coy standback, thadback hold on, tsegai grace — belai (?) tittekuh: be carefeul, don’t mess with me — GOBUZ: good job, nice going. tati (monkey).

Ventral zipper:

— he had invested the vest with his sense of the surge of the heat and his feeling of it, that had been continuously built up, was that it was red–

— There is only one hard calendar date given in A Strange Commonplace, which is New Year’s Eve 1949. This is in chapter 14 of the first book.

–(Corollary. Because the male character in this chapter is the same age as Sorrentino would have been in that year, an autobiographical dimension to the book as a whole seems implied.)

— The historical time of A Strange Commonplace ranges from the 1930’s to the 1990’s. There’s nothing to suggest either the Jazz Age or the Post 9/11 world (or anything before the former, or after the latter period). Though the book was published in 2005, the most advanced technology it mentions is the color television set — and when people are watching the television, they are most often watching movies from the thirties.

–(Corollary. The cultural figures mentioned are heavily weighted toward the beginning and end of these epochs. There is Robert Benchley and John Cusack, Gail Patrick and Meryl Streep, but no Rolling Stones, Jack Benny, Elvis — no 50’s, 60’s, 70’s cultural figures… Why?)

—A Strange Commonplace is intergenerational. One generation is the ‘Ross Columbo’ generation: what I will think of as Sorrentino’s parents’ age. The other is Sorrentino’s generation — “the Charlie Parker generation.” These latter are the ones we see the most of: as children, as parents, as seniors.

–To be noted: that Sorrentino makes no use of world history, its “big events”, in relaying information about time. We see no evidence of WWII, of the Korean War, of the Great Depression, of any of that. No mention of Eisenhower or the Beatles. It is rather through cultural and social markers, often fairly obscure ones, and local and personal history, that as readers we might distinguish (if it is in fact at all important that we do so) the events of the thirties, say, from those of the eighties.

–To be noted: nostalgia and its opposite (feeling bitter about the past) are fairly dominant themes here. (I think for instance this is the “curious sadness” of the man in the second Saturday Afternoon.) Whatever might be of importance, good or bad, happened a while ago while the present is merely unreality, indiscretion, alcohol — “another story.”

This was an attempt to assign each chapter of A Strange Commonplace to a definite era. My reasons for assigning them as I did, which often involved significant guess work, can be found by clicking on the link to each chapter. Some general remarks about time in this book are here.

1930’s/ ’40s

(1.1); (1.9); (1.20); (1.23); (1.24); (1.25) // (2.6); (2.9); (2.12);

1950’s / 60’s

(1.10) (1.14) (1.18) // (2.1); (2.3); (2.5); (2.7); (2.10); (2.13); (2.14) ; (2.16); (2.17); (2.18); (2.19); (2.20);

1970’s / 80’s

(1.3); (1.4); (1.5); (1.6); (1.7); (1.8); (1.13); (1.15); (1.16); (1.19); (1.21); (1.22); // (2.11); (2.15); (2.21); (2.22); (2.23); (2.24); (2.25);

1980’s / 90’s

(1.2) ; (1.11); (1.12); (1.17); (1.26) // (2.2); (2.4) (2.8) (2.26).

.

knees and hands: are the gates

— these knees, I say, which were actually popping or creaking these days — tumblers of safes I listen to with the utmost attention — when will they be cracked? when they are cracked with what will I be rich?

This is the French text of the water lily paragraph of Swann’s Way (pp. 184 of my edition) with links to vocabulary I didn’t know and followed by Scott-Moncrieff’s translation. Somewhat intimidated by passages of this length and difficulty, I’ve also broken it up into four parts — here: (1); (2); (3); (4).

“Bientôt le cours de la Vivonne s’obstrue de plantes d’eau. Il y en a d’abord d’isolées comme tel nénufar à qui le courant au travers duquel il était placé d’une façon malheureuse laissait si peu de repos que, comme un bac actionné mécaniquement, il n’abordait une rive que pour retourner à celle d’où il était venu, refaisant éternellement la double traversée. Poussé vers la rive, son pédoncule se dépliait, s’allongeait, filait, atteignait l’extrême limite de sa tension jusqu’au bord où le courant le reprenait, le vert cordage se repliait sur lui-même et ramenait la pauvre plante à ce qu’on peut d’autant mieux appeler son point de départ qu’elle n’y restait pas une seconde sans en repartir par une répétition de la même manœuvre. Je la retrouvais de promenade en promenade, toujours dans la même situation, faisant penser à certains neurasthéniques au nombre desquels mon grand-père comptait ma tante Léonie, qui nous offrent sans changement au cours des années le spectacle des habitudes bizarres qu’ils se croient chaque fois à la veille de secouer et qu’ils gardent toujours ; pris dans l’engrenage de leurs malaises et de leurs manies, les efforts dans lesquels ils se débattent inutilement pour en sortir ne font qu’assurer le fonctionnement et faire jouer le déclic de leur diététique étrange, inéluctable et funeste. Tel était ce nénufar, pareil aussi à quelqu’un de ces malheureux dont le tourment singulier, qui se répète indéfiniment durant l’éternité, excitait la curiosité de Dante, et dont il se serait fait raconter plus longuement les particularités et la cause par le supplicié lui-même, si Virgile, s’éloignant à grands pas, ne l’avait forcé à le rattraper au plus vite, comme moi mes parents.”

The IEA estimated in 2007 that standby power produced 1% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. To put the figure into context, total air travel contributes less than 3% of global CO2 emissions… One Watt Initiative

Laurent Laffite‘s joke at Cannes about Woodie Allen, which I do not quite get: « Cela fait plaisir que vous soyez en France, parce que ces dernières années, vous avez beaucoup tourné en Europe, alors que vous n’êtes même pas condamné pour viol aux Etats-Unis. »

(It makes a bit more sense if you consider there being, as Le Monde goes on to say, a Roman Polanski reference; i.e., why would an American director travel Europe so extensively unless he’d been “condamné pour viol”?)

A leg up: This is another absurdist piece in which a certain position of the leg is given a perhaps undue degree of attention or predominance.

From the program: “It is is envisioned that the audience, upon reading A Leg Up, rather than standing and applauding half-heartedly or wildly, will instead stand and lift their right leg up, quite soberly and stolidly — indeed they should do this even if they have not read or otherwise enjoyed A Leg up –; balancing upon their left foot, as if frozen in a march, they should hold this position for about as long as they would otherwise clap or for about as long as it would have taken them to read A Leg up if that’s what they had done…”

Of course no one need read A LEG UP, that is ridiculous. Yet all might do one better and “read the experience,” as it were, of having one’s leg up, the program continues. One might “read” in this manner without access to or need of paper, without access to or need of writer, of written, of computer, of other reading device or publisher, of internet, of another… (One might hold one’s leg up, in other words, and feel, and not be told, exactly what that is like.)

“Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity,” Debussy wrote… String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10

Un pont aérien — coincées — axe de circulation

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho … The dump is full
Of images. (Stevens, The Man on The Dump)

Corbeil: A decorative basket for the display of flowers or fruits.

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NASA keeps a five millennium catalog of all the eclipses (both solar and lunar) that have occurred or will occur since 1999 B.C. to the year A.D. 3000.… vox

“At his large dinner party –there were about sixty guests– Marcel tried a dangerous stratagem: that of seating people next to each other who normally should have been at each other’s throats. Léon Daudet was surprised to learn that that ‘ravishing young lady’ next to him was the daughter of a well-known Jewish banker. Daudet’s wonder increased as he realized other tables resembled his own, where ‘rabid enemies’ calmly ‘chewed their cold-jellied chicken within two meters of each other.” He attributed this tour de force, which no one else in Paris could have achieved, to the ‘torrents of understanding and good will that emanated from Marcel, spreading in whirlwinds and spirals through the dining room.’ The host was delighted that his risky little experiment in social chemistry had succeeded. He modestly explained to Daudet that everything depended on how smoothly and adroitly the introductions, the first contacts, were carried out. Marcel had done this brilliantly, insulating those seated at each table in generous buffers of his charm.” (Marcel Proust, A Life. William C. Carter. pp.302.)

‘αὐτίκα τεθναίην, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄρ᾽ἔμελλον ἑταίρῳ
κτεινομένῳ ἐπαμῦναι

let me die soon, since I was not destined to come to the aid of my companion while he was slain [Perseus: Greek / English]

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“She painted canvases of an originality that might some day be noted, and in the meantime, since her retirement from teaching, she was combining her painting with travel and trying to evade her neurasthenia through the distraction of making new friends in new places. Perhaps some day she would come out on a kind of triumphant plateau as an artist or as a person or even perhaps both. There might be a period of five or ten years in her life when she would serenely climb over the lightning-shot clouds of her immaturity and the waiting murk of decline. But perhaps is the right word to use. It would all depend on the next two years or so.” (Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana.)

Very casually undertaken, the page numbers here refer to the Penguin edition of 2011. “Brown” in On The Road (Jack Kerouac): 77, 80, 82, 88, 89, 146, 188, 193, 216, 226, 260, 263, 266, 270, 271, 273, 280, 280, 283, 284.

“I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.” Lyn Hejinian, My Life (pp.65).