Les Vacances

Your faithful Odette is off to Chicago for a week. Alas, it's not Balbec and certainly not Nantucket or Easthampton or any of the stylish places.

Puzzle for you: If Proust lived here today, where would he take his holidays? Perhaps the Riviera, not on the beach but high above the coast approached by a steep corniche, where the view in marvelous and the food equally fine. Art galleries and patrons nearby. A bit of shopping, but not too much. Girls in bikinis with sportscars, not bicycles. How it all has changed.

It would be nice to be in Nice. Instead, the windy city on the hottest week of the year.

Ah well,

Odette

The Duke and the Duchesse

I picked up Proust again, and read and read and am still at Mme. Villeparisis party with Marcel and Bloch and the hostess and the Duke and the Duchesse of Guermantes. The Duke (Basin) arrived and manuevered through the drawing room with his hand held out at his side "like a shark's fin." What a great image. Of course the couple didn't arrive together. She is furious about his infidelities, as naturally a proud duchesse would be. He is still handsome. Oriane and Basin. What a couple.

What a masterful writer! And how the Duchesse disses St. Loup's (her nephew's) mistress. It's interesting how we get various sides, wholly opposite of the mistress/actress. She is dumb. She is smart. She is pretty. She is ugly. She can act. She can't. Hmmm. What is going on here?

And good old Bloch is as clueless as ever, and we find out who Mme. Villeparisis love is, in a clever aside by the author.

I like it ever so much, and even if I only read a page or two (and who can claim to have raced through Proust?) it's well worth while.

I may take the book on vacation with me. A car trip, and therefore a thick hardcover is not such a liability.

So, children, I haven't posted because I tend my garden, and have begun a new novel, not what I expected to write, au contraire, and we had houseguests and dinner guests, and well, yanno, pretty soon the weeks have taken wing and here we are in eeek, August, the month of Vacances.

When all the Paris restaurants are ferme. Mon Dieu. But not Chicago restaurants. I noticed, in a persusal of the guidebook, that Chicago has many more French restaurants than Boston, where French cuisine is practically an endangered species. O.K., there's a few. Damn few. Boston is for seafood and Italian and whatever.

Of course the guidebook stated some pretty eye-popping prices. Better to be at the little evenings of the Verdurins, or better yet, much better, at Balbec on the beach, in the hotel dining room, at one's fixed table, and bicycling with the little band. Ah! Summer!

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

They're Still Summarizing Proust

Personally, I haven't ever tried to summarize Proust but I did write an English paper in my senior year which must have done some summarizing--Proust and time, what a topic--at 21 I was obsessed with time, duree (yeah, I know the apostrophe is missing) and all this terribly pretentious literary stuff.

Life was interesting in those days. But back to Proust, whose birthday was yesterday, by the way. Happy Birthday, Marcel, wherever you are.

Here is a link to an interesting post that links to some summaries of Proust on another website. This all started with the Monty Python All England Summarize Proust Contest, which was one of their classics. God, was that program great. Spam, spam, spam, baked beans, egg, tomato and spam. We quote from it all the time.

Link: http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/2008/07/wendell-berry-madam-marie-and-summarize.html

Maybe you should write your own summary.

Odette, no not that one!

Proust Errata

Blogging Proust in his various permutations.

Jacqui’s room: 15 Classics in 15 weeks.
http://jacquirobbins.blogspot.com/2008/07/july-7-book-by-proust.html

What ambition. I am astounded. Can barely get through the newspapers and magazines that come into the house.

Proust for the 3rd Time. This is what I’m doing. Once as an undergrad, 15 years later as a suburban mom (no soccer) and now with grown children. Each age brings something to Proust. Now I’m enjoying his humor, which I totally missed the first two reads. How is this possible?
http://bestofnow.blogspot.com/2008/07/shadowed-agapanthus-proust.html


Seven Degrees of Separation from
http://gayethechainreader.blogspot.com/2008/07/seven-degrees-of-separation-from-proust.html

Type in an author and see who else comes up. Weird names, for sure.
http://www.gnooks.com/

Blogging Proust

Photo is the beach at Biarritz


By now (July 5th) Marcel would be at Balbec with his grandmother, enjoying sun, sea and the girls in flower.

If you have a true Proust voracity, here are two blogs worthy of mention.

Proust and Penelope
http://lettersfromalibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/07/more-on-proust.html

Swann’s Way after 35 Years
http://thewritingsofproust.blogspot.com/2008/07/end-of-era.html

Odette

Blogging Proust blogging Proust

Proust and the Self:

An essay about re-reading Proust some years later. I can relate to this, but not quite as literarily. Too long in Foxborough?

http://onlywordstoplaywith.blogspot.com/2008/06/proust-and-self.html

Proust is no Hemingway.

Mais non! Proust is Proust and Papa is Papa. They are as different as say, Proust and Kerouac, who really do have much in common. Hmmmm. This is actually another readable essay by someone who has tried Proust and failed, and is back again to scale the summit. Looks like he may succeed this time. God knows, I tried Moby Dick several times before succeeding, and War and Peace endless times. Then I picked it up and read it from cover to cover. Sometimes the reader is not ready for a work of literature, but this is not failure.

http://literarysummits.com/index.php/2008/06/29/moving-on-to-swanns-way/

Another Food Blog

Haven't been reading Proust, barely reading the daily papers.

Here is a fellow Proust and food blogger. Oh to be in Balbec about now. Bet everyone runs around in white jeans and shorts and tiny tops and not a top hat to be seen.

Are the girls in flower riding their bikes along the esplanade? Is Albertine there? What's on the menu?

http://anotherfoodblog.com/?p=2902

Odette

Blogging Proust: the summer heats up

Proust Bloggers:

Wanting Peace: Proust at Last http://peacebemine.blogspot.com/2008/06/proust-at-last.html

McSweeney’s has a Proust parody that’s très amusant: http://mcsweeneys.net/2008/5/21kumar.html

And Reading Proust has a trenchant comment about Balbec, where we’ve all summered at the seaside with Proust.

http://proustreading.blogspot.com/2008/06/sodom-and-gomarrah-2.html

Moi? I'm still at the reception with the Duchesse de Guermantes. I'm the weirdly dressed one from the wrong century with American French looking around surreptitiously for the booze.

Cheers!

Odette

A Proust Geekout

Sigh! What a cool way to spend the day. Wish I'd been there. Read two pages last night from Mme. Villeparisi's endless reception.

http://webcowgirl.livejournal.com/1526169.html


Odette

Literary Notes From All Over

Two posts from Cairo with Proust mentions:

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/901/heritage.htm

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/901/cu5.htm

Women and Reading
http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2008/06/what_happens_when_a_reader_sto.php

Favorite Books
It's been a long time since anyone mentioned The Rosy Crucifixion (Henry Miller)

http://bobbydrake666.livejournal.com/22953.html

Marcel Marcel - we all love Proust

http://postillion-thoughtsonbooks.blogspot.com/2008/06/visualizing-thoughts-la-proust.html

The Duchesse de Guermantes invites a poet to dinner

Back to Proust last night and the long section about the Duchesse of Guermantes and how she entertains.

Another example of Proustian humor which is so gentle, really and so wry and so understated that one possibly could read right over it which is what I did for years.

The Duchesse of Guermantes invites someone to dinner, telling him that a well-known poet has been invited and she knows he wants to meet the poet, etc. The dinner party takes place, and the poet is at the table, but the Duchesse talks about food, gardening, this and that and poetry is never, ever mentioned and the guest who wanted to meet the poet and get his opinion on the state of the art of poetry is out of luck. Like the elephant in the living room, is poetry at that party.

The implication is that the Duchesse thinks that in the interest of hospitality, maybe the poet would just like to eat dinner and take a break from talking about poetry.

The other implication is that the Duchesse is dominating the conversation with her blather about this and that and no one can get in a word edgewise.

If one envisions that dinner, the comic possibilities are endless.

I love Proust.

Reading Proust in Baghdad

In central Baghdad , as carp lolled in a circular pool, Al Faris Restaurant owner Haj Hashim said he now served fried fish to 10 or 12 tables of customers a night, up from only two tables a month ago.
A mile or so away, bookseller Jumaa Mohammed says sales of his newspapers and paperbacks have jumped 60 percent from early this year and 80 percent from a year ago. Now he boasts a table to display them. Before they were spread on the sidewalk.
Between their two establishments, bookstore owner Daoud Mohammed is proud to show his translations of Proust, Melville, Pasternak and Shakespeare. He does so in the dark: power is out again. He sells around 10 books a day, down from about 100 three years ago, but more than earlier this year.

This is quoted from Pat Dollard's blog which is normally not be on my radar. I would think life in Baghdad would not be conducive to reading Proust, but then maybe Proust is the ultimate escapist literature.

If you want one man's slanted view (surely all our views are slanted one way or another, n'est pas?) this is a link to the entire post.

http://patdollard.com/2008/06/decreased-violence-in-iraq-prompts-question-of-us-departure/

The heat in Boston, but not Baghdad, has finally broken and I am off to the city today for lunch with a friend at the Barking Crab, far away from UID and car bombs.

Odette

More on YSL and Proust

From New York Magazine:

I think I've exhausted the subject. Interesting bits and pieces have scrambled out of the quagmire of gossip and fashion.

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/47563/

Proust with his dressing in lots of layers to stay warm , presumably, would not have been a fashion icon. Hate the word icon, the most overused and undeservedly used word in the language. Why did I use it? Merde. A fashion statement. That's better.

Odette