An “over and over”

[Henry, July 11, 2017.]

I feel a Zippy-like “over and over” coming on: Brick and mortar! Brick and mortar! Brick and mortar!

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Another shoe

[The New York Times, July 10, 2017.]

“Part of a Russian government effort”: got that, Junior? Part of. A Russian government effort.

[Another shoe, not the other. Who knows how many shoes need to drop?]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

How happy I should be if you would discover a title for me! But I should like something quite simple, quite grey. The general title, you know, is In Search of Vanished Time. For the first book, which will be published in two volumes (if Grasset allows a box for two volumes), would you have any objection to Charles Swann? If I do a single volume of 500 pages, I am not in favor of this title because the final portrait of Swann will not be included in it, so my book wouldn’t carry out the implications of the title. Would you like, Before the Day Has Started? (I shouldn't.) I had to give up The Heart’s intermissions (original title), The Wounded Doves, The Past Suspended, Perpetual Adoration, Seventh Heaven, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom, titles which, however, will be chapter headings in the third volume. I have told you, haven’t I, that Swann’s Way comes from the two ways of going to Combray? In the country, you know, people say, “Are you going M. Rostand’s Way?” But I don’t want this book to appear with a title that is offensive to the only friend whom, in spite of my effort to emerge from my “phenomenal me,” I have been unable to put out of my mind while writing it. So I shall take another title. I should take Charles Swann if I could explain that these are only the early portraits of Charles Swann.

                                Yours with all my heart,
                                Marcel Proust

P.S. Would you like as a title for the first volume, Gardens in a Cup of Tea, or The Age of Names. For the second, The Age of Words. For the third, The Age of Things? The one I prefer is Charles Swann, if I could make clear that is not all of Swann; First Sketches of Charles Swann.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Louis de Robert, Summer (?) 1913. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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OED Word of the Day: madeleine

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is the ultra-appropriate madeleine.

My most recent madeleine: the stick at the center of a Good Humor bar. Does anyone else remember what it’s like to taste that slightly nutty wood?

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The Post New York Post

A parody from 1984: the Post New York Post, a post-nuclear-war edition of the New York Post. It’s very much of a time and place. My favorite bit so far, from a photo caption:

Writhing nuke victims look on gratefully as newly appointed city fallout shelter chief Leona Helmsley makes her rounds. She had beds turned down and mints placed on each patient’s fluffed pillow.

Here, from The New York Times, is some background.

Times as Post

Lena Dunham says she had to give up her dog Lamby because of behavioral issues, but an employee at the shelter where the writer got him disputes her claim.

That’s the front-page sidebar summary of a Friday New York Times article. Kinda like a Times version of the New York Post.

How might the Post do it? My best shot: Dunham Dumps Doggy — Shelter Bites Back!

*

11:30 a.m.: The real Post headline, which I just discovered: “Shelter says Lena Dunham’s dog tale doesn’t add up.” The headline in the Post URL: “Lena Dunham’s adoption story goes to the dogs.”

“A Billionaire for the Rest of Us”

The 2018 gubernatorial race in Illinois is taking shape as a battle of the billionaires. A leading Democratic contender is a billionaire. The Republican incumbent may be a billionaire. I’d say that only his hairdresser knows for sure, but the governor is just folks, droppin’ -gs and whatnot and goin’ to the barber every four weeks. No hairdresser for him.

I offer this parodic campaign slogan to any billionaire who’d like to use it. I was happy to discover that it appears nowhere on the Internets:



Does being a billionaire disqualify one from running for public office? I don’t think so. But I’d rather put my vote elsewhere.

[The barber data is made up. I have no idea how often Bruce Rauner gets a haircut.]

A social network

Tim Flannery says that for trees, life ”in the slow lane” is “clearly not always dull”:

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today.

From the foreword to Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, trans. Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver: Greystone, 2016).

[Two pages in, and I’m gaping.]

Domestic comedy

“. . . farm-fresh, hand-crafted, local . . .”

“You had me at farm-.”

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Budget!

For the first time in more than two years, Illinois has a budget. Yes!

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[How many times have I called state legislators in the last three years? I’d guess seventy-five times or so.]