Larry Butler Yeats

Larry David, with “a big job to do,” asks a men’s room attendant (Adrian Martinez) to grant him some privacy and step out of the room. But it’s Harold’s job to stay in there. From the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode “The Ugly Section” (March 1, 2020):

“I’m a dying animal.”

“I dunno what to tell you.”

[If Yeats — “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is” — is not behind this exchange, I’m giving someone way too much credit.]

First glimpses of the little gang

“I have to admit, the parasol didn’t seem to be producing exactly the effect that I had hoped for”: from “Young Girls,” Deborah Treisman’s translation of a passage from the long-lost Proust manuscript now in print as Les soixante-quinze feuillets. The passage gives us the narrator’s first glimpses of what will become “the little gang” of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The girls are already aloof and modern; the narrator, already hapless.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Smear shots”

[A New York Times headline, July 12, 2021.]

For a moment I thought that Fox News was hosting smear shots — people taking potshots and smearing the idea of vaccination. Which of course is what they do.

The headline is a garden-path sentence, and as it’s a headline, it’s also known as a crash blossom.

Other garden paths
“Cultured klepto” : “Father of off-duty cop” : “Virtually everything”

Innovation-speak, &c.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lee Vinsel writes about “innovation-speak and business bullshit” in higher education:

An administrator friend sent me a quotation about a faculty member’s work he’d provided to his university’s PR person. It was full of platitudes and nonsense about innovation, discovery, and a much-improved future that the work would create “impactfully.” My friend said he came up with the words in under 10 seconds while in a Zoom meeting on another topic with soccer playing on a television in the background and several social-media and messaging apps open on his phone and laptop.

It is worth striving to bring university communications within the realm of truth-seeking, but doing so would require universities that are quite different than the ones we have today. You have to imagine universities where the felt need to produce words does not outpace the time to think. The root of our word “school” is the Greek word skholē, meaning leisure or free time. To create a school is to create space for thought.

Lee Vinsel teaches at Virginia Tech. He has a website about his work.

[You can dodge the Chronicle’s sign-up request by choosing your browser’s Reader View or by using the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet.]

Letterlocking

Letterlocking: a way to keep your correspondence confidential.

Found via Mike Brown’s Oddments of High Unimportance.

Goodbye, Hackensack Record King

After fifty-six years, Hackensack Record King is closing. But not for lack of customers.

Thanks to the New Jersey reader who sent the news.

A related post
Shopping on Main Street, Hackensack

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1920 letter:

It is possible that a book of mine (Le Côté de Guermantes), which should have appeared much sooner or much later, will come out very soon. In any case, I shall send it to you at once. This volume will still be “proper.” After that the book will be less so without its being my fault. My characters do not turn out well; I am obliged to follow them wherever their flaws or their aggravated vices lead me. . . .

Please accept, cher monsieur et ami, my grateful regards.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Paul Souday, October 8, 1920. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Paul Souday (1869–1929), journalist, literary critic for Le Temps, had written a largely negative review of Swann’s Way. “Souday had sarcastically reproached the author for the banality of his ‘childhood memoirs.’ Instead of compelling events, ‘the matter of the story’ comprised vacations and games in the park”: William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Proust’s apology — don’t blame me, it’s the characters — is a wonderful demonstration of how a writer might reckon with a critic.

What followed The Guermantes Way ? Sodom and Gomorrah.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword is by Greg Johnson. Pretty dang easy — it makes me miss the Stumper.

Clue-and-answer pairs I especially like:

1-A, ten letters, “Face covering.” A nice bit of misdirection to start things off.

7-D, three letters, “Name that looks like a number.” Fun to suss out.

9-D, nine letters, “Devoted a whole show to, say.” I like the dowdiness.

17-A, ten letters, “Show watched by Spanish learners.” My first idiosyncratic (and dated) thought: ¿Qué Pasa, USA?

33-D, five letters, “Goddess well-regarded by Athenians.” Nice to know what her name means.

39-D, eight letters, “Archie Comics hangout.” For the characters, I presume, not the artists and writers.

41-A, six letters, “Dolly’s ‘I cannot compete with you’ woman.” Sung by two generations in my fambly.

60-A, ten letters, “Moby-Dick, e.g.” That’s a name, not a title.

66-A, ten letters, “Shaving in the kitchen.” Sounds like a Depression life hack. “The dish of water you set out last night over the stove’s pilot light will now be warm,” &c.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Mr. Goodman

Our narrator, V., has a strong antipathy to a Mr. Goodman, his half-brother’s secretary, who has already written a biography, The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, a “slapdash and very misleading book” that makes no mention of V. Watch what happens with Mr. Goodman’s name in these paragraphs.

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941).

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Effing-

Effing-crazy in Effingham. And some more crazy.