Martha's Vineyard Reads Proust

Wow!  Wish I didn't live a ferry ride away.  The island of Martha's Vineyard (off the south coast of Massachusetts) will read Proust beginning late September.  Summers are busy, autumns are beautiful, and winters are long on the island as the population dips to the stalwart year rounders.

Reading Proust will make the winter pass a lot faster, and since much of Proust is set on the Atlantic coast where Proust spent summers with his grandmother,  the scenes should resonate with Vineyard residents.

See more here:  The Vineyard Gazette of September 20th

And here:  In Search of a Weinstein Lecture 

Let's  wish the hardy (mentally and physically) Vineyard residents happy reading.  Maybe they'll be baking madelines and imagine dinners at the Verdurins.

Roger Shattuck Read Proust and Read and Read and Read

10 - 12 times, a prodigious feat, and he wasn't even from Foxborough.  Read about it here.  I am in total awe.

Roger Shattuck Read Proust Many Times

Sleeping With Proust - Or Not

Last night, tired after returning from a literary soiree, I headed to bed early, and discovered my trusty Kindle was still downstairs, as was the book we bought at the party.  And this week's New Yorker.  Grrrr.


Good old Proust was still on the nightstand, with its (perhaps) mouse-nibbled cover.  I remembered that I had left off at the Verdurin's dinner party at Raspelier, over-looking the coast and not far from Balbec where Proust often spent part of the summer.  This is Cities of the Plain.


Charlus prefers strawberry juice to  orangeade, both homemade by Madame Verdurin's esteemed cook, no doubt.  By the way he makes his choice, the narrator notes the Baron's preference for men over woman and speculates that he's a woman in a man's body.  Wow!  Was Proust ever ahead of his time!   Transgender stuff.  The Baron goes on to make a fool of Madame Verdurin, not a terribly difficult thing to do.  She's such a fraud and a social climber and manipulative to the max, one of these great characters that we love to hate.  I nodded off after a half-dozen pages, which I would have done with even the most hair-raising thriller, so don't blame Proust.  Tired is tired.  And I like it ever so much.   I am tempted to get Proust on the Kindle, too.  


If you are a Proust scholar (I am not, alas)  or  take an interest in literary studies, I have the monograph for you. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/summary/v042/42.1.lurz.html

Back in the day, when I had perhaps ambitions to be a scholar, I would have dived into this.   At least Proust and I are in synch in that it is summer in Balbec and summer in Foxborough, although the rains and cool weather are more spring-like.  The calendar says summer.  Now do I want Orangeade or Strawberry Juice?  Hmmmm. 


Odette, the Other One

Proust in The Park and the Proust Support Group

Some nice photos and observations:


  Proust in the Park 

And if you live near Venice, no not THAT Venice, you may want to join the Proust Support Group.

  Proust Support Group

Reading Proust on the Metro?

The interesting Proust posts have dried up, and so has, currently my reading.  I'm editing a just completed novel of mine (suspense), and trying to get another one ready for the Kindle.  And sending out stories and poems.   And taking a class.  And doing "stuff" for my Toastmasters club.  And coping with winter and cooking up a storm and ... well, you know.  I had to read a book for my class, so got that done.  A wonderful literary suspense novel  called, "The Whole World."  Published in 2010.  Proust, I think, would approve. 


Today I found this really cool photo.  Note the sepia tones.  Assume one of the two people reading is reading Proust.  The girl?  Obviously not the whole work but maybe  the first volume. Swann in Love?   It's always wonderful to see someone reading on the commuter train or the subway.  Take a look.  


Reading Proust on the Train  


One of these days I'll get back to Marcel.  By now, I'm so deep into the reading and it has been going on for so long and the plot is the novel itself, so it's not like I have to re-orient myself if I put it down for a couple months.  That's the nice thing about Proust.  You can dip into him over a lifetime once you've read the whole novel once.  And always find something different, something wonderful, something, dare we say it, sublime?  Ah Marcel.

Difficulties with Reading Proust

The great work is temporarily stalled on my nightstand.  Proust in Pictures has languished since Christmas.  I read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which scared the bejesus out of me, and started The Girl Who Played With Fire which also seems pretty scarey. 


Too many projects afloat.  Need to give 4 more Toastmaster speeches between now and June.  Just finished a revision class.  Trying to finish my novel.  Need to send out more queries.  We have a huge slide scanning project on the home front.  Big Love, Damages and The Good Wife occupy my TV time, as does the Food Channel.  And I need to learn Word Press.  What would Proust do?  He'd finish his novel.  I don't go out into society much, but of course, the occasional foray is sometimes required.  Winter is progressing much too quickly.  Spring and the call of the garden will soon arrive. 


We had wild turkeys in the yard, necesssitating a trip to PETCO for some cracked corn.  


Here is someone else who is having his own Proust troubles.  A fellow reader, or non-reader. 


http://whatwouldproustthink.blogspot.com/2010/02/first-anniversary.html


Nonetheless, I am determined to forge on, if I could only get by the freaking parties until the last party, the best by far. 


Odette

New England Reads Proust

An alert reader sent information about a Proust reading group at the Boston Athenaeum (private library) and a group of women in Connecticut have formed their own Proust-reading group. This rocks! Is it a movement?


http://womenreadingproust.blogspot.com/2009/08/mon-dieu-someone-has-read-all-7-volumes.html

I took Volume II off the shelf. It looks mouse-chewed and terribly worn, and I notice there's a price of $2.00 on the inside cover. Obviously from college days. Scott Montcrieff translation and hard cover. Avanti!

The other Odette

Have you read these books?

I love lists of books. Just went through the list of Time Magazines All-time 100 Novels (in English from 1923 to the present). I had read about 50 and plan to put a few on my list.

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/the_complete_list.html

Another blogger's list has Joyce and Proust at the top, as would mine. If you can't quite get into Ulysses, yet, try Joyce's short stories or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

You owe it to yourself to read widely, greatly, omnivorously.
http://alterdestiny.blogspot.com/2009/06/lyrads-15-books-in-15.html

Right now I'm reading Eat, Pray, Love, and the Tin Roof Blowdown. Both are very good reads.

What are YOU reading?

Reading Proust In Paris

Sigh. Reading P. in Paris so much more inspiring than here in Foxborough. Actually, I am back at the great work again, trying to finish The Guermantes. Mon Dieu, the drivel about the Guermantes that I've had to plough through, and it has been exceedingly wet to plough, which you understand if, unlike the narrator, you've been involved in farm life.

Nonethless, the end is in sight. I haven't been inspired by any blogs until this one. Ah, Paris and Proust. How sweet it is!

http://readingin.blogspot.com/2009/06/reading-proust-in-paris.html

The other Odette

The oral Proust

Alan Rickman reads Proust.

http://austindm.blogspot.com/2009/05/alan-rickman-reads-marcel-proust.html

Thanks to blogger Austintacious. Nice pun, what?

Hmmm. I wasn't able to open the link. Here's the direct link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKcRpYtaVIs

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

Proust, the summing up

A blogger has completed the long masterpiece:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003084.php#more

The Narrator, Neglected

Eeek! It's been a hideous Proustian dry spell, with no reading of Lost Time and not even any progress in Madame Proust.

Odette broke her foot and her ankle (major bummer) and has been taking a novel plotting course and an HTML class, and getting ready for a writer's conference and stuff like that. Reading Ridley Pearson instead of Proust, can you believe it?

Now if I wrote like Proust, I wouldn't need a plotting course, because I could use my life as a plot, except that taking HTML courses and reading Ridley Pearson don't sound as though they would provide any kind of plot at all. Not literary, certainly not genre, not even mainstream fiction, whatever that is. Does it exist anymore? Seems like there's thriller and paranormal and fantasy and romance and a few actual mainstream books like The Kite Runner, but not many of those. What is mainstream fiction anyhow? Anxious minds want to know.

I also began a new novel, not crime fiction, titled, Such Stuff As Dreams. Sort of a historical mainstream romance, but not a gloppy romance, a kind of tough romance. Well, we'll see what kind it is. I do have a plot, though, and turning points, and archetypes and all that jazz.

So Odette has not been dawdling, except her poor injured foot has turned all sorts of interesting colors and refuses to fit into anykind of shoe except a big klunky sneaker. No stillettos, no pumps, no cut little ballet shoes, no boots. Nada. Shapeless houseshoes, mostly. Madame Swann would be appalled. So am I.

Au revoir!

Odette