Hey, Is That Proust? and Other News

Quite possibly Proust. Photo via the Guardian

 

• All those years of watching old wedding footage and searching for dead authors has really paid off: they’ve found Proust! In what’s believed to be his only appearance on film, Marcel races down the stairs in 1904 to celebrate the nuptials of Élaine Greffulhe. He’s dapper. He’s alone. He’s Proust: “The black-and-white footage of a wedding cortège filmed in 1904 shows a brief glimpse of a man in his thirties with a neat moustache, wearing a bowler hat and pearl-grey formal suit, descending a flight of stairs on his own. Most of the other guests are in couples … ‘Because we know every detail of Proust’s life, we know from several sources that during those years he wore a bowler hat and pearl grey suit… It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries… even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly! It’ll be fine when we have slowed the film down.’ ”

• People say late-night TV is improving in the age of Trump. Man, Colbert really brought it last night, they’ll say; or, Seth Meyers is on fire lately; or, Gee whiz, that Saturday Night Live program sure gave the administration what-for! But make no mistake: the late-night variety show is a pale and desiccated husk of what it once was. For a counterexample, Joan Walsh revisited the one-week stand Harry Belafonte had on the Tonight Show, where he filled in for Johnny Carson in February 1968: “The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated … A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the twenty-five guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost fifty years later. ‘He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.’”

• In the fifties, Colin Wilson scored a big hit with his book The Outsider, which became a kind of pop-existentialist hit. Teens love it. Professors loved it. Teenage professors loved it. But the success went to Wilson’s head—his hubristic followup, Religion and the Rebel was so bad that it relegated his work to “sleazy-looking paperbacks at motorway service stations.” Phil Baker writes, “Even before Religion and the Rebel, Wilson had begun to dig his own grave with his charmless opinions: Shakespeare, for example, had ‘an absolutely second-rate mind’, ‘like a female novelist.’ Publishing his diaries in the Daily Mail, Wilson announced ‘I amthe major literary genius of our century,’ and this generous estimate of his own significance remained consistent: ‘It strikes me,’ he told an interviewer four decades later, ‘that in five hundred years time they’ll say ‘Wilson was a genius’, because I’m a turning point in intellectual history.’”

• And now, with a tidy evisceration of academe, Kevin Birmingham: “The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist … ‘Professionalization’ means retrofitting your research so that it accommodates the critical fads that will make you marginally more employable. It means cutting and adding chapters so that feathers remain unruffled. Junior faculty play it safe—conceptually, politically, and formally—because they write for job and tenure committees rather than for readers. Publications serve careers before they serve culture … The most foolish mistake is addressing an audience beyond the academy. Publishing with Penguin or Random House should be a wonderful opportunity for a young scholar. Yet for most hiring committees, a trade book is merely one that did not undergo peer review.”

• Maud Hart Lovelace is known mainly for her Betsy-Tacy children’s book series; Jia Tolentino picked up a Lovelace deep cut, and found a book with a sensitive understanding of Syrian immigrant life: “I recently decided to reread something else by Lovelace: her one stand-alone young-adult book, Emily of Deep Valley, published in 1950, in which the shy protagonist of the title becomes Deep Valley’s premier advocate for the Syrian immigrants who live on the outskirts of town … Emily throws a farewell party for her friends, who are headed to college. Self-conscious about her house, which is full of old-fashioned trinkets, she decides to jazz up the occasion by serving frogs’ legs—the raw materials peddled to her by two young Syrian boys named Yusef and Kalil. The dish is a hit. Then everyone leaves, and Emily is lonely … One day in winter, she sees a group of boys throw Kalil to the ice on a frozen pond … She takes Kalil to her grandfather, who makes a sling for his arm, and then she walks him back to Little Syria, a neighborhood that she thought of as dirty and run-down, but which opens up to her with sudden warmth.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2lm0LWL