On Carter’s Proust

“The first volume of the Yale project, published to coincide with the centennial, clearly aspires to become the new pedagogical standard. The project’s start, however, is less than auspicious.” On William C. Carter’s annotated edition of Swann’s Way: Leland de la Durantaye, Style Over Substance: Translating Proust (Boston Review).

[I’d have bought this book not long ago, but it would never have fit in the suitcase. Now I think I might pass.]

Chan Is Missing

[Gadget storage. Click for a larger view.]

Jo (Wood Moy) speaks:

“I went home to get a bite to eat. There was only a piece of leftover pizza. Chan Hung used to always talk about how Marco Polo stole everything from us. First pasta, then pizza. Too bad the Chinese didn’t have tomatoes. But I shouldn’t complain. The only thing I use my oven for is to store gadgets. I guess I’m no gourmet Chinese cook, and I’m no Charlie Chan either, although I did start watching some of his reruns for cheap laughs.”

I should have seen Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing years ago — in 1982 to be exact. I saw the trailer again and again at Boston’s Nickelodeon Cinemas. Now I think I know what must have come between me and this film: the end of the spring semester. There was work to be done, to be done.

Chan Is Missing is a wonderful film, filmed for next to nothing ($22,000). Think of it as social commentary in the form of a detective story.

Domestic comedy

“I’ve done that inadvertently.”

“You should do it vertently.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

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Bix to Yoko in three or four Now with two paths.

Bix to Yoko in three or four

I like thinking about degrees of separation, which seem to work — always — in dizzyingly unpredictable ways. E.g.: Barack Obama – Buddy Guy – Son House – Charlie Patton. Guy played at a White House function; Guy and House played together on the television show Camera Three. And then we’re back in the Mississippi Delta.

How many degrees of separation are needed to get from Bix Beiderbecke to Yoko Ono? There’s at least one way to do it in four moves, and at least one way to do it in three. And there may (I hope) be ways to do it that have not occurred to me. Each person after Bix, including Yoko, counts as one move.

Can you solve the Bix to Yoko challenge? Leave your solution as a comment. If no one gets it, I’ll reveal my solutions tomorrow.

A related post
Six degrees of Richard Nixon

[My having met Barack Obama gives me four degrees of separation from Charlie Patton.]

*

June 18: One Bix to Yoko path is now in the comments. Here’s the in-three that I thought of: Jack Teagarden played with Bix and with Chuck Berry. (Really: Teagarden was part of the Newport Blues Band on the stage with Berry at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.) And Berry performed with John and Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show. Bix to Teagarden to Berry to Yoko.

RZ

My friend Rob Zseleczky died a year ago. The one thing I have learned about losing a friend — or losing anybody — is that the losing goes on for a long time, taking different forms at different times. In other words, you keep losing.

How many times in the last year have I read or noticed something that I’ve wanted to tell Rob about? Many.

I wrote these words for Rob last year. There’s a poem of his there too that I love.

Bloomsday 2014

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and stretches into the early hours of June 17. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s catechitical next-to-last episode. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are in Bloom’s kitchen, sharing the sacrament of Epps’s Cocoa.

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen’s present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom’s present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy. Union City, New Jersey. November 28, 1957.]

I looked up the date: it was a Thursday. What we were doing posing for pictures on a weekday? And then I realized: it was Thanksgiving.

I am very thankful to have Jim Leddy for a father. Happy Father’s Day to him and to all fathers.

From Robert Walser

I always walked along the same path, and every time it seemed entirely new. I never tired of delighting in the same things and glorying in the same things. Is the sky not always the same, are love and goodness not always the same? The beauty met me with silence. Conspicuous things and inconspicuous things held hands with each other like children of the same mother. What was important melted away, and I devoted undivided attention to the most unimportant things and was very happy doing so. In this way, the days, week, months went by and the year ran quickly round, but the new year looked much the same as the previous one and again I felt happy.

Robert Walser, “Spring,” in A Schoolboy’s Diary, trans. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2013).

Other Walser posts
From “The Essay”
From “Reading”
Robert Walser, Microscripts
Staying small

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Another school principal borrows from DFW’s commencement speech Now with added technology to prevent plagiarism.