Prosaic
Mozelle Towers
In the Davis Square Symphony, the bustle of Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, has been translated into an orchestral score. Vehicles become strings, pedestrians shift into wind instruments, and bicycles emerge as snare drums. Traffic, which is generally considered irritating and unpleasant, has been transformed into a work of unique beauty. Translating these prosaic phenomena into poetry is akin to the ancient alchemical dream of transmuting lead into gold.
As it turned out, the essays that we solicited for this special issue all manifested a structure somewhat more complex than a simple description of the prosaic imaginings performed by their chosen texts. What they all in one way or another found was a series of variations on a pattern in which a particular generic structure is problematized by its reflexive thematization. Generic forms are represented metonymically in novelistic texts in a way that then illuminates the limits of those forms. At the same time, the category of the everyday turns out to be central to the ways in which each of these problematized generic forms is organized by its recursive metonyms.
Collectively and individually, these essays give us very different answers to our question about the relationship between the novel's prosaic subject matter and novel reading as an everyday activity. Perhaps, too, that question was loaded, and we might have explored in greater depth the sheer diversity of representational modes to which the novel lends itself. Yet the prosaic imaginary has been formative of the European literary tradition and of the world literatures to which it has, by way of Euro-American political and cultural hegemony, contributed. The essays collected here demonstrate some of the complexities of that imaginary.
There is a strong cerebrovascular component to brain aging, Alzheimer disease, and vascular dementia. Foods, common drugs, and the polyphenolic compounds contained in wine modulate health both directly and through the gut microbiota. This observation and novel findings centered on nutrition, biochemistry, and metabolism, as well as the newer insights we gain into the microbiota-gut-brain axis, now lead us to propose a shunt to this classic triad, which involves the heart and cerebrovascular systems. The French paradox and prosaic foods, as they relate to the microbiota-gut-brain axis and neurodegenerative diseases, are discussed in this manuscript, which is the second part of a two-part series of concept papers addressing the notion that the microbiota and host liver metabolism all play roles in brain and heart health.
1650s, "having to do with prose" (a sense now obsolete), from French prosaique (15c.) and directly from Medieval Latin prosaicus "in prose" (16c.), from Latin prosa "prose" (see prose). Meaning "having the character of prose (in contrast to the feeling of poetry)" is by 1746; the extended sense of "ordinary, commonplace in style or expression, lacking poetic imagination or beauty" is by 1813. Both sense are from French. Related: Prosaical; prosaically.
The short answer to my question, is no, the museum does not find a place between myth and history, the sacred and the prosaic, nor, indeed, between past and present. Nor does it want to. It is a memorial museum. It has made itself sacred by design.
First, according to my ancient dictionary, "prosaic" means "straightforward, lacking in imagination". And that is an apt characterization of what I will describe tonight -- a dull, boring way to be a better investor than many of your friends.
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