Ecclesiasical Proust Archive

What next, you might ask.

http://www.proustarchive.org/

The You-Tube stuff kind of barfed on my computer, but the site looks interesting, and anything to do with the All England Summarize Proust Contest is to be lauded.

Today is cat blog day. Thisbe insists on extra love and follows me around. When I failed to pet her quite enough she nipped me on the ankle. Annie is under the weather and allowed Thisbe access to the home office. Which cat will sleep under the Christmas tree this year? Which cat will attack the lower ornaments? Which cat will read Proust? There's an easy answer. Which cat will go out into society? Annie, of course.

Check out the hawthornes

Another Proust blogger on the radar:
http://thewritingsofproust.blogspot.com/

Check out the cool photos of the hawthorne trees.

Yesterday's post was a bit mean-spirited, yanno? That's what blogging is: thinking aloud, and sometimes one should bite one's tongue.

Odette

Reading Proust Ain't All Beer and Skittles

I have no idea where the old term "beer and skittles" came from. Did my Dad use it? He had such colorful language. Beer and skittles is something easy and pleasant.

Last night I got tired of Marcel and his endless games with Andrea and Albertine and the other girls. I mean, it sounded so like high school, genteel, and oh so refined by still like bloody high school.

Marcel was nice to the girls he didn't like and cool to the one (Albertine) he liked. And the stuff about the exam, while interesting, didn't exactly advance the plot. Oh! There's a plot? Well, sort of. Getting close to Albertine and all that.

Gossip Girl in Balbec. Can it be? The problem is, I can't force myself to skip pages. What if I miss out on a true gem?

Not only is my goal of reading the entire oeuvre this year going to fall miserably short, I doubt if I'll get through half of it.

So what have I done? I finished my novel, (well, almost); I gave 10 speeches at Toastmasters; planted a garden, did lots of jobs for all my writerly organizations, went to Alaska, Denver, Nevada, New York, cooked up a bunch of meals, mostly good, and spent quality time with the cats. I read a lot of other books, magazines, 3 daily papers, I did a new website, tried to stay in touch with friends, relatives, Romans, countrymen. Seems like a pretty busy year.

I blew off my gym membership for six months (bad!) and sold my old car. I broke my ankle. But I didn't finish Proust. I feel like Sisyphus. Nonetheless. 700+ pages of really fine print ain't nothing. I also read about Madame Proust , but not about Proust and the Squid. I read Kerouac and participated in the anniversary in Lowell. So......

Onward, allons!

Odette

Back in bed with the Narrator

Confession: I read in bed.

Young Girls in Flower. Marcel loves the girls because they are girls, not women, girls still becoming, not fully formed. This is what he finds most interesting about them.

Oh course, he is still a young man, not fully formed either. So they are perfect for each other. He takes treats on the picnics, procured by the faithful Francois. I think he has a sweet tooth.

Becoming versus being. Is becoming a writer more interesting than being a writer? When is the "becoming" stage discarded? Is it discarded? Aren't we all in some respect unfinished, always becoming old, middle-aged, creaky, ambitious, bitter, opinionated?

Only when we die will we stop becoming something, and maybe not even then. Only when we're forgotten dust will we stop becoming. In the meantime, Marcel glories in hanging out with the girls in flower, even spurning invitations from St. Loup.

Food for thought, which is the best food on this post-Thanksgiving day.

Odette

Grad Student Madness

I love a good rant.

http://gradstudentmadness.blogspot.com/2007/11/la-recherche-du-proust-perdu.html

Even better if the writer mentions Proust.

Proust and Kerouac revisited

So, all summer I was on a Kerouac kick, along with readings of Proust. Seemed like an unlikely duo. Lately, working through some New Yorkers from the fall, I found "Drive, He Wrote," by Louis Menand.

On the whole, this is a very sympathetic review of Kerouac and "On The Road." But what stopped me in my tracks was the following sentence.

"'On the Road' is as self-consciously a work of literature as 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu'--and Proust was a writer whom both Kerouac and Cassady emulated, someone who turned his life into literature." Louis Menarnd, New Yorker Magazine, Oct. 1, 2007.

Maybe my reading Jack and Marcel side by side wasn't so weird after all. How did I not notice this, now, when I certainly would have noticed it when I was 21? I don't read so analytically anymore, no longer being an English major. But what a stunning observation.

Truth be told, I did not find Dean Moriarty aka Neal Cassady so enchanting this time around. Manipulative was the word that came to mind. Something I didn't see at 21. This is a good argument for reading works of literature several times in the course of your life. Something new always pops up.

Back to Proust. He may be just the antidote to the holidays.

Odette

The facts, s'il vous plait

Always poking around, looking for Proust "stuff."

Here is a vanilla site that gives the facts of Proust's life and a list of his works.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/proustmarcel/p/aa_mproust.htm

I have put Proust aside (again) to catch up on the New Yorkers. There is not enough time in the day for reading and writing and cooking and exercise and all the tasks of modern life. My grandmother worked much harder than I do, but I believe she had more leisure. Do we fill up leisure and then complain of no time? Yes?

Did Proust manage time? Yes, when he withdrew from the world and wrote his great work he managed time very well, because he finished his work. Just barely. If he had been gallivanting around in society, the work would not have been completed. Is writing a "leisure" activity? Some would say yes.

In this electronic life of ours with email and instant messages and cells and all of our wonderful hideous gadgets it's hard to categorize what is leisure and what is work. I have to confess that lately, I've no idea.

Tomorrow I must make a pie crust. Thursday is pie day. I'm concocting an apple pie with dried cherries soaked in scotch whiskey. Not my original recipe, but you must admit it sounds quite temping. We are calling it apple pie with drunken cherries. The apples are Golden Delicious and cost so much they are indeed Golden Delicious.

A long way from Proust, but maybe not. I always wonder how the educated American taste buds would react to a meal from Proust's time, when the food all came from someone's garden and was grown without chemicals and additives and the poultry ran around in the yard eating bugs and what have you. We would probably reel from the delicousness of it all. Swoon at the chicken. Savor the the flavorful veggies. With Francois keeping a sharp eye on us.

Onward,

Odette

Remembering Proust's Death

http://thethoughtsofroger.blogspot.com/2007/11/marcel-proust-died-today-85-years-ago.html

I always wondered who mourned him most. His brother? The servants? No wife, no children, only one sibling, parents long gone. Was he lonely?

He had his great work, and must have been racing to finish it before death overtook him. Was he in a frenzy? Did he rework his sentences over and over? The last volume is to my mind, the greatest.

These are some of the things I don't know about Proust. In many ways, the more I read and the more I learn, the less I know.

Odette

What would Proust drive and other minutiae

Ye gods, am I the only one still reading Scott Montcrief's translation?

http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/2007/11/november-oddments/

One of these days I may spring for a newer Proust translation. The old books seem comforting, somehow. I've had them since I was an undergraduate. No idea where they came from. The covers look too old for me to have purchased them new.

I sometimes bought books at a used bookstore in Houston. They had the entire (surviving) books from the old Seamen's Library in Galveston that had been damaged in the 1901 (?) hurricane. One held a moldy piece of history.

My Proust isn't moldy. It would be nice to have separate volumes, small enough for travel. I normally travel with light paperbacks. Nothing like a big tome to weight one down.

Onward,

Odette

Reading Proust in England

Found a new blogger. She likes to talk about food and recipes, too, as well as Proust. She's into Sodom and Gomorrah (so to speak) right now in the great oeuvre.

http://webcowgirl.livejournal.com/

I am currently reading The Joy of Writing Sex Scenes. It's very good, and probably not what you think. Elizabeth Bennet is the author, and I heard her speak last Friday evening at a writing event outside of Boston--not in Foxborough!

Proust intuitively knew what she discusses. Proust intuitively knows everything. I bow before his great genuius. It's just amazing how many are reading and blogging Proust. Or: is there something about bloggers (who are obviously writers) that attracts them to Proust? Is Proust's somewhat confessional style seductive to bloggers?

What is this blogger/Proust relationship all about? Damned if I know. I'm just swept up in it.

The Joy of Blogging Proust?

Odette

It Was The Year Everyone Was Reading and Blogging Proust

Another Proust reader and blogger:
http://gaiawriter.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-marcel-proust.html

And yet another:
http://booksinnorthport.blogspot.com/2007/11/when-to-hold-em-when-to-fold-em.html

This reader liked the first and last volumes, Swann's Way and The Past Recaptured. Have to admit these are my faves, too. But one has to merit The Past Recaptured, which is won, so to speak, by reading the whole WORK.

The blogger above, booksinnorthport, has an interesting post. When does one actually abandon a book? When I was younger, I would pursue the book to the bloody end, no matter what. This is how I actually got through Moby Dick and others classics. It was how I got through Proust the first time as an undergraduate, that and the fact that I was writing a senior thesis on a group of writers of whom Proust was one.

I had a bunch of false starts with War and Peace and then one Christmas vacation I read it from cover to cover in about a week. Wanted to weep at the end. No, not from relief, but from the final passages about history.

I am having trouble getting through Three Trapped Tigers, but I will. Works of so-called popular fiction, i.e. genre writing, I abandon after 50 pages if it doesn't grab me. Have a whole shelf of those. Some of the authors are famous.

A book I read recently that I would heartily recommend if The Poisonwood Bible. Just knocked my socks off. Kingsolver gets better and better, and I would love to read her latest non-fiction about growing your own food.

Now I have to make a mad dash through my own latest oeuvre, before sending it off to a publisher who will maybe even like it. One gets so close to one's writing that the perspective just disappears.

In the meantime, I am enjoying the narrator and Albertine and the little band at Balbec. With winter approaching, Balbec seems desireable, non? The sun, the sand, the dining room, the snobs, the parading up and down. Does Balbec have a Strand Promenade? I feel I know these people. That's what a great writer does.

Odette

The Pleasures of Re-Reading

http://slowreading.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/the-pleasures-of-re-reading-guardian-unlimited/

The books you loved at twenty will be different at forty and still different at sixty. These are arguments for re-reading.

Odette

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/McInerney-t.html?_r=1&em&ex=1194757200&en=2ecd4529817730dd&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin

Professor Bayard's book was reviewed on Sunday in the New York Times.

I read some Proust on Friday and Saturday nights after long brutal day's work. The thing about Proust is, that you know he won't keep you awake past your bedtime flipping pages likes crazy to find out "who dunnit." This can be a good thing.

How tongue in cheek is Bayard's book? Methinks it is.

Odette

Back in bed with Proust

Big weekend coming up, and since we are old enough to be sensible, it was early to bed last night. I looked at the two exciting mysteries on my nightstand and thought "no way." The last thing I needed was to be flipping pages past midnight.

Picked up Proust for the first time in weeks. He was meditating upon his introduction to Albertine, and puzzling why the beauty mark on her face seemed to move from brow to cheek to chin. Marcel and Albertine certainly do prove the point that opposites attract. At the seaside he walks a bit and spends a lot of time in the sun (not swimming), while she cycles and plays golf and confesses to being mad about sports. Her Little Band almost presages the flappers. Wonder if anyone ever wrote a thesis about that? Our narrator still doesn't know what to make of her. A very intriguing passage, but half an hour later I turned off the light.

I had a scary dream that might have turned into a nightmare except that the presumably vicious dog guarding the dark warehouse where I was spending the night became a friendly beast that licked my hand.

So this will be the last post until Sunday, because I am off to a writing conference. Meeting with editors and agents and picking up useful advice, schmoozing, probably drinking too much. It's been years since I was seriously drunk, but don't think this would be the right time for that. Proust never mentions wine or spirits. Wonder why.

Odette