Happy Belated Birthday, Marcel

Alas!  I missed Proust's birthday. Too frantically busy trying to get my novel formatted, final proofs, final spell check, final edits, and some PR.  Crazy time. Heat wave, too.  

Found a good birthday post which I'm passing on to you. 

The Proust news of late has been ho-hum. Waiting for something rip-roaring to happen, although Proust and rip-roaring are not usually juxtaposed together.  

I'm still working my way through the Albertine book. One of thse days. In the meantime, I read other stuff, some good, some just O.K.  Do pick up the novel, HEFT.  It was really good. You'll like it. 

In the meantime, here's Proust: The Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century: Marcel Proust

Remembrance of a Proust Lecture

Oops! The lecture has come and gone. Not likely I would have come all the way from Foxborough. Once, in the depths of a Chicago winter very much like the current one (cold, cold, cold), I dragged my significant other through the snow to a lecture at Northwestern University about Proust.

My god, was it cold!

The professor said we should all read Proust. And I came home and did. From cover to cover.

And here I am again, years later. Sort of bogged down with the Duchess of Guermantes and the narrator's not very subtle (today we would call it stalking) arranging to run into her on her walks and business about town. Just reading the magazines and newspapers that come into the house is daunting, and then there's the books. But I am making progress.

Oh yes! The lecture: http://philostream.blogspot.com/2008/02/philo-event-8-philosophy-and-literature.html

Isn't he handsome in a European professorial kind of way? I have a Frenchman in my latest novel, Festival Madness, which I'll start flogging soon.

Alors,

Odette

Is Proust on Vacation, Too?

Not much Proust news this week. Is everyone at Balbec? The Univeristy of Alabama is to receive some important Proust papers. Nice to have them on this side of the pond.

I confess I've dropped the ball the past few nights and have been reading about the Beat Generation in prep for the big Kerouac celebration on Wednesday. Began reading The Poisonwood Bible. New edition of Poets and Writers also littering nightstand.

And I'm working hard on umpteenth revision of my high-tech mystery Festival Madness, gearing up to put the finishing touches on it before approaching editors and agents.

Summer pulls one in various directions, deliciously, but it is hard to stay focused. The garden calls for attention. We have the sweetest ruby throated hummingbirds, and they really like the butterfly weed or whatever the HUGE purple thing that is full of bees and blooms. I have a riot of color, right now, worthy of Monet, but on a greatly reduced scale. Smaller than Swann's garden, small, small, small.

Here's a belligerent view of Proust from a young man. Young, young, young. Ahhhh!
http://eurotastic.tumblr.com/post/9908815

Odette