The George Floyd Bunt Staff

Fresca posted a photograph of a man playing a Bundt pan instrument in George Floyd Square. “That’s Douglas Ewart!” I said.

Douglas was playing a “sonic sculpture” of his creation, the George Floyd Bunt Staff, which he describes as “an idiophone comprising tin and cast-aluminum Bundt baking pans whose sonic potential and possibilities are incalculable.” The staff honors Floyd as “the Everyday Hero,” known to and loved by many. As Douglas says,

George Floyd Bunted with his life to open the eyes, and awaken hearts, portals, conscience, intelligence, ire, reprimands, demands, and commands.

Here is Douglas Ewart’s website. Here is his commentary on the instrument and the events that gave rise to it. And here is a short video, with Douglas, Ananya Chatterjea, and Julia Gay playing staffs. Videography and editing by Stephanie Watt.

How do I know Douglas Ewart’s music? From LPs and CDs of course. But also from three performances at the University of Illinois, with Stephen Goldstein, Wadada Leo Smith, and Quasar.

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Vaccine, anyone?

When I got my first Moderna shot in March, I was hugely hopeful about vaccination in deep-red Illinois. At that time, the local hospital was vaccinating up to 800 people a day. Now I see the percentage of the population that’s been vaccinated rising at an alarmingly slow pace: 25.92%, 25.97%. My hopes for widespread vaccine acceptance here were ill-founded.

I called the local health department this morning to suggest adding information on vaccination to the daily Facebook post that gives the number of new cases. Before today, those posts suggested just three ways to avoid COVID: hand-washing, masks, and distance. I suggested adding vaccination, with contact info. Yes, good idea, and that info appeared in the new post this afternoon.

What I didn’t know before this morning is that vaccine supply in our area far exceeds demand. It appears that people who want a vaccine have, for the most part, already been vaccinated. As for everyone else — ? You can imagine what it must feel like to be working in the cause of public health when so many people are unwilling to do what’s needed to get us out of this mess.

Also this morning: Elaine heard from a family that will not be participating in an annual summer orchestra for all ages. The members of the family do not feel “comfortable” wearing masks.

This is where we live.

*

The recent This American Life episode “The Herd” is relevant here. It includes a profile of a public-health official and an account of Republican pollster Frank Luntz’s effort to figure out what might persuade Trump** voters to get vaccinated.

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✓

Amitava Kumar writes about writing and the power of the check mark: “The Oldest Productivity Trick Around” (The New York Times).

Jerry Seinfeld did the same thing with a big X.

[That X is a link.]

Writing and dressmaking

As Marcel thinks about the work of writing he’s about to begin, he tries out various metaphors. He imagines working alongside his servant Françoise: the writer as another dressmaker.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

And here’s another writer, Godfrey St. Peter, professor, historian, who shares his attic study with a dressmaker, Augusta, who comes to sew for his family, three weeks every spring, three weeks every fall. St. Peter and his wife Lillian are moving to a new and far grander house, but he insists on continuing to rent the old house so that he can work in the attic. And he insists on keeping Augusta’s dress forms there. But he’s willing to let her dress patterns go.

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Knopf, 1925).

Cather will later write that it is in the attic that St. Peter’s notes and ideas are ”woven into their proper place in his history.”

Cather called Proust “the greatest French writer of his time,” but there’s no possibility of influence here. The Professor’s House appeared three years after Proust’s death and two years before Le Temps retrouvé. I take these passages as a remarkable instance of synchronicity.

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Proust and Cather

[Supplementary pages? A glance will give you an idea.]

Nancy reflections

It’s hot, and Nancy has been wondering if the heat can melt bubble gum.

[Nancy, September 8, 1955. Click for a larger bubble.]

I like the reflections on the glass, especially the way they cut through the gumballs.

Yesterday’s Nancy is also today’s Nancy.

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[Merriam-Webster still has the noun as an open compound: bubble gum. Some compound words refuse to be closed.]

When in doubt, scroll

I opened Dropbox on a new iPad for the first time and — uh-oh.


Oh shoot. What’s a cheapskate to do? Scroll! And look closely:


So I removed three devices, two of which were already wiped clean and given away.

Do you think the absence of “Or remove some devices” from the first screen is a matter of accident, or a matter of design?

I still like Dropbox. If you’d like to try it, here’s the obligatory referral code that gives us each an extra 500 MB of free storage.

Giggles and glances

Marcel is enduring the actress Rachel’s dreadful recitation:

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Oh those young people. I recall from grad school days a poetry reading with an ultra-distinguished poet who begged off reading his work after repeated starts and stops. He had a cold. He announced that he would comment on his poems, which would be read by the fellow who introduced him, a Jesuit priest who had not been prepared for this eventuality. (Who would be?) I think it was a line about thighs &c. that set us off — just the incongruity of it all.

On a more reserved note, I recall sitting at a dinner table with my friend Rob Zseleczky, both of us waiting to see how one was supposed to eat an artichoke. Innocents abroad, or at least in someone else’s house. I bet Rob would remember it too. Our host was gracious.

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Adam Gopnik on Proust

Adam Gopnik, in a cranky essay on Proust in The New Yorker:

Proust front-loads his novel with his philosophy of time. One of the oddities is that its most famous incident happens within the first dozen pages, and is, nonetheless, isolated from the rest: the narrator (Proustians haughtily resist identifying him with Proust himself, or referring to him as Marcel, though he obviously is) eats the crumbs of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea and is suddenly thrust back to his childhood at Combray.

Well, no. And no.

In the Penguin edition of the novel, the madeleine episode begins on page forty-five. And “Proustians,” whoever they are, often refer to the narrator as Marcel. See, for instance, the brief commentaries by translators in the Penguin edition. Or see, for instance, the novel itself. In The Prisoner, we are told that when Albertine speaks to the narrator,

her first words were “darling” or “my darling,” followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce “darling Marcel” or “my darling Marcel.”

Granted, that’s a bit coy. But in the same volume, Albertine writes a letter that begins “Dear darling Marcel” and ends “Oh Marcel, Marcel!” These are the only references to “Marcel” in the novel, but they’re enough to confer that name upon the narrator.

So much strangeness in this essay. Gopnik seems disgruntled that all sorts of minor Proustian efforts are seeing publication. He declares that there is “nothing humanly unconvincing” about the cipher Albertine. He casts Proust as a “Belle Époque Tolkien” and suggests that he is an unusual figure in inspiring debate among non-specialists about preferred translations. Homer? Cervantes? Kafka? Enough.

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[Quotations from Carol Clark’s translation of The Prisoner (London: Penguin, 2003). Thanks to the reader who pointed out an egregious typo in my final paragraph.]

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