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

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

Thanks Kalliope :)

I just read this article which I believe will appeal to some of you:

“Like Most Other Humans, I Am Hungry”

M.F.K. Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, 70 years later.

I'm getting really tired of reading about madeleine moments, and this article does start with one:

"Does each one of us have a personal madeleine, waiting to be discovered? There is so much good writing out there about food that it’s easy to take for granted the ability of a hot fried oyster or a creamy slice of buttermilk pie to suck us into the vortex of memory:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...

On the theme of the curated identity:
All The Selves We Have Been


http://www.guernicamag.com/features/a...

I had posted this elsewhere:
"…I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion

"Many people are likely to mourn the passionate pleasures and perils of their younger life, fearing that never again can they recapture what they have lost. Yet, one way or another, for better and for worse, there are devious means by which we always live with those passions of the past in the strange mutations of mental life in the present, whatever our age. We do not have to be Marcel Proust to recapture traces of them without even trying, though it will surely be harder to find just the right words, or perhaps any language at all, to express our own everyday time-traveling."

“How is it that time, which has no form nor substance, can crush me with so huge a weight that I can no longer breathe?”Simone de Beauvoir

Now this would not be complete without including this article http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...

Phillida wrote: "Book Portrait wrote, " everyone around me thinks I’m monomaniac." Yes indeed. I'd like to know the responses others get when they mention to friends and acquaintances this year of reading Proust. ..."

I think that is why it is so important to be able to read Proust among readers.
ETA BP:
I grew up in France and lived in the UK. And in North America and Germany for a while. Moving back to France I feel a little like a stranger at home (or I feel at home like a stranger...). :)
This just makes you more interesting. "If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home. We become professional observers able to see the merits and deficiencies of anywhere.... We are masters of aerial perspective but touching down becomes difficult..."Pico Iyer.

Elaine wrote: "Recommended - My early morning read:

Who's afraid of Marcel Proust? By Patrick McGuinness -19 Nov 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

Thanks Elaine for the article. I tweeted it to #Proust2013.

Elizabeth wrote: Think of it as becoming a tennis champion in order to play badminton...

lol Elizabeth. Will do so. I didn't finish reading The Portrait of a Lady which I found very readable, but I was trying to read it at the same time that I was reading Franzen's The Corrections, and I caught a summer cold and returned both books to the library. I had also seen a few you tube videos of the movie, and kept reading through Nicole Kidman's voice, and figured I needed to come back to it later. Once vacationing in Perdido Key, I grabbed a book off the shelves of the condo apt we were renting, and it was a collection of short stories by Henry James that I remember I devoured. I couldn't for the life of me tell you the title.

That is reassuring that you both also think James a harder read than Proust. Yes, put him on the oh so, so long list and let us read together. :)

Book Portrait wrote: LOL. Sherlock Reem likes to investigate!

Hmmm. I didn't expect this kind of an answer, but I thank you for making the effort. I didn't want to be intrusive. I really was more curious about where you lived and what got you to join this group. I wanted your college application essay to Proust University lol. So you say you were with us early on. I don't see why someone like you would be intimidated. You seem quite comfortable and quite knowledgeable in posting your comments. I know that I was very intimidated at the beginning, even deleting many of my comments after posting them but then Nick, Proustitute, Eugene, Aloha and Kalliope were really good at making me feel comfortable enough to continue posting. To read Proust while moving house is quite a feat. Good for you for keeping up.I've been reading Proust through a year of really bad headaches/migraines. A few of us have expressed wanting to read 1001 nights which you may have read in one of my investigative searches was originally 101 nights!! You sound like a Brit who has moved to France with words like cheeky and wanting to look French ooh la la. Is that correct?
ETA- that's a good one!

You say, "for someone who doesn't like to talk about oneself my post is humongously long. *sorry*" Don't worry. I think we are all the same. Somehow sharing over the web seems too public. I really just wanted to know how you came to be a part of this group.Curiosity killed the cat. I'm actually glad that you jumped right in. So many people have complained that we are too cliquish and that they don't feel comfortable posting when the opposite is actually true. We welcome new voices.

One gets the sense that these blog entries are like college application essays for admittance to Proust University.

@Elizabeth, even the same conversation we had:

"Granted permission to select your own, you leave your homeroom, turn left, enter the library next door, march to the desk, ask the librarian where “the Russians” are, explain “like Dostoevsky,” go to the indicated spot, choose The Brothers Karamazov, and never look back. God knows what you made of it, aside from a book report, but you were not disheartened to read afterwards in the introduction that the sections with Father Zosima, which you’d found a snooze, are the philosophical heart of the novel. You’re only eleven, it’s early days yet." From the blog-Proust is

French Books USA wrote: "There are three new 'Proust & Me' blog posts on the French Embassy's website!

'Remember the Alamo: Proust and My Breakdown' by Michael Reynolds

'Proust on Twitter' by Davis Schneiderman

'Proust ..."

Oh lovely, I do enjoy these blogs. :) There is a great sense of community in reading how others experienced reading Proust.

I've just completed the section that I had inadvertently missed, and I do have to say that Proust had the most amazing ability to keep going on and on and on... It really is to his credit that he could keep finding new words to say the same things! The poor man must have been tortured by his incessant thoughts!

Elizabeth wrote: "Hope this isn't a spoiler...but TBK begins with the Karamazov family assembled in Father Zossima's cell in the local monastery, to try to resolve their differences. It is uncannily like a Jerry Sp..."

I want to read Henry James again. I started The Ambassadors and found it to be the most difficult read ever! Needless to say, I put it down. Proustitute had mentioned earlier this year that we could read it as a group. I would like that.

Patricia wrote: "I read ASAP i.e. 397 posts(& links) in this blog in 40min. while my assistant Lorena saw to clients and i am sorry to say the morals in this blog are not what they used to be since you have all bec..."

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL My goodness Patricia, you are just the funniest person. I laughed so hard at your comments to us all. I love your theory about the Christian Louboutin shoes, no doubt he got his idea from reading Proust! You are sorely missed in this group! I hate to think how pink these brides' cheeks will be from blushing around you!Go gently on them. Sophia Vergara has nothing on you! Don't be a stranger!

Thank you for liking the article I posted. Now, we're all suffering from papyralysis. And thank you for making me feel like I'm contributing to this group by my investigative Proust-induced searches! There are a lot of good links here that I need to check out later. I think it's great that we are hitting upon the right elements in this novel!

Elizabeth wrote: "Well, I love him. Try The Idiot. It's really more about Natasya Phillipovna than Prince Myshkin (the "idiot"). Writing in a highly puritanical and censored culture, Dostoyevsky wrote a brilliant..."

I did try The Idiot, and I most definitely want to read The Brothers Karamazov. I think Elizabeth that I was reading Dostoyevsky at a time where I really didn't have the time to sit and read him carefully, and that then I was a different kind of reader. It may have also had to do with the fact that the book was from the library and had to go back. Excuses, excuses, I promise to try again! After finishing ISOLT, I will have no excuse for not finishing another book, will I? lol

Another one for you:The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there's no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that's what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful. A year ago I ran into this great lecture on YouTube by Leonard Bernstein about the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. And Bernstein used precisely this language – not approximately this language – exactly this language of inevitability, perfect accordance to its internal logical structure and how difficult and tortuous it was for Beethoven to figure out. He used precisely the same language we use in mathematics and theoretical physics to describe our sense of aesthetics and beauty.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/20...

we had to write essays on a statement by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in which he said "tears and laughter are aesthetic frauds".

Marcus wrote: "Reem re: Dostoyevski...i read one critic who while generally raving said he couldn't write endings"

lol, that's good to know Marcus because I never read one.

Jocelyne wrote:
I thought that LOL meant lots of love, and when I think about the emails in which a friend shared some sad news and which I signed off with LOL.

Jocelyne, you are just too funny! And strange about the Japanese woman sharing private details with you. I too would think they would be more reserved.

Came to share this:
In the archives of the future, we’ll stroll from Proust’s notepad and cork-lined room (already on display in the Musée Carnavalet)

Papyralysis by Jacob Mikanowski

Are paper books becoming obsolete in the digital age, or poised to lead a new cultural renaissance?

Papyralysis by Jacob Mikanowski


http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/papy...

This sounds like a good section, but I still have to catch up on those 100 pages I missed!!!

Book Portrait wrote:
LOL. Sorry about my deadpan tone. I'll make sure to practise my whining and up the abuse of smileys. :DD

LOL BP. You abuse smiley faces, I abuse the exclamation mark!!! I actually have a quote saved about that. I'm not sure who wrote it:

The exclamation point is singular among all punctuation because it has no true grammatical function in English except to amplify a feeling—excitement, enthusiasm, or shock—presumably not adequately conveyed by the words selected. It wasn’t even a standard feature on typewriters until the 1970s. Before then, you had to be judicious about that exclamation point because assembling it required that yo...u type a period, backspace, and type an apostrophe above it. Today the exclamation point is used with unprecedented, hyperventilating frequency in correspondence, deployed to soften underlying hostilities or to gin up excitement where no true reason for it suggests itself. As a default punctuation setting, occupying the place in email and texting where the staid, neutral period once stood, the exclamation point is the grammatical mascot of an age that values the public projection of sunny emotions and feeling.

lol. I have to ask you what ETA means. You use it a lot, and I always mean to ask you what it means, and then get caught up in typing my own comment. Also, do indulge my curiosity by telling me a little about yourself. You came in rather late and have been wonderful about sharing so much info about Proust. One more thing, your avatar is also very interesting. What is it exactly or rather what does it symbolize?

Waiting to hear from you!!!! :)

Kalliope wrote: "ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Kalli, I went searching for answers and found this book, but not much on it though. Have you seen it before?

Proust, the One, and the Many
Identity and Difference in..."

Thanks Kalliope. I'm glad you find the links I find interesting. I had the same thought, that perhaps those who can tap into an academic database can search and report back on the book.