In search of lost passage

Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find a passage from Proust, something about love affairs in the past and present. Here’s what happened.

I think that the passage Batuman was looking for (and still is looking for?) might be this one, from the narrator’s recollections of the “young girls in flower” of his youth, girls who are now much older or already dead:

It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder that this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to what which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then.

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

Unlike Elif Batuman and ChatGPT, I have that passage (or most of it) at hand in a post about Proust gift tags and note cards. But that passage might not be the one in question.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

What’s on your nightstand?

[From Eva (dir. Joseph Losey, 1962). Click for a larger view.]

Francesca (Virna Lisi) has just one book on hers.

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“By the Book” for the rest of us

Bill Griffith and the Reuben Award

Bill Griffith has won the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. Congratulations to him.

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All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Yamandu Costa in Illinois

[Yamandu Costa in Illinois. September 9, 2023. Photograph by Elaine Fine.]

Elaine and I had the great good fortune to hear the guitarist Yamandu Costa yesterday in — of all places — east-central Illinois. His free performance was part of ELLNORA (so styled), the biennial guitar festival held at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

Yamandu is a household name in his native Brazil, and he performs widely in Europe and Latin America. His appearance at ELLNORA was one of only two performances in the United States this year. I’ve been following Yamandu’s music for several years via performances on YouTube and a lone CD. The chance to hear him in person was one I hadn’t counted on.

Yamandu’s range of expression on the guitar (the seven-string Brazilian guitar) is, to my ears, unparalleled. From a whisper to a storm, with impeccable taste, imaginative freedom, and extraordinary harmonic complexity — and maté at his side, which he says helps with faster numbers.

I arrived with my one CD yesterday and left with seven more. I asked Yamandu if he would sign two, and he insisted on signing them all, after slicing open the seven new ones — no hesitation — with his thumbnail.

Here are just two musical samples: an audience video from a September 7 performance in North Bethesda, Maryland, and a professional video of “À Legrand,” a composition dedicated to Michel Legrand. And here are Yamandu Costa’s website, Instagram, and YouTube channel.

Elaine too wrote about this performance, with a photograph of Yamandu at the signing table.

Note to the Krannert Center: bring Yamandu Costa back, please, before the next ELLNORA, and give him the Foellinger Great Hall, where he belongs. Obrigado.

Mind the gap

[561 Union Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Look past the wooden fence and the laundry hung out to dry: there’s a house back there. A recent real-estate listing ($2.695 million) tells the story of a property with “so much charm that even the pickiest Parisienne will melt.” At the time of this photograph though? Maybe not so much.

This is the sixth Gowanus photograph I’ve posted. I’m moving to an island in the Bronx next week.

*

September 12: An alert reader noticed the work of laundry:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

There’s someone at the window. But maybe also someone standing and waving to the camera?

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Today’s Saturday Stumper

What’s up with the Newsday crossword? The puzzle still won’t load from the Newsday website, at least not on my Mac. I’ve tried three different browsers, turned off content blockers, turned off iCloud Private Relay, and still no puzzle.

Brains Only and The Washington Post have the puzzle for online solving, but only on the day of publication. Newsday has slways made the puzzle available at 10:00 Eastern the night before, which makes Friday night Stumper Eve.

Last night I found a printable puzzle at creators.com. I started at 9:00 and was done at 10:00. Today’s puzzle, by Matthew Sewell, might be the most difficult Stumper I’ve ever completed.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, ten letters, “What Martha Stewart bakes with turkey ragu.” I’m not sure how one should clue this answer, but I’m not crazy about this kind of factoid trivia.

9-A, five letters, “Hunger (for).” This clue gives a good idea of the puzzle’s difficulty. It’s a fair clue, but the answer is surprising, at least to me.

10-D, fifteen letters, “Screenplay overhauls.” So that’s what it means.

18-A, ten letters, “Scrooge McDuck, by birth.” It’s a bit of luck that I’d just seen a movie that put the answer in my head. (Not a cartoon.)

20-A, five letters, “Kid-lit pachyderm, aptly enough.” New to me. My first guess was BABAR — because it sounds a bit like babytalk.

26-A, seven letters, “Perrier ingredient?” Très Stumper-y.

28-D, three letters, “Bingo alternative.” GIN? UNO? No, make it Stumper-y.

33-A, eight letters, “Aghast outburst.” I like the clue’s near-rhyme and the answer’s colloquialism. It just occurred to me that the word colloquialism is not at all colloquial, just as big is not big, but David Foster Wallace figured that out some time ago.

35-A, five letters, “Capacity.” See 9-A.

36-D, three letters, “Sports booster.” If you say so.

42-A, seven letters, “Fall break?” Yay!

43-D, six letters, “Met set.” Just a great clue.

46-D, four letters, “What films have to be.”

56-A, four letters, “Rodin’s thinker.” Tricky.

My favorite in this puzzle: 4-D, fifteen letters, “Corresponding request.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Gothamist hears from Lucy Calkins

WNYC’s Gothamist reports on the dissolution of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. And Lucy Calkins responds:

“I stand by what I have said often: In every corner of the city, some of the highest achieving schools are those using the Units of Study and have been partnering with the Reading and Writing Project,” she said.

Indeed, high-achieving schools are using the Calkins curriculum. Those schools represent the world that the Calkins curriculum was designed for, where kids have grown up reading the monograms on their bath towels. What Calkins fails to mention is that low-achieving schools use that same curriculum.

From the Gothamist report:

[New York City Schools Chancellor David] Banks often invokes city students’ poor reading test scores as proof that the previous approach was not working. Citywide, he says, just over half of students are not reading at grade level, including 64% of Black students and 63% of Latino students.

“Our teachers have been criticized … but I think we gave them the wrong playbook for how to teach children to read,” Banks said.

Calkins warns that the city is about to implement what she calls “a one-size-fits-all basal reading program.” But if phonics is one-size-fits-all, then so is the alphabet. And so what?

Basal sounds as if it too is meant as an insult. But there’s nothing wrong with laying a foundation.

A related post
TCRWP LC? LLC! (Close-reading the Teachers College statement about the dissolution of TCRWP)

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“Chairman Jordan, I tell people often ‘deal with reality or reality will deal with you.’ It is time that you deal with some basic realities”: if you haven’t read Fani Willis’s response to Jim Jordan, here it is. It’s a wow.

Salad years

A city day: we dropped into a Trader Joe’s to pick up some items. Potato salad? Nope. Macaroni salad? “Nobody’s asked for that in” — and then the employee stopped herself. No, they didn’t have that. Just pasta salad.

From childhood’s hour, I’ve thought of cold cuts and potato salad as a gold standard for “lunch.” And various breads, Gulden’s mustard, and dill spears, please. And I’d settle for macaroni salad.

[The Trader Joe’s website shows packaged potato salad and several recipes. No sign of macaroni salad though. No one’s asked for that in years.]