Tony Curtis (1925–2010)

[In drag as Shell Oil Junior in Some Like It Hot (dir. Billy Wilder, 1959).]

Tony Curtis, Hollywood Leading Man, Dies at 85 (New York Times)

Carlo Rotella on laptops in the classroom

Carlo Rotella doesn’t allow laptops in his classroom:

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

You can spend the rest of your life surfing the web, emailing, texting. You’ve got one shot at college.

Read it all:

Tuition lost on the techno-dependent (Boston Globe)

Review: Proust’s Overcoat

Lorenza Foschini. Proust’s Overcoat. Translated by Eric Karpeles. New York. Ecco Press. 2010. 128 pages, illustrated. $19.99.

Then he’d ask me to change the hot-water bottles, and he’d put an old fur coat, kept specially for the purpose, over his legs. He had another beautiful coat with a sealskin collar and lined with mink, which he wore going out when it was cold. But the old coat always had to be hanging over the foot of the brass bed.

Céleste Albaret, on Marcel Proust’s efforts to keep warm, in Monsieur Proust, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 2003)

Susan Sontag wrote that “To collect is by definition to collect the past,” an observation that seems trite until one thinks about it, as most of the getting we do in life is future-directed: books, clothes, food, lottery tickets. In Proust’s Overcoat, Lorenza Foschini tells the story of one staggeringly lucky and persistent collector of the past, Jacques Guérin (1902–2000), a perfumer and habitual browser of antiquarian shops and bookstores. He appears to have developed into a collector with preternatural speed: at eighteen he purchased a rare first-edition of Guillaume Apollinaire. At twenty he fell under the spell of Marcel Proust’s work. A year later, Erik Satie called Guérin “the charming bibliophile.”

In 1929, seven years after Proust’s death, Guérin had the good misfortune to find himself a surgical patient of Marcel’s brother Robert. Visiting Dr. Proust in his office after the operation, Guérin saw Marcel’s old furniture — a desk and bookcase inherited from his father — and stacks of manuscript pages. In 1935, several weeks after Robert’s death, Guérin happened into a bookstore whose owner had minutes before purchased hand-corrected Proust proofs. Thus began Guérin’s long association with the man who brought the proofs to the store, identified here only as “Werner,” a semi-mysterious dealer in secondhand goods who somehow — how? — had come into possession of Proustian property. Werner seems to have been something of a tormentor with a storage shed, always hinting at Proust items yet to be revealed. Guérin becomes not just a collector but a rescuer of all things Proustian, seeking out old associates in search of private revelations, developing a cordial relationship with Robert’s widow Marthe, and purchasing from Werner drawings, letters, notes, photographs, hairbrushes, rug, desk, bookcase, bed, and, finally, overcoat. With the coat comes the strangest discovery of all.

Foschini tells Guérin’s story with delightful ease and divagation. We meet Guérin’s mother Jeanne-Louise, a crafty capitalist, and learn something of the daily routine in a perfumery. We follow Guérin’s various efforts as literary patron (of Jean Genet, among others) and the dissolution of his collections. Foschini is especially good in pondering the complications and sorrows of the Proust family: father Adrian’s role in arranging his son Robert’s miserable marriage, Robert’s lack of interest in reading his brother’s work, Marthe’s unconscionable destruction of Marcel’s letters, the family’s general refusal to countenance Marcel’s sexuality.

Proust’s Overcoat is a wonderful piece of Proustiana, beautifully translated by Eric Karpeles. Think of this book as an imaginary documentary film, its subjects beyond any interviewer’s reach.


[Photograph from Proust’s Overcoat, courtesy of Eric Karpeles.]

Thanks to Ecco for a review copy of this book.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Toughbooks and dolphins

In June 2010, I posted some news about dolphins and iPads. Now Jack and Donna Kassewitz at SpeakDolphin have settled on Panasonic Toughbooks, models 19 and 30, for dolphin use. Read and watch:

Panasonic Helps Dolphin Research (SpeakDolphin)
Merlin and a Toughbook (Flickr set)
Merlin and a Toughbook (YouTube)

The Criterion Collection, FBI warnings

David Pogue has a column today about DVDs and FBI piracy warnings:

I absolutely cannot stand those stupid warnings. So typical of the short-sighted, pigheaded, greed-driven video industry, isn’t it? . . .

I don’t understand why some movie studio doesn’t decide to become the Good Guys of the industry. Get rid of all those annoyances, all the lawyer-driven absurdities, and market the heck out of it.

There is at least one such Good Guy, though a quiet one: the Criterion Collection. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piracy warning before a Criterion film. That absence seems to me a gesture of profound respect, treating the viewer as a viewer (and good customer), not a potential thief.

I wrote to Jon Mulvaney at Criterion this past summer to ask about this matter. No reply. Without watching every Criterion release (not a bad idea), it’s impossible to know if no-warning-before-film is a blanket policy. If anyone at Criterion sees this post, and wants to comment, I’d welcome their words.

Bryan A. Garner’s Twitter

If you’re visiting from Bryan A. Garner’s tweet, welcome. This post explains.

Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)

Van Dyke Parks’s performance last night with Clare and the Reasons was part of his first, ever, tour. The audience at Schubas Tavern ranged in age from the old (think canes) to the young (perhaps a third of VDP’s age, which is sixty-seven). These “real quality earthlings,” as VDP called us, assembled for a rare occasion.

I don’t know Clare and the Reasons’ music well enough to have constructed a set list. (That will change, I think, in the near future.) Their songs are beautifully conceived, arranged, and performed, with a surprising array of tonal colors: brass (French horn, trombone, bass trombone, played by guest musicians), violin, cello, clarinet, guitar, keyboard, electric bass, electronica, kazoo, soprano recorder, glockenspiel, whistling, modest percussion, and voices. Clare Muldaur Manchon and the three Reasons — Clare’s husband Olivier Manchon, Bob Hart, Jon Cottle — are exemplary musicians (as were the guest brass). The songs included “Pluton/Pluto” (a lament for the lost planet), “Wake Up (You Sleepy Head),” and, with VDP, Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me.” Most remarkable moment: Olivier Manchon taking a break from guitar to play glockenspiel and soprano recorder, one with each hand. Shades of the Art Ensemble of Chicago!

Van Dyke Parks (at the keyboard) was joined by the three Reasons on violin, guitar, cello, and electric bass, in arrangements that captured the textures of the far larger ensembles of his recordings (no small feat with, say, “Jump!” or “The Attic”). And Clare came back to the stage for a vocal duet on “Heroes and Villains.” Here’s a set list, all compositions by Van Dyke Parks except as noted:

Jump! : Opportunity for Two : Come Along : Orange Crate Art : Black Gold : Delta Queen Waltz (John Hartford) : Danza (Louis Moreau Gottschalk) : The Attic : Cowboy : Heroes and Villains (w/Brian Wilson) : The All Golden : Sail Away

For me, the musical revelation of hearing Van Dyke Parks live is the brilliance and energy of his pianism, foregrounded in the small-ensemble setting. My informed critical response: my God, what a pianist. He is, it turns out, a force of nature, an orchestral player, adding unpredictable and lavish embellishments. As he said, quoting someone (who?), “It only looks easy.”

Two moments that especially stick in my head: Van Dyke’s cry “This is central!” in “Black Gold” (about the Prestige oil spill), and his unaccompanied performance of “The All Golden,” about fellow musician and friend Steve Young. It’s one of my most favorite Parks songs, always suggesting to me a Gertrude Stein “portrait” set to music.

Music is only part of what Van Dyke brings to the stage. His performance was in the tradition of the Chautauqua, with extended episodes of “palaver” (his word) touching on everything from copyright law to beta males (he’s a proud one), to rock critics, to Clare and the Reasons (“Such big hearts”), to what he called “progress for profit”: “Merch, merch, merch along the highway.” I understood last night, in a new way, what it means for a performance to be a gift, something shared, for the betterment of performer and audience alike. I strongly suspect that Van Dyke (a student of the classics) thinks of the work of the performer in Homeric terms: to “lift the great song again,” to bring to an audience the most urgent news of the human story. Indeed, he spoke last night of the work of the songwriter as “epic.”

Van Dyke Parks is as generous offstage as on-. Elaine and I were fortunate to be able to spend the late afternoon with him, as his guests, partaking of afternoon tea at the Drake Hotel. The three of us carried on a conversation that was wide-ranging, allusive, musically informed, and perfectly grammatical. Thank you, Van Dyke! I hope that when we’re in California, we may have the opportunity to return your kindness.

[“[L]ift the great song again”: from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey (1961).]

Related reading
Clare Muldaur (On Frog Stand Records)
Van Dyke Parks (Official website)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1) (VDP’s card)
Tea at the Drake and More with Van Dyke Parks (Elaine’s take)

Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)

[Van Dyke Parks’s card.]

Back from Schubas Tavern, Chicago, where I heard Clare and the Reasons and Van Dyke Parks tonight, or last night. It is very late. Or is it early? A full report will follow soon. (Here it is.)

[VDP’s e-mail address is prominently displayed on his website. No breach of confidentiality here.]

Personal Post Office Scale

The Personal Post Office Scale (aka the MP 4000) is a beautifully dowdy appliance that lets the layperson emulate both Lady Justice and postal worker. Attach the alligator clip to the item to be mailed, hold the scale aloft by its ring, wait for the pointer to steady, and you’re done. The scale weighs up to four ounces of postal matter and comes with an impressive-looking, fold-out “up-to-date rate card” and vinyl case. Only $4.75 plus shipping from Metal Products Engineering, Inc. The case reminds me of the “I.D. wallets” of my espionage-filled youth. (Secret agents always carry I.D., right?)

My only connection to Metal Products Engineering is that of a happy customer.

[Photograph from the PPOS page.]

A tenuously related post
A P.S. 131 class picture, 1966–1967 (with what appears to be an “I.D. wallet”)

Door supervision in the news

Ian Fox, chairman of the UK organization National Doorwatch, has written to the Oxford English Dictionary asking that the “demeaning and inappropriate” word bouncer be replaced by door supervisor. Says Fox, “The term is anachronistic, inappropriate and downright offensive to the new, modern, highly regulated profession of door supervision.” An OED representative replies: “We are not linguistic policemen and our concern is simply the completeness of the historical record. If hardly anyone uses ‘bouncer’ we’ll consider marking it as rare — but that’s not the case at the moment.”

Cf. David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Authority and American Usage” on what Wallace calls the “central fallacy” of “Politically Correct English”: the idea “that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes.”