My copy of À la recherche automatically falls opens to the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes, where the tyrannical housekeeper Françoise complains about the birdsongs in their new quartier. "Le pépiement matinal des oiseaux semblait insipide à Françoise."
In other news, our confrère at AYA in Paris Doug Van Der Heide turned into a Freudian psycho-analyst on the upper East Side of Manhattan Island, like a character in a Woody Allen movie.
As for me, you can follow the most recent ten or twenty years of my life on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jacobfreeze/, including about 500 drawings and paintings.
I hope to hear from you again, David, sometime, soon maybe. I have very fond memories of you and Degginger in particular in Paris, and maybe at a given moment we can simultaneously hoist a toast to our old friend Stuart in the thin air of cyberspace. He meant so well by all of us.
De même, habîbî. -- I had ceased blogging for various reasons, partly related to a Google/blogspot software ‘upgrade’ a few years ago, which broke everything. But yesterday a young computer-maven friend who used to blog using the same kind of platform, came by to visit and say farewell, before moving to the other coast; and he and I fiddled with the thing and got it working again. It was only then that I saw your comments, sitting unmoderated and (thus) unposted. At first the “Jacob” threw me, but it was clearly you.
J’entends bien renouer avec toi, de plein coeur; but I do things slowly these days; so in the meantime, the following morsels may serve you as a madeleine:
I forgot to include a link to Doug Van Der Heide's psycho-analytic practice on East 85th Street in Manhattan, between Madison and Fifth, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum! It's a heck of a neighborhood! If Oriane de Guermantes dreams of death in the Carlyle Hotel, they probably have Doug on the speed-dial.
The previous link to my paintings and drawings is probably useless unless you're deep in the tall weeds of Facebook, and all other forms of sharing photos on the internet are likewise crammed with silly conditions. Easiest for me is https://jacobfreeze.livejournal.com/ which only includes a long long line of images, and it works much better on Microsoft Edge than Google Chrome, which displays ENORMOUS images that don't fit on a screen, blah blah blah!
Meanwhile your Zapruder/Proust essay reminded me of a moment in the movie Amadeus, when Salieri complains that God has chosen "an obscene child" for his divine instrument, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYHJRhRym1U) so it doesn't exactly surprise me that Proust also indulged in childlike antics, like his imaginary friend Robert de Saint-Loup, who once walked all the way across Fouquet's on the backs of the booths, so they say, just for a laugh!
Thanks to your bradykinetic (etymology with a vengeance) correspondence, your blog about Proust running down the steps floated about in my consciousness until it slowly formed itself into exactly the opposite scenario to what you described, where you compared Proust to Zellig and Forrest Gump, a nebbish and an imbecile. But what I see in the film is someone so far above the requirements of ordinary behavior that he walks through barriers impassible to the right-thinking bourgeoisie as if they were nothing, and that's exactly how it was for Marcel Proust, immersed in the intimate circle of Robert de Montesquiou and Prince Antoine Bibesco, between them related to every dynasty in the history of Europe, all the way back to the Etruscans! Marcel skips down the steps out of all order because he and his friends never wait in line, they never wait in line, and if you never saw or heard of such a thing as a "coupe-file," which money could not buy, not even for the obscenely rich clan of the Verdurins, then today is your lucky day!
Swann allait rejoindre le petit noyau des Verdurin n'importe où, quelquefois dans les restaurants de banlieue où on allait peu encore car ce n'était pas la saison, plus souvent au théâtre, que Mme Verdurin aimait beaucoup ; et comme un jour, chez elle, elle dit devant lui que pour les soirs de premières, de galas, un coupe-file leur eût été fort utile, que cela les avait beaucoup gênés de ne pas en avoir le jour de l'enterrement de Gambetta, Swann qui ne parlait jamais de ses relations brillantes, mais seulement de celles mal cotées qu'il eût jugé peu délicat de cacher, et au nombre desquelles il avait pris dans le faubourg Saint-Germain l'habitude de ranger les relations avec le monde officiel, répondit :
« Je vous promets de m'en occuper, vous l'aurez à temps pour la reprise des Danicheff, je déjeune justement demain avec le Préfet de police à l'Élysée.
— Comment ça, à l'Élysée ? cria le docteur Cottard d'une voix tonnante.
I seized this email address about 15 minutes after the internet was invented, (jacobfreeze@gmail.com), and there are now 47 of us jacobfreezes on Facebook and gmail and so on. Apropos, I also have a blogspot blog, (https://jacobfreeze.blogspot.com/) which still updates itself automatically every time I post anything anywhere, even 7 years after I forgot all about it.
Hey, David. Do you still own the Gallimard edition of Proust that we bought so long ago in Paris?
ReplyDeleteIndeed I do. Read it, too.
DeleteHello from Paris in 1967. Is this blog still alive? Reply SVP to jacobfreeze@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteMy copy of À la recherche automatically falls opens to the beginning of Le Côté de Guermantes, where the tyrannical housekeeper Françoise complains about the birdsongs in their new quartier. "Le pépiement matinal des oiseaux semblait insipide à Françoise."
ReplyDeleteIn other news, our confrère at AYA in Paris Doug Van Der Heide turned into a Freudian psycho-analyst on the upper East Side of Manhattan Island, like a character in a Woody Allen movie.
As for me, you can follow the most recent ten or twenty years of my life on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jacobfreeze/, including about 500 drawings and paintings.
I hope to hear from you again, David, sometime, soon maybe. I have very fond memories of you and Degginger in particular in Paris, and maybe at a given moment we can simultaneously hoist a toast to our old friend Stuart in the thin air of cyberspace. He meant so well by all of us.
De même, habîbî. -- I had ceased blogging for various reasons, partly related to a Google/blogspot software ‘upgrade’ a few years ago, which broke everything. But yesterday a young computer-maven friend who used to blog using the same kind of platform, came by to visit and say farewell, before moving to the other coast; and he and I fiddled with the thing and got it working again. It was only then that I saw your comments, sitting unmoderated and (thus) unposted. At first the “Jacob” threw me, but it was clearly you.
ReplyDeleteJ’entends bien renouer avec toi, de plein coeur; but I do things slowly these days; so in the meantime, the following morsels may serve you as a madeleine:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search?q=proust
I forgot to include a link to Doug Van Der Heide's psycho-analytic practice on East 85th Street in Manhattan, between Madison and Fifth, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum! It's a heck of a neighborhood! If Oriane de Guermantes dreams of death in the Carlyle Hotel, they probably have Doug on the speed-dial.
ReplyDeletehttps://drvanderheide.com/
The previous link to my paintings and drawings is probably useless unless you're deep in the tall weeds of Facebook, and all other forms of sharing photos on the internet are likewise crammed with silly conditions. Easiest for me is https://jacobfreeze.livejournal.com/ which only includes a long long line of images, and it works much better on Microsoft Edge than Google Chrome, which displays ENORMOUS images that don't fit on a screen, blah blah blah!
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile your Zapruder/Proust essay reminded me of a moment in the movie Amadeus, when Salieri complains that God has chosen "an obscene child" for his divine instrument, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYHJRhRym1U) so it doesn't exactly surprise me that Proust also indulged in childlike antics, like his imaginary friend Robert de Saint-Loup, who once walked all the way across Fouquet's on the backs of the booths, so they say, just for a laugh!
Thanks to your bradykinetic (etymology with a vengeance) correspondence, your blog about Proust running down the steps floated about in my consciousness until it slowly formed itself into exactly the opposite scenario to what you described, where you compared Proust to Zellig and Forrest Gump, a nebbish and an imbecile. But what I see in the film is someone so far above the requirements of ordinary behavior that he walks through barriers impassible to the right-thinking bourgeoisie as if they were nothing, and that's exactly how it was for Marcel Proust, immersed in the intimate circle of Robert de Montesquiou and Prince Antoine Bibesco, between them related to every dynasty in the history of Europe, all the way back to the Etruscans! Marcel skips down the steps out of all order because he and his friends never wait in line, they never wait in line, and if you never saw or heard of such a thing as a "coupe-file," which money could not buy, not even for the obscenely rich clan of the Verdurins, then today is your lucky day!
ReplyDeleteSwann allait rejoindre le petit noyau des Verdurin n'importe où, quelquefois dans les restaurants de banlieue où on allait peu encore car ce n'était pas la saison, plus souvent au théâtre, que Mme Verdurin aimait beaucoup ; et comme un jour, chez elle, elle dit devant lui que pour les soirs de premières, de galas, un coupe-file leur eût été fort utile, que cela les avait beaucoup gênés de ne pas en avoir le jour de l'enterrement de Gambetta, Swann qui ne parlait jamais de ses relations brillantes, mais seulement de celles mal cotées qu'il eût jugé peu délicat de cacher, et au nombre desquelles il avait pris dans le faubourg Saint-Germain l'habitude de ranger les relations avec le monde officiel, répondit :
« Je vous promets de m'en occuper, vous l'aurez à temps pour la reprise des Danicheff, je déjeune justement demain avec le Préfet de police à l'Élysée.
— Comment ça, à l'Élysée ? cria le docteur Cottard d'une voix tonnante.
To ginger-up the bradykinesis, what is your e-dress? Send to
Deletedavid_justice@post.harvard.edu
A bientot.
I seized this email address about 15 minutes after the internet was invented, (jacobfreeze@gmail.com), and there are now 47 of us jacobfreezes on Facebook and gmail and so on. Apropos, I also have a blogspot blog, (https://jacobfreeze.blogspot.com/) which still updates itself automatically every time I post anything anywhere, even 7 years after I forgot all about it.
ReplyDelete