"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

For some reason, that's been my official favorite "Great Gatsby" sentence for a long, long time. I thought I'd bring it out today after getting unreasonably angry at yesterday's "Great Gatsby" sentence (here in our Gatsby project of looking at one "Great Gatsby" sentence each day in absurd isolation). You remember, the crowded hams and the salads of harlequin designs. People said to me, Althouse, you are wrong, this is a perfectly wonderful sentence, it describes sumputuousness and sensuousness. Sumptuousness! I was contemptuous of all this you-us-ness. I said:

1. Any hack writer can use a lot of words and create a picture of a "sumptuous" feast.

2. I'm a reader, a consumer of the words, not of the food itself, so it's not like I'm getting a lot to eat here.

3. "Sumptuousness" seems like a corny idea, like something from a Harlequin (!) romance, especially in the effort to make it seem to refer to sexuality.

4. I'm not getting enough of an elite vibe from the food choices. They seem rather awful. It really does make me feel like it's Thanksgiving at Mom's, not a glorious affair at Gatsby's. Crowded hams! Could ya scootch over, Mom?

Then betamax3000 came in with sharp analysis attributed to Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot:

Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot has analyzed sentence and determined an 8.6 correlation with:

Appleby's

Suggested improvement: addition of the word "drizzled."

And so forth.  And that put me in a cheerful mood and prompted me to whip out the official Althouse favorite sentence. Three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. I love that. After reading that, you feel like taking an oath never to say anything as banal as: I was introduced to three men, but I didn't catch a single name. Or: Someone introduced us to three men, but the sound quality in the room was such that they might as well all have been named Mr. Mumble. No, you realize, from now on, I must remember to simply assert that the men were introduced as Mr. Mumble. Let the reader lag for a quarter of a second and imagine that could be their names and then get it. Readers are quick. They get this comic, surreal accuracy.

Similarly surreal, the tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight. Don't bother us with the human being carrying the tray. No one thinks there's some magic floating tray. We get it, and we feel woozy with cocktails, so that it's no wonder every man is Mr. Mumble and every woman is a swatch of color — yellow, in the twilight.

Champagne chair...

... contest.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet said:

I passed that along to my wife, who seems interested :) She'd make a nice chair, I think.

Which made me think of this famous Thurber drawing:

>

There must be a comical drawing of a woman as a chair or an actual chair in the form of a woman. I looked for furniture in human form, and found some stuff in the general neighborhood — the Dali-inspired lips sofa — and this amused me:



And you can unburden yourself here:

Victorian...

... Surrealism.

At the Cute Conversation Café...

... the talk is highly animated.

The photo is a detail of a painting called "Personages with Star," by Joan Miró (1933):


(Enlarge.)

At the Forbidden Reflection Café...

... will you ever know who you really are?

ADDED: Thanks to Instapundit for linking to this — and, as you'll see if you clink on the "will you ever know" link — to Pogo for making the connection to Magritte and to Henry (the commenter) for the photoshopping.

When will my reflection show who I am inside?

There's a heart that must be free to fly that burns with a need to know the reason why...



That's a picture taken a year ago, as Obama was about to take the inaugural oath. It was uploaded yesterday, along with a lot of other nostalgic photos, to the White Flickr site.

***

"Obama's first year: What went wrong."

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo is reminded of this Magritte painting:



ADDED: Henry does the photoshopping:

"So I ate that mushroom, fly and all GULP just like that without even chewing. I could feel the fly buzzing all the way down. Mmmmm, fly."

"Then I ☽ met a mysterious ☍ man on ♌ the road, ☻ dressed in 〄 black and ☠ walking a ☢☡♽ white dog. ⚡ He seemed truly ethereal, but I know what I saw. No 〒 really, ✴ I'm ✣ seramous 〠check ❦ out ☥ the picture.✺"



Chip Ahoy ate that mushroom....

What can you say about those atheists who believe in God?

I don't know. I can see the notable atheist Sam Harris is grappling with the contradiction.

Hmmm. I often click on WaPo front-page links that turn out to go to the "On Faith" page. As soon as I see that inside page, I reflexively decide I'm not going to read it! It's something about the way the front page of the Washington Post is journalistically black print on a plain white background, and then the "On Faith" page is various shades of blue. I've left the realm of reason and entered the squishy soft spot. All that blue — those words "On Faith" — those 2 smiling heads — it says: This is something for other people to read. This is some kind of specialized reading for people who want mainstream assistance in their earnest efforts to devote the appropriate amount of time to struggling gently with religion. I find that instantly off-putting.

So, you're on your own. Some atheists believe in God. Okay?

And speaking of my distaste for WaPo's "On Faith" aesthetic: I'm not buying cereal that is packaged like this:


Who is that supposed to appeal to? "Good Friends" cereal?

This high-fiber trio of flakes, twigs, and granola is absolutely delicious. For all the good things fiber does for you, it deserves to be loved.

First of all. Twigs? Second. Fiber deserves to be loved? I don't want relationship neediness from breakfast food. And I don't like the way the paired up heads on the packaging symbolize the cereal's insistence on becoming my close friend. If you're going to foist happy breakfast faces on me, don't be earnest about it. At least have the decency to be surrealistic:

Robert Rauschenberg has died.

Links to obituaries to follow.

Here's an old post of mine about him, from back in 2004:

Robert Rauschenberg answers some questions from Deborah Solomon in today's NYT:

Aren't you having another show now at Yale?

Yes. I am not happy with it. It was organized by the gay studies department, whatever that is. It's not an approach that makes sense. I refused to give them permission to reproduce the works in a catalog.

Hmmm.... a little more info would be nice! There's this description:

"Robert Rauschenberg: Gifts to Terry Van Brunt'' features about 40 pieces that Rauschenberg gave as presents to his former lover, Terry Van Brunt. ... Jonathan Katz, an associate professor at Yale who launched the gay and lesbian studies program there in 2002, organized the exhibit.

"Rauschenberg himself does not want the work talked about in a gay context,'' Katz said. "But I am not responsible to the artist's wishes. I am responsible to the work.''

The collection includes "Bob's Face With Fly,'' a self-portrait that shows a fly on Rauschenberg's face, and "Terry's Briefcase Piece,'' a briefcase that was painted and collaged. Katz believes the exhibit is important because it shows how Rauschenberg's personal life has shaped his work.

Meanwhile, back in the NYT interview, Rauschenberg is presenting himself as impersonally as possible. He speaks of painting from photographs. Asked “What sort of photographs do you prefer?,” he asserts that he “likes photographs of anything uninteresting. Maybe just two doors on a wall.” Asked “What is so great about the ordinary anyhow?, he answers, “I find the quietness in the ordinary much more satisfying." Asked if at 78, he thinks about dying, he says “No. Not at all” and tells a hackneyed anecdote about someone else. Asked why he left New York in 1970 to go live by the ocean in Florida, he alludes to a feeling of responsibility about “everybody … leaving their spouses,” then says a fortuneteller told him “it wasn't my fault but that I should go to sunshine and water” and he “was pleased with that.” He gives as the secret to happiness “enjoy[ing] something simple, like just looking at the ocean.”

ADDED: Here's the NYT obit — a very big one. Excerpt:

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show [in 1951]. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, as Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings, which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events like passing shadows. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well, hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Things Mimi wouldn't understand.

Yoko Ono (in today's NYT) explains why John Lennon's early drawings were surrealistic, but his later ones realistically depicted domestic life:

"In the beginning, when he was doing the exaggerated stuff - the monster-looking people, and all that - those come from a time when he felt that Mimi was always looking over his shoulder," she said, referring to Mimi Smith, Lennon's aunt, who raised him. "He said that was how he came to surrealism. He would write things in his diary that he wouldn't want Mimi to understand, and the drawings were an extension of that. He was getting into an unreal, illusory world.

"Then when he met me, he felt that reality wasn't that scary anymore, so he began drawing us. And eventually, because he was learning Japanese, his drawings were a reflection of that experience too, but the more prominent change was that he began doing a lot of animals, and that was for Sean."

Oh, I think there is a lot more to surrealism than hiding from Aunt Mimi. Ono also says that in the early days of their relationship, talking about art, Lennon said "I think of myself as Magritte." The fact is, the early surrealistic line drawings are much more interesting. If his surrealism was about hiding from the female authority figure of his early life (Mimi), why should we not view the later realistic domestic scenes as mollifying the female authority figure of his later life (Ono)?

The Times article relates to the "When I'm Sixty-Four" gallery show, the title of which I complained about at some length here. There's a slide show of Lennon's drawings at the first link above.

UPDATE: Here's a link for Magritte, whose work really isn't very much like Lennon's surrealist line drawings. Lennon's work is far more similar to Jean Cocteau's drawings.

Madison on a bicycle racing day.

State Street was blocked off today for USCF national championship racing.


Strangely makeshift safety was provided by duct taping old mattresses to various poles and things that bicyclists might slam into. Nobody slammed into anything, but the mattresses made you keep thinking about it.



Some nice street musicians were playing:



And they were encouraging generosity with an image of Gandhi:



Surrealism was visible, surrealistically, through door glass:



More cheerful artistic manifestations could be seen:



And one rock idol from the past advertised her upcoming visit, loomed over by the neon image of another rock idol from the past whom we will forever miss.