Read Me #3: Original and Ordinary
1. ONE
Thank you for being a subscriber to Read Me! I’m very happy that more of you keep arriving. This is a young newsletter. It’s an exciting time. Enjoy this third issue.
2. PROUST BUS
Canadian singer-songwriter Helena Deland has finished reading the seventh and final volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It took her ten years in total to work through them. “I prolonged finishing this one as much as possible, reluctant to part ways with its world. It leaves a bit of a void,” she tells Read Me in an email correspondence.
READ ME: Does reading Proust influence your music?
HELENA DELAND: It’s not uncommon to hear people say this novel changed their life, which I can relate to, and so without being certain about exactly how, I am sure my writing is influenced by having read In Search of Lost Time, especially over so many years. Proust’s extended metaphors are a pure delight, and I think this figure of speech is a very relevant to songwriting, songs sometimes being nothing more than extended metaphors. In fact, there is a passage in the second volume that inspired the way I framed the concept for my first album, Someone New. The narrator is waiting for Albertine to visit him in his room for the first time and describes how imagining his lover’s perception of the space upon first seeing it changes it for him as well. It’s the mundanity of his own life that he momentarily sees with a new perspective.
RM: Which food is your “madeleine”?
HD: The first thing that comes to mind is fresh strawberries dipped in sugar, which I actually haven’t eaten since I was a kid. Merely thinking of the taste brings to mind the feeling of sitting in the sun on the carpet of the apartment my family lived in when I was around five years old. Whether or not eating them now would send me into a spiral of memories and perceptions blurring past and present, that is to be determined.
RM: As a musician did you ever feel like you could imagine the melody of the “little phrase” that Swann is obsessed by?
HL: That is a fascinating question, and a really rich aspect of Proust’s writing: to describe something as sensorial as music in such detail is difficult, and done with incredible elegance here. Some say it’s inspired by Cesar Franck’s sonata, but what I imagined while reading it was something like Fauré’s ‘Nocturne no. 4’.
(Helena finished Time Regained last week, immediately after completing a European tour in support of her second album Goodnight Summerland.)
3. TODAY IN 1994
On this day thirty years ago, Brian Eno wrote in his diary that, “A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it.”
4. FRANCE’S BEST RABBIT
Twenty-two species of rabbit were represented at this year’s Salon d’Agriculture, France’s biggest farm show — which Read Me attended on Saturday. They ranged from the stocky, orange Fauve du Bourgogne to the fairytale-esque Flemish Giant, hulking yet shrewd. But it was a playful Castor Rex that took home this year’s Presidential Prize for best rabbit, scoring an impressive 96 out of 100 based on seven somewhat mathematical criteria (such as weight) but also, a judge told me, “how it presents itself to the judges. How calm it is. Are its nails clipped?” The judge would not confirm whether the president had met the rabbit.
Read Me thought it’d be attending the Salon incognito in a check shirt, green corduroy trousers and leather boots. Blue jeans, white Nikes and a Lacoste sweatshirt would have been the wise spy’s choice: tens of thousands of people wandered the fair, their cumulative profile in line with the clientele of an international airport. ‘One planet. One health,’ said a tag line, doubtlessly expensive to compose, above Danone’s stand in Hall 1. There were pigs and cows. There were ‘jazzy’ and ‘zen’ potatoes, CBD products for three classes of domestic animal, a stand called “merci algue!” (thank you seaweed!), bonbons, knives, beauty products made from ass’s milk, protestors from the agricultural pressure group FNSEA, a “prejudgment space” for cats and a pair of pants — in the British sense — someone had buried for three months to demonstrate how wild, un-farmed soil is filled with underwear-devouring life.
An obligatory item in the schedule of any sitting president, the Salon d’Agriculture is held at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, a space dedicated to keynote trade shows from all sectors (“Salon Baby” opens a week tomorrow). Early footage showed an angry crowd in battle with security forces near the cows but by the time I arrived, proceedings were jovial and friendly. It was a good family day out despite the sheer number of armed police present. Gendarmes in black armour where everywhere, milling around in groups, marching in formation, enforcing hard borders at the edges of “bio-sourcing mazes”, ensuring one’s cashew snacks did not enter a restricted zone. Not far from the rabbits, they stood sentry by a restaurant where President Macron was rumoured to be having lunch. Was it true? Their beards were trimmed in a neat, almost barista-like, style. “We don’t know.”
5. INFRAORDINARY FM: BEHIND THE HEADLINES
There is just under a month left to listen to, or better still become a listener of, Infraordinary FM, the world’s first radio station broadcasting accurate, real-time news of completely ordinary events. Birds sighted in Buenos Aires, tugboats docking in Shanghai, pet salons closing in Philadelphia: all you need to do to receive word of such matters is to click here then click the “play” button. Do it!
My co-creator Daniel John Jones and I wrote a post about the project for the blog of the startup ElevenLabs, creator of the world’s most convincing fake voices. It was they who sponsored us with the provision of Infraordinary FM’s presenters Thomas and Nicole. You can read the post here or, if you prefer, a play button up top lets you listen to it in the polished cadence of a nonexistent professional.
6. SHERIFF’S CALLS
As the ElevenLabs post started doing the rounds, one correspondent referred to the website of Point Reyes Light, a weekly newspaper serving West Marin County in California. It noted Infraordinary FM’s similarity to the Sheriff’s Calls column, a series of one-line bulletins from the local police department e.g.
LAGUNITAS: At 11:21 a.m. someone saw smoke from a burn pile.
HICKS VALLEY: At 12:14 p.m. someone reported racist hate speech on two street signs.
FOREST KNOLLS: At 8:28 p.m. a neighbor complained about barking dogs.
LAGUNITAS: At 11:41 a.m. a woman heard shots unlike any she’d heard before.
TOMALES: At 7:21 a.m. an injured cow was lying on a roadside.
STINSON BEACH: At 7:50 a.m. a garbage truck had torn down power lines.
POINT REYES STATION: At 8:28 a.m. a man wanted to talk about interactions at work.
I see his point. It’s that report-like quality, its stylistic indifference to the nature of the information, which is very different to the hierarchical treatment the real news is obliged to apply. But even so, the Sheriff’s Calls are ultimately distress signals, whereas nobody — I think nobody — would call the police to report how there’s a light breeze blowing in Casablanca.
7. ARTISTS PICK PASSAGES FROM PROUST
“While spending a few days in Paris last week,” Helena Deland also says in her email to Read Me, “I thought about this striking description of the city after curfew during World War I, which is at the beginning of Time Regained.”
“At half-past nine, before people had time to finish their dinner, the lights were suddenly put out on account of police regulations... After that hour, for those who, like myself, on the evening of which I am speaking, had remained at home for dinner and went out later to see friends, certain quarters of Paris were darker than the Combray of my youth; visits were like those ones made to neighbours in the country... There were other elements which had not before existed in Paris and made one feel as though one had arrived from the train for a holiday in the open country, such as the contrast of light and shade at one’s feet on moonlit evenings... In spring, braving the police regulation once in a while, a particular house, perhaps only one floor of a particular house, or even only one room on that floor, did not close its shutters and seemed suspended by itself on impalpable shadows like a luminous projection, like an apparition without consistency. And the woman one’s raised eyes perceived, isolated in the golden penumbra of the night in which oneself seemed lost, in which she too seemed abandoned, was endowed with the veiled, mysterious charm of an Eastern vision. At length one passed on and no living thing interrupted the rhythm of monotonous and hygienic tramping in the darkness.” [passage abbreviated by Helena herself]
8. NEW TARTAN
The following Tartan pattern is new. It was registered in Glasgow last week. I know this because (after seeing it in the Web Curios newsletter) I had a look at the website of the Scottish Register of Tartans, and clicked the tab saying ‘New Tartans’.
9. MORE SOON
We have now reached the end of the issue. Thanks for reading. There will be another one a lot sooner next time — sorry for the delay.
Brian Eno’s diary from 1994 is published under the title A Year With Swollen Appendices. His examples of things so painstaking that nobody else ever bothered include “sixteen-foot-square black paintings made entirely with a very fine (6H) pencil)”. Then, at some point, “the question arises in the mind: ‘Why are they going to all this trouble?’ I like this sort of question. I like any question that makes you start thinking about the ‘outside’ of the experience — because it makes the experience bigger.” Bye for now.
This was an unmitigated delight - such a glorious mixture of strangeness and banality. The description of the agricultural exhibition was bizarre and hilarious. Thank you, Seb!