Proust’s Muse

Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay, the Countess Greffulhe, is the subject of an exhibition: Proust’s Muse, the Countess Greffulhe (Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York). The countess was an inspiration for Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes and Princesse de Guermantes.

Here’s a short video about the exhibition. A Wall Street Journal article about the exhibition recounts the writer Mina Curtiss’s encounter with the countess:

Curtiss asked about Proust. “I didn’t like him,” Countess Greffulhe said, citing “his sticky flattery.” She added, “And then there was the nonsense about my photograph, pestering . . . to get one from me. In those days . . . photographs were considered private and intimate. One didn’t give them to outsiders.”

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Autumn Almanac”

“Friday evenings, people get together, hiding from the weather.” From autumn 1967, it’s the Ray Davies song “Autumn Almanac,” performed by the Kinks: Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Pete Quaife, and Mick Avory.

I’m now convinced that there were three great pop groups in the 1960s: the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks.

Trump music

Elaine and I somehow, I know not how, got on a Donald Trump mailing list. When the first mailing came, we each wrote back with a clear message: take our names off your list. A second mailing arrived today. We each called a toll-free number (meant for donations) and asked that our names be removed. Why two calls? Only one “form” can be filled out per call.

The music that played for each of us as we waited on hold: a Mozart piano sonata. Wait, what?

Twistee Treat

[“As seen in east-central Illinois.” Click for a super-jumbo cone.]

This soft-serve stand closed in 2014. Goodbye, novelty architecture. Goodbye, summer.

“A good summer to be an epiphyte”

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“September,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

[In Illinois, June, July, and August 2016 were the wettest June, July, and August on record.]

FOHN

I do the New York Times crossword in its syndicated form, which means that today is August 10. I let my paid subscription lapse not long after TORME was clued as “Cool jazz pioneer.” Wrong, very wrong.

Anyway: the August 10 puzzle, a Wednesday puzzle, mid-week, not meant to be especially difficult, has a number of obscurities, one of which is the answer to 53-Down, “Warm Alpine wind”: FOHN (föhn ). I know that word because it makes a memorable appearance in John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969). Ashbery explains in a Paris Review interview:

A gag that’s probably gone unnoticed turns up in the last sentence of the novel I wrote with James Schuyler. Actually it’s my sentence. It reads: “So it was that the cliff dwellers, after bidding their cousins good night, moved off towards the parking area, while the latter bent their steps toward the partially rebuilt shopping plaza in the teeth of the freshening foehn.” Foehn is a kind of warm wind that blows in Bavaria that produces a fog. I would doubt that many people know that. I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to open the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. They'd be closing one book and opening another.

Foehn , or föhn , or FOHN, is clearly (ha) obscure. But I got it. I wish I could say the same for SQFT and TSWANA.

Related posts
Crosswords : John Ashbery : James Schuyler

“To be happy”

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

“Fancy Goods,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : “Pencils of light” : On readers and writers : On writing materials : Smoke and ink

“Pencils of light”

A highly convoluted neighborhood, a network of streets that I had avoided for years, was disentangled at a single stroke when one day a person dear to me moved there. It was as if a searchlight set up at this person’s window dissected the area with pencils of light.

“First Aid,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials : Smoke and ink

Word of the day: eclogue

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today: eclogue . Though it’s an outdoorsy word (sort of), eclogue, like loll before it, would not have inspired effort in the brush-clearing department. Shepherds in eclogues don’t clear much brush. They talk and sing — much more fun.

Melville and Mitchell

At Dreamers Rise, Chris puts together the opening passages of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joseph Mitchell’s “Up in the Old Hotel.” Yes!