New Proust Blogger!

Seems like summer belongs to Beach Books and not to the heavy tomes of Proust, although I am reading away in Cities of the Plain.

Here is a Proust blogger with a lot of great historical information.  Interesting how two out of the three who inspired the Guermantes women did not like Proust.  More Marcel!


Do take a look at this informative blog: 

Who's Who in Proust

Still Reading Proust

I pick up The Cities of the Plain sometimes before bedtime and read a few pages.  The narrator is back in Balbec, and Albertine blows hot an cold and lots of stuff about the "liftboy."  I'm waiting for an evening with the Verdurins to unfold soon. 


Another Proust reader comments in his blog:  http://zukointheworld.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/still-reading-proust/


"Still reading Proust"  is a state of being.  The summer passes apace, with trips, house guests, gardening, bird watching and lots of meals on the grill.   
It's amazing to think that Proust and his friends never knew the delights of a meal cooked over charcoal, nor did a lot of people until The Thrill of the Grill hit us.  I knew someone who used a hibatchi and grilled steaks and teriyaki meat sticks many, many moons ago.  My parents cooked trout in a cast iron skillet over a campfire, trout they had caught just hours before.  I never expect to taste trout like that again, but if I did, surely there would be the Proustian experience of Sweetwater Lake and the funky cabins and the wood rat who worried so that my Dad (the tenderest of tender hearts) would harm her and her babies.  He took the wood out of the box and left the critters be. 


The trout was dipped in a mixture of cornmeal and flour and probably friend in bacon fat, maybe Crisco.  How far away those days of my childhood are. 

The Apple Trees in the Countryside around Balbec in Spring

I read the most beautiful passage two nights ago.  Proust is back in Balbec wanting to get together with Albertine.  He grandmother has died and he mourns her.  It is not summer, but spring, and the sea and the landscape are very different than during the high season of summer. 
From The Cities of the Plain: 

Describing the lush blossoms on the apple trees.   ". . . these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants, upon one of the highroads of France.  Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, caught the line of apple-trees in their grey net.  But they continued to hold aloft their beauty, pink and blooming, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drench rain; it was a day in spring. 


I loved this breathtaking passage of trees and weather and comparing the trees to the peasants, the sudden rainstorm and the prosaic ending:  it was a day in spring. 


Ah, Proust!  You put us all to shame. 

The second photo is taken at Giverney.  


The Other Odette 

Montblanc Proust Pen

Rats!  Just when I thought I had the perfect (parfait) Father's Day gift.  No price.  Does that tell you something?


Proust Pen

Reading Proust for Fun

Amazing how many readers are blogging Proust.  It almost beats Cat Blog Friday.  


 Here is another blogger.  http://readproust.blogspot.com/


I am still plodding through Sodom and Gomorrah, and not at warp speed, either.  Many irons in the fire.  Planted the garden, trying to finish my novel, getting ready for house guests, toastmasters speeches, yada, yada.  I realized the other day how moth eaten my volume looks.  Maybe it's time to invest in a new book. 

Off to watch Treme, the Mardi Gras episode.   I think Marcel would have liked Mardi Gras.  I can just see him, all bundled up, wandering the city of New Orleans, having a drink here and there, and listening to the music, examining the costumes, pondering the meanings, his lips curved in a faint smile.   Later he would write it all down. 








Odette

Proust is now on Facebook

Have stranger things happened?  Proust is now on Facebook.  You can sign on and become a fan. 


http://www.facebook.com/pages/In-Search-of-Lost-Time-Marcel-Proust/110452695645104?v=desc


I've just returned from the Edgar Awards in NYC, given annually to those whose 2010 publications excelled in the mystery/crime writing genre.


 Due to a panel I sat in on, I bought Robert Arellano's nominated book, Havana Lunar.  Read it already.  It was short and ultra compelling, not your everyday mystery, and Arellano has a great take on setting and atmosphere as well as character.  I really loved this book.  Marcel, I think, would approve.  The descriptions are great, and for a whodunnit, it's not all that mired down in the conventions of clues and procedure.  Plays against the genre in many ways.  I love books about Cuba. 

Reading Proust South of Foxborough

Providence, RI is just a hop, skip and a jump from Foxborough, and I see a new Proust blogger has set up shop there.  Welcome to the wide world of blogging Proust.  I added "Proust in Providence" to the Proust blogs on the home page of this blog. 

I am making modest headway in Cities of the Plain, and falling behind in other reading.  Ten days of house guests--hard to feed house guests, and almost caught up and then a deathbed watch for a good friend.   Wrenching experience. 

Again playing catch up before I trek to New York for an annual writer's meeting, i.e. Edgar's Week, named after E.A. Poe (ho! ho! ho!).  I'm going to the symposium to find out the state of the genre.  Yes.  I confess.  I not a literary writer like Marcel, but a get-no-respect genre writer, mysteries and suspense, don't cha know?   My next novel will be an ordinary one, not crime fiction, which frees me in many respects, but of course I'll keep in mind the good lessons I've learned about conflict and moving the story along.  

Unknown wild flowers blooming in the garden.  Garlic is huge!  Yum.  We had beaucoup pineapples to eat over Easter, but we did not make the weird pineapple salad that Marcel ate.   Tonight I'm cooking shrimp scampi, ratatouille, and an orange-mascarpone-pistachio tart with a mezze platter for appetizers.  Mostly Mediterranean. 

I hope to come to a calmer spot in life soon, where Proust can again be savored.  In the meantime, onward. 

Odette, the other one 

Reading Proust Again

Ah, some stresses in my life have sent me back into the pages of Proust, because I can always fall asleep while reading him.  Making way thru the endless party of the Princess de Guermantes.  This party is actually more interesting than most of the ones in The Guermantes Way.  Charlus always livens up the page, and St. Loup has just made an appearance and he is an appealing character.  His relationship with Rachel in some ways echoed Swann and Odette, although St. Loup hasn't married her.  Swann is apparently dying, and the reader finds more drama and conflict than in the previous pages.


Onward. 


The other Odette

The Cities of the Plain

This blogger has done such a wonderful summation of the Proust volume that I have been struggling to get "into" that I am all enthused.  Just have to get through one more dull party.  Ole!

Here is the link.  Gosh.  Why can't I summarize my novels thusly?  And isn't that a cool painting of Proust?


http://www.litkicks.com/ProustIV

Wondering.

It's Holy Week--time to read about Proust's visit to Tante Leonie

An alert blogger's post reminded me of some of the best passages in Proust, as the narrator and his family visited Tante Leonie for Holy Week.

No hawthorne's blooming in Foxborough yet, but the forsythia is coming and I have garlic plants, put in the ground last fall, that are peeking out of the garden soil, as are the tulips, those the rabbits haven't eaten, jonquils, and (now blooming) crocus.  Spring is so exciting.  I feel my blood rising with the maple sap which apparently rose early and outfoxed everyone.  The spring peeper's broke into their shrill chorus early, too, and the chipmunks came out of hibernation.  Birds pairing off.  Love it! 



Here is the Great Proust Blog 
and an lovely web site, too.  


The Other Odette

Proust and Euphemisms

The blogger in the link below takes exception to one of Proust's "euphemisms," but I really liked it because Proust  didn't use whatever the  current euphemism was (and there were probably many).  Instead Proust used something very specific to Swann and Odette, something with meaning to them, and I thought that was an example of his greatness as a writer. 
Has anyone noticed, by the way, that "hiking the Appalachian Trail" has become a NEW euphemism, and that in our times, these new expressions come facing at us before the ink is dry. 


Here is the blog link: 


http://readingwithmytwin.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/euphemisms-101/


A cattleya is an orchid, (shown above, and look at Google images if you want to see hundreds), and Odette always wore one on her decolletage. 


The other Odette, who doesn't wear flowers but likes to grow them. 

All Things Proust, Both Large and Small

I found a web site that gives Proustian facts in a nutshell.  The brief, most unProustian of answers about the great man.  I am amused.  


Here is the link. 


http://answers.encyclopedia.com/question/marcel-proust-jean-santeuil-296239.html


I have been too busy writing and preparing and delivering a Toastmaster's speech to read anything except the daily papers and The New Yorker.  One of these days I'll get caught up. 


Seeing a new play in Boston tonight.  Last night we went to a New England Pen event at Upstairs at the Square.  Harvard Square, of course.  In a moment of Proustian recollection, my Significant Other and I  were discussing how the square had changed since our early years in Boston, and I thought, also, of the changes to Central Square and Kendall Square  (my old stomping grounds).  All three squares would be nearly unrecognizable to anyone coming from the past. 


The past weighs heavily, like the lead x-ray apron. 


Odette

Virginia Woolf Read Proust

In the twenties, that most fertile period in English (and French) literature, Virginia Woolf read Proust.  She probably read him in French.  I cannot imagine reading those endless sentences and paragraphs en Francais, but of course well-educated writers of that time would have little difficulty.  Strangely enough, the beginning of the work reads rather easily in French.  Go figure.


Here is an interesting account of  Virginia's reading.


How Virginia Woolf read Proust  

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