Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

You have strange compatriots. An American girl who assures me she is very beautiful, twenty-seven years old (since she lives in Rome, the Villa Wolkonsky, I have forgotten her name, I don’t give a hang, anyway) writes me that for three years she has done nothing night and day but read my books. I shouldn’t repeat what she said (because I never repeat this sort of thing) except for the conclusion which, if it doesn’t belittle her, humiliates me: “And after three years of uninterrupted reading, my conclusion is this: I understand nothing, but absolutely nothing. Dear Marcel Proust, don’t be a poseur, descend for just once from your empyrean. Tell me in two lines what you wished to say.” Since she didn’t understand it in two thousand lines, or rather since I didn’t know how to express it, I decided it was useless to reply. And she will find me a poseur. Do you know who she is (although it is of no importance)?

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Walter Berry, December 9, 1921. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Cheating at Stuyvesant High School

The New York Times reports on a cheating scandal at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s best schools.

A 2010 editorial from the school newspaper (cited in the Times article) suggests that cheating is pervasive at Stuyvesant. Yet a search of the Stuyvesant website turns up nothing in the way of a school-wide policy concerning academic integrity. The school’s code of conduct covers cell phones and iPods, clothing, elevators, extracurricular activities, hallways and lockers, and lunch. Not a word about cheating or plagiarism. I think I hear a blind eye, turning.

Related reading
All cheating posts (via Pinboard)

Prune shake

Inquiring minds want to know: what made you think this ad blogworthy?

First, its comedic value. Second, its comedic value. Third, I have to go with “comedic value.”

Haha. Is there a fourth reason?

Yes. This ad is relevant to a previous blog post.

You mean this one?

No, this one. I’m surprised to see that the prune shake served at the House of Toast in Bob and Ray’s Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife has some basis in reality, or at least a basis in some copywriter’s imagined reality. I mean, there’s no reason to think that anyone beyond this ad ever drank a prune shake, is there?

[Awkward silence.]

Is there?

Could a fifth reason for choosing this ad be the strange resemblance that the mother in the middle bears to Joan Crawford?

I hadn’t noticed that before. But I did notice that the guy and gal at the top seem to running into each other trying to get to a bathroom in time. That could be a fifth reason. Or that coy phrasing could be a fifth reason: “Sunsweet’s delicious — and does something for you.” Kapow! But, hey, wait a minute — you didn’t answer my question.

Sorry. The “C-L Process” is new to me. Or me to it. I gotta go.

[Awkward silence.]

See you soon.



[This ad appeared in Life, April 24, 1950.]

Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012)

[“Ernest Borgnine, talking on phone, in scenes from the movie Marty.” Photograph by Allan Grant. December 1954. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Sad news in the New York Times: Ernest Borgnine has died.

Orange Crate Art is a Borgnine-friendly site. I love Marty. I’ve even watched A Grandpa for Christmas three times — because it stars Ernest Borgnine.

One of my favorite OCA posts imagines life after Marty for Marty Piletti and Clara Snyder, who will never die.

The Cummerbund Response

From a dream:

The Cummerbund Response: a gesture, utterance, or choice of apparel whose degree of formality exceeds what is appropriate to an occasion, typically a result of social uncertainty.

A related post
Skeptiphobia (also from a dream)

[In my dream, the term showed up uncapitalized, but capitals look so good in Jim’s comment that I’ve added them here.]

Domestic comedy

“I think our family is loyal to intellectual questions the way normal families are loyal to a sports team.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

[Used with permission.]

“Medium talk”

At a dinner party, Larry David (Larry David) asks Hank (Chris Parnell) a question:

“So how’s your marriage?”

“What the hell? Why — why would you ask me that?”

“I’m trying to elevate small talk to medium talk.”

From “The Hero,” Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011).

Related posts
Deep talk v. small talk
Larry David on the red phone
Larry David’s notebook

[We’re watching the eighth season of CYE on DVD.]

Too Late the Phalarope

Jim Doyle, the best teacher I’ve ever known, recommended Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope (1953) to me more than thirty years ago. I bought the novel in paperback, a long time ago — so long that the price, $3.45, now looks like a highly improbable price for a book. The book sat on one shelf or another until last week, when I thought I should read that.

And now I can recommend Too Late the Phalarope. The novel tells the story of the destruction of Pieter van Vlaanderen, Afrikaner, police lieutenant, footballer, stamp collector, husband and father, a man undone by his desire for a black woman named Stephanie. The narrative works as does ancient Greek tragedy: we know from the beginning that Pieter is doomed. His family falls with him: the house of van Vlaanderen. The novel’s narrator is Pieter’s aunt Sophie van Vlaanderen, disfigured, unmarried, unable to prevent what is to befall her nephew (and thus something like the chorus of Greek tragedy). Here and there, we read excerpts from Pieter’s journal, now in Sophie’s hands. In these pages, Pieter is never able to articulate what it is that he feels for Stephanie: his is a desire that dare not speak its name, or that has no name.

Too Late the Phalarope captures the agony of living with the expectation that one’s secret will be (or has already been) found out. A neighbor’s glance, the tone of an offhand remark: to Pieter, the slightest gesture or word begins to seem dangerously meaningful. He hides his secret in a world divided into irreconcilable categories: black and white, body and soul, damnation and salvation, justice and mercy, love and sex. Presiding over all events is an angry patriarch — Pieter’s nearly humorless, rigid father, who is willing to banish his son and lock the door against his return.

I think I’m a better person for having read Too Late the Phalarope. And now I wonder why its enigmatic title didn’t move me to read it sooner.

[A comment on a previous post places Jim’s first encounter with the novel in spring 1980. And if it doesn’t go without saying: Paton was a committed opponent of apartheid.]

Higgs boson explained (?)

My son Ben passes on a link to a video from PhD Comics, The Higgs Boson Explained. It’s beyond me. But I find a satisfactory explanation of the particle in the work of Luther Dixon and Al Smith:

Higgs boson, can’t you hear me when I call?
Higgs boson, can’t you hear me when I call?
Now you ain’t so big, you just small, that’s all.

The Fourth of July

[“American children of Japanese, German and Italian heritage pledging allegiance to the flag.” Photograph by Dorothea Lange. California, April 20, 1942. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Saying no to xenophobia is the American way, or ought to be, always. Happy Fourth of July.