Of course, I'm probably just jealous

I read Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life after having read Swann’s Way. Am I doing it wrong? I didn’t like it. How Proust Can Change Your Life, that is. I don’t know; is de Botton a real philosopher, in the practical, know-how-to-die tradition, or just a rich prat? Now that I know what he looks like I’m a bit put off by the idea of his stridently bald and improbably domed head even when I’m thinking highly of him. I imagine him and Patrick Stewart in greasy loincloths, squaring off, like rutting goats, on some grey precipitous crag; I imagine their gleaming pink pates colliding with a mighty crash. I bought Essays In Love mainly because it was the only book in the English section of a small bookstore that didn’t look like it would feature a character named Madison, or use the phrase, “with every fiber of his being”. I quite liked it. It was full of gleaming little aperçus, and I liked its tone: the examined life, on quaaludes.

Anyway, while it’s possible Proust could have changed my life, and still might, he hasn’t so far. But this is not the Proust post.

I do think de Botton’s latest foray into the contemporary consciousness, as a sort of scandalized shusher who’s had quite enough of pushy atheists, or a palms-up, heavenly-choir humanist lobbying for some kind of vaguely defined new-age temple of man, is pretty deeply silly. I feel like he’s going about it wrong, like his answer to the agonies and anomies of modern machine-life (but this is not the machine post) is a kind of Renaissance Faire version of religion. I don’t know; isn’t there just something iffy about the guy? I think he should start a boy band with Julian Assange and Max Headroom.

Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, Paris.

Great Moments in American Prudery

Speaking of Woody Allen, a post from the inimitable Adam Lisagor sent me to PBS looking to catch the American Masters documentary while it was still online. Alas, the window had already closed. I did not torrent the film and watch it; I deny that strenuously. Anyway, it is excellent, but what I wanted to say was that while on the PBS page I made the mistake of scrolling down and grazing on the comments (which is a mistake almost regardless of the site, the topic, or the phase of the moon, but, come on, in this case I really should have known better). Leaving aside all the other excellent arguments—including the one that says we’d all do better to just mind our own business—can we not, finally, dispense with the poisonous accusations of pedophilia? The woman is 41 years old, and has been his wife for 14 years. That this still passes in some apparently indefatigable quarters for pedophilia must have Humbert Humbert rolling in his grave.

Also excellent, and shorter: Woody Allen’s Fresh Air interview from last summer. It is sad, I suppose, that he is so guarded, so closed, even with as sympathetic and graceful an interviewer as Terry Gross. Still, it’s nice to hear him speaking in his own voice; it is a useful tonic against the tendency to imagine he and Alvy Singer are the same person. Note that it is only his delivery that turns Alvy’s line, “I was all-schoolyard” into a joke; with Gross, he is at pains to insist that he really was all-schoolyard, and we believe him.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of The Sandpiper, 1965.

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The Kinks: Waterloo Sunset

Midnight In Paris

If Match Point, Woody Allen’s last really fine picture1, was just Crimes and Misdemeanours transposed an octave younger, Midnight in Paris is a variation worthy of a Bach fugue, in which the theme of The Purple Rose of Cairo is played, as it were, inside-out. The stars align on this one: the whimsy is unforced, the cast is in perfect tune, and the script’s treatment of nostalgia, anachronism, and the ambivalent consolations of art is subtle without being clever, more wise than wiseacre. God, I sound like I’m trying to get into The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town. Playing through Thursday at the Wiltshire, East 32nd Street. Or whatever. Good flick, though, is all I’m saying.

1 Excepting, possibly, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which I haven’t seen.

Oh, word?

(via Belle Waring, à propos the death of Don Cornelius)

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Ticon: Jinxed

 

Motive

Some men commit great deeds in an effort to get laid. Most manage only mediocre deeds, I am sure, but in the (precisely) idiotic manner of the cockerel or bowerbird say to themselves, “By god, at least I’m doing something.” Once a man has succeeded in getting himself laid with some regularity, he typically finds he is a family man, and goes on doing something on that account. This, as is well known, is what makes a little less than half the world go round; I don’t flatter myself I’m telling you anything that hasn’t occurred to you.

But it has not been so with me. Moreover, what phlegmatic fire I had is well banked, now, and wouldn’t cook a potato. Well, what then? There is also fanaticism: the churches and parties are full of padres and cadres doing something, and just occasionally something pretty spiffy. It’s a tough racket, though, believing in things, and probably not for me. Can you imagine? Maybe I’ll just twist in the wind till I’m sixty and then go all crypto-fascist late-life Catholic convert or something. No, I don’t think so, either.

Anyway, I’ve got high hopes for Fear Of Death. Seems like a fit, right?

Fiorenzo Magni

Born 1920, seen here in his final race, the 1956 Giro d’Italia. This is the 12th of 23 stages. He has broken his collarbone, and is using a tube held between his teeth to exert upward force on the handlebars. Two days after this, he will break his humerus. Some 60 riders, including the leader, will drop out of the race during a snow storm on stage 20; Magni will finish second overall.