November 2009
2 posts
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October 2009
5 posts
Let Me Go To Phèdre!
Le médecin qui me soignait — celui qui m’avait défendu tout voyage — déconseilla à mes parents de me laisser aller au théâtre; j’en reviendrais malade, pour longtemps peut-être, et j’aurais en fin de compte plus de souffrance que de plaisir. Cette crainte eût pu m’arrêter, si ce que j’avais attendu d’une telle représentation eût été seulement un plaisir qu’en somme une souffrance ultérieure peut...
Ialdabaoth
L’histoire est simple : des anges rebellés contre Dieu descendent sur terre, à Paris précisément, pour préparer un coup d’état (si l’on peut dire) qui rétablira sur le trône du ciel celui que l’on nomme parfois le diable, mais qui est l’ange de lumière, le symbole de la connaissance libératrice… Les tribulations des anges dans le Paris de la Troisième...
29 Without Venice
Un Carpaccio à Venise, la Berma dans Phèdre, chefs-d’uvre d’art pictural ou dramatique que le prestige qui s’attachait à eux rendait en moi si vivants, c’est-à-dire si indivisibles, que si j’avais été voir des Carpaccio dans une salle du Louvre ou la Berma dans quelque pièce dont je n’aurais jamais entendu parler, je n’aurais plus éprouvé le même étonnement délicieux d’avoir enfin les yeux...
Here We Go Again
August 2009
5 posts
(Other half not featured)
“She belonged to that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.”
Mantegna
“A few steps away, a sturdy fellow in livery mused motionless, statuesque, useless, like the purely decorative warrior one sees in the most tumultuous paintings by Mantegna, lost in thought, leaning on his shield, while others beside him rush forward and slaughter one another.”
Fashionivorous Balzac Tigers
“L’un d’eux, d’aspect particulièrement féroce et assez semblable à l’exécuteur dans certains tableaux de la Renaissance qui figurent des supplices, s’avança vers lui d’un air implacable pour lui prendre ses affaires. Mais la dureté de son regard d’acier était compensée par la douceur de ses gants de fil, si bien qu’en approchant de Swann il semblait témoigner du mépris pour sa personne et...
The Art of Placing a Proper Order
“Un jour que, pour l’anniversaire de la princesse de Parme (et parce qu’elle pouvait souvent être indirectement agréable à Odette en lui faisant avoir des places pour des galas, des jubilés), il avait voulu lui envoyer des fruits, ne sachant pas trop comment les commander, il en avait chargé une cousine de sa mère qui, ravie de faire une commission pour lui, lui avait écrit, en lui rendant...
Salade Francillon (aka Japanese Salad)
July 2009
5 posts
More Stendahl Syndrome
Or she would look at him with a sullen expression, once again he would see before him a face worthy of figuring in Botticelli’s Life of Moses, he would place her in it, he would give her neck the necessary inclination; and when he had well and truly painted her in distemper, in the fifteenth century, on the wall of the Sistine Chapel, the idea that she had nevertheless remained here, by...
Last year at Marienbad
Je peux perdre. Mais je gagne toujours.
Faire Catleya
Portable Landscape
Lake Lucerne. Albert Bierstadt. National Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Peut-être aussi Swann attachait-il sur ce visage d’Odette non encore possédée, ni même encore embrassée par lui, qu’il voyait pour la dernière fois, ce regard avec lequel, un jour de départ, on voudrait emporter un paysage qu’on va quitter pour toujours.
SW, UADS
Stick it up your blog
11/05 Average number of new blogs created each second: 1 Technorati (San Francisco) 5/06 Percentage of white-collar Chinese workers who have personal blogs: 52 CBP Career Consultants Co. (Shanghai) 6/06 Estimated number of fake blogs created every day by websites to improve their rankings in search-engine results: 6,750 Technorati (San Francisco) 2/09 Number of applications submitted last fall for...
June 2009
1 post
My trip to Eagle Lake, Texas
Too Many Sucking Books
Too many books will deny their slaves the race to die in battle with the shout of victory in their ears. Otherwise you only get a cool nap in the shade and kick off with a little ah sound so they know to get you in the ground haste-wise before the public stink.
You dream maybe of Sam Houston whose own army ignored him and struck out to attack Santa Anna at San...
May 2009
25 posts
FREE OF DISTORTIONS
René Magritte. Perspective...
A charm, a meaning that is for me alone
Fennesz. Glide. (You’ll have to work for this one.)
So the ‘Méséglise way’ and the ‘Guermantes way’ remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind. Doubtless it makes...
For the fridge
15, Rue Gignan, Marseille.
If the coachman will not talk to you, what else is left but to fall back on your own company and try to recall your steeples, write deftly about how you once wrote naively about them, metaphorically lay an egg, and then sing at the top of your lungs?
-db- (for a view of the apartment)
The Holy Asparagus
Vittore Carpaccio. Madonna and Blessing Child.
SW, Davis trans., p. 182.
Mme de Guermantes advanced smiling and added to the … wooly weave [of the red carpets] a rosy velvet, an epidermis of light, the sort of tenderness, the sort of grave sweetness amid pomp and joy that characterize … certain paintings of Carpaccio….
-db-
taliban, georgia
Jeff Wall. Pine on the Corner. Duh.
Who knows. Lower frequencies. Lots (lots) of lightbulbs. And stolen electric et cetera.
-terence-
The Amorous Terraphage
Loretta Lux. The Rose Garden. In review.
And, too - just as during those moments of reverie in the midst of nature when, the effect of habit being suspended, and our abstract notions of things set aside, we believe with a profound faith in the orginality, in the individual life of the place in which we happen to be - the passing woman summoned by my desire seemed to be, not an ordinary...
Goaded like a demon
Note, La Chanson de Roland got an early definitive translation by none other than Moncrieff.
Teaching Art to the Young
Paul quoted me someone famous (probably himself) as having said that, with children, all you can hope to do is praise art in front of them and cross your fingers that, eventually, it all sinks in. I’m sure there’s plenty more written about this, as five seconds on Google already reveals such impossibly tedious pedagogical advice as this. At any rate, here’s Proust weighing in...
Animal Collective. In the Flowers. Goosebumps at...
Wet-footed Frogbit
So it was that, at the foot of the path that overlooked the artificial pond, there might be seen in its two rows woven of forget-me-nots and periwinkles, a natural crown, delicate and blue, encircling the chiaroscuro brow of water, and so it was that the sword lily, bending its blades with a regal abandon, extended over the eupatorium and wet-footed frogbit the ragged fleur-de-lis, violet and...
Eupatorium
Sword-lily
Periwinkles
Forget-me-nots
Nasturtiums
Lilacs
Uh, so what's up with the asparagus?
At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what there was for dinner, its preparation would already have begun, and Françoise, a colonel with all the forces of nature for her subalterns, as in the fairy-tales where giants hire themselves out as scullions, would be stirring the coals, putting the potatoes to steam, and, at the right moment, finishing over the fire those culinary...
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true
“Please believe me,” he went on insistently, “the waters of that bay, already half Breton, may act as a sedative, though a questionable one, on a heart like mine that is no longer undamaged, on a heart for whose wounds there is no longer any compensation. They are contraindicated at your age, my boy. Good night, neighbors,” he added, leaving us with that evasive...
Tom Waits. Nirvana.
Not much chance. Completely...
No, I don't know them.
Est-ce que vous connaissez, monsieur, la… les châtelaines de Guermantes?
SW, Davis trans., p. 132 (dinner at Legrandin’s).
Last night/our ship/came in/on fire
There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute.
David Brooks, They Had It Made, NY Times, May 13, 2009.
-db-
As if it wasn't hard enough
From this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review:
Wallace’s Gift
To the Editor:
I was one of the graduates in the audience at David Foster Wallace’s May 21, 2005, commencement address at Kenyon College, described by Tom Bissell (April 26), and I will remember the honor for the rest of my life. Wallace’s gift to the world is his brilliant novels and stories, but it also...
Giotto's Charity
At the Helm
Your defeatist attitude will get you nowhere fast: there is a job as a driver in Strasbourg for which telecommuting is “Ok.” What are you looking at, Proust? You think that you are able to label the Hiero-sound? You still haven’t found a comparable variable.
-db-
April 2009
20 posts
The Kinks. Village Green. The Kinks Are the...
Ennui v. Anomie
Reshmi asked if ennui best described my predicament, but I thought it was anomie. And since I stand accused, some would say justly, of recently uttering the phrase “it’s like squeezing blood from an orange” in Continental Europe with no preceding alcohol intake as an excuse, I thought I’d best put down the definition for both words here to make sure it was, indeed, anomie....
Van Morrison. On Hynford Street. Hymns To The...
Hawthorns
“It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns.”
- SW, Davis Trans., p. 114
Meaninglessness
Reading through Harper’s April on the plane, I ran into this essay from Terry Eagleton, who I had seen in this Times Sunday Magazine profile, which has made me a bit overly-sensitive of the conversation topics of Atlanta’s brunch scene - at others’ tables and my own (refi-, anyone?) - reviewing a biography of William Hazlitt (no prior knowledge of this guy). Anyway, good thoughts...
It's a regular disease of asparagus!
I finally got back to the farmer’s market off 75 this weekend and loaded up with some amazing vegetables for super cheap. For only $8 - a carton of mushrooms, 2 giant red peppers, a bunch of cilantro, a jalapeno pepper, 2 green chile peppers, a red chile pepper, a yellow onion, 4 sweet potatoes, 3 tomatoes, ginger root, a giant zucchini, a yellow squash, a lemon, 2 limes, a bunch of giant...
Oh, and P.S.
In addition to all of our flawed but loveable classic characters, let’s not forget the perfectly wonderful, and wonderfully perfect Mr. Darcy. Just TRY finding a man like that in the “real” world. (How could one not want to merge with Mr. Darcy?!).