DST Proust

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

As I began reading this sentence, I wondered if I was about to read about DST, which, to my surprise, did exist in Proust’s lifetime.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[DST is a dodge, so that I don’t have to write daylight-saving time and look like a pedant because of the hyphen.]

Inside

On Friday, March 13, 2020, my life on pause began. Elaine and I went out to eat at our favorite restaurant that night (Thai food) and made a quick run to the supermarket, where I took a photo of an aisle emptied of paper towels and toilet paper. I remember that empty aisle as a sign of strange times. We then drove to play music for services at the Jewish community center (I’m just a fellow traveler) and made a fast exit before the oneg. These were pre-mask times, and I remember how uneasy I felt that night sitting in a restaurant and looking around at the other tables. I remember how uneasy I felt everywhere.

On March 14 I wrote in my datebook: “Inside the house as of today.” Well, more or less. One or the other of us has gone to get take-out from our Thai restaurant every Friday (minus the weeks when they’ve closed for holidays). We’ve shopped for groceries every two weeks, or, now, every three. We’ve made three stocking-up trips to our nearby “beverage depot” (read liquor store). And thank goodness for beverage depots. We played music for friends on Play on Your Porch Day (everyone masked and distanced). We marched in a Black Lives Matter march. We made an urgent, unexpected day-long drive to New Jersey to bring my mom to Illinois to move into an assisted-living residence and did all the necessary legwork to make that move happen. And we’ve taken a walk nearly every day, weather permitting.

It’s been a year of without: without bookstores, without concerts, without movies, without museums, and, most acutely, without our children and grandchildren in three dimensions. But we have ourselves and we have our lives. When we were walking today, I was listening to a This American Life segment about vaccination, and I thought about how many people aren’t here now, as I am, waiting for a shot.

On March 13 last year we made it home a little after 9:00. Now, as then, I am inside in the house.

Give ’em an inch . . .

. . . and they’ll take a foot.

[As seen on Twitter.]

It’s a Los Angeles thing. Specifically, a Silver Lake thing. It has to do with feet, or a foot, not guns.

Thanks, Rachel.

Related reading
The Foot Clinic sign (With in-person photos) : Leaving Silver Lake : A new home

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Greg Johnson, is not quite a Stumper, but it’s a satisfying puzzle. A distinctive feature: a pair of fifteen-letter answers, 7-D and 34-A, both clued as “Start of some feedback loops.” That’s delightful, and it’s appropriate that getting one of these answers gets you the other.

I started by taking a guess at 3-D, eight letters, “Purple-haired star with an ‘Ab Fab’ film cameo,” which gave me 1-A, four letters, “39 Down’s evildoer,” which in turn gave me 39-D, three letters, “Much-translated author, initially.” And I was off. The sticky wicket for me was 15-A, six letters, “Guinea pig resembler.” Those critters must be really good spellers.

Along with 7-D and 34-A, I found many delightful clues and novel (in my experience) answers. Some of what I especially liked:

21-D, eight letters, “Homemade Philly sandwich slice.” I haven’t thought of it, or them, in years. Surprisingly tasty, at least in memory.

22-A, four letters, “Guy in Parliament.” Not Fawkes.

24-A, nine letters, “Flee.” Nicely dowdy.

36-D, eight letters, “Hotel management figure.” The misdirection worked.

38-D, eight letters, “‘Look here.’” I first heard these words as argumentative, but I had misdirected myself.

42-A, three letters, “HAPPIER TO SEE ___ (POPEYE THE SAILOR anagram).” Crazy! I can imagine Popeye saying “You compleek me.” Or something like that.

51-D, five letters, “_____ a good one!’ (playwright pun).” It’s a good one, and a good way to redeem a bit of crosswordese.

54-D, four letters, “Inedible waffle.” Food for thought.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 64-A, six letters, “Distance between landings at Heathrow.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

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.