Pinter Reads Proust. Pinter produces Proust.

Drat!  I had no idea there would be a Pinter/Proust performance at the 92nd St. Y last week.  It's not all that difficult to nip down to the Big Apple from Foxborough, and there's a friend with a sleeper  sofa!  Oh, she was actually visiting us.  Well,  crap.  Anyhow I missed it.

Here's a fun write up, that even mentions Monty Python's Summarize Proust contest. 

Pinter and Proust   This is a good article both for Proust and Pinter fans.

Another informative article apropos Proust is here: The Nation wrote about Proust. And wrote and wrote and wrote


Odette

Update:  yet another article linkWhen Pinter adapted Proust 

Summarizing Proust

July is looking good for finding literate Proust blogs. The world has not yet fled to the South of France, the Mediterrean isles, the Hamptons or onto a yacht on Long Island Sound.

What? Quel dommage! You're not going to any of those places? Helas!

When our cat took ill, we had one of those maligned "staycations" with local museums and restaurants benefitting from Chez Odette. Kitty is fine now.

The grad student blogger with a link below has actually Summarized Proust, but not of course, in 15 seconds, that can't be done. Or can it?

http://gradstudentmadness.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-notes-guermantes-way-marcel-proust.html

Could it happen on Twitter in 142 characters? Want to try?
Odette is feeling very geeky having managed to have her "tweets" show up on Facebook.

They're Still Summarizing Proust

Confession time. I haven't picked up The Guermantes Way for weeks. We went to a discussion of nature writing at Harvard, an inspiring program which led me to pick up a book about the Grand Canyon, called Down Canyon. The writing is excellent. Great verbs. Lots of interesting detail. Proust would approve.

You will love this book! http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid930.htm The author is Ann H. Zwinger. What a great read.

And of course I read my writing and cooking mags and three daily papers. The other time suck has been submitting to a novel contest (Amazon) and getting a book out to an agent, along with submissions of short stories and essays to various 'zines. God, this takes a lot of time. And I had to finish my robot fish story. Loved writing it. Francis, you're the greatest.

The craziest thing is, I can't remember whether I actually wrote my cat story or if I just plotted it for ages. Writing in your head or with your fingers, too. How weird.

We were in Washington, DC and I only read the New Yorker. Good stuff. All about John Updike. In many ways, Proust was the Updike of his day. Think about it.

Now I am writing a speech I must give next Wednesday and reading entries in a writing contest. House guest, birthdays, Valentine's Day, lots of cooking, esp. a chocolate panna cotta with Port Wine Ice cream. Yowza!

Did I mention a report to write by Sunday? A full, busy life is a good thing. One has little time to contemplate the economy.

Onward,

Odette, the other one. And here is the Monte Python link:

http://ovablastic.blogspot.com/

Onscreen Scientist Summarizes Proust

Finally a most worthy post apropos Proust from "Onscreen Scientist," who has completed a second reading of Proust in French, and has also completed the work in English.

My hat is off to him, for several reasons. He is a physicist and a software writer. In another lifetime, I wrote software for a living, and with a few exceptions, this was not a literary crowd. I cannot think of any of my software colleagues who would have read Proust and my conjecture is that few of them would have even known who he was. Perhaps the scientist writes AI software or something besides grinding out business transactions ad nauseum ad infinitum.

I have known a few literary physics majors, most of the professors. I think physics teaches a certain curiosity about the world--well all science should do that except maybe creationism, which is of course not science but pseudo-science like astrology and phrenology and Madame Sostirus, cardreader and fortuneteller. I know people who actually believe this stuff.

But back to Proust. Onscreen Scientist offers a great summation of the book--a bit longer than those in the All England Summarize Proust Contest, and I think he is dead on about Albertine. One just cannot ever quite get a handle on her. She remains, for me, too, a tabula rasa.

Currently, I am wallowing in Mme. Villeparisis' endless party, and in two days I leave for Northern Nevada, a wonderful place for reading Proust but I only travel there with softcovers I can leave behind, and of course, that would not be Proust.

So click ye forth and read Onscreen Scientist's Proust post, and then hie ye to Proust himself, the great one. I was an the New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show yesterday and scooped up a wonderful bunch of books.

When people say they don't read, I feel an awful sympathy. How could you not read?


After all, Onscreen Scientists reads the master in French. Zowie!
http://onscreen-scientist.com/?p=35

Odette, the other one

Proust and Fortuny

Apparently Fortuny's technique has been lost and can't be recovered. Interesting, that with all our technology no one has figured it out.

In the meantime, here's food for thought. Albertine and the Duchesse of Guermantes both wear Fortuny. La di dah!

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/30/arts/rcartborch.php

While we're on the topic of Fortuny, here is a link to the website:

http://www.fortuny.com/Mariano/History.html

Others are re-reading Proust like moi. I wish the blogger would change fonts and colors. Sometimes interesting blogs can be, alas, hard to read, font and colorwise.
http://anthonyscoggins.blogspot.com/2008/05/rereading-proust.html

Ecclesiasical Proust Archive

What next, you might ask.

http://www.proustarchive.org/

The You-Tube stuff kind of barfed on my computer, but the site looks interesting, and anything to do with the All England Summarize Proust Contest is to be lauded.

Today is cat blog day. Thisbe insists on extra love and follows me around. When I failed to pet her quite enough she nipped me on the ankle. Annie is under the weather and allowed Thisbe access to the home office. Which cat will sleep under the Christmas tree this year? Which cat will attack the lower ornaments? Which cat will read Proust? There's an easy answer. Which cat will go out into society? Annie, of course.

Madame Proust

I finished Madame Proust last night. Of course the ending was sad, with her sickness and death at a relatively young age and leaving the somewhat helpless Marcel, who managed to pull himself together and write his great work.

At some of the writer's groups I've been in, there have been deep discussions of how members really started to write after the death of a parent. Seems to trigger something.

Madame Proust hectored and nagged and cajoled like any mother. Proust's impossible habits--sleeping all day and up (and out) all night with total quiet required during the day would drive anyone batshit. Weird how he always showed up with overcoats and scarves even in mild weather. I know womeome else who does that but she is a frail little thing with no fat on her bones and obviously suffers from the cold. There's a lot to be said for a bit of padding. And poor Madame, walking 10 hours a day at the spa to try to lose some weight.

Is it just me or does pineapple salad with truffles sound rather. . . unappetizing? In days of yore, we sometimes at dined at Le Francais in Wheeling, Illinois, and the meal was often tres truffled but I don't believe the dessert was. Almost sounds like a Roman feast oddity. Pineapples must have been a rare treat.

My husband's father always announced he would only eat the kinds of vegetables that grew in his grandmother's garden. No new-fangled broccoli for him. Rest of family rolled their eyes, of course. I wonder what grew in Swan's garden. Monet had a great vegetable and herb garden. The recipes in the Monet cookbook are so simple that you just know the produce must have been so spectacular it stood on it's own. Meat and fish and poultry, too. Quite frankly, the chickens my grandparents raised were the best, as were the strawberries and the tomatoes. I can mimic the strawberries with organic local ones, but the tomatoes, the tart Kansas tomatoes are gone. Mine were all right this year, better than store bought, but nothing comes close to my Grandfather's. He fed them with horse manure. Maybe that was the trick.

How did we get from Madame Proust to my grandfather's garden? Not so far a jump as you would think. Madame Proust's life was a mirror into the past, and was interesting in her own right, even if her son had not written the great book. How did he do it without her? A miracle of sorts. Something to ponder.

Odette

The All England Summarize Proust Contest

This is a classic. You have to admire Maud's mother-in-law. Obviously a lady with a certain amount of leisure.

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=8096

Everyone is blogging Madame Proust as well as her great son. See below:
http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/2007/10/29/the_quintessential_writers_mot.html

And yet more literary musings. Did I list this yesterday?
http://penamerica.blogspot.com/2007/10/michael-ondaatje-davis-on-proust-urban.html

Sometimes it seems the entire world is Proust obsessed, except here in the Boston area where we in Red Sox Nation are World Series and the-end-of-a-perfect-baseball- season obsessed. The fete yesterday was one for the books. It's like a tsunami of energy is rolling onward.

My question: after Proust secluded himself in the cork-lined room, did he still want to go out into society? Maybe some of my readers know the answer. I have Painter's biography, but have not perused it lately.

Onward.

Odette