Thursday, Feb 28 2008

It is with great relief and joy that I have finished The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust and am starting with Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust this February 28, 2008. The leap year bodes well for literary pursuits. I am reading some secondary sources for Proust and they are the best to cite when trying to explain the appeal of such heavy reading. One is called The Proust Project and it involves authors and essayists who try to remember where they were when they first encountered Proust and take excerpts and write about them kind of free-formed. Another is Harold Bloom’s How To Read and Why, which has a section on In Search of Lost Time as a kind of literary monument and explains the significance of the work in a all encompassing context. Why does it feel like I am writing something for school here? I should insert a “like, it’s totally awesome!” statement. I made it to the book sale and got tons of stuff! For example, another copy of Sleepless Nights. A hardback copy of the first Louise Erdrich I ever picked up. Pristine condition and with a newspaper article inserted as a surprise. Like a cereal box surprise! A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, Rabbit Run and Rabbit at Rest by John Updike, Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (or John Banville, really) And much, much more.

I also finished this book yesterday called: Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie. It was pretty interesting. A murder mystery where the killer is never unveiled. You end up thinking its every character in the book. I love this American Indian fiction. Alexie is my favorite along with Louise Erdrich. This is his author picture….

In other news, I received an A on my Odyssey essay to my surprise! The comments, and I quote McGregor here: “This begins in an uncertain way, but when it finally comes to the point has lots to say. A” I love rhyming comments. I don’t think I deserved this grade, but I think that he is just going to give us all As until we graduate because he is a lovely man. Adios my reading audience

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Zagajewski- The Greenhouse Wednesday, Feb 27 2008

“In a small black town, your town,

where even trains linger unwilling,

anxious to be on their way,

in a park, defying soot and shadows,

a gray building stands lined with mother-of-pearl.

 

Forget the snow, the frost’s repeated blows;

inside you’re greeted by a damp anthology of breezes

and the enigmatic whispers of vast leaves

coiled like lazy snakes. Even an Egyptologist

couldn’t make them out.

 

Forget the sadness of dark stadiums and streets,

The weight of thwarted Sundays.

Accept the warm breath wafting from the plants.

The gentle scent of faded lightning

engulfs you, beckoning you on.

 

Perhaps you see the rusty sails of ships at port,

islands snared in rosy mist, crumbling temples’ towers;

you glimpse what you’ve lost, what never was,

and people with lives

like your own.

 

Suddenly you see the world lit differently,

other people’s doors swing open for a moment,

you read their hidden thoughts, their holidays don’t hurt,

their happiness is less opaque, their faces

almost beautiful.

 

Lose yourself, go blind from ecstasy,

forgetting everything, and then perhaps

a deeper memory, a deeper recognition will return,

and you’ll hear yourself saying: I don’t know how –

the palm trees opened up my greedy heart.”

 

From the collection: Mysticism for Beginners. So wonderful…

 

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no, seriously… Wednesday, Feb 27 2008

I have a problem. Here’s the story. With 50 pages left in my 3rd Proust book, I left it in my Dad’s car and haven’t gotten it back. Thus, I freak out. I leave work to go to the ACC book sale and it isn’t open yet. Freak out! I go home and sit… I have a house FULL of books to read… Pynchon, Words without Borders, War and Peace, Louise Erdrich, The Road. I have choices. I work in a library. I am literally sitting on top of thousands of books that need to be read. Up above is the picture of a chair that houses books. I want this chair. In short, I really do have a book problem. But I refuse to believe that this is a bad thing. I’m going back to the book sale after work and there better be something besides Danielle Steel there to buy. Athens is dry when it comes to the sale of used books.

The books I’m getting from the library are:

The Proust Project, Adam Zagajewski, Elizabeth Hardwick. I am reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf as well. I have the Josipovici, but it is in my Dad’s car. There. I’m going to be okay. I keep leaving my planner at home, but there is an installation at the Guggenheim that Becky needs to go see. It’s a Chinese guy… really cool stuff. I will post a poem by Adam Zagajewski next… Polish people can really write poetry! Awesome!
Time to read! Bye! Do you like exclamation points?! I do!

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hello. my name is jessica. i am a bookaholic. Tuesday, Feb 26 2008

I have about 50 pages left in The Guermantes Way and am taking a little break to write about some fun stuff. It is funny when people say something is trite and then admit that they have never read the book that is being discussed. How trite. Ha Ha. Anyway, I got the New Yorker to read a story by Salman Rushdie and got distracted by goings on in NYC and need to tell Becky all about some things to see. There is an installation at the Guggenheim and a play that sounded interesting at 59E59. Girl–clear your schedule… Jessica is coming to town and needs an IV of culture. Stat.

William T. Vollman came to Athens and I missed it? Way to go. Ok… so here’s the scoop:

• The Book Is Dead (Long Live the Book) by:  Sherman Young-To Check Out.

“Reading Gabriel Josipovici’s The Lessons of Modernism and his The World and the Book, last night, I was reminded, yet again, what a matchless critic and writer he is. The first essay in The World and the Book is Proust: A Voice in Search of Itself. It’s a superb paper which reminds us how “philosophical” and disruptive Proust’s mammoth masterpiece actually is. And, crucially, how anti-novelistic. Lots of readers, who actually bother to read Proust, seem thrilled by its Edwardian grandeur and its scale and they miss its manifold subversions. Proust understands his own obsessions; he observes them and works through them within the body of the work. He recognises that the world within the pages of his book is not the world – despite the length of the work and some realist descriptions, the thrust of the work is anti-realist (there is nothing “natural” about Realism it is an invented, historically situated style): Proust is not attempting verisimilitude, he realises that truth is not mimesis.”

And I quote/because these are things that I think are true and interesting.

• The Proust Project (Hardcover) by:Andre Aciman (Editor) –To Check Out
• Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World– To Check Out

The Architecture of Thought

“The apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in which Proust wrote most of In Search of Lost Time is now owned by a bank. The bedroom in which Proust slept, rested, ate, received visitors, and wrote is used by the bank for meetings with clients. And it is relatively bare of reminders of Proust. There is a portrait of him on the wall and some of his books in a bookcase. The only other furniture is a table and four chairs and a sideboard. What is still there that Proust looked upon daily is the marble fireplace, the doors, the two tall windows, and the wood floor with its herringbone pattern. Sparsely furnished like this, it does not seem very large, though Proust described it as vast.

Sometimes, after he’d been awake a few hours, though still in bed, Proust would decide on impulse to go out and see a friend. At ten or eleven at night in a dark bedroom, the only light comes from the lamp by his bed, and the fire in the fireplace if it’s winter. The dark room is crowded with furniture, including two large bookcases, a wardrobe, a grand piano, an armchair for visitors, and various little tables. Proust leaves his bed, crosses the short hallway, and gets dressed. His suit is made to measure and his patent leather boots were bought at the Old England Shop. He does not tend to wear out his shoes. He is transported by taxi and walks on carpet and parquet floors.

He arrives at his friend’s house, waking him up, and begins talking. His friend, perhaps exaggerating, later reports that Proust speaks in one long sentence that does not come to an end until the middle of the night. This sentence is full of asides, parenthetical remarks, parentheses, dashes, illuminations, reconsiderations, revisions, addenda, corrections, augmentations, digressions, qualifications, erasures, deletions, and marginal notes. The sentence, in other words, attempts to be exhaustive, to capture every nuance of a piece of reality, and yet to be correct–to reflect Proust’s entire thought. To be exhaustive and correct is of course an infinite task. More can always be inserted, more event and more nuance, more commentary on the event, and more nuance within the commentary. Many contemporaries of Proust’s insisted that he wrote the way he spoke, although when Swann’s Way appeared in print, they were startled by what they saw as the severity of the page. Where were the pauses, the inflections; there were not enough empty spaces, not enough punctuation marks. “I can’t read it,” said one old father to his son. “You read it aloud to me.” The sentences did not seem as long when they were spoken as when they were read on the page. The voice punctuated. On the page, the punctuation is eccentric. Certain sentences are remarkable for their absence of commas, and others for having suddenly so many more commas than you would expect. The punctuation obeys some other law. Is this style conversational or not? Well, it seems to want to give the illusion of the conversational. Sentences begin with “and so,” “but,” “in fact,” “actually,” “and yet,” “of course,” “yes,” “no,” “wasn’t it true,” “really.” But what a strange conversation, long and one-sided, composed in darkness and silence. And sentences so elaborately constructed with towering architectures of subordinate phrases that you have to stop and think, and then go back over them, just to figure them out.

Proust felt that a long sentence contained a whole, complex thought. The shape of the sentence was the shape of the thought, and every word was necessary to the thought. When he used a deliberate effect like alliteration, it was there not as an empty flourish, but to tie two similar elements or contrasting elements together in one’s mind. He despised empty flourishes. He categorically rejected sentences that were artificially amplified, that were overly abstract or that groped, arriving at a sentence by a succession of approximations. Great length was not desirable in itself. As he proceeded from draft to draft, he not only added material but also condensed. “I prefer concentration,” he said, “even in length. I really have to weave these long silks as I spin them,” he said. “If I shortened my sentences, it would make little pieces of sentences, not sentences.”

“Please break up these long sentences” is the plaintive request that a translator of Proust hears at least once. No, the book is really more about thought than plot. And in any case, in Swann’s Way at least, there is a nice balance. Eighty percent of the sentences are not excessively long. The sentences must be kept intact, long and short, and they must retain as many elements of their complexity as possible, the parallel structures, the pairs of phrases, the triplets, the alliteration and assonance, the meter. But above all the intricate architecture of syntax by which Proust inserts his parenthetical remarks and digressions, delaying as long as possible the outcome of the sentence. So this means in the end trying to preserve not only the ease of a sentence when it is easy, but also the difficulty of a sentence when it is difficult, and it means asking oneself the same question with each sentence, though with a different problem in each: If I can’t produce, for example, the hexameter which Proust has so beautifully embedded in this phrase, by just how much will I have changed his thought?”–Lydia Davis.

Cool. Bye.

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Josipovici Wednesday, Feb 20 2008

Becky says to respect The Odyssey, so I guess I say I can agree with that. I still don’t like the essay question I had to answer on it and I think I did badly. The question was something like how does Odysseus and other characters in The Odyssey embody the redefinition of hero from regular hero to domestic hero. Say what? I much prefer to not think about that, but maybe if I read Joseph Campbell’s book that Becky recommended I could find the answer to this essay question retroactively.

I just read a really short book by Gabriel Josipovici, an author that is talked about majorly on blogs everywhere. So I traveled down to the 3rd floor and checked it out! so to speak. It is called “Everything Passes.” Up above is the cover. It is fragments of a life and kind of reminds me of David Markson or Elizabeth Hardwick. I like this style: the lack of words creates a different kind of tone. I think I’m going to also read “The Goldberg Variations” by the same author as well. He has written tons of stuff and I think the library has them all. I guess I also have to start reading Beowulf tomorrow. Uh….we’ll see about that one. Becky: I have read Miranda July and if you like that collection you should check out the movie she made called You, Me, and Everyone we Know. It’s pretty funny! Also her interactive website.

See ya! Szia!

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finding time to read Tuesday, Feb 19 2008

I am a little anxious today after finding a site called: readysteadybook.com. Who knew about all the stuff I’m missing? There are countless things to read, countless.

The next state to know about is Alaska. Who knew there was stuff to read about Alaska? Oh well, just one more thing to read…here’s the link.

I am about to go and have a test on The Odyssey. Homecoming…blah blah blah…Cunning blah blah blah… Suitors blah blah blah… Is the horse dead yet? Have we beat it into the ground enough?? I think we should read it 1 more time just in case I missed something important. Wish me luck because when I have this kind of attitude about something the essay I write is full of sarcasm and smartassiness.

Can I go to graduate school now?

I am simultaneously reading Proust and Sherman Alexie. Great combo. Moving right along…

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“the power of books” Thursday, Feb 14 2008

The Power of Books! Here is a sneak peek:

This is just a taste…go to this site… just click… it will open in a new window. DO IT! I rarely force people to do things…

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Thursday, Feb 14 2008

Ah love… when Odysseus arrives home after 20 years, Penelope is like: whatever, he must prove to me that he is who he says he is. After she’s been crying a river for 20 years… After she’s given up and decided to marry a suitor… After her trusted nursemaid has already promised that it really is him. Odysseus, after one night at home… decides to leave to go see his father and tells Penelope to stay in her room. By the way, I REALLY hate the Odyssey. I resent having to re-read something that is 500 pages long… after I’ve already been subjected to it, once in high school and twice already in college. I’ve read the damn thing already. I get it. Can we drop it now? It’s torture considering I have about 1,000 things from the past 100-200 years that I need to fit into my life at some point. John Updike? Baudelaire? Dostoevsky? Kurt Vonnegut? I don’t have time for Homer anymore! It’s over! Was Homer even a real person? Who cares! I’m DONE studying Homer!!!!!

Ok, I’m over it. I also finished The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. Fantastic. Utterly brilliant. Just read it. Don’t ask questions. Go to your nearest library and fill up on Pamuk. Now. Leave Greek mythology for you last, painful semester of college. Pamuk is for the rest of your life.

Now, I am going to continue with The Guermantes Way. So far, so good. And here’s why:

“In the meantime, my daydreams lent glamour to anything that came their way. And even in my most carnal desires, oriented always in a particular direction, concentrated around a single dream, I could have recognized as their primary motive an idea, one for which I would have laid down my life, at the very heart of which lay, as in my daydreams when I used to sit reading in the afternoon in the garden at Combray, the notion of perfection.”

More to come… as always.

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if you want to read something pretty amazing… Wednesday, Feb 13 2008

Read This!:   This book is really, really cool. And yes, I will try to tell you why. The structure of the novel keeps you engaged, because it is not just Oscar’s story. The basic premise is that there is fuku (a Dominican curse) and Zafa (the Counterspell). The major question is whether or not Oscar’s family is cursed with fuku all the way up in New Jersey. Can you run away from the problems you face in the DR. And is it a wise idea to return? We are presented with a Dominican who is not your average pride swelled loverboy. The narrator, however, is that guy. And he will forever be haunted by Oscar and what he represents in the novel. My favorite thing about this book is the mongoose. A golden eyed, talking mongoose that appears in moments of danger. I found one part that is relevant to this blog. It references Proust and then begins to mirror the sentence style and I love it!:

“The beat-you-down heat was the same, and so was the fecund tropical smell that he had never forgotten, that to him was more evocative than any madeleine, and likewise had the air pollution and the thousands of motos and cars and dilapidated trucks on the roads and the clusters of peddlers at every traffic light (so dark, he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, Maldito haitianos) and people walking languidly with nothing to shade them from the sun and the buses that charged past so overflowing with passengers that from the outside they looked like they were making a rush delivery of spare limbs to some far-off war and the general ruination of so many of the buildings as if Santo Domingo was the place that crumbled crippled concrete shells came to die-and the hunger on some of the kids’ faces, can’t forget that-but also it seemed in many places like a whole new country was materializing atop the ruins of the old one…”

I swear, this is the only place in the book that seems to ramble on, mirroring what Proust does for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Very cool.  Diaz has written another book of short stories called Drown, which I need to get my hands on.

Now that this is done, it’s back to Proust and finishing up Pamuk later today. What should be next in the side queue? Maybe some Pynchon?

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oscar wao Monday, Feb 11 2008

I am currently head over heels in love with the Junot Diaz novel I am reading. So much so that the Proust has fallen by the wayside for the next day or two. Parts of this book are in Spanish and Dominican dialect and for now I am ignoring what I don’t understand. If I reread the book, maybe I’ll look up these phrases. It was the same with the yiddish in Chabon. I don’t think it takes away from the story. There are several sections in the novel and each are narrated by a character that we don’t really understand as the narrator until the middle and then we can go back and see that this character introduced the book in the first place. Oscar hasn’t had a chance to narrate yet. Lola is the secondary narrator. The most important theme in this book must be family and obligation, love and chance, and the difference between what happens in New Jersey and in the DR, which aren’t that different in the scope of the novel. I appreciate the story being told from so many angles. I appreciate the narrator’s interpretation of events. This is not a very quotable book, but I’ll finish it and then see if there is anything else to share about it. Diaz has another novel out that I’ll have to check out from the library soon.

My new yoga practice is an hour a day at home with the internet site www.yogatoday.com

Every day there is a new lesson and they are for all levels. Yesterday I was introduced to Kundalini Yoga and it is my new favorite! Breath of fire! Anyway, I think that this will be a better way to go. Rushing to yoga class after work is too stressful! And anyway, this changes it up a bit every day. When I move to NYC, there is a Kundalini center right down the street from Pratt campus. Every yoga studio in NYC is muy expensive! Like 400 dollars for a monthly pass. I can’t even afford the power yoga place here in athens. I know that rubber soul is cheap, but I just can’t get there on weekdays for classes straight from work. I could ramble on all day about yoga, but we’ll see how it goes! Maybe I will factor in Yoga to my student budget for the fall. It is a part of my everyday health and well being.

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