Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1912 letter:

Du côté de chez Swann is the fragment of a novel, which will have as a general title A la recherche du temps perdu. I should have liked to have published it as a single whole, but it would have been too long. They no longer publish works in several volumes. There are novelists, on the other hand, who envisage a brief plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous. I hope that by the end of my book what I have tried to do will be understandable; some unimportant little event will show that time has passed and it will take on that beauty certain pictures have, enhanced by the passage of the years.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November ?, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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Seymour Barab (1921–2014) With a link to a New York Times obituary.

VDP talks, plays, sings

At dublab (“a non-profit web radio collective devoted to the growth of positive music, art and culture”), Carlos Niño interviews Van Dyke Parks. I would say that Van Dyke is in fine fettle, but doing so would require that I first look up fettle. So I will say instead that he is in rare form — expansive, generous, funny, wise. A sample: “I worked very hard to be anonymous. And I finally achieved that goal.” Maybe. But Van Dyke has many irons in the fire and still more waiting on deck.

I just mixed metaphors.

Post-interview, Van Dyke plays and sings “The Silver Swan” (Orlando Gibbons), “Home in Pasadena” (Harry Warren, Grant Clark, Edgar Leslie), and his own “The All Golden” and “Orange Crate Art.” You might recognize the final little phrase from the theme music for PBS’s This Old House : it’s a bit of “Louisiana Fairy Tale” (Mitchell Parish, Haven Gillespie, and Fred Coots). Eclectic? It’s all music, and it’s all good.

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“Orphaned photographs”

“[P]eople die childless or separated from their families, children have their own lives to lead and can't be bothered, any number of things can sever the thread. Things drift off and go their own ways.” At Dreamers Rise, Chris Kearin looks at what he calls “orphaned photographs.”

Grammar brawl

“He said the fight began over a disagreement over grammar as well as their views on sports teams”: Grammar dispute becomes brawl (Beaver Dam Daily Citizen).

One of the BDDC ’s commenters might benefit from reading this post. If the brawl concerned the use of the subjunctive, the brawlers might benefit from reading it too.

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October 4: The alleged brawler has pleaded not guilty.

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February 5, 2015: The brawler has been — no pun intended — sentenced.

[Garner’s Modern American Usage: “pleaded is the predominant form in both AmE and BrE and always the best choice.”]

Naked City mystery guest

[From the Naked City episode “Howard Running Bear Is a Turtle,” April 3, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

She’s making her third appearance in television. Do you recognize her? Your best guesses are welcome in the comments.

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3:31 p.m.: The answer’s now in the comments.

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Another Naked City mystery guest : Yet another, sort of : And still another : And another (Scroll down to see him) : And two more

Overheard

“Did you know, Mother, that the sun shines practically every day in Los Angeles?”

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Things to do in Los Angeles (2012 edition)
Things to do in Los Angeles (2014 edition)

[It was months and months ago. The television was on for “warmth.” I wrote down this bit of dialogue on scrap paper. Just found it.]

“Paper wraps stone”

Without paper, we are nothing. We are born, and issued with a birth certificate. We collect more of these certificates at school, and yet another when we marry, and another when we divorce, and buy a house, and when we die. We are born human, but are forever becoming paper, as paper becomes us, our artificial skin. Everything we are is paper: it is the ground of activity, the partner to all our enterprises, the key to our understanding of the past. How do we know the past? Only through paper and all it records — and through architecture, of course, though architecture, as we shall see, rather depends on paper. So. Paper wraps stone.

Ian Samsom, Paper: An Elegy (New York: William Morrow, 2012).

Lively writing, yes; I especially admire the wit at the end of this passage. But here and elsewhere, Sansom makes absolute claims and large generalizations that defy plausibility. Is it really the case that we know the past “only through paper and all it records”? Archaeologists and anthropologists and cosmologists and geologists and paleontologists would be surprised to hear that. Assyriologists too would be surprised.

Reading Paper: An Elegy reminded me of an experience I had many years ago: a tour with a guide who did not stop talking. It was an eight-hour tour. Paper: An Elegy is often entertaining, but the book ranges so broadly and digresses so freely that it feels, finally, haphazard and a little exhausting. Best borrowed from a library.

[A book about paper that says almost nothing about diaries and notebooks and letters: kinda haphazard.]

Star Trek paper and pencils

At l’astronave, Fresca has a wonderful post on ancient writing technology in an episode of Star Trek. Fresca’s invented dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny, even if (like me) you know next to nothing about Star Trek. And there are Dixon Ticonderogas to be seen. Go, enjoy.

Opie Taylor, Mongol user

[“Opie’s Ill-Gotten Gain,” The Andy Griffith Show, November 18, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

Opie Taylor (Ronny Howard, not yet a Ron) is doing his math homework with a Mongol pencil. This episode’s title might lead you to suspect that the ill-gotten gain is the Mongol itself — it’s a fine pencil for a young ’un, mighty fine. Did Opie steal that Mongol from Walker’s Drug Store? Or from a classmate? No. The Mongol is not the ill-gotten gain. The ill-gotten gain is the new bicycle that Pa will give Opie as a reward for straight As. Why ill-gotten? Because Miss Crump wrote the wrong grades on Opie’s report card. WTF, Crump! Opie in fact has an F in math. And a new bicycle. And a Mongol, which did nothing to help him with his math.

The Mongol was the pencil of my childhood too. It’s still my favorite all-around pencil. It’s a fine pencil. Mighty fine.

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All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)