“The art of scything”

Renée Michel is the concierge at 7 rue de Grenelle, Paris. She keeps a journal. Here she likens her writing to scything, “conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation”:


Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, trans. Alison Anderson (New York: Europa Editions, 2008).

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a beautiful novel, made of the journal entries of Madame Michel and Paloma Josse, a twelve-year-old child of affluence and resident of the building. As their journal entries show us, Madame Michel and Paloma think in remarkably similar ways about art and life and language. Rather similar to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which we see characters, at least sometimes, thinking along parallel lines, or looking at the same thing, neither of them knowing it.

But The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a perfect antidote to To the Lighthouse. Madame Michel is the kind of character who would be a mere figurant in the Woolf world, without consciousness and virtually silent. So many such characters (if they can even be called characters) populate Woolf’s novel: the maid, the cook, the women who clean up the Ramsays’ summer house, the man who helps them, the tradesmen who do repairs, the sailor and son who take Mr. Ramsay and two of his children to the lighthouse. They’re all more or less figurants, and the novel has little or no interest in what they might think and feel.

I know — To the Lighthouse is that kind of novel, and there is much in it that dazzles me, especially the eerie middle section, “Time Passes.” But there’s something wonderful about leaving that kind of novel for one in which a concierge who describes herself as “born in a bog and bound to remain there” is a secret reader of Husserl and Tolstoy and a connoisseur of Dutch still lifes and Japanese cinema. We learn about all of it from her journal. Things, or people, ain’t always what they appear to be.

My identity as a child of the working class is at work in my ambivalence about Woolf: I know that in the world of To the Lighthouse, my dad would be knocking out and redoing a wall in the Ramsays’ twenty-years-neglected bathroom. And I might be helping him if I weren’t off at university on scholarship.

[This post began as a sort of scything, texting back and forth with a friend. I don’t know how the final paragraph showed up.]

A grand cake

[Nancy, May 6, 1950. Click for a larger cake.]

Stan Carey offers a helpful commentary on the uses of grand in Ireland and elsewhere.

Nancy herself will feel grand once she cuts herself “a slice” — that is, the top half of the cake, the part with the icing. Enjoy, Nancy, and watch out for Aunt Fritzi.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
“Mother, you always pick the grandest things”

Whale, oil, beef, hooked

From NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, an interview with Sam Lilja, the dialect coach for Little Women and other films. With a quick lesson in how to do an Irish accent:

Say the words whale, oil, beef, hooked.

Then say them all together, fast.

[This lesson came in handy when I learned about Orson Bean’s later-life politics.]

Recently updated

Orson Bean (1928–2020) Now with Bean’s later-life swerve to the right, unmentioned in his New York Times obituary.

Orson Bean (1928–2020)

From a New York Times obituary for the actor and television personality Orson Bean:

While he eventually performed in some 50 television series and 30 films, he may be best remembered for his appearances on early panel shows, which, in contrast to the greed, noise and kitsch of many modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated.

“We were much more intelligent then,” Kitty Carlisle Hart, a frequent panelist with Mr. Bean, told The Times in 1999. “It sounds like an awful thing to say, but it’s true.”

Yes, it is.

When Miss Carlisle (as she was known) died in 2007, I wrote in a post,

She was one of the people who seemed to be living on television when I was a boy, along with Steve Allen, Peggy Cass, Arlene Francis, Phyllis Newman, and Nipsey Russell, friendly presences every weekday after school.

I should have remembered Orson Bean as well.

Here’s an entertaining episode of To Tell the Truth from 1964 with Orson Bean and friends.

*

February 9: Daughter Number Three has a post about Orson Bean’s later political life and his influence on Andrew Breitbart. See also this Hollywood Reporter article: “The men had a weekly meal together at Hal’s, a restaurant in Venice, and many point to those chats as the source for Andrew’s brand of populist-conservatism.” All the Times obituary says is that Bean’s daughter Susie married Breitbart, with no reference to Bean’s later-life swerve to the right. A Los Angeles Times obituary quotes Breitbart on Bean’s “sharp ideological metamorphosis.”

Bleach, please

⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩ returns to the White House from Charlotte, North Carolina. Photo by William Moon at the South Lawn of the White House on February 7, 2020 pic.twitter.com/n1a1Z93LrJ

— White House Photos (@photowhitehouse) February 7, 2020

Aaron Rupar confirms that this photograph is genuine. Now I need to rinse my eyes.

Donald Trump*’s orange of choice is reported to be a Swiss brand, Bronx Colors. More here and here.

*

4:12 p.m.: The photographer is apparently a Trump* enthusiast with access to open press events. A Getty Images photograph of the same reality shows less orange but the same grotesque mask.

4:54 p.m.: But here’s another Getty image, same time and place, with much more orange. And another with even more orange.

[Caution: no matter how many photographs, never really use bleach to rinse your eyes.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

was a killer.

If this post were a Marianne Moore poem, that’s how it might continue from its title, if Moore were in a slangy mood and writing about crosswords. Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, is exceedingly difficult. Do “Marmoset cousins” (44-A, eight letters) turn up in Moore’s poetry? Not that I can find. But that clue is, for me, a fair sample of this puzzle’s difficulty. Working at it, I felt — sigh — so “Totally alone” (44-A, eight letters), and not in the way that clue’s answer would suggest.

Not everything here is difficult. I had early help from 24-A, eight letters, “‘Fun to make’ snack brand.” And from 60-A, nine letters, “Current successor of the ’60s slogan ‘Let's Eat Out!’” Or rather, I had help from my TV-saturated life. “Let’s Eat Out!”: what a sad slogan when you think about its source.

But elsewhere, difficulty, difficulty, difficulty. 31-D, nine letters, “Not pressing.” 38-D, eight letters, “Like a chill in the air.” NODUEDATE? No. SEASONAL? Uh-uh. I ended up doing something I’ve never done before with the Saturday Stumper — checking letters in the browser, never more than one to a word, the only way I could rule out wrong guesses. I still needed eighty-one minutes to finish the puzzle.

Clue-and-answer pairs I especially admired:

1-A, nine letters, “Occupation associated with Tennessee.” I thought whiskey. DISTILLER? No.

1-D, five letters, “Drizzle on some leaves.” Just a bit of misdirection.

13-D, nine letters, “They’re taken when leaving home.” HOUSEKEYS? No.

26-A, six letters, “Red state.” I’m back in E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture. Good times.

32-A, nine letters, “Write.” PUTININK? No, that’s eight. (PUTIN INK is what’s Donald Trump*’s to-do lists are written in.) The correct answer is straight from the dowdy world.

40-D, seven letters, “Novel assumption, now and then.” REALISM? No.

45-D, six letters, “Where strikes are seen.” No great cleverness is needed to see the context, but there’s still a bit of rethinking needed to get the answer.

I’d say that 1-A and 13-D tie for first in today’s Stumper. No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Stephen Joyce (1932–2020)

James’s grandson. From a New York Times obituary:

Stephen Joyce gleefully maintained an iron grip on his grandfather’s printed works, unpublished manuscripts, letters and other material, although his hold loosened somewhat on the 70th anniversary of James Joyce’s death, when most copyrights on his masterpieces like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake expired. He said he was safeguarding the material’s literary integrity and defending them from critics and biographers, whom he likened to “rats and lice” that “should be exterminated.”

According to a New Yorker piece that the obituary cites, it wasn’t just “critics and biographers” but all academics: “Academics, he declared, were like ‘rats and lice — they should be exterminated!’”

Not a good guy.

I hope that Stephen Joyce and his admirer Paul Zukofsky (“‘What I’ve heard sounds very, very good. He is a staunch defender of rights.’”) have a chance to chat in that other world.

[“That other world”: from Ulysses. “I do not like that other world” is a sentence in Martha Clifford’s letter to Leopold Bloom, who corresponds with her as “Henry Flower.” Did you catch the agreement error in the passage from the Times?]

Domestic comedy

“Just so you know — it’s pronounced Stōffer’s.”

“What did I say?”

“Stauffer’s. Just so you don’t embarrass yourself in public.”

“I wouldn’t embarrass myself. It’s not like a shibboleth — except among the astronauts.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[If nothing here makes sense, see this post.]

Sherrod Brown on fear and power

Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator from Ohio, writing in The New York Times, says that “For the stay-in-office-at-all-cost representatives and senators, fear is the motivator”:

They stop short of explicitly saying that they are afraid. We all want to think that we always stand up for right and fight against wrong. But history does not look kindly on politicians who cannot fathom a fate worse than losing an upcoming election. They might claim fealty to their cause — those tax cuts — but often it’s a simple attachment to power that keeps them captured.

As Senator Murray said on the Senate floor in 2002, “We can act out of fear” or “we can stick to our principles.” Unfortunately, in this Senate, fear has had its way. In November, the American people will have theirs.

[In 2002 Patty Murray (D-Washington) voted against authorizing the use of military force against Iraq.]