Joni’s Comments (group member since Nov 21, 2013)

Joni’s comments from the Reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 2014 group.

Marcelita wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "Sunny in Wonderland wrote: "Can anyone tell me if the song that is played at the Saint-Euverte party an actual composition, or is it something that was written by one of the charac..."

I really enjoyed Radio Proust - thanks for the link Marcelita.

Andree wrote: "Sunny in Wonderland wrote: "Can anyone tell me what the relationship is between the Lady in Pink and the Uncle? I feel like I must be tremendously confused, because that phrase about "that kind of..."

Yes I suspect that too, particularly as the young Marcel develops an infatuation for Madame Swann

I don't mind at all Susan. It gives me a chance for a breather from Proust (as I find In Search of... rather claustrophobic) and to catch up on reading for another group.
Sometimes too, like a huge meal, it needs time to settle in one's stomach ;-)

Crikey, the madeleine was originally the 'banal' biscotte and the pleasure taken in writing the word 'homosexual', an exhibition of Proust's early drafts of Swann's Way shows...
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/...

Dwayne wrote: "Another thing I notice is a connection between Proust's style and subject matter and the work of Jean Cocteau. It turns out they knew each other, which sent me over the moon.

I've been obsessed wi..."

Dwayne wrote: "Another thing I notice is a connection between Proust's style and subject matter and the work of Jean Cocteau. It turns out they knew each other, which sent me over the moon.

I've been obsessed wi..."
A connection between Cocteau and Proust would have never occurred to me. A fin-de- siecle kind of bloke next to someone who would become associated albeit not formally, with the surrealists? When you reflect upon it I suppose some similarities crop up, not least an interest in reverie and plumbing the unconscious (psychoanalysis was more pivotal to the surrealists and I’m not sure whether Proust read Freud). There’s also eroticism in Cocteau’s work (as well as his interest in the sur-naturel, an in between sex explored with Man Ray in Barbette for instance, transcending conventional ideas of beauty and gender – a first appreciation of the aesthetics of Queer?) that’s not present in Proust and that would perhaps have shocked him. I find in Proust sex is there in a kind of oblique way (where is desire?). Swann and Odette make cattleya thank you very much – they don’t make love, or indeed fuck. The work is rife with lesbians and their trysts (as something rather unhealthy and to be despised – the depiction of Mademoiselle Vinteuil and her lover) but it’s all rather shadowy (the metaphor of lanterns reverberating through). Swann can forgive Odette for her affairs with men, but when he learns that she may have had flings with women – well it’s something else entirely. I find Proust a prude and closeted or is it all meant as decoy? (I’ve read Vol 1 twice within the last couple of months and am rolling my eyes at ‘A love of Swann’s’ – I find Odette and the Vendurin circle odious and Swann more so for not being able to tear himself away).

It would have been interesting to sit next to the pair (Proust and Cocteau) at a dinner party and see what they talked about, if indeed they talked. Perhaps a friendship between the men would have made Proust more liberated about being queer. The famous meeting of Proust and Joyce is rather funny. And since I’m reading both authors and find them so totally different (Joyce could sum up a childhood in a few paragraphs) I have to wonder at the comparisons many people make.

http://flavorwire.com/318990/when-mar...

Louann wrote: "Louann wrote: "I was astonished at the length of Proust's description of asparagus and how he would reintroduce the subject of asparagus throughout.

My favorite asparagus passage,

"what most en..."
Quite a description for a chamberpot of pee - don't you think. Apparently, you can test either positive or negative for the perfume ;-)

Alia I have read it! Just now admittedly. :-)
I enjoyed reading your blog about reading Proust. In a way your photo encapsulates very accurately what it's like to read Proust; and probably, how it was like to be inside Proust's head. So much going on - finding the time and solitude to put it down before it's lost forever, which was probably what made him take to the bed to write so intensely in the later part of his life. Perhaps to look at a work of art...really look or listen, as Proust seemed to, was a way to slow down, and catch one's breath.
I was going to try and create a couple of works of art around my reading of Proust this year (albeit I’m not sure whether I’ll be blogging about it. I do a lot of writing but I write for myself and when I try to write for others it’s not quite the same. Perhaps I feel that writing leaves you too exposed and vulnerable), – the theme of how art is central to make sense or make meaning or get one’s bearings in the novel resonates with me. I suffered from a back injury towards the end of last year, which made me unable to work for four months and my making requires lots of physical labouring, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to achieve what I want. I’ll have to pace myself and see how my body holds up. You mention working in bursts or when the inspiration strikes and it's not necessarily a flaw of character. Sometimes you need to give yourself permission not to do and just be (often we have to rely on illness to take time out). I suppose we can learn a lot from the dilettantes Swann and Marcel. Or the way Keats phrased it - encourage more ‘diligent indolence’ in our days. It was a blessing to be flat on my back, unable to move as it gave me permission to idle my days reading, or thinking or doodling.
(In a letter to his friend Reynolds Keats wrote) ‘I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner - Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander upon it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale - But when will it do so? Never - When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all 'the two-and-thirty Palaces.' How happy is such a voyage of concentration, what delicious diligent Indolence!...’
So much of art making requires the capacity, not only for solitude, but for play, and reverie.
While I like that I can converse with you from ‘down under’ I dislike so much the way people don’t think and everything is required fast. People don’t bother picking up books but want a ‘link’ – something fast and easily digestible, so that they can click on another link and ‘share’. Sometimes I think ‘Proust get to the bloody point’ and then I come across a sentence that is so insightful and beautifully written that I think ‘yes but what makes you bury it’. He makes us work at getting to the gems of his writings and insights and isn’t that definitely a bonus?
Well I've babbled on for long enough. Off to the physio.
Cheers

I don’t think there is a distinctive ‘I’ in Proust’s novel – ‘the narrator’ is in the process of ‘selving’ - the self is a verb not a noun…continually remaking or discovering the self through the reflection/writing –there is the older narrator who’s an I and then the boy also an I and sometimes one blends into the other. Isn’t it hard to fix the self (those of us who think or reflect or write about our selves will notice the tendency to write or tell our own fictions, not only to ourselves but others), and though Proust had mastery through words, he shows us how elusive the self is.

Sometimes others try and ‘fix’ us – as the family at Combray try and fix Swann into a particular attitude or ‘tonality’ (like a depiction or picture) – fallen because of his courtesan wife or according to a ‘caste’ system, or through memories of his parents. ‘But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.’ (p.22 Prendergrast/Penguin ed). The narrator then goes on to describe ‘two’ Swanns … ‘I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann – to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though it were the same in our life as in a museum where all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, one tonality…’

There’s not that one tonality in the depictions of the characters or of the narrator, whether we name him or no, or whether we assume Proust is delving into his own memoirs/memories to tell a fiction…

Guy wrote: "Jonathan wrote: "I realise that as I've been posting messages I'm writing 'Proust' when I really mean the 'narrator'. Maybe it would be best if we all decide to use 'narrator' when we're talking ab..."

The account is very close to Proust's life, whether you call it autobiography, fictional autobiography, fiction, whatever...the narrator's name is referred to in volume 5, and as I read volume 5 first, I tend to think of the narrator by his name. Though I won't spoil it for the rest of you...

Audrey wrote: "Hello to all of you fellow Proust readers,

I will read the book with you this year, but as French is my mother tongue, I will do it in the original language, ( I'll make some unwanted mistakes in..."

Cool! Lucky you. French was my first language, but immigration to Australia changed that. And I'm now lucky to read through a couple of sentences in French before feeling exhausted.
Cheers
Joni

Hi Jonathon, I've already read the first & fifth volumes of In Search Of in the last couple of months and I had meant to start re-reading the first again after the New Year. I've just completed "Emma" and to my astonishment realized at the very last that one of the characters Mrs Weston has a baby and I'm trying to work out how it came about (her pregnancy was never mentioned between characters who are always gossiping or have an opinion about each other – how could I have missed it? Did early 19th cent women just pop them out without anyone, including the husband, noticing the pregnancy? At first it crossed my mind that the baby was adopted) “Emma” has prevented me from getting stuck into Paintings in Proust and now I have this dilemma of trying to come to terms with an enigmatic pregnancy – and search out whether other readers have been as equally surprised. So distractions…
I can’t abide noise when I read. I try and read when I get into bed when the house is fairly quiet (there may be the football playing on the TV downstairs but not loud enough to prevent my hearing an owl’s hooting or a possum’s scratching, the favourite part of the day for me) but lately I get into bed and before I have read a few pages my eyes are closing and so I give into sleep. There's a lot to be said for insomnia! I have signed myself up to the group “Brain Pain” as well – I don’t know how I’m going to fit it all in, unless I have a serious bout of insomnia. I may have to drop out of “Brain Pain” though I had looked forward to reading more from Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. Funnily enough I have joined these two groups on Goodreads because I want to be accompanied in my reading. I couldn’t have coped with a cork lined room and too much solitude.

Proust was a Dalai Lama ;-)
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/... (contains some spoilers...but come on one doesn't read Proust for the plot)
@ Jonathon, the fact that you're part of a reading group, reading Proust, means that you're not totally alone, sealed in your cork lined room. Neither was Proust - think of all those characters, all those situations, not to mention those works of art inhabiting his head and soul, and thus his room - so lots of windows in fact, open ...
I think Proust would have loved the world wide web...

Thanks Alia. I thought it might have to do with that cup of tea! :-)
I got a copy of "Paintings in Proust" and have been reading the introduction there. But at the moment am too ensconced in Austen's "Emma". ...

Hi Alia I'm trying to work out pages for the Modern Penguin Classics ed (general ed. Christopher Prendergast). To page 64 doesn't really tell me anything, as I have a hundred fewer pages, which means I'll be reading it faster ;-). (NOT) I've worked out the rest for the first volume, just need the first section ending.
Cheers
Joni

Gloria wrote: "Like Alia i recently read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life and i love how i could read a small section and then ponder it's meaning and what it meant to my own life. I have the de..."

Hi Gloria
I like what you say and your approach - particularly creating that space in your mind (pity there's no like button here). Cheers

You're a well rounded individual! :-) There's not much of a divide particularly when you look at the 18th & 19th centuries or the Renaissance (Leonardo considered himself more a scientist than an artist). I think the divide is more contemporary and the education system (well here in Australia)tends to make you choose a 'stream' to pursue.
And what was that class room smell? More importantly, Proust would ask you what it evoked and how you felt about it?

Jonathan, if you’re interested in how the madeleine soaked in tea triggers Marcel’s memory of Combray and thus the volumes of la recherche – there’s a chapter on how Proust got it right when it comes to the neuroscience of memory in "Proust was a Neuro-scientist" by Jonah Lehrer. “The past is hidden…in some material object of which we have no inkling.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...

I'm jealous Jonathan. I've got so far as finding several madeleine recipes but I've as yet to bake. Baked a batch several years ago and didn't like them (found them too dry) but then I didn't dunk them into tea...

midnightfaerie wrote: "Think I'll be one of those ppl who want to read it as an innocent.

The only thing I've seen on it is this:

A little Monty Python humor"

LOL

Many people confess to beginning all over again, once having finished the many volumes of "In Search of". So I don't believe that it's about plot, or that 'spoilers' can spoil it ;-)