Tag: Dustbury

Proust-like answers

I hate it when honesty is done nastily, and people say, “I’m just being honest.”

proustBlame Dustbury; I do. He posted about the Proust Questionnaire. And because I apparently have ADHD, I decided to tackle the questions Marcel Proust reportedly answered at gatherings when he was 13 and 20. Some are duplicated, but of course, I didn’t copy them.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

The lack of a moral compass.

Where would you like to live?

In a compassionate land. Someplace near flowing water.

What is your idea of earthly happiness?

To live in contact with interesting people, listening to a wealth of music, and have access to a good cinema and a good Internet connection.

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

To too much curiosity.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

Any of those folks who help the oppressed: Zorro, Robin Hood, for two. And Spider-Man.

Who are your favorite characters in history?

Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas K. Gandhi

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

Currently: Elizabeth Warren. Clara Barton, Margaret Sanger, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Gloria Steinhem (I had a subscription to Ms. Magazine when it was brand new), lots more

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Amelia Louise McBride. Or Sue Ann Nivens on the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Your favorite painter?

Gaughin or Van Gogh

Your favorite musician?

The Beatles, if that’s a singular entity, John Lennon if not.

The quality you most admire in a man?

Intelligence, moral sense, common sense, compassion

The quality you most admire in a woman?

Intelligence, moral sense, common sense, compassion

Your favorite virtue?

An honesty honed by compassion

Your favorite occupation?

Singing, looking up stuff

Who would you have liked to be?

Methuselah – saw a lot of history.
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Your most marked characteristic?

A desire to be loved, and especially, understood

What do you most value in your friends?

Steadfastness

What is your principal defect?

Impatience

What is your dream of happiness?

I don’t dream of happiness. I live my life in hope that happiness arises; sometimes, it does.

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

To be mistreated as a child.

What would you like to be?

Another year older and less in debt.

In what country would you like to live?

This one (United States), necessarily idealized.

What is your favorite color?

Aquamarine – oh, something on the green-blue spectrum.

What is your favorite flower?

The lily.

What is your favorite bird?

The cardinal, which I have seen more often in my yard in recent years.
proust.effect
Who are your favorite prose writers?

Russell Baker, Garrison Keillor, Paul Grondahl

Who are your favorite poets?

Frost, Whitman, Shafarzek

Who are your favorite composers?

Mozart, Beethoven, Lennon-McCartney, Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan

What are your favorite names?

Isabella. Surnames, almost anything long and Italian or Polish or Russian or French.

What is it you most dislike?

Arrogance, especially when it’s unwarranted.

What historical figures do you most despise?

Joseph Stalin; I’m terribly pleased that he died just before I was born. Josef Mengele, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann and sure, Hitler. Kim Il Sung, and his descendants. Idi Amin.

What event in military history do you most admire?

The US/UN control of Iraq in January 2003, with inspectors on the ground looking for those “weapons of mass destruction.” And then we had to spoil it all by saying something stupid like, “Let’s go to war.”

What reform do you most admire?

Much of FDR’s New Deal.

What natural gift would you most like to possess?

Willpower.

How would you like to die?

In my sleep. Failing that, saving someone.

What is your present state of mind?

No more muddled than usual.

What is your motto?

To quote the great philosopher Kenneth Ray Rogers:

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run

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There’s a “modern” version, questions found here.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

A daily massage to soothing music.

What is your most marked characteristic?

Iconoclasm

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Being married 15 years.

What is your greatest fear?

Losing people.

What historical figure do you most identify with?

Frederick Douglass

Which living person do you most admire?

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Who are your heroes in real life?

People who see wrongs and try to right them.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Being prone to melancholy

What is your favorite journey?

Riding on a boat up and down the Hudson River.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Honesty, when it’s done nastily, and people say, “I’m just being honest.”

Which word or phrases do you most overuse?

“Well,” when I’m formulating an idea.

What is your greatest regret?

Failure in marriage.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

Maybe a little more play before work, now and then.

What is your most treasured possession?

It’s this very incomplete family tree of my maternal grandmother’s family.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Suicidal despair.

Mayonnaise and other important topics

I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

mayonnaise-vs-miracle-whipDustbury hates mayonnaise, and managed to write a whole blog post about it. I’m not being critical. Rather, I’m impressed that he was able to engender a whole condiment conversation in the comments section. I like mayo well enough, in egg salad or on a BLT. It should be real mayonnaise or perhaps the light (usually written as “lite”) version, whatever that is. But I HATE the low-fat versions.

And worse is that stuff that looks like mayonnaise but is sold as Miracle Whip salad dressing; I can always tell when that’s been substituted. I’m actually not sure WHAT it is, but “Miracle Whip does not meet the minimum requirement of 65% vegetable oil to be labeled as mayonnaise as dictated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” One of the worst things of my youth: bologna sandwiches on white bread with Miracle Whip.

This is similarly true of yogurt. Regular yogurt’s fine, and there are some decent lite ones, but the no-fat iterations I’ve tried are vile. The strange aftertaste, probably from some toxic chemical compound.

I used to drink 2% milk, then 1% for a long time, but now I have gotten used to skim. But the Daughter has not; she likes the 2%. Her mother once said it tasted like ice cream, and I scowled; surely it is fuller flavor, but it’s hardly ice cream because I know ice cream.

Ice cream is another product where the real thing is great, and the substitutes, not so much. I once had something called ice milk, which was disappointing, to say the least.

What food substitutes are acceptable to you, and which food items just can’t be replaced?

Time passages

I’ve read old journals/diaries of mine from the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is cringeworthy.

from the Oddity Mall
from the Oddity Mall

I read this book last year, Thinking in Numbers, by Daniel Tammet, and discovered that I had something in common with American philosopher William James, who noted that “the same space of time seems shorter as we grow older.” He cites a mathematical explanation by contemporary French mathematician Paul Janet, who noted:

our experience of time is proportional to our age. For a ten-year-old child, one year represents one-tenth of his existence, whereas for a man of fifty, the same year equates only to one-fiftieth (2 percent). The older man’s year will thus seem to elapse five times faster than the child’s…

I came to that same conclusion at least thirty years ago; it’s all math.

Someone on Facebook noted that the TV series The Twilight Zone – Season 1, Episode 1 – “Where Is Everybody?” was presented 55 years ago this month, October 2, 1959. Another commented, “I can hardly believe it.” This response seemed strange. Things that happened 50 years ago (Beatles, ML King, Vietnam) feel like a long time ago to me.

Whereas, when the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the TV show Friends made Jaquandor feel old, that seems more understandable to me. (Not that he’s old, but that he feels so.) Because looking back 20 years doesn’t feel like twenty years when you’re over 40; it’s all math.

Friends isn’t that chronological linchpin for me, as I watched it only about half the time. But the band Nirvana is; the band, with Dave Grohl as its final drummer, just before stardom, got together 24 years ago. Now THAT makes ME feel old.

Looking back can be kind of uncomfortably yucky. Ken Levine listened to tapes of radio programs he DJed in the 1970s and cringes a bit. The Coverville is celebrating its 10th anniversary this fall, but host Brian Ibbott said on that program, “Don’t listen to the first year,” when he was figuring out the format. I know that feeling.

For some obscure reason, I’ve read old journals/diaries of mine from the 1970s and 1980s, and much of it is cringeworthy. The only reasons I keep them are these: 1) I could use some of it to cull out family and FantaCo history; 2) all the terrible stuff I could throw together as a roman a clef.

 

September Rambling: unlikely friendships, and NYC songs

cat.paws

Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson. Also, Pantheon Songs on the singing group The Impressions, featuring Curtis Mayfield, which is also about Ferguson.

Next Time Someone Says Women Aren’t Victims Of Harassment, Show Them This. Plus, These Are The Things Men Say To Women On The Street. Oy: Woman Discovers ‘Rape Room’ in Comic Book Store; Is Promptly Fired. Also, Ray Rice, a Broken NFL Culture, and How to Fix It and ‘The Burning Bed,’ 30 years later. And Ray Rice, now.

John Oliver’s investigation reveals Miss America scholarship claims are made of lies.

This month, the 7th circuit struck down gay marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin. “The three judge panel was unanimous and the opinion was written by [conservative] Judge Richard Posner.” After listening to his oral arguments and reading the opinion, what kind of rebuttal could someone could possibly make? Continue reading “September Rambling: unlikely friendships, and NYC songs”

U2, Bob Crewe, Fab Four, plus more

Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs.

u2If you’ve read this blog long enough, you know I can have some strong opinions. But with the U2/Apple thing, I feel ambivalent. On one level, I’m oddly entertained by people freaking out over Apple’s forced iTunes download of U2’s new album, and wonder if it’s just a first world problem. I particularly loved how it ruined someone’s “carefully curated collection.” I’m impressed how well the secret was kept, with the release date of the next U2 album still unclear to the media as of last month.

Then there’s the Why U2? contingent epitomized by this quote: “It’s true that Apple’s wine-drinking, plane-flying user base probably overlaps with U2’s cool-dad core audience more than most bands.” Ah, U2’s not cool enough; here’s the album should have given away instead, and maybe they’re right. Fortunately, I’ve read plenty of suggestions about how to delete it.

The result of this apparent misstep is that the album, Songs of Innocence, is crap. 24 hours after release, it was deemed the worst U2 album ever, as though one could decide something like that so quickly. I still haven’t hear the thing, so I have no opinion.

The bulk of the criticism, though, has to do with lack of choice in the matter, that was fascistically foisted upon millions of users. Maybe that’s true, I dunno. Read the Rolling Stone article about the event.
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Bob Crewe died at the age of 83. You may not know the name – I’ll admit I did – but you surely know the songs. There are nice pieces by Rolling Stone and Dustbury.
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Without much effort, I keep finding Beatles-related stuff, some e-mailed to me, for some obscure reason.
*1964 – the menace of Beatlism
*their 1st US TV Appearance?
*Someone Uploaded the Entire ‘Beatles’ Cartoon Series to YouTube – it’s not “long-forgotten” by me
*Kids React to the Beatles.
*Apple scruff Lizzie Bravo: the girl who sang with the Beatles
*It Don’t Come Easy by George Harrison
*Paul McCartney ‘Early Days’ behind-the-scenes blues jamming.
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Jay Z Steps Up To The Plate To Argue That Tiny Music Samples Are Unprotected By Copyright As TechDirt said, Good for him.
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Early Simpsons: a hymn by I. Ron Butterfly.
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Arthur points to the drinking song that we sing when we present the US national anthem. No, it isn’t that easy to sing either. I’ve been REALLY liberal when people do the Star-Spangled Banner (Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Jose Feliciano are all fine with me, but Rosanne was not). I hear it as a swing version myself.

Oh, here’s version (of SSB, not the drinking song) by niece #1, Rebecca Jade, if I’m doing that FB embed thing correctly:

Post by Rico Curtis.
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