"A new series of adverts on the London Underground instructs men to say 'maaate' to friends making inappropriate remarks about women."

"Proust was gay and one of the incidentally entertaining things about In Search of Lost Time is its unconvincing portrait of heterosexual lust. Albertine’s cheeks 'glowed with a uniform pink, violet tinted, creamy, like certain roses . . . I felt a passionate longing for them as one feels sometimes for a particular flower . . . what might be the perfume, the taste of them?' Is this toxic masculinity? In the present climate you never know. Whenever Proust starts going on like this I mutter 'Maaate' under my breath, just in case."

James Marriott, in his London Times column, has various things to say about his summer reading. Interesting to see the London approach to the toxic masculinity problem.

"Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker’s stirring denunciation of all males, black and white?"

"My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. The author has no self, the literary character has no self, and the reader has no self. Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved? The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves."

Wrote Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon."

That jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking about the idea of forgetting oneself.

Last night, I was reading the story, "Kleist in Thun" (from this collection by Robert Walser), and I was struck by this passage:

"Confined in a Soviet prison camp in 1941, Polish painter Józef Czapski chose a unique way to cope: He lectured to the other prisoners on Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time."

"In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Czapski’s ambitious project and the surprising importance of literature to the prisoners of oppressive regimes."

Highly recommended! With no books and exhausted from deprivation and forced labor, prisoners preserved and reveled in their humanity by lecturing to each other about something they had in their memory. And Czapski lectured about what he could remember about a novel about memory.

ADDED: What if you were trapped somewhere with other people and you decided to keep yourself and the others going by lecturing from the knowledge stored in your head? What topic would you choose? Notice that these people were not thinking about preserving knowledge for the sake of all humanity. The books still existed and were not threatened with destruction. The prisoners were cut off. They were trying to preserve themselves. In that light, what would you select?

AND: From "Józef Czapski: painter, prisoner, and disciple of Proust/Czapski survived his incarceration in a Soviet prison camp and went on to produce vivid paintings and prose. But his life and work was haunted by the massacre that he escaped" (NY Review of Books).

In a stroke of genius, Czapski compares Proust with Blaise Pascal.... A 17th-century French mathematician and physicist... Pascal “considered all the ephemeral joys of the senses unacceptable.” For Proust, on the other hand, only the world of the senses existed and had value. In a letter to a friend, he confessed he desired only one thing: to take pleasure in life and physical love...

As much as any of Pascal’s Pensées, Proust’s monumental novel is a meditation on death and the vanity of life. Swann, “a refined and intelligent man of the world”, receives a sentence of death from his doctors. When he tries to pass on the news to his aristocratic friends, they tell the quaking cadaverous figure that he looks marvellous, then leave him standing in front of their magnificent townhouse as they walk off, talking of the mismatch between the duchess’s shoes and her ruby necklace....

Whereas Pascal turns from the world with disgust, Proust seeks salvation in its fugitive sensations.... Czapski was not mistaken in finding in Proust’s work a kind of religion: not a story of redemption, but a struggle to defy time and disillusion, and eternalise the passing moment in memories of meaning and beauty.

And here is Czapski's "Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp."

31. Write big and write small.

That's Jack Kerouac's list of 30 rules for writing. I don't think he planned to come up with 30. More like 18 to 20, but he damned well resisted turning that page.

When you need to cover a blank page, write big, because you might run out of things to say, and when you see the end approaching, don't wrap it up in fewer words, write smaller and smaller.

I used to teach my classes this way, talking expansively in the first half, with side roads and pauses, gearing up and pushing forward expeditiously in the second half. I saw myself doing that for more than 30 years, yet I never acquired the belief that there was plenty of material and expansiveness could be done at the end, if there was extra space. I guess I liked the expansiveness, the big writing on the left-hand page. If we're cramped later, we'll adjust, but for now, while we're young, we're left-side-of-the-pagers, let's breathe.

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is...
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time...
29. You're a Genius all the time

Those are the ones about about time. What does "Like Proust be an old teahead of time" mean? From "The French Genealogy of The Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac" (page 82)(click to enlarge):

"Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period."

That's one sentence in a belabored essay by Lee Siegel titled "Is the News Replacing Literature?" Subheading that appears at the top of my browser but not on the page: "Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow v. Proust and Kafka."

Of course, Woody Allen has written innumerable screenplays in the 20 years that have gone by since we first heard the accusations about what he might have done to Dylan. We still consume those things. We (some of us) endeavor to fathom "Blue Jasmine" or whatever his movie of the year is.

But Siegel insists: "Instantaneous news of what happened, or might have happened, has become our art, and, like the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, we are all part of the swelling roar." If so, is this bad? In novels, the characters are fictional, so our inferences from the evidence don't pass judgment on anyone real. If we can't see all the facts, it's because the author created ambiguity or didn't foresee all the various ideas we'd have, reading, and the additional things we might think we need to know.

It's a mental exercise, reading fiction, and the author may be a despicable person, like Woody Allen, if Woody Allen really did the things he's accused of, so maybe it is better to stretch our minds over the framework of some news story, like the story of Woody and Dylan. There, the facts are incomplete for a different reason, but the incompleteness is reality-based: Reporters can't get any deeper into the truth of the past. If we judge, we judge real people, and that isn't merely a mental exercise. We risk our own morality.

Siegel observes "a backlash of fanatical certainty and malevolent personal projection" in much of the "swelling roar" about Woody and Dylan, but people say foolish things about art too. High art is a filter. Who has opinions about Proust and Kafka? Maybe what's really eating Siegel is that those who used to consume high art and exchange their fanatical certainties and malevolent personal projections amongst themselves have joined the mob blabbering about news stories, and where can you find the truly excellent people anymore?

"For great writers, retirement is a fairly recent career option."

"There have always been writers, like Thomas Hardy and Saul Bellow, who kept at it until the very end, but there are many more, like Proust, Dickens and Balzac, who died prematurely, worn out by writing itself. Margaret Drabble may have started a trend when, in 2009, at the age of 69, she announced that she was calling it quits. [Alice] Munro said she was encouraged by the example of Philip Roth, who declared that he was done last fall, as he was getting ready to turn 80. 'I put great faith in Philip Roth,' she said, adding, 'He seems so happy now.'"

The Kit-Cat Clock brings out the Proust in Bird Dog.

A black plastic cat pricks the memories of a man who's named himself after a dog.

I see my room, the window, my bookshelf-turned-rock-and-fossil collection, the Revolutionary War prints on the wall, my little desk and chair with my chemistry set in one of the drawers, my first precious little transistor radio, the big aquarium set up with rocks and sand for my various lizards, and my bed that I hid my forbidden Mad Magazines beneath to read with a flashlight after lights-out....

***

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