“A marvelous Rembrandt”

In Doncières, the narrator stands in the dark, looking into lighted windows.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Merriam-Webster has niello, noun and verb.]

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Stan Newman, is a tough puzzle. As I worked at it, I though, Wait a minute, this puzzle is supposed to be easier than a Saturday Stumper. But this puzzle was comparable to a Stumper in difficulty. Not a lot of trickiness, but an awful lot of indirection. 20-D, five letters, “Official endorsements”? 25-A, four letters, “Office initials”? I had no idea, until I did.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

9-D, five letters, “Soprano line opener.” Clever.

17-A, eight letters, “Flag-capturing game.” I am surprised to see that this game is still around — the answer feels dowdy to me. Quick, to the rec room!

22-A, three letters, “‘Inside‘ amenity.” I was thinking it must be something for A-listers. Silly me.

55-D, four letters, “In the bag, perhaps.” The clue redeems the answer.

61-D, three letters, “He’s old-fashioned, ultimately.” Shades of the Stumper!

And my three favorites:

8-D, fifteen letters, “Diner menu listing that can’t be ordered.” Maybe obvious to some, but new to me. And I like anything with a diner in it.

35-A, “Theft insurance of a sort.” The other fifteen-letter answer in the puzzle. A useful reminder for those who need one.

58-A, eight letters, “Naval enlistee.” I admit it: I had to do some rethinking to see the plainly obvious answer.

One clue-and-answer I have to take issue with: 44-D, six letters, “Stradivari, secondarily.” No, he was not.

January 31: Good news: the Stumper is not gone forever. See this post.

Deadpan reportage

From a New York Times article about Lenka Perron, a one-time believer who found her way out of QAnon:

Mr. Trump himself was a source of doubt. Q presented him as a brilliant mastermind, and for a while she accepted that. But it became harder to reconcile that persona with what she observed in real life.

Sonny Fox (1925–2021)

Newsday has an obituary. And from last year, a brief interview. And here, from Montclair State University, is an extended look at Sonny Fox’s life and work, which included much more than Wonderama.

Raise your hand if you remember Wonderama.

Sardines and gin

Once unpacked, so to speak, the headline makes sense: “Popular Tin of Sardines gin bar to open in former Roker toilet block.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A Gris collage

At The New York Times, Jason Farago offers a close reading of Juan Gris’s Still Life: The Table.

[If I were teaching William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, this Times feature would be doing some of the work for me.]

Cicely Tyson (1924–2021)

Cicely Tyson, in a recent interview with The New York Times: “When I smile, I smile. I do not grin. There’s a difference, OK?” The Times has an obituary.

Cicely Tyson’s third appearance on television was in an episode of Naked City.

“Orange-colored envelope”

Mme de Guermantes: the narrator seeks to know “the mystery of her name,” which is not to be discerned when he sees her leaving her house or riding in her carriage.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).

I love the way what “my father’s friend had said” becomes, “after all,” the measure of objectivity. Proust is unsparingly comic in his presentation of a younger self.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Cloris Leachman (1926–2021)

The most abiding image: as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The most striking: as Christina Bailey, running down the highway in nothing but a trenchcoat in Kiss Me Deadly. The strangest: as Ruth Martin in Lassie, pre-June Lockhart. Jon Provost: “Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role.”

The New York Times has an obituary.

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