Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of a book I’m reading at the moment — Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s six-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time . “The novel”, writes Professor Andre Aciman in a nice WSJ essay, “is about a man compelled by a sudden surge of memory to revisit his past and, in the process, to draw meaning out of his seemingly uneventful life. Its unfolding is prompted, famously, by the narrator’s dunking of a madeleine in a cup of herbal tea.

Untold universities have planned at least one reading or roundtable dedicated to Proust. Every self-respecting bookstore will hold its own Proustathon, with authors, actors and book lovers reading snippets from his epic novel. The Center for Fiction in New York has scheduled a Proust evening, and the French embassy is organizing its own Proust occasion. There are Proust T-shirts, Proust coffee mugs, Proust watches, Proust comic series, Proust tote bags, Proust fountain pens, and Proust paraphernalia of all stripes.

Still, for all the brouhaha, many modern readers still find themselves in agreement with the two French publishers who turned down Proust’s manuscript in 1912. A third agreed to publish it, provided that Proust himself cover the expenses. As one early reader declared: “At the end of this 712-page manuscript…one has no notion of…what it is about. What is it all for? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading to?”

Where indeed?

We now have plenty of ways to easily document the sights and sounds of our everyday lives, whether for social networking or posterity. But what about smells — a perfume that might remind you of a lover, say, or the aroma of roast dinner in your grandparents’ home?

What if we had a way to capture these fleeting olfactory memories before they disappear into thin air? Amy Radcliffe, a designer at Central St Martin’s art school in London came up with the idea of a device that could capture and reproduce odours accurately. She called it — what else? — the Madeleine. It is, she writes

to all intents and purposes, an analogue odour camera. Based on current perfumery technology, Headspace Capture, The Madeleine works in much the same way as a 35mm camera. Just as the camera records the light information of a visual in order to create a replica The Madeleine records the molecular information of a smell.

Lovely idea.

I’ve always thought that the best description of Google is that it’s humanity’s memory prosthesis. But for me a more important augmentation aid is an electronic diary. Since iOS7, however, my iPhone has started ‘reading’ my diary and trying to make sense of it. Here’s what it’s just told me:

“It looks like you have a busy day tomorrow. There are six events scheduled, and the first one starts at 09:00.”

Yeah, I know. I know.

From Wikipedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Now why does this remind of the England football team under Sven-Gøren Eriksson?

Lovely blog post by Paul Krugman.

Basically, having a fancy named chair and maybe some prizes entitles you to a hearing — no more. It’s a great buzzing hive of commentary out there, so nobody can read everything that someone says; but if a famous intellectual makes a pronouncement, he both should and does get a listen much more easily than someone without the preexisting reputation.

But academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.

Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it has made it possible for a number of people meeting that second condition to gain an audience. I don’t care whether they’re PhDs, professors, or just some guy with a blog — it’s the work that matters.

Meanwhile, we didn’t need blogs to know that many great and famous intellectuals are, in fact, fools.

Reminds me of a famous story about Sir Thomas Beecham who, travelling in a first-class railway carriage, lit a big cigar. A grande-dame, seated opposite, told him to extinguish it. Beecham, equally grandly, ignored her. The dialogue then went like this:

Lady (exasperated): “Do you know who I am?
Beecham: “No”.
Lady: I am one of the Director’s wives”.
Beecham: “Madam, I don’t care if you are the Director’s only wife, I shall continue to enjoy my cigar”.

These nauseating posters greeted me this afternoon on arriving at Waitrose to do some shopping. What really grates is the saccharine misrepresentation, which is a bit like a visual version of those really annoying female Classic FM disc jockeys.

It’s not ‘my’ bloody Waitrose. It’s Waitrose’s bloody Waitrose. And inside the place has been transformed into a kind of aircraft hangar while the ceiling has been removed to facilitate the installation of the so-called ‘improvements’.

Which ‘improvements’ were not commissioned to make life easier for me, by the way, but to increase the store’s turnover per square foot.

Laura Bennett has a lovely interview with the celebrated literary agent, Andrew Wylie, in the new Republic. It contains some memorable quotes.
For example:

“The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyses its strategies as though it were Procter & Gamble. It’s Hermes. It selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. Is a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized.”

And I particularly liked this exchange:

Q: you grew up with a father who worked in publishing. Was there a disdain for mass-market fiction in your house?

A: Not really. I think what I wanted to know was: Is it possible to have a good business? The image I had was, if you represented writers were good, they and you were doomed to a life of poverty and madness and alcoholism and suicide. Dying spider plants and grimy windows on the Lower East Side. On the other side of my family, there were bankers. So I wanted to put the two together.

Q: how did you put the two together?
A: What I thought was: if I have to read James Mitchener, Danielle steel, Tom Clancy, I’m toast. Fuck it. This is about making money. I know where the money is. It’s on Wall Street. I’m not going to sit around reading this drivel in order to get paid less than a clerk at Barclays. That’s just stupid. So if I want to be interested in what I read, is there a business? Answer: yes, there is.

And the way to make it a business, I figured out, was: One, if you’re going to represent the best, you must represent a preponderance of the best. You’ve got to be very aggressive about representing the right people. Two, it has to be international and seamless.