Orienting Between Hyperobjects

An initial warning: I know this blog is for people to talk about the quarantine and various experiences they've been having, and I fully intend to make this post about that, but this will also include some things pertaining to the current situation in America and the widespread unrest.

I've seen contrasting images of once-empty NYC streets with entire cities flooded with people. One represented the fear of an intangible, pernicious disease. The other represented people protesting an intangible system of oppression. Watching these protests from another country feels like I'm witnessing an alternate reality, one in which there is no global pandemic sweeping through the world. I didn't expect seeing so many people in one place to seem so foreign to me. I am happy to see people protesting a deeply broken system but I dread that these protests will lead to more deaths from the virus.

The protesters in this case seem to be caught between two "hyperobjects" that is an object that is so far-reaching that it cannot be necessarily touched but its effects can be felt. The internet, global warming, race, and class could be considered hyperobjects by this metric. More information on hyperobjects. I would posit that a pandemic can also be a kind of hyperobject. One of the key factors of a hyperobject is the interactivity of a multitude of smaller objects all acting on each other. The main hyperobject is only made apparent when we look at how these smaller objects are affected. We only notice climate change through things like raised sea levels, temperature changes, emission levels etc.

This made me think about race and how all these small systems culminate into a far-reaching web of violence, hate, ignorance, and mortality for people of color. I am also reminded of a series of articles that show that Black Americans are dying of Covid-19 at a rate of three times that of white people. Here we can see two hyperobjects compounding to create a horrific system of co-morbidity in which the pandemic is exacerbated by a racist system.

I wanted to write this because I feel incredibly unmoored with everything that's happening but at least I can attempt to measure out some of what's going on.

I hope you all stay safe.

reality blurs

from my journal 4/20

I finished the Book of Delights by Ross Gay, and it was an uncanny experience partially because so much of the book is about touching people – how nice it is when people come together, when they touch, when they work on a task or in a community garden with each other. There is an entire chapter on how much Gay likes it when people touch his shoulder, when people he doesn't know dap him, about being in public, in public space.

It's been 39 days of quarantine (but who's counting,) and even watching television or movies feels weird to me – people eating together, taking the train, walking down a crowded street... Was there ever such a time? Will that time ever come again?

I had a nightmare last night that I was at a beer festival – odd because I don't even like beer and would never attend a beer festival. It was summer, and everyone had closed me in against a table. I was wearing a tank top, and I looked at my brown shoulders in the summer sun. I felt hot, uncomfortable, and confused. Why wasn't anyone else scared? I reached for my neck and felt I had a bandana I could cover my mouth with, and I did, but everyone around me was dancing in a perverse simulacrum of "happy spring break."
"Stop!" I started to scream. "Let me out of here!" I told them. But no one could hear me and no one cared. I woke up in a sweat.

People keep saying that things will be different once all this is over, that we won't ever go back to normal, and I hope in some ways we don't. I could live without wasteful beer festivals and streets flooded with trash. I would be sad, though, if I could no longer walk down a crowded street without fear, if I could never hug a stranger or eat off a friend's plate or buy something from a thrift store. I feel unsettled about this, more unsettled than I have in months. It makes reality blur and slip, and the seeming strangeness of things I used to take for granted is troubling.

Posted outside a neighbor's door

Cyclamen in a Pot

Dora Carrington

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

Take a deep breath.

Now, let it out.

Slowly.

Repeat.

Now, smile.

Here are a few COVID-related silver-linings. I mean, it's not all doom and gloom (especially for the non-human world).

LA's air has not been this clean for three decades.

The same goes for Italy and China while in lock-down.

There are dolphins swimming in Venice canals. DOLPHINS.

Mountain goats take over a town in Wales.

Bears and bobcats in Yosemite aren't angry the park is closed.

Sea turtles are happy the beaches are empty.

Burning Man is canceled.

China proposes a ban on dogs as food.

Saudi Arabia is looking to get out of Yemen, citing coronavirus fears.

This may all change when capitalism is up and roaring again. In the meantime, however, let's savor the good things while they last.

On being overtrusted, overbefriended and overconsulted; or, Responsibility

Talent, knowledge, humility, reverence, magnanimity involve the inconvenience of responsibility or they die…

Example is needed, not counsel; but let me submit here these four precepts:

Feed imagination food that invigorates

Whatever it is, do it with all your might

Never do to another what you would not wish done to yourself.

Say to yourself, “I will be responsible.”

Put these principles to the test, and you will be inconvenienced by being overtrusted, overbefriended, overconsulted, half adopted, and have no leisure. Face that when you come to it.

--Marianne Moore

SATURDAY NIGHT POWER QUOTE

It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! ... There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed.

--Henry David Thoreau

Stars: they're just like us, Zoom Passover edition

The best part of Zoom calls is glancing into people's houses. We watched parts of the Passover fundraiser this evening, and I was mostly struck by all the weird and great stuff in celebrities' houses. Some highlights:

Darren Criss's I ♥ NOLA sign

Fran Drescher's dirty dishes

Ilana Glazer's djembe

Richard Kind's...lamps? I don't know what's going on here

Andy Cohen's novelty votives (Jennie informs me that these are novelty votives of himself)

Nick Kroll's lamp

Henry Winkler's incredible array of files

Reza Aslan's many copies of his own book

Isaac Mizrahi's cake platter covered in books

Bette Midler's squirrel statue

Seemingly everything that's in Harvey Fierstein's house

Antonello da Messina--St. Jerome in His Study--1475

St. Jerome's pleasure is also his pain, of course. He lived in a neon-less, wi-fi-free world. St. Jerome's pleasure is also his pain. 

how to bathe

I've bathed almost every night during isolation, all kinds of baths, from short baths with lots of bubbles to a long personal "spa night" with candles and a face mask (the luxurious kind), to Epsom salt baths with lavender essential oil.

I bathe a few times per week even when I'm not in quarantine, but this time has provided me a space to really up my bath game.

I remember reading a diary in college from the 18th century by a woman who had never gotten her whole body wet at the same time. Her delight at her first bath, in her 80s, was palpable. Though Western Europeans aren't necessarily seen as a bathing culture, what surprised me about this diary is that Medieval people absolutely were! It's almost as if, through plague times and religious wars, Western Europeans forgot about the joys of bathing.

As an Eastern European Jew, my people are big on baths – we love a good shvitz, and women are supposed to go monthly to a ritual bath, called a Mikveh. I've been to a mikveh twice: when I turned 30 with my mother, and when Josh and I got married  (who knows if it will reopen again! Jews have gotten through many a plague.)


When I was young, baths were my mother's cure-all:
Have a headache?
Take a bath.
A cold?
Take a bath.
You think you're getting sick?
Take a bath.
Anxious?
Take a bath
Happy?
Take a bath

In many ways, my mother was right: Research has shown that bathing burns as many calories as a 30 minute walk and has many anti-inflammatory, metabolic, and disease-fighting benefits besides. Most bathing cultures do not bathe every night, but I've decided to throw caution to the wind and bathe as much as I like during this time.

Here are my tips for a good bath:

• Leave yourself enough time – don't treat bathing like a shower and try to do it right before you go to bed. You'll want at least an hour to fully luxuriate.
• Get one of these drain stoppers so you can fill it totally up, but be careful you don't overflow
• Add ins are crucial: I use a shea butter bubble bath, but dealer's choice
• Don't make the water too hot. It's tempting, but very hot water can make you pass out or worse.
• Leave your phone in the other room! This is your time. Also, you don't want to drop your phone in the bath.
• Light a candle – it's just nice.
• Bring a book, maybe some mood music. I get most of my reading done in the bath, which means that most of my books are unfortunately water logged. If you are a person who cares about this, bring a magazine.

Finally, here's a collection of open access bath related content from the Met, and my favorite bath-related image: The Death of Marat. Let's hope that we fair better than Marat.

Progress

Yesterday was especially hard. That's all I really have to say. The seeds I planted a while ago, though, are more than sprouting -- the nasturtiums, in particular, are taking off. I love nasturtiums; they're so hardy and colorful, and they have a wonderful spiciness that makes them a treat to add to salads. These ones, little seedlings, look like tiny waterlily pads. Today I went outside and planted some carrots, lettuce, spinach in the area I've been trying to turn into workable soil. Everything's awful, but I'm trying to remember to move around, be generous, take pleasure from small beautiful things.

William Tyler

Just another song helping these days. I love this whole album.

Vt.-Ore. Floor

There's a thousand taverns, taverns in the sky. I just think this song is so beautiful -- elegiac and ribald at the same time, so primo Michael Hurley.

RE: ARE YOU DEAD OR ALIVE 62

This was the email heading that absolutely frightened me about three days ago (sorry if it alarmed anyone at first glance). In a split second I thought I had neglected to reach out to a friend or family member and had inadvertently caused a significant amount of undue stress.

As I read the email I was bewildered but happy to find that it was just a scammer going by the name Kirsten Peterson. They wanted to notify me that two men (an American national named Charles Weston and a Canadian national named Joseph Bevan) had somehow gotten power of attorney over me and had claimed that I was dead and wanted to claim a $30 million USD fund in my name. This fund was now lying dormant and unclaimed according to her and I simply had to provide a few key details about my address, marital status, full legal name, occupation and so on in order to get it.

For the first time since all of this began I felt a jarring return to normalcy, but not the normal anyone really likes or wants. I was immediately reminded of James Veitch’s TED talk about replying to spam and I decided to reply to pass the time.

It amazes me that even in the face of a global pandemic spam emails, phising, and scams still go on. I feel a strange sense of admiration for the people that, no matter what, are set on “hustling” that is to say doing anything and everything to "get that money" during a crisis. In the wake of news stories about people getting their karmic payback for buying obscene amounts of resources (hand sanitizer and the like) only to be thwarted into donating it I am blown away by the human commitment to “the hustle”.

I also recently watched a video from a YouTuber about the practice of “scambaiting” or wasting scammers’ time for entertainment on the internet that I would highly recommend. The video raises some interesting questions about the typical American relationship to customer service scams and what external factors come into play when we engage with scammers. The video left an impression and when I was making my response it made me curious.

All of this to say that although I think the scammer is doing a bad thing which is made even more sinister because it is being done during a global pandemic I still wonder about the person on the other end. I gave a few non-serious answers with the intention of wasting their time but also included a question for the person on the other end (if there is one): how are you holding up? In the absence of a lot of interpersonal connection I've suddenly started latching on to any kind of relationship I can get. I wonder if the looming pandemic has altered their thinking in a similar way, if at all.

PS I haven not yet heard back from them about the $30 million but rest assured I'm going to get that money.

A comment on Genghis Blues

For some reason, I'm not able to comment without adding a URL, not sure why.

Yes, I love the film Genghis Blues, I own the DVD and have watched it many times.  It stirs my soul. I love the part when Paul is drinking water fresh from that beautiful Mongolian river, but the traveler in me is screaming, "No, Paul! This is livestock country!" The group of people that surround him -  the film makers, Feynman groupies, and musicians form this circle around Paul that is really incredible to watch form. Since that movie, I have seen the band Huun Huur Tu, Tuvan throat singers, here in Portland and in NYC a number of times and I've wondered, "Who was the first throat singer to say, 'Oh! I can sing two notes at the same time?'" Probably a tribe member, surviving in isolation, during a particularly boring month, in a yurt on the Mongolian Steppes.

Paul Pena

"Late at night when he cannot sleep, he listens to the world on a shortwave radio. We see his fingers delicately touching the dial, rotating it just a little at a time, seeking stations hidden in the bandwidth.One night he hears strange, haunting music on Radio Moscow. He tracks it down. It is called khoomei, or 'throat singing,' and is practiced in the tiny republic of Tuva, which you can find on the map between Mongolia and Siberia. Tuvan throat singing, he learns, involves creating an eerie sound that combines different and distinct notes at the same time.

For years Paul Pena studies throat singing, just for the love of it. He translates the lyrics using two Braille dictionaries, one to get them from Tuvan to Russian, the other from Russian to English (we are not amazed to learn there are no Tuvan-English dictionaries in Braille). He becomes possibly the only throat singer not born in Tuva, all this time without ever meeting anyone else who knows what he is doing.

Now it is 1993. A touring group from Tuva performs in San Francisco. He visits them backstage and sings their songs--in their style, in their language. They are thunderstruck. In 1995, Pena is invited to Tuva for the annual khoomei competition. He is accompanied by the sound engineer Lemon DeGeorge ("I am basically a tree trimmer"), San Francisco disc jockey Mario Casetta, and Roko and Adrian Belic from Evanston, who are documentarians. They return with this film.

But so far we have touched only on the amazing facts of "Genghis Blues." If the film were only about Pena learning throat singing and going to Tuva, it would be a travelogue. It is about much more. About the way we communicate with music." - Roger Ebert on Genghis Blues (1999)

Paul Pena is an ongoing and ever-surprising source of comfort for me. A long time ago, I think as a young teenager, I saw the movie that Roger Ebert is reviewing above -- Genghis Blues -- in which Pena is an amazingly talented musician beginning to enter a huge world that became deeply meaningful to him as he struggled with depression and physical illness. Pena was the original author of that Steve Miller hit "Jet Airliner," which is always on the radio. I think Pena's version was way better. I don't know. After that movie, which you can watch for free online here, Pena's album "New Train" (which you can listen to in its rambunctious, funky, moving entirety here) became something really soothing to me, even though it's bouncy and energetic. I just think it's a beautiful, feeling album. His voice is amazing. Here in self-isolation with my family, we've started something we're calling "Cheer Hour," where we try together for an hour to do something kind of fun and laughter-inducing. Mandatory fun is rarely fun, but so far this hour has been a spirit lifter. Last night we put on "New Train" and drew bad portraits of each other.

If you know this movie or this album, please let me know, or let me know if you watch/listen and if you also enjoyed it!!

"It was a morale booster, a jolly place, but it was not curative"

This profile of Naomi Replansky and Eva Kollisch was a wonderful read.


I loved this story because I learned more about these incredible women and the circumstances around their lives. At the same time, I've noticed an odd rash of stories about "getting through difficult times" featuring... Holocaust survivors and people who survived escaping the Syrian army or lost their brother in 9/11. I'm sure there are more!

This is a terrible time, many people are struggling, but... what? The advice is lovely, but I feel like this media turn is vastly inappropriate. Maybe it's just me.

I read the novel Writers & Lovers by Lily King and was up half the night because I didn't want to leave the characters. I thought it was as enjoyable as Conversations with Friends, but it may have been because it was so relatable. It takes place in Boston/Cambridge in 1997, and is so site specific. There are paragraphs documenting the specific route she takes to work, paintings at the MFA that are still on display. Reading about her biking around and going to places (particularly the closed stores, RIP Border Cafe) was a perfect escape. All I wanted was a juicy novel about women, love, grief, and the patriarchy, and it delivered. I'm very tired today.

Speaking of museums, the findable map of the Met is delightful!


Met Museum Map

The Munch-Cohen Connection

Entitled "The Heart" and created in 1899, the above Edward Munch woodcut is best paired with the below 2019 Leonard Cohen song "Happens to the Heart."

 

https://youtu.be/2AMMb9CiScI

The Dexterity of Desnos

Surrealism is one of my favorite "brands" of writing, in particular the work of the French Surrealist poets. Below is a good one by Robert Desnos. Fun/sad fact is that during WWII Desnos was a member of the French Resistance and died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1945, aged 44. Doubly fun fact--the below poem was translated by Paul Auster.

At the Edge of the World

Babbling in the black street, even at the end, where
                         the river shudders against the banks.
Tossed from a window--a lone cigarette-butt
                         blooms  into a star. 
Again, babbling in the black street.
You loud mouths! 
Thick night, unbreathable night. 
A cry comes near, is almost upon us,
But fades at the moment it arrives.

Somewhere in the world, at the foot of a slope,
A deserter is talking to sentinels who do not understand 
                           his language. 

Mild Celebration

Today I get out of self-quarantine from my parents! Not a huge deal, but we get to now be in the same space, and I can stop eating dinner in another room and yelling into the conversation. For reasons too long and boring to explain here, all of my stuff is stored in this house, packed away in the late summer, but I haven't been able to access it during quarantine. For some reason I've just been fixating on being reunited with my overalls, which are back there somewhere, and I guess with seeing what, exactly, I've stored and forgotten about.

In other news, I started some leftover seeds from last year inside -- dill, nasturtiums, basil, parsley -- we'll see if they successfully sprout.

Here are some photos I was looking at, without any context.

happy zoom day

I missed a few days on this blog because I kept waking up late and feeling meh. Also, I turned 32 on video chat this week.

Having a Zoom birthday was, according to Josh, like having a party in which everyone is standing in a circle. I got all dressed up and changed outfits three times to keep it interesting. At one point, we went outside and danced with my neighbors. Patty couldn't get her video to work, so her avatar was an image of a baby being baptized. My mother in law sent me a video:

 Here are some photos:

In the 2 seconds that Patty could get her video to work, she showed us her "coronavirus haircut," which included a long rat tail. "Everyone should have a fucked up coronavirus home haircut by the time we're done with this," she said.

What was nice is that I got 30 people from 10 different states to participate in what someone described as feeling like "a weird art project" because I was so dressed up and drank an entire bottle of orange wine from a goblet. I'm not the only one having these birthday parties – they're proliferating and who knows how much longer they're going to go on. (I have one tonight, in fact!) I tried to make the best of it, but I love my friends and I found it depressing.

I also baked an angel food cake, which was pretty easy, but took 12 egg whites. Josh baked an opposite cake with the yolks, so now we have a white pound cake and a yellow pound cake. We froze the yellow one.

 

About a week ago I deactivated all my social media because reading up to the minute commentary at the same volume was getting me down. I thought I'd miss it, but I honestly don't! Now I read the news once or twice a day instead and keep up on Metafilter. The internet without social media is very different, and I like it.

I've been reading and listening to Emergence Magazine primarily, and I am getting a lot out of it. The magazine publishes online and then provides a podcast – either a discussion or a reading of an article by the author. I particularly loved this piece, about enclosures and humans living with trees. They're doing some online classes on topics like nature writing, and a reading group of Braiding Sweetgrass, one of the best books I've read in a long time.

shouts out to all of my regency era girls

Unemployed and quarantining with my parents in the suburbs, I've been thinking a lot (well even more than usual) about the women living in country houses in those Jane Austen novels. They basically live in isolation - maybe they go to a country dance or have guests occasionally, but most of the time they're really just by themselves. They didn't do housework because they had servants. What did they do all day? From the novels we know they embroidered a lot, went for walks in the countryside, maybe played piano. I guess they spent a lot of time on their "correspondence." Did they not get bored? Maybe it never occurred to them to be bored, the pace of life was so slow then. The most exciting thing that could happen was a man of considerable fortune (5000 pound a year!) moving into the neighborhood. That was conversation fodder for months. Anyway I guess what I'm saying is that I'm Elizabeth Bennett now and if you email me I am absolutely thinking of it as my "correspondence"

participatory moments

being stuck inside has made me think a lot about Elastic-City, known for its participatory walks, but was/is much, much more than that.

i'm just home, but i think about what i can do to be present in where i am
and i think about what i can do to draw and feel like i can put good ideas and bad ideas on my little whiteboard and do something with it or erase it all and do it again. i mostly erase all of it.

and i think about how i can de-stress, even if it is just to check in with myself for a second.

"Sapokanikan"

I went out for a walk this morning and put Joanna Newsom's "Divers" on. Spring is slowly coming on in Denver; we're supposed to get some rain/snow late tomorrow night but then nothing for weeks. About halfway through the walk "Sapokanikan" came on and I remembered how much I'd loved it a few years ago, listening to it over and over. Newsom has (justifiably, and admirably) never put her catalog on Spotify so I have to pull up my Bandcamp download to listen to the album which I usually forget to do. In Newsom's words in 2015:

"Sapokanikan" is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.

It's also quite simply a song about New York City, which is a place I've been thinking about a lot in that last couple of days. I'm not sure if folks living in the city are going to be comforted by its weary, cosmic history of the town from the Lenape to the near-present, or the music video shot in 2015 of an isolated Newsom singing the song as she travels through the streets of Sapokanikan. But finishing my walk around the park I ran into my own weird history: a man dressed in an overcoat, cowboy hat and boots, walking across the crosswalk towards me.

He's in the middle-right of the photo, next to the big tree. I tried not to be too creepy or invasive taking a photo of him. 

Pixelated Apricot Blossoms

My parents have an apricot tree in their backyard and it's started to flower in earnest. Last summer it dropped so much fruit they started to almost (almost) hate it -- we're still making our way through the inventive preserves, of different kinds, my mom made from the spoils. It's hard to imagine that it's going to start fruiting any time soon, during this pandemic. I think it'll be both a glad occasion and a kind of harried, unnerving one, if it has all of the bounty of last year.

"Satch Plays Fats: A Tribute to the Immortal Fats Waller by Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars"

"Satch Plays Fats" is sundown music. I've never listened to it before 7p.m. at the earliest. I've noticed more people in Denver out on their porches and patios in the last week and it would be perfect blasting through an open window, as well as in dinner parties or general bullshit sessions with your neighbors at some future date.

There are no liner notes, just a back cover with some adorably 1955 musings from the album's producer, the jazz/rock/pop God George Avakian. He says that Waller's songs "were invariably written with simplicity, charm, and an over-all perfection" so that it is "easy to remember a Fats Waller song, but it is also easy to think that they are no trouble to write." This is correct. I hear "Blue Turning Grey Over You" and "I've got a Feeling I'm Falling" in my head at least once a week.

The solo at 3:07 always slays me. I'll always fight it, but I'm also always going to think of all music through rock music, and that solo feels like a quietLOUDquiet guitar solo from Joey Santiago on a Pixies song. Satch starts with the lovely melody in the first two minutes of the song, then he sings one verse and almost goes back into the melody (the band drops out) but then goes right into the second verse, and at the end of the second verse you're ready for the third verse, he's baited you, but instead he unleashes a full open trumpet solo. Or in Avakian's words: "This extraordinary performance is all Armstrong--a muted trumpet solo, an impassioned vocal, and an open trumpet solo."

There's something both meditative and completely unhinged about this whole album. I think I like it at night because it organizes my emotions from the day, energizes them, and puts them to bed.

Garden

I just feel really down and scared today. I looked at seeds because my parents have cold frames on the side of their house, and it was really joyful for an hour or so to plan a garden that could make use of this space. So many different kinds of lettuce to choose from. Here's a pic of the potential layout:



Obv more than can probably fit in this space, but I really want to garden. It's sunny and somewhat warm (mid 50s) here in New Mexico today. Gardening is somewhere in the future..

little delights, and one missing delight

 It snowed today, but the garlic is coming up! This is a sure sign of spring. So early, yet so satisfying.

 I loved this selection from "Braiding Sweetgrass" about the Honorable Harvest

Azaleas: another sure sign of spring.

My desk is messy with books, but I took these photos to show my colleagues my workspace. I built the standing desk myself. The horse painting in the corner was inherited from my grandmother and is by Chucho Reyes. It is one of the most beautiful objects I own. In the corner of the second photo is a cell of Lucy from the Peanuts gang that belonged to my mother. The other small prints are from Lisbon, Havana, and Detroit. The Greek bust belonged to my grandmother. Above my desk you can see books by Lewis Hyde.

 I made fish tacos with red cabbage slaw.

I distributed literature on the coronavirus for the city. Distributing literature in a mask and gloves was dystopian and a bit overwhelming, but I'm glad I did it.

I started to learn to cross stitch. The pattern I'm using is embarrassingly earnest, (It says, "You are ENOUGH.") but I think it's big enough and easy enough to learn on.

I also took a long walk in Forest Hills Cemetery with Lauren, but I didn't take any photos. A number of famous people are buried there, including ee cummings, Anne Sexton (monster!), Eugene O'Neill, Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison, and Amy Beach. Amy Beach wrote some lovely pieces. Here's one.

Zooming with Proust, the literature of convalescence

I've been couch-ridden for about a week, experiencing all the COVID-19 symptoms without the fever (and thus apparently without the main criterion that would make me eligible for testing in Massachusetts). Yesterday I started reading Swann's Way, and let me just say that a quarantine is a great time to start reading this masterpiece of lying around in bed.

Amidst pages upon pages of the narrator waiting for his mom to walk upstairs to give him a kiss goodnight, there's this, which seems to be about Zoom dinner parties or the internet or something:

No doubt the Swann who was known at the same time to so many clubmen was quite different from the one created by my great-aunt, when in the evening, in the little garden at Combray, after the two hesitant rings of the bell had sounded, she injected and invigorated with all that she knew about the Swann family the dark and uncertain figure who emerged, followed by my grandmother, from a background of shadows, and whom we recognized by his voice. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. No doubt, in the Swann they had formed for themselves, my family had failed out of ignorance to include a host of details from his life in the fashionable world that caused other people, when they were in his presence, to see refinements rule his face and stop at his aquiline nose as though at their natural frontier; but they had also been able to garner in this face disaffected of its prestige, vacant and spacious, in the depths of these depreciated eyes, the vague, sweet residue—half memory, half forgetfulness—of the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the card table or in the garden, during our life of good country neighborliness. The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed with all this, as well as with a few memories relating to his parents, that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to the first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one's life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon (19–20). 

Waiting to talk to a nurse about symptoms did drive me to this 2014 episode of This American Life about "Opus No. 1," the best hold music song, and then this 2014 How to Dress Well song that samples it.

Dinner Parties

"They saw no signs and smelled no smells of supper, their faces were long and dismal under all the politeness. Chexbres and I let them suffer until we thought the alcoholic intake was fairly well adjusted to their twelve or fifteen rather jaded bodies. Then, with the smug skill of two magicians, we flicked away the empty glasses and the tired canapés, and slid the salad and the rolls into place on the old dresser. He gave the ragout a few odorous stirs...and the puzzled hungry people, almost tittering with relief and excitement, flocked like children into the kitchen for their suppers. They ate and ate, and talked as they had not dared talk for too many years, and laughed a great deal." -MFK Fisher remembering her tricky dinner parties in Switzerland...


I attended a virtual quiz night last night, which was as close to riotous a time as I've had in isolation. I've been really craving people-full nights. Dinner parties. I wonder if it would be possible to throw a virtual dinner party somehow, everyone making and eating a different part of the meal, or cooking some simple thing all together and sharing in it. I hope when this is all over to have more dinner parties.

[Edit: because someone else just posted a screenshot from their Zoom hangout, I'm going to post my own here, from the virtual quiz night.]