Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Proust and Self-Parody

I apologize for my current obsession to those who come here looking for a more scattered and slapdash approach. Next week when I gear up for the classroom, I suppose I'll have to turn my mind to more mundane matters.   For the moment, it's Proust again, and this time, the matter of self-parody.

But I start with my old college bud Larry Block.  Over something like 50 years now, Larry has established himself as a journeyman producer of mystery novels (here's his Facebook fan page) with a faithful and enthusiastic audience.  Among the many virtues of his work, we can count the fact that his books are darkly funny.  But before he became a player,  he apprenticed by churning out product for an outfit called Nightstand Books, whose genre was pretty much what you might guess it to be ("books to  be held with  one hand," oh snigger snort).  There's a genial account in his personal memoir, but you probably want to read some of his novels first.

I read a few Nighstands in those palmy times--purely as a matter of personal loyalty, oh yuk yuk.   And one of the main things I remember is that they were funny--intentionally funny, in a sense that was probably apparent to the reader and certainly to the author.   "It was Tippecanoe," wrote Larry, describing the main event, "and Tyler, as well."  Now, that is funny--funny enough for a college humor magazine at least, and funny enough to fend of boredom for the ink-stained wretch in the struggle to achieve his meagre coin.   Funny, I suppose as a kind of parody, perhaps self-parody, of what might be more exalted prose.  As the links above will suggest, there is even a modest retro-fan-base for this sort of trash stuff based in large part, I suspect, on their success as comedy.

Okay. now Proust.  Among Proust's many talents, it is said that he is a master of pastiche, the imitation of other's styles.  I speak with caution because he is writing, after all, in French, and my French is so primitive that I am sure I miss the best of it.  But I do know a couple of things about pastiche. One, it's almost always funny.  Even if you are trying to be deadpan, the very idea that it can be done, inevitably turns into a joke. And two, it is possible to pastiche oneself.  Think Ernest Hemingway. Any but the most faithful would admit that almost anything Papa wrote after, say, 1922, is an imitation of his (brilliant, but brief) creative flowering.  For almost all of it, if you didn't laugh you'd jump of a bridge.  Papa, unfortunately seems not to have realized that he was writing comedy, but then his bank balance didn't seem to care.  

Now at last turn to Proust, and consider in particular his description of his attempt (unsuccessful, as it turns out) to snatch a kiss from his beloved Albertine:
I found Albertine in bed. Her white nightgown bared her throat and altered the proportions of her face, which seemed of a deeper pink, because of the warmth of the bed, or her cold, or her recent dinner; I thought of the colors I had seen close at hand a few hours before on the esplanade, which were now going to reveal their taste; her cheek was bisected from top to bottom by a lock of her long black wavy hair, which to please me she had completely undone. She smiled at me. Beside her, through the window, the valley was bright with moonlight. The sight of her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks had so intoxicated me (that is, had so transferred reality from the world of nature into the deluge of my own sensations, which I could barely contain) as to have upset the balance between the tumultuous and indestructible immensity of the life surging through me and the paltry life of the universe. The sea, which through the window could be seen beside the valley, the swelling breasts of the closest of the Maineville cliffs, the sky where the moon had not yet reached the zenith, all of this seemed to lie as light as feathers between my eyelids, at rest upon eyeballs in which I felt the pupils had expanded and become strong enough, and ready, to hold much heavier burdens, all the mountains in the world, on their delicate surface. Even the whole sphere of the horizon did not suffice to fill their orbits. Any impingement of the natural world upon my consciousness, however mighty, would have seemed insubstantial to me; a gust of air off the sea would have seemed short-winded for the vast breaths filling my breast. I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or, rather, it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me. A pitying smile would have been my only response had a philosopher expressed the view that, however remote it might be now, a day was bound to come when I would die, that the everlasting forces of nature would outlive me, those forces with their divine tread grinding me like a grain of dust, that after my own extinction there would continue to be swelling-breasted cliffs, a sea, a sky, and moonlight! How could such a thing be possible? How could the world outlive me, given that I was not a mere speck lost in it—it was wholly contained within me, and it came nowhere near filling me, since, somewhere among so much unoccupied space, where other vast treasures could have been stored, I could casually toss the sky, the sea, and the cliffs! “If you don’t stop that, I’ll ring!” Albertine cried. ...
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 8641-8659). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Can we agree on a few points here?  One, properly understood this is beautiful   Two, every word of this rings true, in the respect that it is a fair representation of any besotted adolescent on his way to home third second first base.  Three, at least if you are alert, I'd say it is also very funny: funny in its portrait of adolescent passion, but funny also in its presentation of a writer when his words get away from him.  And finally, not least important, can we stipulate that Proust is in on the joke.  He knows he is laughing at his narrator.  He may also be laughing at countless unknowns who scrivened away at their own versions of Nightstand books. And he knows, finally, that the joke is on himself.  Proust the self-parodist.  Just like Larry Block.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Proust and the Deflationary Bada Boom

You know the joke that ends "no, I'd just forgotten to put on my trunks."  It's a classic example of what I will choose to call "the deflationary bada boom,"a joke that starts with some sort of exalted narrative and then ends with a sudden, sharp return to reality.   A sting.   Bada boom.

The deflationary bada boom is everywhere in humor. Maybe it is the only kind of joke there is.  It certainly suffuses, say, the modern practice of  publishing, where nearly every subtitle takes the form of How ABC did X, found Y and wound up Z.  How a small boy from a Pennsylvania mining town won the lottery, cured cancer and wound up serving five to life in the stony lonesome. Bada boom.

As you sink in to Proust you may be surprised to discover--I was--that he is drenched in incongruity, often comic incongruity.  Look for it and you find it on almost every page.  Here's a classic example from early in Swann's Way.   The narrator is in the kitchen and the topic is asparagus:
It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.
Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 123-124). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Bada boom.  But there is so much more.  Just a few pages later we learn how Marcel's mother, always delighted to enjoy her country walks with her family is always astonished to find herself back at her own front door.  Bada boom.  Later in the second book, Marcel takes the furniture which he has inherited from a beloved aunt and gives it to the keeper of a brothel--and not  particularly important brothel at that, bada bash bada boom boom ba.

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody has catalogued the whole lot of these things.  I have not, but I think I have read enough to note a larger point.   Try this: it seems to me that the function of all these bada booms is not mere entertainment, not mere comic relief. Rather, I'd mark them down as far more pervasive in he structure of the novel.   For what Proust is trying to explore (inter alia) is the relation between imagination and reality, between anticipation and the crude thinginess of life.

In short, irony.  Not just the irony of the comic moment, but the irony of life itself, where things are so often both less and so much more urgent than they seem.  In a splendid essay on the topic, -- writes:
Irony may be defined as the conflict of two meanings which has a dramatic structure peculiar to itself: initially, the one meaning,  the appearance, presenting itself as obvious truth, but when the context of the meaning unfolds, in depth or in time, it surprisingly discloses  conflicting meaning, the reality, measured against which the first meaning now seems false or limited and in its self-assurance, blind to its own situation.
Norman D. Knox, "Irony," Dictionary of the History of Ideas II 625-34, 626, Philip P. Weiner ed. (1973).

There is a great deal more here, from Socrates through to Northrop Frye (though unless I missed it, no mention of Proust).  And I won't try to itemize all the Proustian applications here (as if I could). As a reader, I will often enough content myself with the jokes--but with the guiding voice to remind me that things are often not as funny as they may seem.

Bada boom.

Hey, wait a minute, what did you just say?


Saturday, December 28, 2013

On Proustian Rhetoric (Proust and Gibbon)

This is going to be another post about Proust, but bear with me a moment, dear reader, while I say a word about Edward Gibbon, he of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The comparison stretches across space and time, but the points of contact shouldn't be that hard to see. Each has a name to be uttered  in hushed tones, as if  the patriarch of his particular tribe.  Both wrote long: for each there is a standard edition in three volumes.   Both are famous for the long, convoluted, serpentine sentence.

Both, in the cliché, are more talked about than read.  But hold on here a moment: I suspect that last generalization is true as far as it goes but that it obscures an important distinction.  Which is to say:  I've no doubt that the number of Proustians is small, but I'm betting that it grows over time and that Proust is slowly, incrementally, making his way into the common culture.

And Gibbon?  Well, I wouldn't be surprised to find that quite a few people have tried Gibbon.  But my own bet is that very few have gotten beyond the first hundred pages.  Or maybe the famous "Chapters 15 and 16," where Gibbon takes his most enthusiastic swipe at Christianity.  I suspect that few aside from a handful of academics who do it for money ever complete the long, slow, slog through the Byzantines (full disclosure: I have not).

And here's one very good reason why people slack off after a while: Gibbon after a while gets really boring, in a way that Proust does not.  

You laugh, or, more likely, snort.  You say that both Proust and Gibbon are boring, and in the same way; long sentences and longer paragraphs that put you to sleep before you're half done.  Well, I'll grant you long (mostly--see infra), and I'll grant you difficult in the sense that it may take work to disentangle all the cantilevered commas and semicolons and get to a point.  Difficult in the sense of complex, then, although for my money, neither one is difficult in the sense of being obscure: with each, if you disentangle the threads you will find that the end product is entirely clear.'

So, what is the difference? The difference, dear reader, is that Proust's rhetoric--his orotund periods, if you will--display an amazing flexibility.  He's got easily a dozen, maybe several dozen, different modes of expression, and he is a master of flexibility, a master of fitting the word to the action.  Gibbon, after a while you realize, just keeps repeating the same damn thing.  Hypnotic for 10 pages, soporific for 100, and nobody knows what it is for 1,000 because by that time you are all dead.

Proust's rhetorical fluency does, I admit, require a certain kind of attention.  That's one reason why I so much enjoy Neville Jason's superb audio version.  Jason clearly gets it, and he helps you to get it, to understand just what Proust can do not just with the vocabulary but with the structure of the language.

[Idle aside: it just lately struck me that Proust and Hemingway would have lived "together," as it were, for a short time in Paris, just blocks apart: I read that Hemingway took up residence in December of 1921 and Proust died in November of 1922.   Fun to imagine what they might have said to each other but I can't imagine the conversation lasting very long.  Anyway, back to Jason and Proust.]

Indeed, Jason is so good with the language that I admit I find myself not just subvocalizing but actually reading aloud long with the written text, just to catch the flavor.  Probably freaks out the guy on the next elliptical machine, though I try to keep my voice down.  And it is something I can't begin to imagine myself doing for very long with Gibbon.




Thursday, December 26, 2013

Marcel as Pug

This may be no more than a quibble--and anyway, I suppose there is a vast literature on the topic with which I am vastly unacquainted--but let me quibble away.  One thing I really don't get about "Marcel" in the novel is how he gets to be buds with all these important people.  Robert Saint Loup showers him with friendship.  Madame de Villeparisis takes him for a drive in the country.  Swann addresses him (even when a child) as "vous."  Even La Duchesse de Guermantes gravely smiles at him from her box at the theatre.   After a while you begin to think you are reading about "Pug" Henry, the Robert Mitchum character in the Herman Wouk novel who just happened to meet everybody  who was anybody in World War II.   Or Mel Brooks' 2,000-year-old man, who knew Jesus Christ ("thin lad …  Always asked for water").

You may not notice it on first or second reading (I don't think I gave it any thought until just now).  But once you do think of it, you can't help but think of it as absurd.  Who is this wimpy, neurasthenic  after all, who gets singled out and taken in hand by the good and great?   So posed, this is a problem that needs some sort of solution.

I suppose there are various lines of attack.  You could put this off as a mere literary convenience, but Proust doesn't seem to allow that. Elstir the painter for example, is insistent that it is he and not St. Loup whose visit he solicits--no mere happenstance here.    You could simply throw in your hand and write  it off as just the odd bit of  narcissism ("how could everyone not love me?") and I suspect there has to be some of that. 

But if you must have a respectable explanation, I think I can offer a possibility. That is Proust-the-author (similar to, but not the same as "Marcel" the protagonist) does in fact seem to have been almost preternaturally shrewd in his literary or artistic, not to say his human, judgments (In this respect, for whatever it may be worth, he is entirely unlike the 2,000 year old man.  The Brooks routine is funny precisely because Brooks does not get it.  I'm arguing that Marcel really does.). It is just remotely possible that some grownups, men of the world and suchlike, really did take a fancy to this kid, and really did find themselves treating him as a person who must be taken seriously, no matter his age and his superficially unprepossessing manner.  Maybe Proust-the-author can't quite show all this in the novel because, living inside this bubble of sympathy--maybe he never noticed it.

Maybe, but I don't think that will quite wash. If Proust-the-author is so insightful about so much else in the world (and he was) how did he not notice this curiosity of relationships surrounding Marcel-the-character.  I confess that beyond this offering, I got nothing.  And I'll have to learn either to ignore it (actually, I probably can do that) or go back to treating him like "Pug" Henry or the 2,000-year-old man.

Afterthought:  Another example: Johnson's Boswell.  Nobody, and particularly not Boswell, can comprehend what the great man thinks of the impressionable young puppy.  But Johnson's affection for the young man seems sincere and enduring.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Reading: Me and the President

I'm another who has spent more time than he should have this morning measuring his/my own daily reading habits against what Salon so pointedly characterizes as the President's Hack List.  I'd agree with whoever-that-guy-is at Salon that the President's tastes run to the conventional and boring, and it could be an interesting Christmas dinner parlor game (in carefully selected company) to speculate on how far this represents his own tastes and how far the dictates of his spin doctors: myself, I tend to the view converge enough that he himself can't tell them apart, but I am often wrong about this kind of thing.

Anyway, whatever the source, I'm startled at how little overlap between the two of us.  The main point of convergence would be Ezra Klein (inc.) who I,  no mean snarker in my own right, think is a lot better than Salon's snarky dismissal.  The only other overlap is Josh Barro, whom Salon dismisses as the "fantasy" of the "Reasonable Republican."  I don't think that is why I read him; I would say rather that he is genuinely funny and often original--not st all like so many others on the Obama list whose main political identity appears to be "soporific."

Beyond that--you know, on review, I find that my own reading habits have fallen into a shamble lately.  I can identify a bunch of possible reasons.  The simplest is the collapse of Google Reader.  I used to read my morning aggregate the same way Mrs. Buce imbibes her dead-tree New York Times.  Yes, I fired up Feedly as a replacement, but somehow it doesn't seem to work quite the way I remember the other one.  And anyway, the shift was enough to remind me of the emerging plenitude of alternatives.  I have had a Twitter feed for many months although I scarcely ever post (140 characters is just not enough for my subtle and nuanced mind).  For whatever reason, I do find myself checking out what others say there.  I have a Facebook page which has been mostly limited to family snaps and banter with former students, although that seems to be changing (see infra).  I did sign up for Google Plus although I don't suppose I've even looked at it for perhaps a year.    Redditt, Tumblr, nah--hey there has to be some limit to my day.

But beyond mere mechanics: I also join with those who believe that your habits have to change here or you get into a rut. I've said before that I'm spending less time on current events, more on Proust.  Some very good bloggers, even aggregators, just get predictable over time; they're still good, but I don't need them any more. I still read Krugman (I wish Obama read him) but not because I expect to be surprised at what he says: rather, it's more a matter of sheer admiration for his skill as an expositor (confession, I have more than once dazzled a student with some idea or insight that I had just pinched from a Krugman textbook tucked under the table).  I still read DeLong because he is a pretty good aggregator and because, hey, he is (almost) the only bigfoot blogger who ever linked me (I also like the  new site).  I somehow seem to have lost track of Ritholtz--did he get left behind in the move, locked away somewhere  in a a vacated apartment?  And while I think of it, how is Farhad Manjoo enjoying life over at the Wall Street Journal?  Everything okay?

I suppose if I had a current fave, it would be Bruce Bartlett, who uses his Facebook page as a convenient link to all his good stuff.  His taste in music leaves me cold and I do get a little tired of his school yard name-calling.  But he is still the single most clear-headed analyst of tax policy anywhere--and since it all comes down to tax, what more do we need?   

But as I think of it, I suspect the one institutional source I am most likely to read in detail is The Atlantic, particularly The Wire.  If Obama is really looking for a black commentator to read, I can't imagine why he hasn't discovered Ta-Nehshi Coates.  And James Fallows does count as a journalist, right?  He seems to me clear-headed about everything, except for the crazy-assed notion that it is fun to fly airplanes.  And who is this Bump guy?  Does he ever sleep?

Oh, and one final item, although I'm not entirely sure it belongs on this list.  That is: if there is one source I check unfailingly almost every day, and  for which I have no sense of tiring, it would be this.  And no, Mr. President, in case you were wondering, Darrell Issa is not there.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

FA on States and Cities

There's an interesting, if unintentional, parallel in the current issue of Foreign Affairs Quarterly which picks up on a hobbyhorse of mine.  One component  is Michael Mazarr's (ungated!) essay on "The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm," designed to give comfort and cover to those who want to do what George W. Bush used to say (back before he was George W, Bush) that we just ought to back off from this whole state-fixing business.  Mazarr presents a full-frontal assault but the pervasive aroma is that state building is pretty much undoable and anyway, we've got other fish to fry.

Now bracket Mazarr with a (n undated!) capsule review (by G. John Ikenberry) of If Mayors Ruled the World by Benjamin Barber, subtitled "Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities."  Barber's pitch isn't exactly new--Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City sounds like it covers a good bit of the same turf.   

I can think of all kinds of ways in which cities can go wrong. They can consolidate the power of an elite (think the Yorty/Chandler Los Angeles).  They can mobilize a majority against a disfavored minority (think Karl Leuger of Vienna in Hitler's youth).  They can--well, I was going to say "they can produce the nightmarish masses of Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forever, or Rohinton Mistrty's  A Fine Balance, or even David Gregory's Shantaram--but are they books of urban failure, or of urban success?  Complicated question, I suppose, but in all these contexts, you'd have to say that cities have a kind of concreteness (couldn't avoid the pun) that the more abstract and universal state does not enjoy.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Lawless on the Geography of Chapter 13

I'm gearing up to go back onto the coal face into the classroom in January for another semester's teaching.  Which means, inter alia, that I've got to bring myself up to speed on what's been happening in bankruptcy law during the months when I focused my attention on opera, Proust and suchlike. This new inquiry  brings me to the excellent website of the American Bankruptcy Ihstitute (I swear, those guys have more money than is good for them--they should start a sovereign wealth fund).  It also means a a glide through the superb videos of Bloomberg's Bill Rochelle. 

And perhaps most important, it means turning attention to the unparalleled  "debt website" run by Bob Lawless and his cronies at Credit Slips--leading me in particular to Bob's superb map (and commentary)   on the geography of Chapter 13.

With a moment's reflection, nonspecialists will probably recall the point of Chapter 13 as distinct from "ordinary" bankruptcy. In the ordinary case, the debtor throws the keys on the table and the creditors get to divvy up what they can find.  If he plays by the rules, the debtor gets to wipe out (most of) his unpaid debts,   Familiar as far as it goes, but it finesses the fact that most debtors don't have any assets to distribute  so they are wiping the slate clean in exchange for nothing.

In Chapter 13, by contrast, the debtor agrees to deploy some of his (post-bankruptcy) earnings to pay pre-bankruptcy debts.  Just as a matter of taste, I've always found Chapter 13 to be a fascinating social artifact.  It is also (not incidentally) hugely controversial.    My late beloved colleague Pete Loiseaux (and there are others like him) used to dismiss it with a growl as a form of semi-involuntary servitude, a form of peonage.  

Another faction holds that it's a perfectly legitimate use of sovereign power to help induce people to do what they were supposed to do anyway.  Answering the case in favor, Pete used to take malicious delight in directing  to the map, to see where actual debtors filed for Chapter 13.  The point was that the vast majority of Chapter 13s were filed in the Southeast, aka the Old Confederacy, aka the Slave States (Memphis, Atlanta and the whole state of South Carolina used to lead the list).  The geography was enough to convince Pete that supporters of Chapter 13 were just refighting (and winning) the Civil War.

Pete's parallel air tight.  For example, Chapter 13 is, on the face of things (and ahem, unlike slavery)  "voluntary."  The alert reader will wonder: if the debtor can wipe out his debts in ordinary bankruptcy, why would he ever bother pay them off voluntarily from future earnings?  The answer is complicated; suffice to say that there are have always been carrots and sticks to induce the debtor into Chapter 13, pace the off-the-rack rule.  For present purposes, the interesting part of the story begins in 2005.  That was when Congress substantially rejiggered the filing rules, making it  harder for debtors to get relief in "ordinary" bankruptcy.  Clearly the hope was that some debtors, deprived of the protection offered in straight bankruptcy would opt to go down the 13 road.

So, at least in crude summary, it pretty much came to pass.  Overall filings fell; Chapter 13s rose.  I (at least) took it as a natural corollary that the map also changed: that we would find Chapter 13 numbers rising in places where such cases really hadn't arisen before.

And that's why Bob's new map is so interesting (if you missed the link, here it is again).  Bob makes clear that one's (at least "my") intuitions were wrong.  In mild oversimplification, Bob makes it clear that the geography of Chapter 13 is exactly the same as it was before 2005, before the new trends, before the changes in raw numbers.   

I really don't know quite what to make of all this.  I admit I have often wondered if the "old Confederacy" theory made sense in the first place.  For one thing, if Chapter 13 is an artifact of the old Confederacy, how come we see high numbers along the coast of California? Or rather, why California at all, but if California, why not inland, where comparisons to the old Confederacy seem far more apt?  Perhaps there is some other hidden premise that supports the data better. But if so, I haven't the slightest idea what it might be.  Or it may be one more proof that whatever they do in Washington, folks on the ground go on behaving in pretty much their own way.  Or as Andy Capp used to say in the comics, the difference between a law and a custom is that it takes a hell of a lot more courage to violate a custom.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Nobody Does Condescension like You-know-who

I was going to write something about fear and loathing in the  Duck Dynasty and the wingnuts' rediscovery of the fairness doctrine.  But my betters are probably all over it and I'd rather get back to my reading so I content myself with an excerpt of an insight at which Marcel Proust has no peer--the gracious condescension of a great lady.  Here, the young Marcel encounters--no, better, is encountered by--the Princesse de Luxembourg:
Despite her wish not to appear to dwell in spheres far above ours, she must have misjudged the distance between us; and her eyes, not properly adjusted, overflowed with such loving sweetness that I would not have been surprised if she had reached out a hand and patted us, as though we were a brace of docile animals, poking our heads through the railings at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne. This idea of being animals in the Zoo was instantly underlined for me.  It was the hour when hawkers of sweets, cakes, and other delicacies haunt the esplanade, barking their wares in strident tones. At a loss to show her goodwill toward us in a fitting manner, the Princess stopped the next one who came along. All he had left was a little loaf of rye bread, the sort you feed to the ducks. The Princess took it, saying to me, “This is for your grandmother.” But she then handed it to me, with a smile full of feeling: “You be the one to give it to her,” meaning no doubt that my enjoyment would be greater if nobody came between me and the animals. Other hawkers having gathered around us,
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 4742-4749). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Going Forward, Let 'er Rip




Roundabouts Again

Groupies will know that the staff and management here at Underbelly central are big fans of highway roundabouts.  They do take a bit of getting used to, but after a few hours days weeks  (whatever) of being chased around Southern England.  I came away a true believer, an acolyte, even a proselyte. We now even have a few roundabouts here in Palookaville--mostly in somewhat out of the way places, which suggests that the proponents were settling for what they could get--but the fact may have the unintended virtue of letting newbies practice their rounding skills in a low-stress environment. There is a new one near the center of town which seems to be trouble waiting to happen: there's a one-way street in just where you would most want to go out. But I grant that the deeper issue here may be a whole new traffic pattern, as if calculated to leave the whole town screeching and hollering on their way into the season of love and joy. We'll get used to it, and emerge better for the ordeal.

The Wichita Bureau, reporting from exile in nearby Lawrence, offers a more complicated account:
The city government ... is proposing to put in a ‘roundabout’ in a major street near here. Although they have been building them here for years, the locals (esp. the elderly) don’t adapt easily and entirely too many take the shortcut straight across. The intersection in question is in need of a light due to traffic levels but supposedly the roundabout would save money. At that point the local arts commission which has no money pipes up with a proposal to put a piece of art in the center.

I’m going to propose that they weld two Mercury Grand Marquis (or Lincoln Towncars) into a sculpture and put it in the roundabout. Here in the midwest, the aspiring elderly all drive Grand Marquis (or to show they made it) - and since they quit making the brand, they are getting a bit battered. They are a huge car – a throw back to the days of cheap gas – and welding two into a sculpture would be appropriate and also block the short cut.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Big Weekend for Music (And a Note on Accessibility)

A big weekend for the Buces on the music scene. Saturday we took in the Met HD Falstaff at the Palookaville multiplex: we had to buck the crowds for The Desolation of Smaug and  I must say they did tank up the (operatic) sound rather a lot--perhaps left over from the previous night's megalolapalooza but otherwise, I'd say it lived up to expectations: a rollicking good time, going as far as you can go to confirm Falstaff's somewhat shaky label as a "comedy."    It was fun also  to listen to James Levine, restored to mental vigor if not physical mobility, wax ecstatic over a comic tradition in which he brackets Falstaff alongside Marriage of Figaro and Meistersingers.  I'll certainly have to give him Figaro which can be falling-down funny (along with so much else).  I still don't get Wagner and Meistersingers in particular gets up my nose.   But it's true that these are three operas in which no virgins are sacrificed which may be enough to put them into a special class, however small.

Sunday we trekked on down to Davis to take in a lovely Messiah from  the American Bach Soloists.  It was all you could hope it could be--maybe not the most show-stopping soloists, but a carefully-thought-out, fully-integrated, coherent production.  It was heavy on the 18th-Century origins, which was fine and refreshingly different from the last full Messiah I saw, this at Royal Albert Hall in London, with double orchestra and double chorus.  I do wonder why the alto/countertenor had to rrrrol so many rrrrs, not just on rrrredeemer but even on rrresurection--but I suppose I should allow him a personal tic.  [Mrs. Buce adds: integration of words and music.  She says she finds it hard to remember any production in which the conductor seemed so completely to understand that there was a reason why particular phrases went with particular themes (she added that she particularly liked the scourging)].

But here's a pointless anomaly that offers me amusement, if  nothing and nobody else.  That is: one thing you have to say about Messiah is that it is just about the most accessible piece of good music ever presented.  Hard to think of a spectator with even the slightest musical literacy who cannot hum HA le lu ja, HA le lu ja.  People in my generation even "knew" that the tune was the same as "Yes. we have no bananas," though this trifle may have passed from the popular inventory.

Now turn to Falstaff.   Verdi's last opera here has many virtues but accessibility it not one of them.   It is, as many say, loaded with musical material. But it tends to come at you thick and fast, such that even the careful listener is left repeating "hey, wait a minute, what did he just say?"  You cold almost say that this torrent of thematic material is a vice except that, in a good performance, it is tried together by a unity of tone.

I've seen Falstaff a number of times now, and I think I have come to appreciate it, though I probably don't have the musical chops to appreciate its nuances (quaere whether I have yet heard it for the first time).  I am spurred to wonder, though, how, if Falstaff presents such challenges, then why was the current Met offering such a success?  I'm sure part of the answer lies in sheer musicianship.  You could see that Levine could barely contain himself as he enjoyed this reprieve opportunity to show that he still has it.  Ambrogio Maestri certainly has the title role down and cuffed to the doorknob; and that Stephanie Blythe woman is a wonder of nature.

But you'd also have to give some of the credit to showmanship.  Robert Carsen has put together a production that you can't help but enjoy, even if the music goes a bit over your head.  It is cheerful, energetic, warm-hearted, earthy enough to carry you over any number of rough spots.  Of course there might be a question of when all the stage hokum turns into a kind of betrayal, distracting attention from its real reason for being.  Could be: I  think this happens a lot with contemporary productions of Shakespeare.  Could be, but for Falstaff I'd say not yet.  There's enough going on underneath the glittery surface which the surface serves, I think, only to enhance.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Is This Your First Time?

The other day  I was nattering on about seeing my favorite Caravaggio "for the first time."  Count on Proust to remind me that "first time" is a far more complicated concept than it may seem at first blush.  Here he is talking about music, but I don't see why you couldn't carry it over to art in general or, for that matter, to life itself:
 Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression “hearing something for the first time” is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1887-1891). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

He elaborates:
What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory. Our memory span, relative to the complexity of the impressions that assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1890-1894). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

And a bit later, he writes of the fictional composer, Vinteuil:
In the Vinteuil Sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it. This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new.
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 1909-1916). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

That last, I suspect you might apply to Proust himself.  So what could I have possibly meant when I spoke of my shock at seeing the Caravaggio "for the first time"--?  My best guess is this:I do remember being bowled over when I first saw The Calling of Saint Matthew. If pressed, I'd still say it is "the best" Caravaggio (but why let myself be pressed?).  But it wasn't my first Caravaggio.  Earlier--some years earlier, in fact--I had seen the Crucifixion of Saint Peter  and The Conversion of Saint Paul.  I knew I was in the presence of something important--knew it, not least, because I had been told as much by my friend and guide.   Indeed, the same day that I saw the Saint Matthew, I had earlier seen the Madonna dei Pellegrini in the Chiesa San'Agostono just up the street.  So I was, as its were, primed.

Was it Vladimir Nabokov who said that one should never read a book for the first time?  Maybe.  He apparently did say:
When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.
Quoted here.  And come to think of it, I am remembering one person who said we should never read (a certain) novel for the first time.  It was Joseph Epstein. The novel he had in mind was À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Footnote:  I just pulled down my copy of Terence Kilmartin's fine Reader's Guide to Marcel Proust where, inter alia, he lists all the "persons" listed in the novel--i.e., authentic human beings, as distinct from "characters" (they get their own list).  There must be well over 500 such"persons." Caravaggio is not one of them

This One's a Keeper

Syllabus for Journalism 101:
When a politician calls a scandal involving himself “sensationalized,” you know he’s in deep yoghurt. When he says “mistakes were made,” the passive voice is a tell for near-panic. When he starts firing subordinates, that means he knows he’s near the edge of the cliff. And when he says he wants to “turn the page,” it’s a good bet the story is far from over.

Link. 

Friday, December 13, 2013

Consent of the Governed

My friend Ignoto has been hassling me a bit about my allegedly misty-eyed daffiness over the Somalis. Somalia is not a "failed state" I argued; it is not "ungoverned;" it is just governed by principles other than those we recognize.

Well, I'm sticking to my guns (ahem) here, though I will grant it would be useful to drill down a little further.  I think Ignoto's point is that it can't be a government worthy of the name unless in some sense it concerns itself with the welfare of its citizenry.  

That's a very seductive proposition.  Consent of the governed blah blah.  Social contract blah blah.   Hold these truths to be self evident, long train of abuses and usurpations, hoo boy where have I heard all that before.

Actually, you know the answer to that last question.  The snippets were, of course, from the Declaration Independence, the crowning achievement of a long struggle to establish a theory of government on the principle of the welfare (or at least the "consent") of the government.  It's the ornament of our history, our presiding narrative, but that's the trouble: it is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we forget that it is a human creation, a cultural artifact that lives in time and space. We cannot conceive it otherwise.

Cannot conceive it otherwise; this doesn't mean it can't be otherwise, and that is where I give myself the prize.  I'd hate, hate, hate, to give up this presiding narrative; still my point is that societies can operate without it. Can?  Hell, most have, and still do.  We live now in a world where our presiding narrative is so deeply ingrained that virtually everybody has to pay obeisance to some version of it.  Some are sincere; some are sincerely deluded.  Some barely bother with the pretense.

Am I saying that "common weal" begins with, e.g., John Locke?  I wouldn't go quite that far.  I suppose going back to prehistory, contenders for elite status made a habit of appealing to some model of the common interest.  It is good that you delegate to me because I am stronger, tougher, wilier than the rest of you and thereby better than you at implementing your own interests.  I suppose  fair amount  of that goes on today.  I suppose also it was common enough that after a few years in office, he'd decide that God's real plan was to be implemented through his own (earthly) DNA, his own spawn.  And after a few more, the idea of general welfare probably fell under the bus* altogether.

Other times, other strategies.  The Classical Greeks are a fascinating example because they seem to be a rare outlier in which some combination of weak leadership and endemic paranoia seemed to provide for decentralized authority to exist for more than just a few weeks.  But that's the point: they are fascinating because so unusual.

I don't see much evidence that Roman emperors (say) took much thought of the common welfare, though they may from time to time have pretended to--out of grandiosity, out of fear, or both.  But in his heart of heart, each knew that he was the one who counted, and the rest of the multitudes could go fry or not, as they saw fit.

This is an artless adolescent-style lurch at an issue that deserves (and, let's admit it, often gets) more serious or sophisticated treatment.  My narrow point for the moment is that there is nothing inherent about "welfare of the people."  It's a feature. not a bug, but you can perfectly well organize a society without it, and usually do.


Wups, You Missed It

It's 12:12 12/13/13

Hat tip, Sally.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Death Watch

I can remember the balmy days when we--by which I mean "I"--wanted to run away with this girl, and be this guy.

Bang the drum slowly.

All You Need to Know about the Structure of Banking.


  • The US has 6,891 banks.


  • There are 515 banks on the FDIC "problem bank" list.


  • "There are currently over 900 publicly traded banks and thrifts with a market capitalization over $10 million. These banks have $12.4 trillion in assets and $1.4 trillion in market cap."


  • The four largest account for 54 percent of the aggregate market cap.

--From a commentary at American Banker, by one "Harvard Winters," identified as "a former investment banker, writes research on banks." He must get tired of jokes about Yale Springs and Columbia Falls.   BTW, no, not one of the four largest is on the "problem bank list."  The reader is left to ponder whether he considers this fact reassuring.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Palookaville, Winter Sunset



Just happened on this as I left the coffee shop about 5pm. Must have been an event; I saw several others taking the same picture.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Old Norpois

Reading Proust, I've always had a soft spot for Old Norpois, the shrewd, some would say cynical and sardonic, master of affairs and stalwart of the reactionary virtues.  You, perhaps, are not impressed. But do you know that Napoleon III might have saved himself had he taken the old scoundrel's advice?
My father was aware that M. de Norpois had been perhaps the only one to warn Napoleon III about Prussia’s growing power and warlike intentions, and that Bismarck had a high regard for his intelligence.
Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 293-295). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Later, papa tries to draw the old man out on the regime in Germany:
"I was pretty sure the Kaiser’s recent telegram would not be very much to your taste,” my father said. 
As much as to say, “That man!,” M. de Norpois cast his eyes heavenward: “For one thing, it was an act of arrant ingratitude. It was worse than a crime—it was a mistake! And as for the stupidity of it, the only word for that is monumental. For another thing, if someone doesn’t put a stop to it, the man who gave Bismarck his marching orders is quite capable of repudiating each and every one of Bismarck’s policies. And when that happens, we’ll see a fine mess!”

Proust, Marcel (2005-01-25). In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Kindle Locations 748-753). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

"That man" is pretty clearly Wilhelm II who ascended to the throne as Kaiser in 1888.  I'm a little shaky on just when this conversation would have taken place:  the Kaiser pushed Bismarck out of office in 1890; Bismarck died in 1898.   The scene seems to be set prior to World War I.   The book wasn't finally published until 1919 but Proust had been working on the project for years and I really can't say whether it was written before or after the War (i.e., careful students may know but I do not).  "Worse than a crime, a mistake," I have always heard attributed to that prince of old scoundrels, Talleyrand himself, but apparently there are other contenders.   In either event, it is said to describe "Napoleon’s execution of the Duc d’Enghien in 1804." 

Sunday, December 08, 2013

This Man's Army--Whose?

Audioreading The Shadow World, Andrew Feinstein's history of the global arms trade, I'm struck by something I never gave much thought to before.  That is: at least as late as World War I, it was proper in polite circles to believe that there should be no private arms trade whatever--that the manufacture of arms should be the province of the governments only, corollary, I suppose, to that "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force," the Monopol legitimen physischen Zwanges, which Max Weber took to be the defining mark of the state.  Apparently Woodrow Wilson thought so--and so also Lloyd George, until he found himself the leader of a great nation in war.

I know what you are thinking; we can burble on about how the arms trade has been "privatized," and the structure of arms production and distribution has indeed revolutionized itself over the generations.  But privatization? Perhaps, but maybe the real point is that the fulcrum of violence has shifted and it is the Lockheed-Martins, the BAEs, the EADs that run the show while states exist (if they do) as--oh, I don't know, the human relations department or the brokerage office.  Feinstein has some wonderful stuff about the British government's headlong plunge into the arms trade, driven by the very good reason that they needed the money, that's why.  And this was a socialist (heh!) government, too (I'm talking about the pre-Thatcher 70s).  It may have seemed like a novelty in its time. These days, that sort of thing may raise issues, but its elementary being is just taken for granted.

We talk about "failed states," of course, but I think I've argued before that "failed state" is a misnomer: Somalia continues to function, just not according to a Treaty-of-Westphalia model  (recall also: by general report, the Somalian shilling continues to function, even if the "sovereign" does not--from what we hear this weekend, perhaps more effectively than the Bitcoin).  And any agglomeration of people that can draw 2500 tribal leaders together into a loya jirga--well, there may need to be a new name for it, but the name is not "failed."

[Side note: I know it's just a  movie, but I'm harking back to that hijacking flic I watched the other night out of socialist, statist, Denmark, by all measures one of the most successful "states" in being.  Can I make anything out of the fact that "state" presence in this operation was exactly nil?  We had scruffy pirate kids on the one side; grey-suited corporate types on the other.  The nearest thing we had to a "sovereign" presence was the Aussie (yes?) freebooter whose advice, if followed, might have ended matters more cheaply and quickly.]

Were I the point man for an international arms conglomerate, I suppose I'd be willing to keep the traditional state around--to preserve deniability, perhaps, to handle the inconvenient and onerous cleanup chores, probably to provide the costly training and apprenticeship programs I would need for my work force.  Or perhaps as cosmetics--the lipstick of legitimacy on the pig of violence.  Yeah, as John Lovitz would say, that's the ticket.  Or perhaps it has already come to pass?


Saturday, December 07, 2013

Lucky to Have Had Him

While were engaged in the (entirely justified) enterprise of honoring the memory of Nelson Mandela, may we pause for a moment to generalize-- to reflect on how lucky we've been in the civil rights movement as a whole, not just once in South Africa.

There used to be a catch phrase back in Kentucky, whenever anybody got appointed to anything: you think he's funny looking'?--you should have seen the guy they almost appointed.  Cute if unkind, but it's worth reflecting on when we consider Mandela v., oh well, almost anybody else in Africa.  Or when we compare Martin Luther King, Jr., to, um …. Or my own hero, Thurgood Marshall, with his bravery, his keen sense of justice, and his sometimes antic wit.  I might even throw in Malcolm X, at least as represented by Alex Haley, although I recognize that here I veer into fiction.  The point is: the people I'm remembering are the ones who knew how to make their points without losing their dignity and while respecting the dignity of others.

I'm tempted to  broaden my list to the formidable roster of black celebs noteworthy, inter alia, for their enormous likability: Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, Michael Jordan, Colin Powell, the big O itself: all at one time or another on anybody's list of most admired Americans.

Yet I can see that there is a trap here.  My friend Evelyn (herself black) bleakly reminds me that "likability"--making themselves agreeable to whites--is a venerable survival skill among blacks who have always had to concern themselves with fates far worse than failing to make the "most admired" list.  Flip side, I can't think of any pop entertainment in my lifetime more revolting than the spectacle of poor, short, skinny, one-eyed Sammy Davis Jr. trying so frantically to win favor with a bunch of thuggish old drunks--while the rest of us cheered him on.   Well, maybe Little Miss America, but you get my point.

Sometimes you can have it both ways, of course. Likeability certainly has led Oprah to a level of wealth and power that the vast majority of white folks can only dream about.  And sometimes you can do it without losing your honor.  The first time I ever saw Cosby--it would have been late 60s--he was hosting some show about the black experience which was blunt and disturbing.  And the Coz never smiled.  And he intended it that way, and it worked.

With "political" figures like King or Mandela, there is another problem: swaddling them in a gauzy afterglow tends to defang the very things that made them famous and influential to begin with    King was in so many ways a model of civility and courtesy that we could forget: the burden of his message was (is!) turbulent and confrontation.   Interestingly, we haven't seen a lot of swaddling around King  yet--a lot of the people who hated him back in his day are still alive and not in a conciliatory mood.   But once Disney makes him into a feature-length animated cartoon, we'll know the game is up.

With Mandela, it is easier.  Face it, for all the fewferaw, most Americans never did have any more than the vaguest notion of why Mandela is famous to begin with.  So it''s not that hard to present him as a right jolly old elf--a point I think, Cornel West was driving at on CNN today when he warned against "Santa Claus-ification." (thanks, Caroline).  Mandela is famous not for being a nice old man; he is famous for speaking truth to power with great courage and at great personal sacrifice.

So there are delicate lines to be drawn here.  Not too cute, no Santa Claus.  King and Mandela and their ilk raised momentous issues.  But the point remains: patience and civility and fundamental human decency are not to be dismissed lightly.   Not only for what they did but for how they did it, we can only be grateful.

Update:  Just after posting, I ran across this, thanks to Chaucer Doth Tweet.




Friday, December 06, 2013

Hannah and her Detractors

We took a flutter last night on 'Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt, remembering the kerfuffle over Arendt's New Yorker reportage on the trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann.   I think the best thing you could say about it is "inoffensive," maybe "workmanlike."  Barbara Sukowa held one's attention in the title role and Janet McTeer as Mary McCarthy was as annoying as McCarthy probably was in real life (that's a compliment).  But if you remember the Arendt/Eichmann episode, you wouldn't have learned anything new, and if you don't, the film probably won't inspire you to dig any deeper.

I do remember the episode and I remember feeling that Arendt had it pretty much right from the get-go.  As Arendt argues (I think), too often, evil is not outlandish, unworldly.  It's just stuff that people do--evil stuff, but still stuff.  FWIW,  you can say pretty much the same about good; cf. Marcel Ophul's pendant account of French resistance to the Nazis,  memorialized in The Sorrow and the Pity, where heroism is no more saintly than Eichmann's crimes are devilish. I suspect that Arendt came away winners in the long run (one reason the episode is forgettable); indeed I always thought that some of the outrage against her had a perfunctory air as if some of her critics found it politic to attack her even though they didn't have their heart in it.

But the movie did set me reflecting a bit on Arendt's career as a whole.  The book I take to be her iconic showpiece --The Origins of Totalitarianism--pops up on any number of lists of "great books" for the 20th Century. But does anybody read it any more?  Can anybody serve up a sufficient 50-word summary?  Or has it receded to the status of period piece, like Jack Paar or the Kaiser-Frazier auto brand?  Okay, grant that most, perhaps all, works of political/social theory begin as period pieces.  But some quintessential period pieces--Machiavelli might be the best example--have a way of transcending their period, to establish some lasting value.  Can the same be said for OT?

As to the rest of Arendt's work, there's a lot of it I can't evaluate because I haven't read it.  I do remember the character sketches or occasional pieces brought together in Men in Dark Times and I once again savor a curious truth: sometimes a writer's best work is his (her) more modest or less pretentious stuff: as a long-form journalist, she was actually quite good.

I also remember The Human Condition, not least as  orderly and systematic  in the way OT seemed to me not to be.  This may or may nor be a compliment--orderly Dickens is not Dickens at his best.  But her distinction between "work" and "action" (i;.e., "politics") does stick in the mind.   I do take some wry amusement for her Aristotelian contempt for mere "labor," the chores that you need to accomplish to get yourself through the day.  As a person who once cooked for a living, I am still a little startled to see her classify cookery as mere labor.    It cannot achieve dignity, she argues, it leaves nothing that endures.

Well.  Maybe last night's dinner is not something I wish to contemplate this morning.  But she seems utterly to have failed to grasp that while cooking may not endure, still cookery does.  The skill, the practice, the cuisine: no nation can call itself great if it lacks a great cuisine.  So if they invite for dinner at Hannah's--go for the conversation,  but stop for a burger on the way.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Proust on Love: A Footnote

I suppose somebody has made this point somewhere but I haven't seen it so I'll give it a try.

The subject is Proust and love  Or lust, or passion, whatever.  There's certainly a lot of it in Proust.  Indeed sometimes you forget there is anything else.

But as many have observed, if love it's a bleakly self-absorbed sort of love.  It's hard to think of any lover in Proust who shows any real tenderness for the "beloved," any concern for their well-being.  Think Swann and Odette, where the very title "Un Amour de Swann," "Swann in Love" is  a kind of acid irony.  I'd sign on to this view, and add that it is one of the things, perhaps the main thing, that hangs a cloud over so insightful a narrative.

But here's what I never noticed before: the married couples.  The Verdurins. The Cottards, Heck, Marcel's own parents. Even--though I am a bit more tentative here--the Duke and Duchess de Guermantes.  Perhaps there are others.

I'm not suggesting there is any real passion here--there just might be, but we don't see it. But neither is there any of the isolated obsession. Instead, what we have is couples that just seem to rub along, that wear each other like an old shoe.  

I'm not exactly how this works in practice but that also is part of my point: for the most part, Proust doesn't tell us.  For such a great student of the human soul, he seems oddly uninterested in these relationships.  It's almost as if they aren't there.  For your weekend homework, discuss where "just rubbing along" and "private obsession" rank in the hierarchy of loving relationships.

Undocumented Extra: I do love this little tidbit which suggests what challenges Swan and Odette face as they try to rub along together:
 As for Vermeer of Delft, she asked if he had ever suffered because of a woman, if it was a woman who had inspired him, and when Swann admitted to her that no one knew anything about that, she lost interest in the painter. 

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (p. 250). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.


Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Kapringen

Entertainment planing tip: two Somali pirate movies in one month is quite enough. Back around the beginning of November we watched Tom Hanks do his stuff in Captain Phillips; last night we took in (I shouldn't say "endured") Tobias Lindholm's Danish Kapringen, A Hijacking, which tells (of course) tells the story in a much different way. It was exhausting, but time well spent. I wouldn't say that it's a better movie in the sense of "things that move," movable parts, all that stuff: in Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass directed about the best overall action film I've ever seen--really. But I'd say that Lindholm's is perhaps a better "movie" in the sense of storytelling and high drama. The focus here--you probably know this--is on the negotiations for the hostage release. We never even see the boarding.  Rotten Tomatoes reports that critics loved it all the way to 95 %; interestingly, audiences were more lukewarm, weighing in at only 77 percent.  My guess is that they might have been confused; they may have gone to A Hijacking expecting Tom Hanks and he was nowhere to be seen.

There's a superb general summary/review here (of all places) which I won't try to duplicate, but I do want to follow up one one issue--specifically, the treatment of the corporate boss back in the boardroom. At least one leading right-wing crazy site has said it is a subtle and insidious piece of leftist anti-corporate propaganda--made more mischievous, I suppose, by the absence of Navy Seals. But that is precisely what it is not. The leading grey-suit negotiator makes at least one horrifically wrong decision and some other questionable judgments.  But in this respect he is not all that different from his counterpart on the boat. He still comes across as a serious guy who understands that running his company does not cancel his responsibilities to his crewmen, both as employees but also as human beings.

I suppose you might sort this out as "Hollywood" versus "independent," but I'm more inclined to go with "US" v "Danish." I've had a bit of exposure to Danes: in my caricature I find them as highly entrepreneurial, serious about business but with some sense of themselves as parts of a functioning society. I don't mean to suggest they have better DNA than the rest of us: I'm more incline to ascribe it to us v them as in "small country" v "the world." You get a sense of "we're all in this together," coupled with a knack for cooperation (now that is the mystery ingredient) as they gear up to face the world.

So I'm tempted to full back on my own favorite bit of historical reconstruction: that it goes back to Viking longboats, collaborative enterprises where, in the words of the immortal Milo Minderbinder, everybody gets a share. Of course these were the same guys who used to kidnap their neighbors and sell them as slaves to chop cotton in Iran.

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

More Proust, Joe Biden Memorial Edition:
"If She Knew Me, She Would Like Me"

I seem to be yielding to the lazy temptation to clog the blog with gobs of Proust.  I will try to avoid the standard stuff (petites madeleines the steeples at Martinville) and choose pieces for which I can find a reason.  

So for today.  My good buddy Joel once said that the mark of success for a celebrity is to convince the Mugginses that "if he knew me, he would like me."  So Franklin D. Roosevelt saying "and you are my friends."  So Ronald Reagan saying--oh, whatever it was that Ronald Reagan said. And here, in Swann's Way, young Marcel gazing for the first time on Mme. de Guermantes, living avatar of a clan that can trace its lineage back to Gilbert the Bad, in whose chapel she now appears.  This being Proust, we are not surprised to learn that our narrator encounters a confused mismatch between reality and expectation. Still, much of the aura remains.

[I] can still see her, especially at the moment when the procession entered the sacristy, which was lit by the hot and intermittent sun of a day of wind and storm, and in which Mme. de Guermantes found herself surrounded by all those people of Combray whose names she did not even know, but whose inferiority too loudly proclaimed her supremacy for her not to feel a sincere benevolence toward them, and whom, besides, she hoped to impress even more by her good grace and simplicity. Thus, not being able to bestow those deliberate gazes charged with specific meaning which we address to someone we know, but only to allow her distracted thoughts to break free incessantly before her in a wave of blue light which she could not contain, she did not want that wave to disturb or appear to disdain those common people whom it encountered in passing, whom it touched again and again. I can still see, above her silky, swelling mauve tie, the gentle surprise in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to intend it for anyone but so that all might take their share of it, the slightly shy smile of a sovereign who looks as though she is apologizing to her vassals and loves them. That smile fell on me, who had not taken my eyes off her. Recalling, then, the gaze she had rested on me during the Mass, as blue as a ray of sunlight passing through Gilbert the Bad’s window, I said to myself: “Why, she’s actually paying attention to me.” I believed that she liked me, that she would still be thinking of me after she had left the church, that because of me perhaps she would be sad that evening at Guermantes. And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 181-182). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

Monday, December 02, 2013

Proust: Some Beginning Thoughts and Some Afterthoughts

I suppose it is some kind of irony that I am beginning my reading of Proust just as the rest of the world is finishing its. Fine, big deal: maybe I am in some other time zone. I'm not even sure what started me on this latest exercise although I do know I was flailing around for something to sink my teeth into; and it may have had something to do with this guy.

This would be my third reading of Proust, more or less, if I tough it out, which I very likely will not. I'm a little coy with the "more or less;" reason is that I never read it through as a sustained exercise but over the years, I'd say I've been through it twice--more if you count those wonderful Neville Jason CD (I did the "abridged" not the whole nine yards).  I even had the Jasons with me for a couple of days while I languished sick in my hotel room in Uzbekistan and that was a little weird, let me tell you: they were on shuffle and I was super medicated and I would drift in and out of these glorious, disconnected little jewels.

I can note a few things about this new venture that will distinguish it from previous outings.  One, an insight I think I owe to the best of all short intros to Proust (at least that I've seen).  That would be Sur Proust by the French belle-lettrist Jean-François Revel.  It was Revel, if memory serves, who argued that Proust is perhaps best understood not as a conventional novelist but as an essayist in the tradition of Montaigne.  That strikes me as entirely right. Think of it: the plot of Proust is improvisational, almost perfunctory.  But every page or two or three, Proust is saying something on the order of "it reminded me of.." and flying off into one of those jewels I was describing before.    Montaigne also, of course, takes second place to no on as a student of his own inner life. Well: to no one except Proust.

Another: I think I understand Proust's style better than I did.  Everyone talks about the famously long sentences. There are plenty of those.  My college dorm-mate Mark Strand called them "great cathedrals of commas and semicolons."  And dense, no doubt about that.

But be careful here: dense but not abstruse.  I indulged myself by rebuking an old friend just this afternoon for treating Joyce and Proust as the same.  I think that is wildly of base.  Joyce is a trickster, a leprechaun.  He takes pride in his puzzle-making.   He used to boast that people would still be trying to figure him out after 100 years.  Proust's sentences may be sinuous, serpentine. But disentangle them and their meaning is always exactly clear.  I'm pretty sure there is a rhetorical purpose to the complexity (though I probably haven't doped it out),  But I know there is one, and that it adds to the book's bite, power and drive).

[And BTWFWIW, the book is not all serpentine sentences.  "Combray" in Swann's Way can be almost daunting in its complexity. But turn the page and begin "Swan in Love" and you find yourself in an entirely different world.  Somebody (Joseph Epstein) said that Proust set out to write a trashy novel and by mistake wrote a masterpiece.  "Swann in Love makes that case."]

And finally, the French.  The first time through, I stuck to the old standard Scott-Moncrieff translation.    The second, I went for Kilmartin.  This time, I thought well, I really  ought to try the original. That was when I downloaded a French version (along with a Lydia Davis English) plus a French dictionary.  And it worked like ma--well, no, not quite magic.   Passages that I remember well in English--those I find I can plow through in the French.  Others--well, I can make some headway with extensive access to the dictionary.  Too bad.  I can see that for a book like this, there really is no second best.  But the fact is, I'd rather read than struggle.  Maybe in my fourth read...