Blogging Not Proust

I founds a link that this blogger was having Proust Fridays, but I didn't find any. Nonetheless. I thought the blog photos were incredibly cool. Maybe you will too.

http://this-wheel-is-on-fire.blogspot.com/

Odette

Proust Musings

Now and then I still find a good Proust blog post or article. Here is one that I liked.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/book-of-a-lifetime-in-search-of-lost-time-by-marcel-proust-1626573.html

If Proust lived in New England (an unlikely scenario) he would be muffled in scarves, hats and overcoats this winter (maybe three at a time), because it has been colder than old-Billy-be-danged, and that's pretty cold.

I'm waiting for spring and some blooming hawthornes. Yes!

The other Odette

Blogging Proust Again

Some noteworthy Proust blogging this week:


I did not know there was a Proust screen play. Anyone have details?

http://adferoafferro.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/little-patch-of-yellow-wall-or-a-single-asparagus-harold-pinter%E2%80%99s-the-proust-screenplay-2/

More on Reading Proust. Or not. Anyone have thoughts on the Amazon Kindle? Seems pretty polarizing. I would love to have one to take to Europe. Saves schlepping all those paperbacks, and the horror, the absolute horror of having to buy English paperbacks in Europe at those godawful prices. Yikes! http://www.thegrue.org/tdaoc/

Great Quote by Proust and Interesting Blog
http://slightobsessions.blogspot.com/

They're Still Summarizing Proust

Confession time. I haven't picked up The Guermantes Way for weeks. We went to a discussion of nature writing at Harvard, an inspiring program which led me to pick up a book about the Grand Canyon, called Down Canyon. The writing is excellent. Great verbs. Lots of interesting detail. Proust would approve.

You will love this book! http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/BOOKS/bid930.htm The author is Ann H. Zwinger. What a great read.

And of course I read my writing and cooking mags and three daily papers. The other time suck has been submitting to a novel contest (Amazon) and getting a book out to an agent, along with submissions of short stories and essays to various 'zines. God, this takes a lot of time. And I had to finish my robot fish story. Loved writing it. Francis, you're the greatest.

The craziest thing is, I can't remember whether I actually wrote my cat story or if I just plotted it for ages. Writing in your head or with your fingers, too. How weird.

We were in Washington, DC and I only read the New Yorker. Good stuff. All about John Updike. In many ways, Proust was the Updike of his day. Think about it.

Now I am writing a speech I must give next Wednesday and reading entries in a writing contest. House guest, birthdays, Valentine's Day, lots of cooking, esp. a chocolate panna cotta with Port Wine Ice cream. Yowza!

Did I mention a report to write by Sunday? A full, busy life is a good thing. One has little time to contemplate the economy.

Onward,

Odette, the other one. And here is the Monte Python link:

http://ovablastic.blogspot.com/

Proust and Photography

I finished reading the slim volume about Proust and Photography, Brassai: Proust and the Power of Photography. What a great book! Brassai was a comtemporary of Proust, and he writes in such a lucid manner (hail to the translater, too), and has so many interesting things to say about Proust and his love, nay, his obsession with photographs and of course his obsession with the image. Brassai gives scads of examples and quotes from Proust's writing, not just "Remembrance" but earlier work and non fiction.

I was quite taken with it. Inspired, I read a few more pages of The Guermantes Way and am determined to finish it before the end of February.

Brassai mentions Poulet and Painter and all the old Proust sources I used to be so familiar with. So many years have passed since I was an undergraduate, but a lust for academia has never quite left although the vocabulary and ways of thinking are, well, gone. When I embraced technology in its many modes I left something behind, although academia and technology requite critical thinking and not making a priori assumptions, there is a still a huge difference, and I don't think I could return to academia withhout a great deal of reprogramming of the brain paths, if you will.

Viva Proust and viva photography. Proust leaves one with so many images. Church spires, the sea at Balbec, the dining room, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the hawthorns, the Combray church windows. Endless wonderful images, as crisp as an apple. Thanks, Marcel.

The other Odette

Proust and the New England Winter

By no means have I given up on either Proust or this blog. We had Christmas, company, snow, more snow, and did I mention snow?

Your faithless Odette has been cooking up a storm and also writing, writing, writing. She left Proust for a bit and read Water For Elephants and a Carl Hiaason book, both good. She is working on her robot fish short story and her new novel and also the last novel which an agent is showing some interest in and she needs to make a few changes.

When you open the patient for surgery, so to speak, you always find a diseased gall bladder as well as the appendix, and things proceed from there.

It is a job keeping the birds fed, the Scottish Highland cattle fed with fruit and veggie treats, the cats fed and medicated, food in the house and on the table. We are applying to work the census, visit D.C. and life is just very busy, almost intense.

Proust would understand. I am going to finish the Guermantes book. I really am.

Did I mention snow? And the inauguration? Alas Marcel, I feel so guilty.

Photography In Proust

My mother's Brownie Camera.

Happy New Year or Bonne Annee! Whatever. Forgive for the missing accents. Tooooo lazy.

I've been reading Photography in Proust, a little gem of a book, which I've almost finished. The author, who was a contemporary of Proust, has a lot of interesting things to say about Proust's work, not only Lost Time but other writings.

He makes his point about Proust using photographic techniques and even incorporating photography into his writing to a degree that was unusual at that time.

My mother, who grew up in a small Kansas town in the twenties, always had a Brownie camera, and photographed her friends endlessly. The town of Newton, KS has several excellent photographers who did portraiture. I'm always amazed when I get out those old photos.

The point is that the author is not exaggerating Proust's or the public's interest in photography. Of course Proust was obsessed with all the arts: music and painting above all.

Can't wait to finish the book and get back to Proust, whom I did not finish before 2009. Just have to get beyond The Guermantes Way, my bete noire, as it were.

My bad!


The other Odette

Proust and Photography

Santa meant to bring Paintings in Proust, but he got a tad confused and arrived with Proust and the Power of Photography

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=36726

A big surprise, to be sure, and this turns out to be a very interesting little book, with lots of unexpected gems about Marcel.

Apparently M. was something of a sloppy dresser and was the bane of his mother who liked for him to leave the apartment looking rather spiffy. Alas, not.

He loved exchaning photographs with friends and with new acquaintances, and he would bother them until they acquiesced and gave him their image.

It's all about images, isn't it?


Merry Christmas, and Joyeux Noel.


The Other Odette

The Proust Auction in Paris

I'm not the only blogger obsessed with the procedings:

http://john.mignault.net/blog/2008/12/18/proust-roast/

2.2 Million Euros- - Zowie! That's a lot of cash for our narrator's stuff. Would that I had been there.

More. More more.
http://artmagazine.arcadja.com/2008/12/17/proust-fans-battle-to-buy-authors-letters-watch-in-paris-sale/

Proust Auction in Paris

Another Bloomberg post about the French Proust Auction:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aIsCnutyTdeA&refer=muse

Maybe Santa will being you a letter from Proust. No? At least one can hope for the Paintings in Proust book.

I'm baking cookies, creating interesting nibbles with nuts, and planning a dinner party (simple).

We have a dusting of snow today.

'Tis the season

Odette, the other one

Proust's Letter Auctioned Today

The letters that Marcel Proust wrote to his housekeeper in the last years of his life are to be sold today at Sotheby's Paris auction house.

Let us hope that a university or other institution that would be likely to put some of the letters on view will be the high bidder.

For the full story: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aKh_5nfb6wv0&refer=muse


What a great Christmas gift!

The Other Odette

The Blogosphere Is Still Reading Proust

I'm determined to finish volume III before the end of the year. I'm almost there.

Here are more Proust readers, an industrious bunch, to read Proust and blog. Yowza!

Literary summits: (and what could be more elevated than Proust?)

http://literarysummits.com/index.php/2008/12/10/a-universe-of-sound/

Stranded on a desert island with Molly and Marcel:
http://mollister.blogspot.com/2008/12/desert-island.html


Blogger’s Book List and Proust is on it.
http://botheyes.wordpress.com/2008/12/11/culling-the-list/


Maybe New Hampshire should get a new license plate: Read Proust or Die

The other Odette

Goodbye, Proust from Thailand

The destination, one hopes, was worth the journey. Finishing Proust is a huge accomplishment.

http://court-merrigan.blogspot.com/2008/12/end-of-era-goodbye-proust.html

Practical Proust and Mae West

Aha! A new blog to brighten this snowy Sunday in Foxborough. The slough is wintry and the squirrels have discovered (yet again) the suet feeder. I feed the critters lavishly, as Proust feeds my aesthetic needs.

Now I have another new blog, sort of Proustian for you. Love the colorful "home page."

http://operachanteuse.blogspot.com/2008/12/penses-du-jour-practical-proust-and-mae.html

Practical Proust, indeed. As practical as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

Irony isn't dead. My mom loved chicken gizzards. My dad ate the liver. That left me with the heart until I was old enough to demand half the liver. No one ever fought Mom for the gizzard.

The Other Odette