Betsy Blair (1923-2009)

Betsy Blair, an Academy Award-nominated actress also known for her forthright memoir describing her youthful marriage to Gene Kelly and her firsthand experience of the Hollywood blacklist, died on Friday in London. She was 85 and had lived in London for many years. . . .

Winsome and red-haired, Ms. Blair was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as Clara Snyder, Ernest Borgnine’s shy love interest in the 1955 film version of Paddy Chayefsky’s television play “Marty,” directed by Delbert Mann.

Betsy Blair, 85, Actress and Wife of Gene Kelly (New York Times)

The Jupiter String Quartet

I heard the Jupiter Quartet last night, playing Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich in the Great Hall of the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois. If you, reader, ever have the opportunity to hear the Jupiter String Quartet: go.

So many of our more "celebrated" classical musicians play in a way that seems to say "Look at me, how passionate I am, how intensely self-absorbed." The members of the Jupiter Quartet play in a way that seems to say "Listen to the music. That's why we're here." The quartet's musicianship and expressive communication — among themselves and with their audience — are extraordinary. And these people are still so young! Catch them if you can: their touring schedule's on their website.

Mint garlic tea tasting

Elaine and I tried some mint garlic tea this afternoon. We used Bigelow's Mint Medley Herb Tea ("Blend of cool garden spearmint & peppermint") and three cloves of pressed garlic. We shared: garlic, like money, don't grow on trees.

After careful research, we have arrived at the following conclusions:

1. We do not like Bigelow's Mint Medley Herb Tea. We probably wouldn't like any mint tea.

2. We'd rather eat garlic. We like garlic. We knew that already.

There are many online recipes for garlic tea that call for water, a few halved cloves, lemon, and honey. In these recipes, the garlic merely flavors the water as it boils. One could make a much more potent tea by crushing some garlic in a cup and adding the other ingredients. I like garlic. You know that already.

"Be irish"

Be irish. Be inish. Be offalia. Be hamlet. Be the property plot. Be Yorick and Lankystare. Be cool. Be mackinamucks of yourselves.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

(The name Leddy is Irish.)

Vladimir Nabokov's index cards

Index cards were gradually loading a shoe box with their compact weight.

Pnin (1957)

*

The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed, consists of eighty medium-sized index cards, on each of which Shade reserved the pink upper line for headings (canto number, date) and used the fourteen light-blue lines for writing out with a fine nib in a minute, tidy, remarkably clear hand, the text of this poem, skipping a line to indicate double space, and always using a fresh card to begin a new canto.

Pale Fire (1962) [From Charles Kinbote's foreword to his edition of John Shade's poem.]

*

After a leisurely lunch, prepared by the German cook who came with the house, I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning.

Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (1973)

The photographs of Nabokov's research materials for Lolita and of the author at work with index cards are by Carl Mydans, taken in September 1958 in Ithaca, New York. I found them in the Life photo archive, here and here.

Related posts
Nabokov’s unfinished (Review of The Original of Laura)
Raymond Carver's index cards
Writing and index cards

Mint garlic tea

On NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, garlic farmer Chester Aaron recalled visiting the country of Georgia:

Every morning, they'd have a cup of mint tea into which they pressed three cloves of garlic. And if they were in their eighties or nineties, they pressed five cloves of garlic. And if they were over a hundred, they pressed six to eight cloves [laughs] of garlic. Every morning, mint garlic tea.

Weekend Edition is looking for garlic recipes.

Related post
Mint garlic tea tasting

David Allen: "the shudder of the world"

"I'm feeling the shudder of the world as we live in it now": David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, telling an audience at the GTD Summit this week that he has laid off 40% of his consulting firm's staff.

Productivity guru faces changes of downturn (AP)

π Day

Today is π Day. 3.14, &c.

Richard Preston's 1992 New Yorker profile of the Chudnovsky brothers, David and Gregory, calculators of π, is online. David Chudnovksy:

"We need many billions of digits. Even a billion digits is a drop in the bucket. Would you like a Coca-Cola?"

in 1992 the Chudnovksy brothers were unsalaried, untenured "senior research scientists" at Columbia University. They are now distinguished professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

The Mountains of Pi (New Yorker)

Pluto Day

It's Pluto Day in Illinois. Above, an imaginary headline, also in Illinois.

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MVEMJSUNP!

Resemblance: The Portraits

Here's a beautiful project with an appropriately Proustian title: Resemblance: The Portraits. David Richardson has made sixty-three 3" x 4 1/2" paintings, acrylic on balsa: one of Marcel Proust as a young man, one of Jeanne Proust, five of scenes from À la recherche du temps perdu, and fifty-six of the novel's characters.

These imagined portraits are wonderfully lit and highly expressive, and again and again, they seem right. Consider the portraits of young Gilberte Swann and the writer Bergotte:



Richardson's work also shows an understated sense of humor. A portrait of the composer Vinteuil bears a strong resemblance to César Franck, whose Violin Sonata in A Major (1886) is one of the real-world analogues of the Vinteuil Sonata. And Richardson's portrait of the the lift boy at the Balbec Grand Hôtel appears to be modeled on Johnny Roventini, the bellhop of "Call for Phillip Morris." I lived in Roventini's Brooklyn neighborhood when very young. No remembrance of things past here: I know only what I've been told. I was very, very young.

David Richardson's work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Thanks, David, for letting me know about your work.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)