ReemK10 (Paper Pills)’s Comments (group member since Dec 26, 2012)

ReemK10 (Paper Pills)’s comments from the The Year of Reading Proust group.

Book Portrait wrote: The Fortuny coat is from Proust et la peinture italienne (the coat is in a private collection but I found a small pic online).

I recognized the Fortuny coat you posted that was in the link I posted earlier where it says:

"Some accounts have Fortuny designing the costumes for Welles’ 1952 movie, “Othello.” Others say Welles had the costumes made of Fortuny fabric; doublets have been mentioned, and “three coats.” One tale has Welles bursting in on Fortuny shortly before the designer died in 1949 and modeling some kind of fur-lined item.


Welles himself recalled learning, while preparing to shoot in a small Moroccan city, that his Italian costume–maker was bankrupt. He immediately shifted one scene to a Turkish bath to justify filming male actors naked from the waist up, and hired local tailors to make costumes based on pictures of Renaissance paintings.

In the end, Welles claimed to have had an army clad in armor made of sardine tins, but what of the main characters? Did any of them get to wear Fortuny? Some grainy old black-and-white stills from this black-and-white movie show Welles in a costume that looks as though it conceivably could include this fur-trimmed multi-color coat, left."
http://jdavidsen.wordpress.com/tag/fo...

Davidsen says the coat is at the Museo del Traje, Madrid. Kalliope shall have to go investigate.

Kalliope wrote: "Today is the 100 Anniversary of the Publication of Du côté de chez Swann.

Congratulations to everyone in this Group.

"

This calls for a celebration! Madeleines for everyone!

@Jocelyne, good to know that I still have time to find you some special flowers, and thank you for reassuring me about Ce Ce. She's had such a hard year coping with her renovation, that I really want her to enjoy this vacation!

Anyway, look what I found as I was browsing the web:Club Monaco Will Offer Books and Coffee Alongside Fashion


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/16/rea...

http://strandbooks.tumblr.com/post/66...

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Kalliope wrote: "And I think we should be pleased with ourselves in this group for having paid attention to the leitmotiv of Fortuny in the previous volume.

He is bro..."

Good find Kalliope. Yes, I too was surprised to find that he was a Wagnerian and worked on the lighting. The painting is a knock out!

I'll check your links tomorrow.

You know how in our day, now, we have people with blogs, tumblrs, twitter pages, facebook pages, instagrams and what not with everyone creating a curated identity. Proust did the same thing in his day, collecting and giving us all that was trending, the pop culture of his day. He was recording it all.
ISOLT= a curated identity

Normally I try to read the week's reading before I look at the thread because I don't like to know beforehand what to anticipate. This week, luckily I checked in here first, and saw all the photos shared by Kalliope, and BP and things that Fionnuala said, and the Khan Academy video links, and I'm so glad I did because the recognition only enhanced my reading experience. Venice is magical.I'm thrilled that Kalliope's trip was so perfectly timed!

Jocelyne wrote: "Just as I received my computer back from the Geek Squad I got swamped with relatives gathering for a family event.

I am now finishing up preps for my upcoming trip to Peru in early December. If I ..."

So that's why you've been missing Jocelyne! Enjoy your family and your future trip. I'll have flowers waiting for you when you come back home!

I'm actually worried about Ce Ce being on a boat in the Pacific ocean with all the bad weather hitting the Philippines.

Elizabeth wrote: "Reem: And to think...our entire culture is based on usury. Nowadays Webster defines it as "excessive" interest charges, but originally it meant charging ANY interest at all on loaned or saved mone..."

I can imagine the poor high school kids that entered your English class not to realize that that their entire lives would be changed by what they would learn from you. They would all become readers.

Elizabeth wrote: "Reem: loved your list; I counted up and I've read 13 (but a few only in parts--"The Faerie Queene," The Divine Comedy(Inferno, Purgatorio, about half of Paradiso), The Canterbury Tales (but what I ..."

Oh thank you Elizabeth. So glad that you did. Check out the Khan Academy link I posted in the thread that talks about Dante depicting Scrovegni as a usurer who will go to hell.

Marcelita wrote: "Kalliope wrote: "Marcelita wrote: "Marcel Proust and 10 talking points
The 100th anniversary of Proust’s first novel falls on Thursday
By Mayank Austen Soofi

"Actually, Spanish was the first tra..."

Thanks for sharing this Marcelita. I found Kalliope's review in your link:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Great pics here as well. I think I will read this later.

Kalliope wrote: "And I think we should be pleased with ourselves in this group for having paid attention to the leitmotiv of Fortuny in the previous volume.

He is brought up again, now very closely to the Carpacci..."

To add to this I found this link that covers Fortuny quite well. Maybe it's been posted before, but definitely worth seeing again.



Incredibly beautiful!

Fortuny’s 1896 Flower Maidens from Parsifal is one of his cycle of 46 Wagnerian mythologies on show in Leipzig to celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday. At the Klinger Forum through July 8 (and possibly Bayreuth thereafter). Palazzo Fortuny, Musei Civici, Venice,

"Like much of the cultural elite of his time, Fortuny was besotted with Richard Wagner’s “music dramas” as well as with Wagner’s ideal of the unification of all art forms into a single event. Tapped to work on costumes and scenery for the 1900 La Scala production of “Tristan und Isolde,” he recognized that theatrical lighting failed Wagner’s unified-arts goals. He conducted experiments to find a way for light to flow and change with the texture of the music, that quickly transforms to enhance shifts of mood and atmosphere. He found that light reflected off various surfaces changes such properties as color and intensity, and patented a system to achieve this in 1901. He engineered his next invention, the Fortuny Cyclorama Dome, to allow illusions of a more extensive sky and distant horizon than perspective and stage size could create on their own. “Theatrical scenery will be able to transform itself in tune with music, within the latter’s domain,” he reported. ”That is to say in time whereas hitherto it has only been able to develop in space.”

More on his designs:
http://jdavidsen.wordpress.com/tag/fo...

No wonder
"Marcel Proust described Fortuny as “faithfully antique but powerfully original,” and mentioned him at least sixteen times in “Remembrance of Things Past,” where he was the only real character."

Marcelita wrote: "Marcel Proust and 10 talking points
The 100th anniversary of Proust’s first novel falls on Thursday
By Mayank Austen Soofi

"We give you 10 talking points on Proust and his seemingly endless nove..."

Very interesting trivia Marcelita. Lol@ the editor shot dead by the wife of a former prime minister.

Is this a spoiler? "Swann’s Way’, the first volume, famously starts with the narrator trying to sleep, or so it seems to an unsuspecting reader" unsuspecting? hmmm

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "This is much too irresistible , the impulse to google o sole mio! I found this:

I will read it when I catch up. Here..."

Reem, you really are a fisher of precious c..."

Thank you Kalliope! :)

Book Portrait wrote: "Proust in Venice

http://ireneetlalitterature.files.wor..."

A lovely photo BP that shows a window and goes well with this passage.I can see the mother looking out of this window at her son.

" from a long way away and when I had barely passed San Giorgio Maggiore, I caught sight of this arched window which had already seen me, and the spring of its broken curves added to its smile of welcome the distinction of a loftier, scarcely comprehensible gaze. And since, behind those pillars of differently coloured marble, Mamma was sitting reading while she waited for me to return, her face shrouded in a tulle veil as agonising in its whiteness as her hair to myself who felt that my mother, wiping away her tears, had pinned it to her straw hat, partly with the idea of appearing ‘dressed’ in the eyes of the hotel staff, but principally so as to appear to me less ‘in mourning,’ less sad, almost consoled for the death of my grandmother; since, not having recognised me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there was no longer any material substance to support it on the surface of her impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to be kissing me, in the framework and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the arched window illuminated by the midday sun; for these reasons, that window has assumed in my memory the precious quality of things that have had, simultaneously, side by side with ourselves, their part in a certain hour that struck, the same for us and for them; and however full of admirable tracery its mullions may be, that illustrious window retains in my sight the intimate aspect of a man of genius with whom we have spent a month in some holiday resort, where he has acquired a friendly regard for us; and if, ever since then, whenever I see a cast of that window in a museum, I feel the tears starting to my eyes, it is simply because the window says to me the thing that touches me more than anything else in the world: “I remember your mother so well.” (847)

This is much too irresistible , the impulse to google o sole mio! I found this:


http://www.miscelaneajournal.net/imag...

I will read it when I catch up. Here it is for you to read.

Kalliope wrote:That is an idea... certainly it must have impressed him.... He had already seen it when he began writing the novel, but he chose to refer only to the "grisailles" a the bottom of the wall, with the Vices and Virtues, in his Combray part, to acquire the full dimension and color later on, once he undertakes his redeeming trip to Venice...


Kalli you wrote this earlier:

What I found most extraordinary about the way he introduces Venice is by the parallel he establishes between this city of the imagination, Venice, with the village inhabiting also his imagination, as memories of a Temps Perdu.

!!!!!

Honestly Kalliope you bring so much to our reading that I feel sorry for the pour souls who have to read Proust on their own. That is not to take away from the rest of you that bring so much analysis to the discussion. And lucky the future readers who will find this group. There needs to be a blog post by our humble host Proustitute who set this up in the first place, that becomes a first hit on google so that people find this at the beginnig of their read. There are so many other blogs that surface first, but not ours, yet!

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Kalliope wrote: We visited the Scrovegni chapel at night, and it is an unforgettable visit.

Gorgeous! I'm sure you got goosebumps the minute you entered the chapel! A..."

Kalli, you will notice the structuring like a spiral mentioned as well. Actually I've been thinking about this, and how the part 1 video mentions the structuring of the chapel like a spiral with tiers, that maybe Proust had this architecture in mind while writing ISOLT and that it wasn't the church at Combray that resonated with him as much as it was the Scrovegni chapel. Perhaps? Or me on another wild goose chase? lol

Kalliope wrote: We visited the Scrovegni chapel at night, and it is an unforgettable visit.

Gorgeous! I'm sure you got goosebumps the minute you entered the chapel! All that blue! I know absolutely nothing about the Scrovegni chapel, so I googled and found this: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/g...

I just watched part one and found it very educational in its explanation. I'll go watch the rest. This is a really nice treat for those of who want to see the chapel. Thank you Kalliope for being the catalyst!

A must see!!! Part 2 mentions the ultramarine blue that Proust mentioned way back.

“... asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume.”

― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Did Proust mention this chapel? I'm just watching the lamentation scene, the grieving that Proust may be using as a parallel to his grief. I'm still behind so I haven't come across or perhaps noticed any reference to the chapel. Very clever though if this is the case!

Kalliope wrote: Here is the Futurist version of Tiepolo's Pink to which I had referred in the earlier post.. By Giacommo Balla. The Spell is Broken, 1922-23...

Nice. Funny that he named his daughters:

By 1914 Balla was advocating a Futurist lifestyle - he even named his two daughters Propeller and Light.

A little Tiepolo blue for you and for Ce Ce Tiepolo orange:
Giacomo Balla: Mercury passing before the sun

Here is another one for you:

Giacomo Leopardi's "Zibaldone," the Least Known Masterpiece of European Literature http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11...