Pieter de Hooch

He would begin with the sustained violin tremolos that are heard alone for a few measures, occupying the entire foreground, then all of a sudden they seemed to move away and, as in those paintings by Pieter de Hooch, which assume greater depth because of the narrow frame of a half-open door, away in the distance, in a different color, in the velvet of an interposed light, the little phrase would appear, dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic, belong to another world.

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

The Lydia Davis translation does note that de Hooch was a Dutch painter known of his handling of light and perspective, but a visual of a mother looking for lice in her daughter's hair is always of use, is it not?

(Cross-posted at Involuntary Memory)

"Do you remember that blizzard last summer? The strange moths that melted in our hands? Those were the ashes of the National Library. Your Serbs must have feared that we would take all those books, in so many languages, into our hands and hurl them against your tanks. Fat gray flakes of novels, poems, and plays floated down on our heads while corpses floated in the river."

--Scott Simon, Pretty Birds

Saturday afternoon cat nap, Ellie style

Carnival of the Cats will be at This Blog is Full of Crap on Sunday.

On the nights when Irena wasn't working, she had little difficulty falling asleep at home. She was tired and often hungry. The snap and pop of gunfire--even whimpers and screams--were like snores and stomach growls to her now. But almost every night she would awake in the middle of the night--two, three, who could say?--and drag herself over to Pretty Bird's cage. Usually his gray head was cocked slightly to the left. His eyes would be shut, baring small, pearly lids, his small clawed toes, pink and precious as veins, clasping his perch. His red-fringed tail would droop and rustle slightly, lightly, breezily. Irena would marvel. Such a small, soft thing to survive bombs and vipers' bullets. He was just breath, blood, matchstick bones, and feathers. She would put her right hand up to Pretty Bird's tender black beak and wait a second or more until she felt a small puff of his breath brush against her knuckles, then creep back under her blankets and fall asleep.

--Scott Simon, Pretty Birds

Proust and birds

Now, scarcely a few minutes after the young pianist had begun playing at Mme. Verdurin's, suddenly, after a high note held for a long time through two measures, he saw it approaching, escaping from under that prolonged sonority stretched like a curtain of sound hiding the mystery of its incubation, he recognized it, secret, murmuring, and, divided, the airy and redolent phrase that he loved. And it was so particular, it had a charm so individual, which no other charm could have replaced, that Swann felt as though he had encountered in a friend's drawing room a person whom he had admired in the street and despaired of ever finding again. In the end, diligent, purposeful, it receded through the ramification of its perfume, leaving on Swann's face the reflection of its smile. But now he could ask the name of his stranger (they told him it was the andante from the Sonata for Piano and Violin by Vinteuil), he possessed it, he could have it in his house as often as he liked, try to learn its language and it secret.

Readers of Proust who also wish to possess Swann's "little phrase" in their own house will be disapointed: it does not exist. Several pieces of music have evidently been put forth as inspiration for Vinteuil's sonata, and others have since been composed based on Proust's description. I added Swann in Love to my Netflix list yesterday so that I'll be able to hear one.

And, in homage to Pretty Bird, the starving African grey that has just been set free in Pretty Birds since there is no bird seed to be found in the battleground of Sarajevo, the three wasteful birds of our household, who keep the squirrels and doves outside fat and happy:

Leo

Trevor

Ezra

Forget that human life is priceless

"The West won't permit a war to last more than a few weeks these days," she continued without an audible change of direction. "They put a stop to wars these days before bankers and brokers start hurling themselves through windows. The United Nations already has soldiers here. For Croatia, of course. But they will have to get their hands dirty in Sarajevo, too. Vietnam, Afghanistan. Capitalism, Communism--the big isms learned their lessons in those petite shit holes. They'll let the little brats of the world make their point, then clean up their mess. That's why Kuwait, Panama, Haiti were short wars. War burns money. For each bomb you see, imagine a million dollars in cinders. For each body you see--and, I beg your pardon, I am thinking of your mother, too--imagine someone who can't buy a thousand more Cokes. Losses add up. The West might let killing creep on in Ethiopia or Somalia. People there don't have two rubles to rub together for a Coke." Mrs. Julianovic slapped her hands against her wrists for emphasis. "But they're in the Dark Ages. We are in Europe. We have Benettons here on Vase Miskina Street. Richard Branson sells music next door. Forget that human life is priceless. Consumers' lives have market value. In the end, it's a better guarantee. My mottto: you can't sell Volvos to dead people."

--Scott Simon, Pretty Birds

Modern Western Novel 101

It took a post by Ex Libris for me to realize that Library Thing had added group thingie message boards to its site. A visit to the Westerns board linked me to Allen Barra's "The New True West" article, which says "the western is more with us than ever" and claims "virtually all of the finest novels about the legendary West have been written between 1964, when Thomas Berger's Little Big Man was published, and now."

Little Big Man ranks as the best western ever written, in Barra's estimation, followed by Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

My reading list for Modern Western Novel 101 would include Charles Portis' "True Grit" (1968); Michael Ondaatje's collection of "left-handed poems," "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" (1970); Ron Hansen's novel of the Dalton Gang, "Desperados" (1979) and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" (1983), which has just been made into the most anticipated western film of the year starring Brad Pitt; Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic "Blood Meridian" (1985); Pete Dexter's elegiac twilight-of-the-god novel of Wild Bill Hickok's last days, "Deadwood" (1986); N. Scott Momaday’s "The Ancient Child," which juxtaposes the legend of a young Kiowa boy with the legend of Billy the Kid; Robert Coover's phantasmagorical "Ghost Town" (1998); Philip Kimball's sweet, sad and savage "Liar's Moon" (1999); and Bruce Olds' bracing postmodernist portrait of Doc Holliday, "Bucking the Tiger" (2001).

A second, hardly less worthy, list could be made from E.L. Doctorow's "Welcome to Hard Times," an amusingly nasty revisionist take on the pulp western; Susan Dodd's heart-rending novel of Jesse James' mother, "Mamaw" (1988); Daniel Woodrell's 1987 "Woe to Live On" (which Ang Lee made into the film "Ride With the Devil"); and David Thomson’s witty and original "Silver Light," which straddles the lines between western fiction, film and history by mingling the destinies of a real-life and movie frontiersman and which was wrongly dismissed by some critics after its 1990 publication -- including, I must now admit, myself.

I've read seven of the novels mentioned above. I know I checked Little Big Man out of the library when I was a kid, but I can't remember if I actually read it; guess I need to remedy that.

Other worthy western titles garnered from the letters to the editor section following the article:

Rest of the Earth. William H. Henderson

Giant in the Earth. Ole E. Rolvaag

Giant Joshua. Maureen Whipple

The Bad Lands. Oakley Hall

I think most of these are out of print, but the library here has all of them but the Whipple.

I was surprised no one mentioned Guy Vanderhaeghe--The Last Crossing certainly ranks as one of my favorite westerns.