FML in colledge

A student at my university attended a party in violation of COVID-19 protocols, an unmasked off-campus party to mark “Unofficial” — that is, Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day. After testing positive for COVID-19, he posted a photograph of his test result to Snapchat with the caption “FML” — that is, “Fuck My Life.”

What a perfect me-centric way of seeing the situation. Never mind the friends or housemates or family members or community members he may have already infected. Never mind that he may have been the student who brought the virus to the party and infected others.

Well, that’s life in colledge.

Related posts
College, anyone? : Colledge signage : Homeric blindness in colledge

[I’m revealing nothing private here; this incident is public news. And colledge is not a typo.]

Hamlet, revised

Robert Saint-Loup has no interest in meeting M. and Mme Verdurin and company: “I find that kind of clerical circle exasperating,” he tells the narrator. Saint-Loup sees the Verdurins and company as “a small sect,” kind to those on the inside, contemptuous of everyone else. An apt comparision, as the Verdurins refer to their salon regulars as “the faithful.”

Listen to Saint-Loup, unnamed narrator:

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Anyone in academia has known such sects. They may be found in the ranks of both grad students and faculty. Sometimes they think of themselves not as a sect but as a “set.” I tend to call them “the anointed.” I never was one of them, nor was meant to be.

My friend Aldo Carrasco once mocked a grad school “set” in a letter: “They’re all too busy buying Entenmann’s cake for each other to read anything aloud.” Sometimes it was cookies.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[“Kind to those on the inside”: and even that’s not true. Ask M. Saniette.]

Signed today

President Joe Biden has signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Some context from Heather Cox Richardson:

Rather than focusing on dismantling the federal government and turning individuals loose to act as they wish, Congress has returned to the principles of the nation before 1981, using the federal government to support ordinary Americans. With its expansion of the child tax credit, the bill is projected to reach about 27 million children and to cut child poverty in half.

The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign Friday, is a landmark piece of legislation, reversing the trend of American government since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Rather than funneling money upward in the belief that those at the top will invest in the economy and thus create jobs for poorer Americans, the Democrats are returning to the idea that using the government to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans will rebuild the economy from the bottom up. This was the argument for the very first expansion of the American government—during Abraham Lincoln’s administration — and it was the belief on which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal.

Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.” “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”

It’s a good day.

A missing person

Yet another social gathering, this time at Mme Verdurin’s salon, home of “the faithful,” “the little clan,” and occasional visitors.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

The Norwegian philosopher, we are told, speaks French very well but very slowly. He also knows how to leave a gathering of some size: “The fact was that he had vanished without anyone having had the time to notice, like a god.” I’d say that he had the good sense to get out. Perhaps the narrator will follow his example.

I have long thought of such a departure as an Irish goodbye. I had wanted to make a joke about the philosopher being fluent in French and Irish, but I just learned that the Irish goodbye is also known as the Dutch leave, the French exit, and French leave. And in French, one might filer à l’anglaise.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[One reason the philosopher appears in the novel, aside from the comedy of his disappearance: he’s described as having recounted to the narrator, perhaps reliably, Henri Bergson’s thinking about memory and hypnotics.]

BILL’S RESTAURANT

A confusing chyron on The 11th Hour just now:

GOP SENATOR BRAGS ABOUT BILL’S RESTAURANT
      BENEFITS AFTER NOT VOTING TO PASS IT

“State Street Rag”

Thinking about guitar and mandolin duets, I thought of this recording:

[“State Street Rag” (Bogan–Armstrong). Louie Bluie (Howard Armstrong), mandolin; Ted Bogan, guitar. Recorded in 1934).]

On the flip side, “Ted’s Stomp” (Bogan–Armstrong), for violin and guitar.

Notice that the illustration accompanying the recording is by Howard Armstrong. For more of his life, music, and visual art, see Terry Zwigoff’s 1985 documentary Louie Bluie.

Small pleasures

From Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (dir. Albert Lewin, 1951). We watched this movie last night. Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner) inquires of Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick):

“What is today’s date, Stephen?”

“March the ninth.”

[No. 5 in a series.]

Yazoo Zippy, sort of

In today’s Zippy, Bill Griffith pays tribute to his great-grandfather, the painter and photographer William Henry Jackson. I knew there was something familiar about this image of two musicians.

[“Picture Maker.” Zippy, March 10, 2021. Click for a larger view.]

Of course: another Jackson photograph from this depot scene appears (uncredited) on the cover on the 1972 Yazoo LP Blues From The Western States 1927–1949 (L-1032). Here’s that photograph: Waiting for the Sunday Boat. You can see the album cover in this illustrated Yazoo discography. And here’s the photograph Griffith captures in today’s strip: True Lovers of the Muse.

*

Later in the day: I just discovered an earlier glimpse of True Lovers of the Muse on page 5 of Griffith’s Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist (2015), where the artist depicts himself examining the photograph with a magnifying glass.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Orange Crate Art, footnoting the comics since whenever.]

Louis Stettner in Penn Station

An online exhibition from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery: Louis Stettner’s The Penn Station Series (1958), twenty black-and-white photographs.

Would pair well with Walker Evans’s 1938–1941 subway photographs (collected under the title Many Are Called). Also with Stanley Kubrick’s 1946 photographs in New York subways. And with his film Killer’s Kiss (1955), which begins and ends in Penn Station. And with Aaron Rose’s photographs documenting the destruction of Penn Station.

“Paradises lost”

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

This idea reappears in Finding Time Again: “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.”

The large and ordinary world as I knew it before March 2020 feels like that paradise right now.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Ian Patterson’s translation in Finding Time Again: “the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.”]