Proustian music

“Two new compact disks, both of them more or less perfect and charming, evoke the ambience of the Proustian musicale”: in The New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews recordings by Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih, and Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Tanguy de Williencourt.

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[But disk, New Yorker ? Really?]

Instant Hallmark

Turn mealtime into a Hallmark movie. For instance, while eating a blueberry muffin:

“Cancel the Blueberry Festival?! Berry Hollow wouldn’t be Berry Hollow without the Festival!”

Work and fame

One piece of advice:

“Work, achieve renown,” he said to me.

That’s Charles Morel, violinist, speaking to the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, who’s said that he finally wants to get to the work of writing. “Who’s that from?” the narrator asks. “From Fontanes, to Chateaubriand.”

Another piece of advice:

Work your ass off to change the language & dont ever get famous.

That’s from “Experiments,” a list of writing practices compiled by Bernadette Mayer and members of a St. Mark’s Church Poetry Workshop.

Sources: Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005). Bernadette Mayer et al., “Experiments,” in In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986).

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[Translator’s note: “‘Work, work, my dear friend, achieve renown.’ Chateaubriand cites the words as having been written to him in 1798, by the Marquis Louis de Fontanes (1757–1821), a mediocre writer with whom he had become friendly during his exile in England.”]

Sardines in film

[John Kellogg as Dan Monroe, newspaper reporter. From Tomorrow Is Another Day (dir. Felix E. Feist, 1951). Click for a larger view.]

Some reporter. He’s eyeing an ex-con and missing the big story: a sardine sandwich, only 25¢. There’s a tiny “¢” next to “25.”

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Typewriters in film

A short marvel of imagination and editing, by Ariel Avissar: The Typewriter (supercut).

Mike Brown at Oddments of High Unimportance passed on the link, found in Sameer Vasta’s newsletter Weekend Reading: Flashing Palely in the Margins. Thanks, Mike and Sameer.

Performative

When I hear the word performative on the news, I think back to graduate school, where I spent considerable time thinking and writing about speech-act theory. In speech-act theory, the word performative is both noun and adjective. Performatives, or performative utterances, are statements that satisfy these conditions:

A. they do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all, are not “true or false”; and

B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as “just,” saying something.

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

“I bet you a nickel,” “I bequeath you one thin dime”: given the appropriate circumstances, to say it (or write it) is to do it. That’s a short explanation of performative utterances.

Performative as an adjective invoked on the news is quite different. Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition:

disapproving : made or done for show (as to bolster one’s own image or make a positive impression on others).

A Merriam-Webster citation, from Alia E. Dastigir:

But when expressing outrage is as easy as posting a hashtag, a meme, or an empty black square, there’s a question of whether that outrage is genuine or performative.

So in speech-act terms, a performative is a statement that does something. In current everyday use, performative describes a statement that pretends to do something, that is merely a performance, that substitutes for doing anything of substance. One can of course bet or bequeath merely to bolster one’s image or make a positive impression. Still, such a bet or bequest is genuine, unless the bettor or bequeather is acting in bad faith. But something “made or done for show” is inherently ungenuine, not a matter of commitment to one’s statement, not a matter of obligation to another person (as a bet or bequest must be). It’s only an attempt to convince another of something about one’s self. Look at me: see how good I am?

Thus performative has become what H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage calls a “worsened word,” a formerly neutral or commendatory word that has acquired a pejorative meaning. Alas, that shift makes perfect sense when discourse, of all sorts, is too often a form of cheap performance. (Cue some senator reading Dr. Seuss.) One might imagine a book about the role of such performance in our politics. I bet it would do well.

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Dear Abby and J.L. Austin

[“Worsened words” is an entry in the second edition of Modern English Usage, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers. Among Gowers’s examples of worsened words: academic, epithet. Please notice that my “I bet” is not a performative. It’s a way I stating what I would anticipate. No stakes, no taker of a bet.]

Chess 1024

Chess in 1024 bytes: The Kilobyte’s Gambit. Two tips: 1. The opponent is highly aggressive. 2. It’s easy to mistake bishops for pawns.

St. Patrick’s Day in the comics

In ones that I read anyway: The Far Side is all green and Irish. Hi and Lois is all alcohol and Lucky Charms. (So tasteful.) Mark Trail is all four-leaf clovers. Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

[The name Leddy is Irish.]

“The roads were not lit”

Traveling through the dark to Mme Verdurin’s rented retreat, La Raspelière. The travelers are in carriages, after a train ride. What’s out there?

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

The hours are “nocturnal, pastoral, and marine” because it’s night, away from cities, on the coast. Why a “double sash” and “double journey”? That’s traveling through the dark and back again. The “double sash” of darkness alters the character of the social world of light. “The darkness sur- / rounds us,” as Robert Creeley wrote, and I think of every soirée in the Proust world as an unconscious attempt to stave off the darkness. There’s great poignance in the image of these salonistes again and again assembling at railway stations to board a train, travel to a station, and climb into the waiting carriages. And then they cimb back into the waiting carriages, travel back to the same station, and board the train to go home, in darkness once more.

Even without trains and carriages, anyone who’s driven to visit a friend who lives in a remote rural spot should have an idea of what it’s like to step into a bright household after an at least semi-mysterious darkness. What’s out there?

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[Sash? It’s écharpe, scarf. Nothing to do with double sash windows, nothing to do with (my first guess) heraldry.]

Meta doghouse

[Peanuts, March 19, 1974. Click for a larger view.]

Some context: Peppermint Patty has refused to go to school. She’s “the only kid in the history of education to have a straight ‘Z’ average,” she says. The final insult: a teacher criticized her lunch: “She said I had too many doughnuts and not enough carrots.” Peppermint Patty is just going to sit atop Snoopy’s doghouse: “He never had any education, and he’s done all right!”

Look carefully at that doghouse: it’s made of one wall and one side of a roof. Charles Schulz did, in earlier years, offer foreshortened views of Snoopy’s home, but the standard view became one wall and one side of a roof. On March 19 and March 20, 1974, Schulz showed the reader a meta doghouse, or guest cottage, a two-dimensional form rendered in three dimensions.

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.

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