Writing in The Atlantic, Tim Naftali, historian, says it’s Donald Trump**:
As a result of his subversion of national security, his reckless endangerment of every American in the pandemic, and his failed insurrection on January 6, one thing seems abundantly clear: Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.With all the necessary comparisons.
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).
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
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.”
[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.
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.[My transcription, from watching again at C-SPAN. One source for the Joyce quotation: Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty (1964).]
“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.”
[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.
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.Skip James, not so much:
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).
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.Related reading
Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1994).
