February 25, 2005
Frankie Goes To Sentosa!
There will be themes for the night parties at SEAjam this weekend. It is worrying that for Saturday night's theme of "LOUD!" I immediately know what I will wear, and for Sunday's theme of "Cooool" I'm clueless.
But sartorial choices are really unimportant in the context of my main goal for this weekend, which is to dance with this 90-year-old man. (To non-swingers: it's the equivalent of taking writing classes from Nabokov.)
I'm so psyched!
Posted by Michelle at February 25, 2005 12:17 AMAnd hopefully Michelle will have time for a few dances with this 26 year old man. (To non-swingers this is the eqivalent of having a fish finger when you really wanted sashimi.)
Posted by: Alec at February 25, 2005 5:29 PMI'm so jealous of you two! Have fun at SEAjam!
And if you're wondering whether my missing out on this is a function of my being lazy or because of work, let me just say... I got home from the office at 11 pm today without having eaten breakfast or dinner.
And I'll be going in to the office tomorrow to do some more work.
See you on Monday night, perhaps. I'm doing my best to catch Frankie's talk!
Posted by: Dominique at February 25, 2005 11:12 PM As a bit of a non-swinger, I can’t begin to imagine what lindy-hopping with Frankie Manning might be like (though I do remember seeing the Jiving Lindy Hoppers giving a free performance in the Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall three, maybe four, summers ago, and I must say they seemed pretty nifty on their feet).
However, switching to Nabokov: on this cold and rainy Wednesday evening in London, after chancing upon an advert for the same at lunchtime, I found myself attending an hour-long lecture at the RSL at Somerset House, “Zadie Smith discusses Vladimir Nabokov” (specifically “Pnin”, in the context of Galya Diment’s “Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel”). Never expected to hear Zadie Smith intoning the words “Doctorate in Desuetude” in a public lecture, but there you go, she was doing so at Somerset House tonight, and I thought of an old post in syntaxfree. Never having read “Pnin” nor “White Teeth”, and therefore not wishing to reveal myself to Ms. Smith as a philistine prat, I didn’t hang around afterwards for the complimentary wine, and instead made my escape out into the cool, damp, air on the Strand. For anyone that has read “Pnin” though, Zadie Smith ended her lecture by revealing that her favourite passage in modern literature is that concerning Pnin and the bowl, if that means anything to you. (Zadie had a great sense of timing, by the way; as she was finishing her lecture, outside the bells of St. Mary-le-Strand were chiming eight o’clock).
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