“Who? Me?”

The narrator is walking with the painter Elstir who — guess what? — is a friend of “the little band,” “the little gang of girls” whose remote beauty fascinates the narrator. Several of the girls come into view at the end of an avenue. Trusting that Elstir will make an introduction, the narrator turns his back, and stoops to look in the window of an antique shop, “as though fascinated by something.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

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Today

President Joe Biden: “This is democracy’s day.”

And: “Democracy has prevailed.”

Yes, and yes.

It's getting dusty in here

In every corner of our living room. Maybe yours too.

Wrong way

As the Frank Sinatra recording of “My Way” came to an end, Air Force One took off. Well, there’s at least something a Trump** administration can coordinate — even if the farewell spectacle itself started late.

I will think of that “My Way” as the last public evidence of the Trump** presidency. And it’s perfectly characteristic: unlimited ego and grandiosity, tempered by not a trace of self-awareness, joined to an utter poverty of intelligence and imagination. I know, let’s use “My Way”!

“My Way” was preceded by (among others) the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

Uh-oh

“We will be back in some form.”

Stranger Things?

A cover for today

[Barry Blitt, “A Weight Lifted,” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. Click for a larger weight.]

Gives new meaning to the words “bird droppings.”

Drop him anywhere. In the nearest ocean perhaps.

The New Yorker has a brief feature on this cover and other Blitt Trump** covers.

Humanity in a president-elect

President-elect Joe Biden, speaking a little while ago in Wilmington, Delaware:

”My colleagues in the Senate used to always kid me for quoting Irish poets. They thought I did it because I’m Irish. I didn’t do it for that reason; I did it because they’re the best poets in the world.

“James Joyce was said to have told a friend that when it comes his time to pass, when he dies, he said, ‘Dublin [long pause], Dublin will be written on my heart.’ Well, excuse the emotion, but when I die, Delaware will be written on my heart, and the hearts of all of us, all the Bidens.”

[My transcription, from watching again at C-SPAN. One source for the Joyce quotation: Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1964).]

“Think only pleasant thoughts”

[Life, March 21, 1969. Click for larger muffins.]

In his book Class: A Guide through the American Class System (1983), Paul Fussell got it wrong:

If you merchandise tasteless little blobs of dough, you can sell billions of them by calling them “English” muffins.

Thomas’ English Muffins are not tasteless, nor are they blobs. They are a pleasant thought, though I really want to add a terminal s to Thomas’. To “keep right on going,” muffins no end, breakfast to midnight — that might be pleasant thought, though expensive.

English Muffin pizzas are, for me, a madeleine, though the ones I remember from childhood run along these lines. That’s right — ketchup and American cheese. The ketchup should go under the cheese. Madeleines come in many flavors.

I still like English Muffin pizzas, with pizza sauce, please. But hold the mozzarella. Only American cheese will do.

Knowing of

M. Bloch senior, dropper of names:

But the fact was that the only famous people whom M. Bloch knew were those he knew of, people whom, “without being acquainted with them,” he had seen in the distance at the theater or about town.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Skip James, not so much:

He was the opposite of the blues name-dropper, when asked about the fabled Mississippi bluesmen Rube Lacy and Kid Bailey (both of whom he had met), he would say “I know of  Rube Lacy,” or “I know of  Kid Bailey,” and fail to elaborate.

Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1994).

Related reading
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Pen wipers

[Nancy, June 11, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

No seamstress, she.

Webster’s Second has it as penwiper : “any device to wipe a pen.” The word is gone from the Third. Here’s a brief history of penwipers, pen-wipers, and pen wipers.

Yesterday’s Nancy is today’s Nancy.

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