Thursday, December 25, 2008

Proust and Photography


Santa meant to bring Paintings in Proust, but he got a tad confused and arrived with Proust and the Power of Photography




A big surprise, to be sure, and this turns out to be a very interesting little book, with lots of unexpected gems about Marcel.

Apparently M. was something of a sloppy dresser and was the bane of his mother who liked for him to leave the apartment looking rather spiffy. Alas, not.

He loved exchaning photographs with friends and with new acquaintances, and he would bother them until they acquiesced and gave him their image.

It's all about images, isn't it?


Merry Christmas, and Joyeux Noel.


The Other Odette

Friday, December 19, 2008

The Proust Auction in Paris

I'm not the only blogger obsessed with the procedings:

http://john.mignault.net/blog/2008/12/18/proust-roast/

2.2 Million Euros- - Zowie! That's a lot of cash for our narrator's stuff. Would that I had been there.

More. More more.
http://artmagazine.arcadja.com/2008/12/17/proust-fans-battle-to-buy-authors-letters-watch-in-paris-sale/

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Proust Auction in Paris

Another Bloomberg post about the French Proust Auction:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aIsCnutyTdeA&refer=muse

Maybe Santa will being you a letter from Proust. No? At least one can hope for the Paintings in Proust book.

I'm baking cookies, creating interesting nibbles with nuts, and planning a dinner party (simple).

We have a dusting of snow today.

'Tis the season

Odette, the other one

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Proust's Letter Auctioned Today

The letters that Marcel Proust wrote to his housekeeper in the last years of his life are to be sold today at Sotheby's Paris auction house.

Let us hope that a university or other institution that would be likely to put some of the letters on view will be the high bidder.

For the full story: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aKh_5nfb6wv0&refer=muse


What a great Christmas gift!

The Other Odette

Thursday, December 11, 2008

The Blogosphere Is Still Reading Proust

I'm determined to finish volume III before the end of the year. I'm almost there.

Here are more Proust readers, an industrious bunch, to read Proust and blog. Yowza!

Literary summits: (and what could be more elevated than Proust?)

http://literarysummits.com/index.php/2008/12/10/a-universe-of-sound/

Stranded on a desert island with Molly and Marcel:
http://mollister.blogspot.com/2008/12/desert-island.html


Blogger’s Book List and Proust is on it.
http://botheyes.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/culling-the-list/


Maybe New Hampshire should get a new license plate: Read Proust or Die

The other Odette

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Practical Proust and Mae West

Aha! A new blog to brighten this snowy Sunday in Foxborough. The slough is wintry and the squirrels have discovered (yet again) the suet feeder. I feed the critters lavishly, as Proust feeds my aesthetic needs.

Now I have another new blog, sort of Proustian for you. Love the colorful "home page."

http://operachanteuse.blogspot.com/2008/12/penses-du-jour-practical-proust-and-mae.html

Practical Proust, indeed. As practical as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Irony isn't dead. My mom loved chicken gizzards. My dad ate the liver. That left me with the heart until I was old enough to demand half the liver. No one ever fought Mom for the gizzard.

The Other Odette

Friday, December 05, 2008

The Proust Questionnaire

Everyone and anyone answers the Proust Questionnaire which dates to, naturally, Proust but is always found in the pages of Vanity Fair. Of course it has spawned a lot of others answering the questions, but I don't often see a crime writer responding to the questionnaire.

Here goes: http://www.sohopress.com/blog

By the way, Wednesday evening Marcel's grandmother died, and a page or two later he is entertaining a newly plump Albertine in his room and Francoise bursts in on them. I couldn't have liked it more. Albertine, in the narrator's mind, has achieved a new louchness. Is it experience? Something else? He doesn't tell us, nor, of course does Albertine.

I am actually going to finish the book before the year is out. I am plump giddy.

The other Odette