March 15, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent La Sagesse des Femmes By Sadie Stein Comtesse Anna-Élisabeth de Noailles, 1922. “Never saw him write even the shortest note standing up,” Proust’s housekeeper Celeste Albaret wrote. Proust, it seems, spent the better part of his day—and the last three years of his life—in his spartan, cork-lined bedroom. He wrote, according to his biographer Diana Fuss, “from a semi-recumbent position, suspended midway between the realms of sleeping and waking using his knees as a desk.” His bedchamber has been fully reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris’s Marais neighborhood. This is apt; when forced to move from 102 Boulevard Haussmann later in life, the author was at pains to keep his environment intact. An exact copy, the Carnavalet installation is small and snug. According to Albaret, Proust wanted no distractions whatsoever from his writing, nothing extraneous in the room. Writing implements were arranged close at hand on a series of occasional tables; everything else was simple and unadorned. Read More
March 14, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Arrangement By Sadie Stein From a late nineteenth-century French advertisement. The French are known for how they wear scarves. That’s such a cliché that it hardly merits repeating. But like so many clichés, it’s rooted in truth. And today I was reminded of that. I was at a clothing store in Paris. While I sat on a low bench and waited for a friend to emerge from the dressing room, I watched women of all ages try on scarves and wraps in front of a nearby mirror. Each woman tried on her scarf differently; some draped, some wrapped, some poufed the lengths of fabric into tall, proud collars. Several tried more than one effect, seeing how the cloth behaved. But one thing they all had in common. Read More
March 11, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Helped by Recollection By Sadie Stein From the New York Review of Books reissue of More Was Lost. The other day, lacking something to read, I picked up a book at the Paris Review offices: Eleanor Perenyi’s More Was Lost, published in 1946 and recently reissued by New York Review Classics. Perenyi is probably best known today for her 1981 gardening memoir Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. It’s considered a classic of its genre, but, having never had any particular interest in gardening, I’d never read her. Read More
March 10, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Time for Spring By Sadie Stein From To Spring, the season’s all-time creepiest creation story. Though the calendar disagrees, for the past two days it’s been spring in the northeast. Everyone is going wild. Premature sunbathing is rampant. “Spring fever,” an old man winked at me—but then, that’s what I get for sitting on a traffic island in the middle of West Broadway. In 1936, MGM released the “Happy Harmonies” cartoon “To Spring”—a lighthearted celebration of the season, on the face of it. And it is physically beautiful. But as with so many animations of the era, there’s a serious dark side. Read More
March 9, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Taking Inventory By Sadie Stein False advertising, yes. But still. At the ninety-nine-cent store, I looked in vain for a bathtub stopper. “Can I help you?” asked a woman, presumably the owner. When I told her what I was looking for, she flew to a seemingly random shelf and began to scan it with a gimlet eye. She tried to give me a drain catch and then one of those flat rubber pads that covers everything, but I really wanted the sort with a chain. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I can just go to the hardware store … ” At which moment she gave a triumphant cry and pointed to the stopper that was, indeed, hanging some six feet over our heads. Employing an impressive combination of hook, broomstick, and step stool, she managed to retrieve it as I looked on anxiously. “Hardware store, she says!” she crowed. I’d never actually heard anyone use that construction in modern life. Read More
March 8, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent The Great Books By Sadie Stein Gunnar Asplund, View of Interior for Paris Exhibition 1925, Bookcase Wall Elevation. There’s something profoundly sad about being surrounded by books and unable to find anything to read. It feels like a failure: yours, society’s, the universe’s. It can happen in a poorly stocked library branch, a failing bookstore, an airport newsstand. And it’s a horrible feeling. Read More