Wednesday, December 12, 2007

It's a Movement!

A fellow-writer told me she was listening to Proust on tape. There’s Proust madness afoot. Cool, huh? I subscribe to a service that puts all Proust references on the net in my mailbox.

The majority of references are in passing, like how the Madeleine made Proust remember, and I just bit into a cupcake and thought about by grandma’s chicken yard. Well, you get the idea.

Other references to all the books, from Proust and the Squid, Madame Proust, to large tomes of critical work about Joyce, Proust and whomever. Extreme literary stuff, parodied by the All England Summarize Proust Contest.

Then there are the Proust bloggers. My favorites are Orange Crate Art and Marcelle Proust. I believe they are both academics.

We have ordinary people who are trying to read or re-read Proust and blogging it occasionally, or habitually like Odette.

Taken together, one thinks the entire world is reading, studying and blogging Proust which is not the case, as one finds out when EYES GLAZE OVER, when the reading and blogging or our narrator is mentioned. Eeeek. A passive sentence.

So anyhow. I have to confess I have been slothful and less than energetic about pursuing Proust lately. Got bogged down with Albertine in Balbec. Onward.

Maybe if I whipped up a recipe of madelines? No? What then?

Odette

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