What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says — but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.Other Walter Benjamin posts
“These Spaces for Rent,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
I found a book on the library’s New Books shelves: Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness by David Weeks and Jamie James (1995, not new, I know). I looked in the index for anyone I knew and landed on pages 84 and 85. Here’s Emily Dickinson:
Emily Dickinson always wore white, never went out of her room, and hid her poems in little boxes.Well, no. The 1846 daguerreotype of Dickinson (as a young woman) shows her wearing a dark dress. The 1859 daguerreotype that may be of Dickinson also shows dark clothing. In later life Dickinson became more reclusive and often wore white. She did not hide her poems in little boxes: she shared some of her work with close friends and published a handful of poems anonymously. And she wrote (famously) to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to ask for his thoughts about her poems — a gesture that suggests she was thinking of publication. Dickinson sewed pages together to bind her poems into fascicles. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson’s niece, described the fascicles and also noted “variants and fragments found lying loosely in drawers and boxes.” Lavinia Norcross Dickinson said that her sister’s poems were discovered in a locked box. Mabel Loomis Todd, Dickinson’s posthumous editor, kept Dickinson’s manuscripts locked away for decades in a camphorwood box. But did Dickinson hide her poems in little boxes? No.
One of the most widely admired pianists of the twentieth century, Glenn Gould is perhaps even more famous for his eccentric performance habits and extreme hypochondria that for his interpretive genius. He lived in deathly fear of drafts, and habitually appeared on stage dressed for an arctic expedition — in the words of Leonard Bernstein, “doubly hatted, doubly mittened, and endlessly muffled and mufflered.”Gould is perhaps even more famous for leaving the world of concert performance for the recording studio, a point that goes unmentioned in Eccentrics. Hypochondriacal, yes, of course, but the claim that Gould came on stage to perform in hats, mittens, and mufflers is absurd. It draws upon Leonard Bernstein’s account of having Gould over for dinner:
Bernstein invited the pianist to dinner at his place in the Osborne apartment house, just across from Carnegie Hall. “He was all bundled up,” Bernstein recalls, . . . “and he had an astrakhan hat over some other kind of hat, doubly hatted, doubly mittened, and endlessly muffled and mufflered.”And from another Bernstein account of the same dinner:
Otto Friedrich, Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations (1989). This title appears in the bibliography for Eccentrics .
At some point, early on — I think when he was doing the Beethoven C Minor Concerto with me — Glenn and I were going to do some work at my apartment, so I invited him to dinner first. This was the first time Felicia, my wife, had actually met him. As you know, Glenn had a “cold complex.” He had a fur hat on all the time, several pairs of gloves and I don’t know how many mufflers, and coat upon coat.I think it’s fair to assume a degree of comic exaggeration in Bernstein’s description. Comic or not, it’s not a description of a musician appearing on stage.
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
“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.
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?
[“As seen in east-central Illinois.” Click for a super-jumbo cone.]
This soft-serve stand closed in 2014. Goodbye, novelty architecture. Goodbye, summer.
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.]
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.
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.Other Walter Benjamin posts
“Fancy Goods,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
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.Other Walter Benjamin posts
“First Aid,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
