Completing Proust

Cast your eyes on the perfect madeline from this New York bakery. On the very big occasion of the blogger's friend's having completed his reading of Proust. Zowie!

http://escape-to-new-york.blogspot.com/2008/10/10112008-oh-madeleine.html

I read some pages last night. The narrator is finally leaving the party with Charlus after causing the hostess some angst and treating us to a horrible scene between St. Loup and his poor sweet mother. That bad Rachel. Stupid, smitten St. Loup, like all of the lovers in Proust, his head is in the sand up to his shoulders. And all the lovers are unfaithful. It's quite awful, really, and very, very good. And even our Odette, AKA Mme. Swann was with once with Charlus, the narrator remembers, thinking of a troubling scene from his boyhood.

What goes around is certainly coming around. And back around.

Odette

The Best Proust Birthday Present

This blogger (see link below) has a fab photo of madelines and a glass a wine, never mind the tea.

Hmmm. When I was an undergrad at a Texas school, we always referred to U of T students as "tea sips." This was a huge insult, and in fact when I hear someone ordering a soy latte with no caffeine, the word "tea sip" always comes to mind, as with any wimpy talk, like "I could never drink wine with lunch," eat, butter, bacon, fried food, strong coffee, any number of wimp-outs. Kierkegaard said, "Sin bravely."

Proust was no wimp either, in spite of his poor health. I think of him tramping around St. Loup's barracks, and through town and hiking along the paths of Balbec.

Here is the link to the Birthday Present. Cool blog, too.

http://www.thebunnybungalow.com/2008/07/joyeux-anniversaire-monsieur-proust.html

Grapeshot

It's a Movement!

A fellow-writer told me she was listening to Proust on tape. There’s Proust madness afoot. Cool, huh? I subscribe to a service that puts all Proust references on the net in my mailbox.

The majority of references are in passing, like how the Madeleine made Proust remember, and I just bit into a cupcake and thought about by grandma’s chicken yard. Well, you get the idea.

Other references to all the books, from Proust and the Squid, Madame Proust, to large tomes of critical work about Joyce, Proust and whomever. Extreme literary stuff, parodied by the All England Summarize Proust Contest.

Then there are the Proust bloggers. My favorites are Orange Crate Art and Marcelle Proust. I believe they are both academics.

We have ordinary people who are trying to read or re-read Proust and blogging it occasionally, or habitually like Odette.

Taken together, one thinks the entire world is reading, studying and blogging Proust which is not the case, as one finds out when EYES GLAZE OVER, when the reading and blogging or our narrator is mentioned. Eeeek. A passive sentence.

So anyhow. I have to confess I have been slothful and less than energetic about pursuing Proust lately. Got bogged down with Albertine in Balbec. Onward.

Maybe if I whipped up a recipe of madelines? No? What then?

Odette