread,' said a spokesman.

Tesco believes there is a deeper reason and drafted in a scientist to explain it. During a time of insecurity and uncertainty, it's all apparently down to the 'Proust effect', named after the 19th-century French author who suggested that the rich, heady smell of baking bread created feelings of nostalgia for mum's kitchen and an instant sense of homeliness.

Sigh.

"[T]he 19th-century French author": Yes, Proust did write and publish in the late 19th century. But he's a 20th-century writer. The first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu appeared in 1913.

"[T]he rich, heady smell of baking bread": No, it's the taste of a madeleine, or more precisely, a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, that brings back the narrator's past.

"[M]um's kitchen": No, the narrator's aunt Léonie would give him a bit of a madeleine in her room.

"[M]um's kitchen": No, the taste of the madeleine brings back "the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little dwellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings": a world.

It's difficult to decide whether the mistakes here are the work of Tesco's scientist or the newspaper reporter. Did the scientist mention only the "Proust effect"? Did the reporter assume that it concerned bread? Was someone getting confused by a recollection of Anton Ego and Ratatouille?

[Passage from Swann's Way translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 48.]

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

"That bathroom has a dearth of toilet paper. That's the opposite of a plethora — a dearth."

Related reading
All "domestic comedy" posts

Blogger "recent posts" feed

The community-college-based server hosting the service that has provided my "recent posts" feed seems to have gone kerflooey. So I found a better way to set up a "recent posts" feed: Feed2JS.

Feed2JS allows any number of posts in its display (Blogger's widget has a maximum of five). Feed2JS is a free service, coded by Alan Levine, hosted by Modevia Web Services. (Thanks!)

Fungible

"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."

Palin Takes Questions at a McCain Town Hall (ABC News)

Not allow the export bans? What bans? Huh? (Here are some details as to where American oil exports currently go.)

What fascinates me in this stream of semi-consciousness is the word fungible. To which one might also say, Huh? But Merriam-Webster's on the case. I've added the pronunciation from the entry for the noun (which means "something that is fungible — usually used in plural"):

fungible
Pronunciation: \ˈfən-jə-bəl\
Function: adjective
Etymology: New Latin fungibilis, from Latin fungi to perform — more at FUNCTION
Date: 1818

1 : being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation < oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities >
2 : interchangeable
3 : flexible

And that's my word of the day.

A Neil Postman story

I heard Robert McChesney tell this Neil Postman story during a lecture earlier this week. The story appears to have originated with the psychologist Gordon Allport. Its point: there's no such thing as a neutral question:

The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question "Is it permissible to smoke while praying?" and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one's whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray.

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 125–26

Robert McChesney

I went to a talk by University of Illinois professor and media critic Robert McChesney the other night. McChesney spoke on various matters related to journalism, politics, and democracy: the Constitution's safeguards against imperial ambition, the distinction between freedom of the press and freedom of speech, the enormous decline in the numbers of professional journalists and D.C. bureaus, unreported stories (the growth of the American prison population), the roles of anonymous sources and public relations in journalism, the work of Free Press ("Reform media. Transform democracy."), the importance of Net Neutrality, the limited efficacy of political humor (the Soviet Union under Stalin, he noted, had great political humor), and an instructive story from Neil Postman about the importance of asking the right question.

One exact quotation about the present shape of things:

"Professional journalism makes politics a liars' paradise. . . . There's no accountability. It's a liars' paradise."

Typewriter

The delightful webcomic xkcd.

Quicksilver discovery

I came across a sentence somewhere online today celebrating the ability to drag and drop almost anywhere on a Mac. I wondered: can one drag and drop in Quicksilver? I decided to try. Yes, it works.

To move a file:

1. Activate Quicksilver.

2. Type to get the name of the destination folder or drive.

3. Drag the file's icon onto the left Quicksilver panel, the one showing the folder or drive.

To copy a file:

1. Activate Quicksilver.

2. Type to get the name of the destination folder or drive.

3. Hold down the Option key and drag the file's icon onto the left Quicksilver panel, the one showing the folder or drive.

This feature provides a nifty way to remove files from the desktop without opening the Finder or moving through spring-loaded folders. Who knew? (Not me.)

"Size is the answer"

Thomas L. Friedman, from a column in Saturday's New York Times:

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of "drill, baby, drill!"

I'll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — "Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!" — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. "Typewriters, baby, typewriters."

Me, I'm reminded of the William S. Burroughs routine about the dinosaurs:

Fellow reptiles, at this dark hour, I do not hesitate to tell you that we face grave problems . . . And I do not hesitate to tell you that we have the answer . . . Size is the answer . . . increased size . . . It was good enough for me . . . (Applause) [. . .] We will increase both in size and in numbers and we will continue to dominate this planet as we have done for three hundred million years . . . (Wild applause).

"The Hundred Year Plan," in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Seaver, 1986), 122–23

Happy birthday, dear Art

My blog turns four years old later today.

Orange Crate Art began as an extension of my teaching, a place to collect items relevant to coursework and college. It soon became an extension of "me," moving in whatever directions seemed appropriate. My impulse always has been to notice — whether by introspection or looking around or reading — and to gather what might be delightful or useful to a reader.

I'm grateful to everyone who's read any or all of it, and especially grateful for the kindred spirits I've met only through written words (in comments here and in their writing elsewhere). Perhaps we'll meet in non-pixel form, somehow, someday, somewhere.

And I'll say thanks (again) to Rachel, who suggested Orange Crate Art as a name, to Rachel and Ben for showing me that I could learn some HTML, and to Elaine, whose taste is ever discerning. And thanks (again) to Van Dyke Parks, who was generous and enthusiastic about my borrowing his title.

As a young professor-type, my idea of writing was to get on the shelves of libraries, where I would live forever. Writing here, now, brings me much better rewards.

And for Pete's sake, if you read this blog and have never listened to "Orange Crate Art" (the song) and Orange Crate Art (the album), please give them a try:

Van Dyke Parks, Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove
Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, Orange Crate Art

Onward!

Previous birthday posts
You say it's your birthday (2005)
Birthday (2006)
Orange Crate Art turns three (2007)