First the madeleine, then the music

• Blair Sanderson undertakes a Proustian investigation at the Allmusic Blog.

Very interesting post, with musical examples, which attempts to determine exactly what piece of music served as the inspiration for the fictional "Vinteuil Sonata," rhapsodized over by Marcel Proust in an early section of Swann's Way.

Much as the flavor of the tea-soaked madeleine evoked powerful feelings of nostalgia for Marcel, another device is used by Proust to stir up the memories and emotions of the main character, Charles Swann. In the second part of the first book, Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love), a piece of chamber music is introduced to the story. It is a sonata for violin and piano composed by a Combray musician named Vinteuil, which haunts Swann throughout the novel as a leitmotif, reminding him again and again of his troubled, obsessive love for Odette de Crécy. They shared this music as their favorite sonata, and hearing it always brought Odette to Swann’s thoughts instantly, whether she was present or not. Its familiar “little phrase” recurs many times and its subtle changes in expression affect Swann profoundly. Effectively, Vinteuil’s evocative sonata is used by Proust as an analogue of Swann’s interior life, as well as a nearly synesthetic source of revelation.

My money is on Fauré, but who knows for sure?

Climb ev'ry mountain

Via Conversational Reading, I'm directed to a Believer essay about a book called Codex Seraphinianus, a book by an Italian architect, artist & author named Luigi Serafini, which is apparently totally untranslatable.

Gravity's Rainbow is looking like Sesame Street in comparison. This word nerd just found a new challenge to tackle... of course, you can't find an American pressing of the damn thing anywhere for less than $500. Figures.

Update: After a bit of digging I found that you can buy a new Italian-language edition, with a new introduction by Serafini as well as new illustrations, here. The inevitable caveat: It costs 89 euros, which shakes out to about $120 American.

It stinks to high heaven when you can't get interesting works through American retailers. At least the remaining two volumes (The Prisoner and The Fugitive, Finding Time Again) of the Christopher Prendergast-supervised translations of Proust's In Search of Lost Time are available from Amazon. (Because of copyright laws they cannot be published in America until 2018.) At Amazon UK you can also get all 13 books of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage cycle -- frustratingly hard to find in America, it's a work I've been wanting to get me greasy mitts on for a while.

As Al Swearengen would say: Anyways...

Looky looky I got booky

Gotta love it when books are gifts:

• H. L. Mencken on Religion, edited by S. T. Joshi - a surprise gift from some old friends. Mencken’s no angel and he does his share of fence-straddling, but for the most part his observations are still as cutting and prescient as they were eighty years ago. Of particular note are his writings on the Scopes trial, especially interesting reading in these heady days of “intelligent design.”


• How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss - I had forgotten how Seuss could make a wintry landscape look edible; the snow looks like cake icing. And I still think someone will discover an alternate ending buried in some dusty trunk, one in which the Grinch marinates the roast beast with strychnine.


• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - I hope this is as interesting as it looks. In the current climate of obtuse nationalism it's beneficial to look beyond the boundaries of an institution, and from the few pages I've sampled so far this looks to be enlightening. End pretentious windbagging.


• Bradbury Stories by Ray Bradbury - What a wonderful collection. Bradbury’s style is exquisite; florid, yes, but vivid and tactile. He creates worlds you ache to get lost in.


• McSweeny's Quarterly Concern, Issue 13, guest-edited by Chris Ware - A great find. Ware’s “temporary” stint as editor features his usual jam-packed, elaborately-designed scheme, but there’s more to chew on than just the comics (which are great); there’s an interesting essay by John Updike and a Ware-penned appreciation of an intriguing gallery artist named Philip Guston.


• Candide by Voltaire - Continuing the Ware deluge, this is the edition I profiled in November, with his witty wraparound cover design. Included as a special bonus is the complete text of Candide, too, so it’s double the fun.


• The Early Stories 1953-1975 by John Updike - This one will be fun to dive into. Short-story collections are great to have on hand for lunch breaks, and Updike does ‘em awfully well.


• Marcel Proust: A Life by Jean Yves Tadie - I will never, ever read all of this (986 pages that could double as a murder weapon), but it was a steal at $4 and I love Proust’s books. I think it’s interesting how you read a bio of a famed personality and all in all, their lives end up being just like everyone else’s: a long string of good times and bad times alike.


• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester - Book-dork nirvana, from the looks of it. I’ve heard nothing but good things.


• Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates - I’ve read a bunch of Oates’ short stories, but never a novel. The time is drawing nigh.

Lost in an art, conservative bears, and a very good excuse

• Andre Aciman dissects Proust’s translators at the New York Review of Books.

The difference between the Moncrieff translations of In Search of Lost Time and the new series overseen by Christopher Prendergast are indeed very distinct; Moncrieff tends to tie Proust’s sentences into knots, whereas the James Grieve translation of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, for example, flows silky-smooth. You get the point (and with Proust, there are many worth getting) without having to untangle an overtly-ornamental rendering to do so. Aciman’s article, however, serves the dual function of being at once a perfect example of tunnel-vision typographical nitpicking, and an illustration of the inherent pitfalls of translation, proving again that the process involves its very own prickly form of creativity. It could be that Moncrieff’s original versions better approximates the context from which the work emerged (as Aciman notes, Moncrieff began his work on Swann’s Way just before Proust’s death in 1922), but as language inevitably evolves into different forms it does become necessary to take a fresh look once in a while.

• Stan Berenstain, 1923-2005.

Having grown up in the same region of the world that Berenstain hailed from, his Berenstain Bears series does have a nostalgic appeal to me, but I can’t say I ever saw much correlation between his vision of the world and mine; I just thought that living inside a tree would be pretty neat. Berenstain’s conservative storytelling was less interesting than his art; the books were always fun to look at, anyway. Ironic, then, that Theodore Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, helped get the series started at Random House in his days as an editor. Small world.

And now, an early holiday gift for all frustrated arty types:

• Creativity linked to sexual success.

Old news, really. Just save this article and use it as you might a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Then thump your chest and bellow, "I am all that is man!"

This so-called writer's life

Early in the film Wonder Boys, adapted by Steve Kloves from the novel by Michael Chabon, a character named Q mounts a podium in front of an auditorium full of college students and faculty and announces, with fat-cat gravitas, “I... am a writer.” Dutiful applause follows, while the main characters roll their eyes at one another.

Make the mistake of telling people you’re... a writer... and the instant assumption is that you fall cleanly into whatever artist-stereotype category they’re familiar with, and most likely, it’s the Q type, the pompous know-it-all. Or the Proust type, the nutter holed up in a cork-lined room, slaving away on some epic, unintelligible monstrosity. Or the Mozart type, the genius-savant who rises phoenixlike into the artistic stratosphere, has a spectacular flameout and is dead by 30. Or, best of all, the Hemingway/Bukowski type, whereby life becomes a very simple progression: Drink. Fight. Fuck. Write. Repeat.

The second instant assumption is that a writer just sits down and unscrews the top of his head, and out onto the desktop falls a diamond called War and Peace, which of course is nonsense. It’s not like housework or gardening or carpentry where you sweat all day and end up with a clean living room, a rose bush and a deck chair. Sometimes you pound out fifteen pages in an hour and sometimes a sentence takes up a week. Writing is a strange, ever-fluctuating vocation. It’s like a relationship: it takes a lot of time and a lot of physical and emotional energy and a whole shitload of coffee. And yeah, sometimes you’ve gotta make that tough decision on whether or not to stick with it or move on.

The third instant assumption is that you specialize in just one thing, that you’re a mystery writer, or a western writer, or a thriller writer, that you only write comedies, plays, cookbooks, stereo instructions, cell phone ads, whatever, which drives us straight up the wall. The instinct of others to categorize, simplify and classify what we do runs exactly counter to our ambitions. A very small percentage of writers in the world are able to earn a living by just sitting at home and filling up pages. The rest of us Joe Six-Packs punch a clock so we can put food on the table, and write whenever we have a free moment, just for the sheer pleasure of release. It doesn’t matter if it ever gets published, or if anyone else even reads it; it just matters that you’re writing. That, or you have a blog, and you fill up entry after entry with endless masturbatory philosophizing. Like this one.

Writers can be miserable, hateful, bitter, spiteful, horrible people. Obsessed with their so-called gifts, buoyed by a fatuous sense of entitlement, convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority. But they’re also capable of incredible generosity, love and support. Willing to listen, ready to advise, happy to give everything they can to help another realize their dreams. They’re us. They’re everything that we are, composed of different shades, moods, ideas, temperaments: kaleidoscopes on legs, slaves only to the bizarre whatever-it-is that compels them to roll up their sleeves and put down one word after another. We don’t understand it, we can’t explain it, and we won’t even try. Why is there air? Because.

The problem with Proust (and Tolstoy too)

• Salon's "Summer School" series wraps up with Jane Smiley's take on In Search of Lost Time.

I don't know what it is about Proust and Tolstoy, but they make other writers lose their minds, either out of exasperation or jealousy (probably a combination of both). Proust's digressive style, packed with sentences that loop and curl and flow and never quit, seems like it does something to people with an interest in, and love of, language. It's like they put down Swann's Way and run straight to the keyboard to write about what they've just experienced, to hammer out an explorative essay about Proust's style/themes/whatever, just to hang on to that feeling. It's next to impossible to recommend Proust to anyone because you have to preface your recommendation with something along the lines of, "Well, he's not really a storyteller per se, but he's an amazing writer," which makes most people's eyes roll back into their heads before the sentence has even left your tongue. Nonetheless, he's worth your time. (I've heard it said that Proust can't be truly appreciated unless you read the original French, but if you're an ignorant monoglot Yank like me, a halfway decent translation is about all you can hope for.)

• Orlando Figes gets a lot right about War and Peace at the Times Online.

Tolstoy is a similar matter, despite the fact that War and Peace is hardly the unwieldly behemoth it's at times made out to be. A high-concept, fast-food culture like ours doesn't know what to do with a novel that's 1500 pages long and appears not to have any one central character or storyline. And yet you pick up the thing and grimace at the weight and tell yourself, well, if it's a drag, then I'll try again in another decade or so, and before you know it Tolstoy's hooked you, the bastard, and you find yourself awake at 3am, ink-stained thumbs sore from flipping pages, screaming, "What's gonna happen to Natasha?!?" The many characters are vivid and memorable, the philosophical ideology of fate is endlessly fruitful and the dissection of the chaos and calamity of warfare is enlightening (particularly these days). Filter out all those scholarly exhorations and you're still left with a ripping good story, told with incredible clarity and confidence and nary a dull moment. When you do, in fact, put it down, you feel like you've just been reintroduced to the world.