My Year With Proust - Day 125

   "Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte?  She would not have heard me.  We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening.  My words would have come to her only in distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my beloved, unrecognizable, sounding false and absurd, having no longer any kind of meaning.  The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 659

Here Proust is explaining why he did not talk to Gilberte and make it clear to her that he would no longer love her.  Beyond the obvious fact that all proclamations like that are fraught with potential disaster, his point is that she could not have possibly heard him.  "We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening."  Maybe another way to think about it is to consider the reason why others don't understand us is that we aren't even talking to them, we're only talking to ourselves.  This would definitely continue the theme of the previous pages on the self-possession and self-absorption of love.  Proust had proposed that what one found attractive about the beloved was the reflection of their own interests.  Sometimes when we're discussing objectivization in class I will saying something like, "OK, how many times in your life will you not be making love with another person but instead simply using them as a masturbatorial tool?"  While some students will respond with a look somewhere between stunned and mystified, others will, doubtlessly inadvertently, reveal a knowing, sad, maybe even guilty, expression.  The point is how much of the time, even the most intimate moments, we spend entirely alone, unable or unwilling to know others.

"For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself.  When one begins to love, one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really is, but in arranging for to-morrow's rendezvous.  When one renounces love one seeks not to know one's grief but to offer to her who is its cause the expression of it which seems to one the most moving.  One says the things which one feels the needs to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 660-661

My Year With Proust - Day 124

"And no doubt at that very moment in which (since I was determined not to see her again, barring a formal request for a reconciliation, a complete declaration of love of her part, neither of which was in the least degree likely to be forthcoming) I had already lost Gilberte, and loved her more than ever since I could feel all that she was to me better than in the previous year when, spending all my afternoons in her company, or as many as I chose, I believed that no peril threatened our friendship, - no doubt at that moment the idea that I should one day entertain identical feelings for another was odious to me, for that idea, deprived me, not only of Gilberte, but of my love and my suffering: my love, my suffering, in which through my tears I was attempting to grasp precisely what Gilberte was, and yet was obliged to recognise that they had not permit exclusively to her but would, sooner or later, be some other woman's fate.  So that - or such, at least, was my way of thinking then - we are always detached from our fellow-creatures: when we love, we sense that our love does not bear a name, that it may spring up again in the future, could have sprung up already in the past, for another person rather than this one; and during the time when we are not in love, if we resign ourselves philosophically to love's inconsistencies and contradictions, it is because we do not at that moment feel the love, which we speak about so freely, and hence do not know it, knowledge in those being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 657-658

" . . . the idea that I should one day entertain identical feelings for another was odious to me, for that idea, deprived me, only only of Gilberte, but of my love and my suffering . . ."

So much of Remembrance of Things Past has been about the pain of unrequited love or love lost, and in a lot of ways that makes perfect sense because what is more likely to inspire intense emotions and thus stamp itself indelibly onto memory like a disastrous love affair.  As all my students can attest from Concepts of the Self and Linden's the Accidental Mind, the brain plays cruel tricks on us in its monomaniacal desire to get us to lock onto one person and thus successfully raise one of those slow developing children that are all the rage (truthfully, they're overrated - they turn into things like me, so you're better off to spend the time and resources on foreign travel).

In this particular instance I think Proust is carrying on his discussion of the deeply personal and egotistical nature of love.  We become one with our love and maybe even more so one with our suffering, and to move on to another woman results in us not only losing our original love but also part of ourselves. Erasmus reminds us of the line from Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of Vanities! All is vanity."  There was a time when I believed in the concept of a great love, but I don't know if I believe that any more.  If we open ourselves up to the world I suspect there are innumerable people who could help make us happy.  One of the few things I've figured out over the years is that you should never expect someone to make you happy; whereas it's much wiser to look for someone to help make you happy.  No one needs that much extra responsibility.  If you're waiting for someone to make you happy you'll doubtless never be happy.  However, we convince ourselves that there is only one great love, and I've reached the age where I think the Great Love is actually the Great Vanity.  This is not a bitter statement because it's not some condemnation of the unworthiness of other human beings to give us what we need.  Rather, I think it's a recognition of the fact that so much of our unhappiness come from our vain belief that only that one person could possibly make us happy; and in the end this is just self-absorption, or maybe laziness.  How many amazing people do we channel through in our lives because we expect them to "make" us happy because we won't take responsibility for our own happiness.  And how many perfectly great relationships are destroyed by an imaginary great love, a love so profound and unique that it somehow makes our humdrum lives special?

Discography - Week #2

And now we're moving on to Week 2 of the Discography project, and we'll be hard pressed to top the first week.

Dave Wallace

The Monkees, Valleri

Huh?  First off, the Monkees are not a guilty pleasure.  They made a startling number of great songs (whether they actually played the instruments on them or not), and Micky Dolenz is one of the most under-rated singers ever.  Stepping Stone is another song of theirs that could easily make this list for me.  With that said, I adore Valleri.  The vaguely Middle-Eastern flavored guitar line, the surging horns, the killer chorus.  Legend has it that the guitar line was played by Frank Zappa, but the recent documentary, The Wrecking Crew, clarified that it was legendary session guitarist Tommy Tedesco.  (Great doc by the way.)

Gary Beatrice

Prince, 1999

I haven't paid much attention to his recent music, but I still find it very sad to think about a world that does not include Prince. His music, his look, the whole package was intoxicating, and most of it sounds and looks every bit as great as it did when he recorded it. For my money, Prince's best is the first single to bring him massive crossover success 1999.
Life is just a party and parties aren't meant to last. Prince has passed but his music is eternal.

Gary Scudder

Elvis Presley, Kentucky Rain

Yes, it definitely appears to be a week of odd change-ups (sort of the Discography version of the 46 mph eephus pitch that Clayton Kershaw threw last week).  It's odd for me because, in the category of Voice of the 20th Century, I always come down on the side of Sinatra vs. Presley.  And, doubtless, some Sinatra song will appear this year, and then Gary Beatrice will kindly and patiently explain to me why 1950s cool Sinatra is better than Big Band Frank.  That said, my mother passed away last weekend and I guess this counts as my homage to her, a huge Elvis Presley fan.  I am sure she would have preferred Can't Help Falling in Love, but I have to live with this choice.  Actually, I've always liked this song, which may be just a Midwestern thing (which may also explain my early love of Winesburg, Ohio or The Magnificent Ambersons) or it may speak to my almost magnetic attraction to sad songs, especially attractive if they feature desolation.

Bob Craigmile

Peter Frampton, Do You Feel Like We Do

I don’t really understand why I have such a connection to this album except that it came at a formative period (16 years old!) and it has such exceptional music.  I’ve literally had dreams of playing his stuff on stage with him.  Hearing it always seems to make me happy.

From the opening intro and the bright and happy guitar work on the first track (“Something’s Happening”) to “Do you feel…” it’s all there emotionally.  Perfectly timed for adolescence (and adolescents) you have the up-tempo-yet-crunchy guitar and singing, and the fluttery prettiness of “Penny for your thoughts”(which every boy should have tried to learn, but instead wasted their time on “Stairway…”).

Frampton’s guitar playing has always been criminally underrated.  His sense of playfulness and melody put him up there with McCartney or Clapton.  Whoever created voice tubes for guitar should write him a check due to “Do you feel like we do”.

His use of echo/reverb is still a thing of wonder to me in relistening.  The band with him is also tight as hell, and now some of them have passed on to the great gig in the sky (wink).  Frampton cut his chops as a literal kid in Humble Pie and he later became such a mega star that he was kind of the template for “washed up rock star” by 1985.

It’s a shame that he was given, and took, such bad advice.  And yes, I did see the Sgt. Pepper’s movie when it came out;  I blame Jeff Brede.

Dave Kelley

The Clash, Clampdown

"Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer.  I think he may have been our only decent teacher"  The Hold Steady "Constructive Summer"

While that is a great song, it is not my week three selection.  In a song partially about going to a crappy high school in the early eighties, The Hold Steady give an homage to one of the two main songwriters for The Clash.

My choice for week three is "Clampdown" off of what I think has to be on the shortlist for greatest record of the rock era "London Calling".  Strummer and Mick Jones were perfect songwriting partners.  Strummer brought the anger, intensity, and passion while Jones brought great musicality and pop sensibilities.  For proof of that I would offer "Train in Vain" by Jones which is just a perfect three and a half minute pop single.

With all of the craziness taking place at Donald Trump rallies, not to mention in many other parts of the world like Yemen, Russia, and fill in the blank, I think Clampdown is amazingly relevant today.  Sadly there has never been nor there will be a time when it is not relevant somewhere.

"No man born with a living soul can be working for the clampdown."

"We will teach our twisted speech

 to the young believers.

We will train our blue eyed men

to be young believers."

But you grow up, and you calm down and

you're working for the clampdown.

You start wearing blue and brown,

and you're working for the clampdown."

The lyrics posted above are taken out of order but are representative of the themes.  At the end of the song, Strummer chants some of the places where "The Clampdown" was taking place at the time it was written.  The make-up of the list may have changed some, but it is longer than ever today.  There is a great Townes Van Zant song called "Lungs".  Steve Earle once said if that song doesn't scare the shit out of you, you are not paying attention.  I would say the exact same thing about my choice for this week. 

Jack Schultz

Dave Mills

Brad Mehldau, Lithium (by Nirvana)

It’s only the second week of this fine endeavor, and I’m already finding ways to cheat. My choice today is a twofer, and I’m going to sneak in a third (albeit nonmusical) artist as well – James Baldwin. To appreciate my musical selection here, I highly recommend that you read his short story “Sonny’s Blues.” Here’s a link: http://swcta.net/moore/files/2012/02/sonnysblues.pdf

For me, that story displays exactly what’s so wonderful about the song choice I’ve shared here, in which Brad Mehldau improvises a post-bop jazz version of Nirvana’s Lithium. Late in Baldwin’s story, the narrator says this:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

For me, this applies to the frenzied urgency of a Nirvana show (wherein the wrecking of instruments and dismantling of the stage that inevitably ensues feels like release in the form of a final surrender to that “roar rising from the void,” an exhausted inability to control and shape it any longer). Baldwin’s narrator also captures the barely controlled fervor of improvisational jazz. For me, Mehldau is a master of imposing a highly complex order on the chaos that constantly threatens to overtake the order. He triumphs.

Mehldau is absurdly intelligent – his album liner notes feature heady critical interactions with thinkers and artists such as Goethe, Rilke, Kant, Emerson, Heidegger, Freud, and James Joyce (to pull examples only from the liner notes to his 2000 album Places ), he can improvise counterpoint compositions on the piano, and he can play completely different melodies in different rhythms simultaneously in the right and left hands. If you like what you hear here, you might like some of his other post-bop improvisations of recent non-jazz music, such as Nick Drake’s River Man, Radiohead’s Knives Out, or Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun.

Mike Kelly

Sturgill Simpson, In Bloom

“Spring is here again/Reproductive glands” 

Last night, I woke up at 3am nostalgic for the Omaha I used to live in.  In my vivid dream, two of my friends from high school were at a roadside bar (which was more like a swanky Chili’s) and I was walking in. They were walking out.  We went back inside, had a few drinks, etc.  You get the idea.   After Andrea gave me that hottest (but tonguelessly chaste) kiss, I woke up. 

Over the next hour, this song became the soundtrack to my lovingly wistful hour spent thinking clichéd thoughts about the urgency of being young, the possibilities associated with having a car and a fake ID and the ways that Jason Isbell taught us that “time moves slow when you’re 17 and then it picks up steam at 21.”  Nirvana’s version of “In Bloom” was emblematic of what it meant to be 13 in Nebraska, especially when you were in on the joke that was laughed at every time a new meathead kid bought a copy of Nevermind. He was the one who liked all those pretty songs, but didn’t know what they meant.   

The Omaha I miss isn’t the Omaha that’s currently there.  Out of the very few of us who are still around, Ryan is the only one who still lives east of 72^nd street. Everyone else has perfectly functional suburban lots way out in the places halfway to Lincoln.   The beauty of the land and of the people is even more opaque- it’s even harder to find it now than it was before. 

Omaha is a place where there are two ways to succeed (which is two more than most places mind you). A person can either succeed as a bootstrappy farm kid or immigrant whose pluck reifies the values we purport to have or you can be a person deemed capable enough to go anywhere else but chose to stay.  It’s not my town anymore, but then again, it hasn’t been for a long time. 

23 years later I’m lying awake at 3am thinking about the same people and the same song still works as a soundtrack.  The point of this post isn’t to wax nostalgic for my fleeting youth but to make an argument for the serendipitous power of cover songs to create a thinking experience for the listener that is consistent with how we evolve in the rest of our lives.  The past and present consistently blend up together to make new meaning from old thinking.  

What Sturgill Simpson does in the song and Matt Mahurin does in the art style strips the song of the raw emotional intensity of the original and replaces it with a more disorienting but still comfortable uncertainty about the way things are.  At 3 am, it seems like a metaphor.  At 1042  am, it seems like a cliché. 

Nirvana is never coming back, the Omaha of my youth is gone but the potential to see old things in new ways is an underrated, life-affirming quality that good music can bring us.     

Miranda Tavares

Grand Funk Railroad, (She's) Some Kind of Wonderful

There are so many reasons to love this song. It's classic. It's catchy. It has horns. But I'm picking it because it is my favorite love song. Love songs often tend toward sappy and saccharine or mournful and maudlin. I get the sad ones; love lost is a complex, infinite topic, a bottomless muse. The sappy ones, well, if you've heard maybe five, you've heard them all. But this song captures the real reason we're all, as a species, obsessed with love: when we have it, when it's going right, it brings us pure, wholly uncomplicated joy. This song isn't about planning overly grand romantic gestures, or comparing your significant other to a summer's day. It's just about being very, very happy.

I picked this version over the original version because Grand Funk Railroad did what you're supposed to do when you cover a song: take it to the next level, and make it your own. The original is a little slower, nowhere near as jaunty, and misses some of the happiness. And GFR added the horns. 

Nate Bell

500 Miles to Memphis, Six Foot Hole

This song is not the best song this band wrote, and there will likely be more selections to come from 500 MTM.  This local Cincinnati area band (Bethel, actually) introduced us to a whole new genre of music.  We listened to a short clip of 6 Foot Hole, and decided to see a show at the old Southgate House (now the Thompson House), on a night where 500 MTM was recording for a live album.  The ballroom was the venue, and it was packed, energetic, and had the feel of a large crowd of friends, friendly, relaxed, spanning a large age range and set of appearances, all there just to enjoy a good musical time.

I could say the crowd was electric, I can say the energy was palpable, but all those overused cliches don't really fit.  The show was pure, unadulterated fun.  From the moment the band walked onstage, to the Muppet Show theme song, we were hooked.  I fell in love with their "Cowpunk" genre---a definite Americana/country sensibility and vocal style, but musically very much hard rock with overtones of punk.  6 Foot Hole is a typical song about a band on the road, but the gritty guitar hook, the vocal phrasing, and the overall impression was the start to a intense musical affair that led us to Bands like Drive by Truckers, The Bottle Rockets and their ilk, but 500 MTM remains something a little different, modern, country, and nostalgic (in a sense that hearkens back to my hard rock/metal younger years).  The band has both matured and expanded, but a taste of that song left me wanting more....since then we must have seen the band a dozen times, and they never disappoint, from their very tight and controlled timing to their ever-emerging and interesting themes--sometimes dark, sometimes frivolous, but always accessible.  Just listen to that guitar hook in 6 Foot Hole and then follow them down the musical rabbit hole that exist somewhere in the empty rural sprawl of Bethel, Ohio. :)

Journey Through the Past - My Mom

I just wanted to post some pictures of my mom that are making the rounds among my brother and sisters as we prepare for the service.  This is going to sound horrible, but I'm having trouble remembering her this happy.  What I keep coming back to is the thought that I probably played a role in her being so unhappy later, not necessarily because I was a terror (my father pulled me aside once in my 30s and felt compelled to tell me that I was actually very easy to raise; which he didn't realize until he and mom worked their way through my siblings), but because I could have been more giving, that I could have been more involved in her life; essentially, that I was guilty of being as distant as she often was.

I definitely remember this avatar of my mom.

Wow, how classic teenager is this picture?

I think this is my all-time favorite picture of my mom, especially since it also features my grandma Alice.

This may be an outtake from Grapes of Wrath.

My Year With Proust - Day 123

"When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves.  It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 655

I can't decide whether this is a happy thought or a sad thought to inspire my 900th post; either way, I'm pretty sure it's a profound thought.  The notion of love itself as almost a tangible entity which reaches out to others is somewhere between beautiful and alarming.  It reminds me of the chapter on Contact from every Concept of the Self student's least favorite book, Freeland's Portraits & Persons (except for my students, oddly, who end up liking the book).  She discusses how icons are designed to not only honor the deceased, but to establish a true connection with them.  Granted, Proust is speaking more metaphorically here, but if he were correct then we are almost filling up the space between us and our loved ones, which would allow us to support our loved ones in an ethereal emotional gravitational field.  That's the positive, life-affirming way to look at it.  The other way to consider the question is that what we really appreciate and love about the other person is ourselves, since we're really just appreciating our own reflected feelings.  Again, Proust is speaking more metaphorically, although I suspect it works more realistically in this sense.  Cutting to the chase, I guess it would mean that all love is self-love, which makes sense if you consider that people tend to gush over what people have in common with them.  I always joked that my ex-wife married me for my Neil Young record collection, which, I guess, she ended up with after all (although, having to live with me for twenty-four years to acquire it is a steep price to pay). So, what we love about them is what we love about ourselves. To take it to the next level, think of the people who have no self-love and have therefore no love to send out to others, and thus no love can be reflected back.  It sounds a bit like the poster on a high school girl's bedroom, but, truthfully, I think that Proust is on to something here.  And, come to think of it, I think this is pretty life-affirming as well.

Either way, if you've reached 900 posts then clearly you have immense self-love. Or my complete lack of self-love.  At the very least it speaks to my extraordinary sense of self-fascination.

Thanks, as always, to the folks who have followed the blog, even an occasional quick glance, over the years.

My Year With Proust - Day 122

"But if our unhappiness is due to the loss of someone dear to us, our suffering consists merely in an unusually vivid comparison of the present with the past."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 654

My mother passed away last weekend so I've been even more reflective this week than usual.  As is always the case, especially when you are not present with the person at the time of their passing (I live up here in wintry Vermont and my mom was living down in Savannah, Georgia with my sister Lisa), it doesn't seem quite real yet.  I'm still a little emotionally bruised, so I'm even less likely to stumble into a profound thought than usual. Truthfully, I've been much more concerned about my son, who was remarkably close to his grandmother.  I told him the other night that I sincerely believed that he was a much better grandson to her than I was a son to her.  At the end of Swann's Way Proust proposed that memory is intricately linked to regret, and I certainly have enough regrets on that front.  We clearly loved each other but I also wish I had spent more time with her and tried to get an even clearer sense of who she was and what she believed.  A couple weeks ago I asked the questions of what, if anything, I had in common with my mom (since people always tried to turn me into a little version of my father).  My mother always seemed removed  from the crowd and a bit out of focus, which is one of the reasons why I always felt that I didn't know her as well as I might.  And that is when it hit me; that's one of the things we have in common.  It might be the single most clearly defined aspect of my own personality.  My father always commented on the fact that I never joined in, and I can only relate this to all the time that my mother would sit by herself in the kitchen, not joining in but also probably reveling in her own privacy.

All the kids, well, mainly Lisa, Eric and Beth, are busily planning the funeral, such as it is (my mother had very strong opinions on things and didn't want any ceremonies in a church or in a funeral home).  I've been charged with heading up the graveside ceremony, so I've been thinking about what I might say, which led me back to digging deep into my own memory in search of memories of my mother.  Oddly, I think my favorite memory of her relates to sitting at a Waffle House restaurant late at night.  As horrible as divorce is, there are some people who come out of it as better people.  I suspect this might because you're free of an unhappy relationship or you've just been tempered by the fire of the experience or you're just not living a more honest existence.  In the case of my mother I think the experience of the divorce humbled her, but also reminded her of what really mattered in the world.  In the days when she was queen of Lawrenceburg, Indiana her days were filled with the perceived responsibilities of that exulted position, and that included constantly feeding the monster that was the Big House on Kirby Road.  After the divorce she bought a house down in Atlanta next to us and got a job at Kroger's.  Often when I got out of my night class at GPC I would meet her after she left work and we would grab a late egg sandwich at Waffle House.  It was great to have the time alone together, but in some ways we were both getting back to our roots.  Plus, we were both putting aside our tendency toward solitude and devoting time to each other.  I don't think I was ever her favorite child (because, come on, every parent has a favorite, even if they won't admit it), but I was her first, which means that for a while it was just the two of us. 

My Year With Proust - Day 121

"There was another reason, apart from those given above, for the flowers' having more than a merely ornamental significance in Mme Swann's drawing-room, and this reason pertained not to the period but, in some degree, to the life that Odette had formerly led.  A great courtesan such as she had been, lives largely for her lovers, that is to say at home, which means that she comes in time to live for her home.  The things that one sees in the house of a 'respectable' woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan.  The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for society, but that in which she undresses herself for a man.  She must be as elegant in her dressing-gown, in her night-dress, as in her outdoor attire.  Other women display their jewels, but she lives in the intimacy of her pearls.  This kind of existence imposes on her the obligation, and end by giving her the taste, for a luxury which is secret, that is to say which comes near to being disinterest.  Mme Swann extended this to include her flowers. There was always beside her chair an immense crystal bowl filled to the brim with Parma violets or with long white daisy-petals floating in the water, which seemed to testify, in the eyes of the arriving guest, to some favourite occupation now interrupted, as would also have been the cup of tea which Mme Swann might have been drinking there along for her own pleasure; an occupation more intimate still and more mysterious, so much so that one wanted to apologise on seeing the flowers exposed there by her side, as one would have apologised for looking at the title of the still open book which would have revealed to one Odette's recent reading and hence perhaps her present thoughts.  And even more than the book, the flowers were living things; one was embarrassed, when one entered the room to pay Mme Swann a visit, to discover that she was not alone, or if one came home with her, not to find the room empty, so enigmatic a place, intimately associated with hours in the life of their mistress of which one knew nothing, did those flowers assume, those flowers which had not been arranged for Odette's visitors but, as it were forgotten there by her, had held and would hold with her again intimate talks, which one was afraid of disturbing, the secret of which one tried in vain to read by staring at the washed-out, liquid, mauve and dissolute colour of the Parma violets."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 638-639

We continue to learn more and more about Odette, not simply as the object of Swann's mad, jealous desire, but as a more nuanced character.  Proust starts by reflecting on Odette's complicated response to receiving flowers, and, as is his wont, then moves on to deeper and more intimate issues, in this case Mme Swann's life as a "courtesan." At first blush, and blush seems more than the appropriate word here, it could be seen a mere prurient intrusion into her bedroom. "The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for society, but that in which she undresses herself for a man.  She must be as elegant in her dressing-gown, in her night-dress, as in her outdoor attire.  Other women display their jewels, but she lives in the intimacy of her pearls."  OK, it's difficult to not read pearls as a sexual metaphor, but when you get beyond that you end up with a a sad but still lovely description of a woman's personal universe.  If Odette was actually a courtesan, then she, in a patriarchal society, was forced to be even more reactive to the needs of men, so the juxtaposition of dressing/undressing is even more apt.  Liminal spaces play such a huge role in Remembrance of Things Past, and here are two more.  I have a pet theory that one of the things that causes the sex life of long-term relationships to grow stale is not enough time devoted to dressing and especially undressing.  And this is not a clarion call for more trips to Victoria's Secret since I can honestly state that I don't find anything sexier on a woman than a t-shirt, jeans and Keds; which I think is a reflection of natural, unaffected sexuality.  Well, there is something to be said for a conservative business suit with just a bit of lace revealed, but I digress.

The dressing and undressing duality here is an interesting one.  There is always that time in the flowering of any relationship when that first undressing occurs, and, clearly, it is one of the most memorable moments.  Now, it begs the question: will it be the dressing or the undressing that comes closer to revealing truth and identity?  I remember one of my first year students several years ago producing an extraordinary self-portrait in Concepts of the Self.  It was a nude, although, thankfully, nothing was revealed, which was actually the point - and what made it brilliant.  The young woman was naked in front of a window - or at least appeared naked (it was very artfully done) - but the light streaming in from the window dominated the picture and she appeared in a stark silhouette.  Her point, which she expressed in a beautifully written paper, was that she only revealed what she wanted to reveal, and even if she were naked you wouldn't really be seeing anything that she didn't want to reveal.  And, assuming that anyone's nude body actually expressed something profound about them is pretty shamefully reductive.  So, oddly, is dressing actually the part which, in addition to expressing identity, actually the action that shares the truth of the individual?  As the great Canadian philosopher reminds us, "you're only real with your make-up on."

The Parma Violet, the favorite of Mme Swann. Apparently they are believed, incorrectly, to be sterile, but with careful nurturing they can produce a seed pod. As with most things related to Remembrance of Things Past, I can't believe their selection in this case was an accident.

    

My Year With Proust - Day 120

"With women who do not love us, as with the 'dear departed,' the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait.  We live in expectancy, constantly on the alert; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health.  And this expectancy, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son if no more, to forget gradually, and to survive his loss - or else it kills her.

   At the same time, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love must profit by it.  Every visit that I paid to Mme Swann without seeing Gilberte was painful to me, but I felt that it correspondingly enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me.

   Besides, if I always took care, before to see Mme Swann, to ensure that her daughter was absent, this arose not only from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps from the ope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to renounce her (very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a continuous form, in this human soul of ours, once of whose laws, confirmed by the unlooked-for wealth that memory supplies, is intermittance), and hid from me something of its cruelty.  I knew how chimerical was this hope.  I was like a pauper who moistens his dry cru with fewer tears if he assures himself that any any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune.  We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 635-636

One of the testaments of the greatness of Proust is that even during another lengthy exegesis on the pain of love (Swann's for Odette; his own for Gilberte; and I know enough of the story to know that there is more waiting in the near future) I know grow frustrated.  I've often joked that halfway through The Sorrows of Young Werther I was volunteering to buy Werther a gun so that he could finish the job (having said that, I should really give it a re-read, because I read it in early graduate school and who knows what kind of mood was dominating me at that age).  Proust does mention suicide in passing.  "For, being free at any time to enter the house in which Gilberte lived, I constantly reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of making it cease."  That's always the answer lurking in the back of so much of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, not as a preferred option but rather as the logical reality of the human existence.  Instead, Proust survives by keeping the illusion of his love alive, including his extended "romance" with Mme Swann.  "We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves."

My Year With Proust - Day 119

"Each evening, on arriving home, I reminded myself that I had things to say to Gilberte of prime importance, things upon which our whole friendship hung, and these things were never the same.  But at least I was happy, and no further menace arose to threaten my happiness.  One was to appear, alas, from a quarter in which I had never detected any peril, namely from Gilberte and myself.  And yet I should have been tormented by what, on the contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for happiness.  We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail.  What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced.  In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, sheer agony."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 625-626

I'm coming to believe that if I had read Proust when I was younger I would have saved myself, theoretically, a lot of heartache.  The disclaimer "theoretically", is included, naturally, because I would not have listened, as none of us do when we're in love.  In this passage Proust is reflecting on his dysfunctional relationship with Gilberte, but I could have included myself and any number of women in here (with less commas and semi-colons, obviously).  Proust describes being in love as an "abnormal state," and have truer words ever been spoken?  Further, he identifies "the presence in our hearts of an unstable element."  If we're going to follow this analogy to its conclusion I guess we should ask whether this unstable element, love, is actually found in nature, but we'll leave that alone for now.  What interests me at this moment is that it takes us back to the question of why love fades. So, in the end is it the abnormality or the instability that makes love sublime, but which also makes it untenable?

My Year With Proust - Day 118

   "A whole lot more of my aunt Leonie's things, and notably a magnificent set of old silver plate, I sold, against my parents' advice, so as to have more money to spend, and to be able to send more flowers to Mme Swann who would greet me, after receiving an immense basket of orchids, with: 'If I were your father, I should have you up before the magistrate for this.' How could I suppose that one day I might particularly regret the loss of my silver plate, and rank certain other pleasures more highly than that (which might perhaps have shrunk to nothing) of paying courtesies to Gilberte's parents.  Similarly, it was with Gilberte in my mind, and in order not to be separated from her, that I had decided not to enter up on a career of diplomacy abroad.  It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.  I could scarcely imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and which radiated from her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could be liberated, could migrate into another person.  Unquestionably the same substance, and yet one that would have a wholly different effect on me.  For the same sickness evolves; and a delicious poison can no longer be taken with the same impunity when, with the passing of the years, the heart's resistance has diminished."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 622-623

"It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions."  This sounds like something that Marcus Aurelius would have written in the Meditations.  It is sound, and essential, information, and one that we dole out repeatedly to our friends and loved ones, just as we ignore it ourselves.  I remember when my son was down to his final two college choices he was balancing out the merits of Saint Anselm and Drake University, and he had to admit that one of the biggest selling points for Saint Anselm was that was closer to our hometown and, thus, also closer to his hometown girlfriend at the time.  My advice was that he also needed to keep in mind the unimpressive half-life of hometown girlfriends in college; essentially, he needed to have a greater sense of the difference between the temporary and the permanent when making decisions.  Like all parents, I was free in handing out that advice when I've never good at following it myself.   We are all subject to the tyranny of the transitory.

My Year With Proust - Day 117

   "Once I nearly made up my mind, bur she had 'gone t press,' another time she was in the hands of the 'hairdresser,' an old gentleman who never did anything to the women except pour oil on their loosened hair and then comb it.  And I grew tired of waiting, even though several of the humbler denizens of the place (so-called working girl, though they always seemed to be out of work), had come to make tea for me and to hold long conversations to which, despite the gravity of the subjects discussed, the partial or total nudity of my interlocutors gave an attractive simplicity.  I ceased moreover to go to this house because, anxious to present a token of my good-will to the woman who kept it and was in need of furniture, I had given her a few pieces - notably a big sofa - which I had inherited from my aunt Leonie.  I used never to see them, for want of space had prevented my parents from taking them in at home, and they were stored in a warehouse.  But as soon as I saw them again in the house where these women were putting them to their own uses, all the virtues that pervaded my aunt's room at Combray at once appeared to me, tortured by the cruel contact to which I had abandoned them in their defencelessness!  Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse.  I returned no more to visit their new mistress, for they seemed to me to be alive and to be appealing to me, like those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance.  Besides, as our memory does not as a rule present things to us in their chronological sequence but as it were by a reflection in which the order of the parts if reversed, I remembered only long afterwards that it was upon that same sofa that, many years before, I had tasted for the first time the delights of love with one of my girl cousins, with whom I had no known where to go until she somewhat rashly suggested our taking advantage of a moment in which Aunt Leonie had left her room."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 621-622

Proust is relating more stories associated with his visits to various houses of assignation, including his temporary fascination with one woman named Rachel.  As the mistress of the house tells him, "She's Jewish.  How about that? . . . That of that, my boy, a Jewess!  Wouldn't that be thrilling?  Rrrrr!"  In this anecdote he has to stop visiting one particular brothel because he realizes that it features a couch which used to belong to his aunt Leonie, and which he had given to the mistress of the houses because she was short on furniture.  He imagines the couch was like one of "those apparently inanimate objects in a Persian fairy-tale, in which imprisoned human souls are undergoing martyrdom and pleading for deliverance."  He proposes that, "Had I outraged the dead, I would not have suffered such remorse."  It is odd how we will imbue inanimate objects with animation and personality, and sometimes feel more deeply toward them than their human counterparts.  I remember being in downtown Omaha, Nebraska at a conference one time and stopping in front of a consignment shop.  In the front window it featured a number of well-worn older suitcases, and I remember feeling a sense of loss and sadness, and even pity, that this suitcases, who, in my imagination had traveled the world, were now condemned to spend their days in used furniture shop in Omaha, Nebraska.  I felt this overpower urge to smash the windows and set them free, and take them on one last great adventure.  

Discography Week #1

As this blog enters its dotage (although it's still in better shape than its guardian) it continues to evolve.  It started out as a travel blog, but as I began to do less travel it, again, like me, had to change course.  Presently it is much more thematically-focused, which is evidenced by all of the half-witted attempts to explore Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  With this in mind, I thought it would be great to get a group of my best friends together and discuss their most meaningful songs, essentially creating a group discography spanning one year.  While we might have an occasional theme, generally it's just going to be what we're thinking at that moment.  So, with that in mind . . .

Dave Wallace

Lucero, Here At the Starlite

I discovered Lucero about a decade ago, and they immediately became one of my favorite bands.  For my money, Ben Nichols, their leader, is one of the best songwriters going today.  (Interesting side note, his brother, Jeff Nichols, is an excellent movie director.)  Lucero has a ton of great songs, but this one is my favorite.  It's classic Nichols - brooding in a dive diner over the end of a relationship.  I love how the guitar work is such a great compliment to his mood.  And the ominous instrumental build to the end of the song is brilliant.

Bob Craigmile

James McMurtry, Lights of Cheyenne

I think about this song’s lyrics all the time.  Musically it’s simple yet interesting.  But an artist does something special when they inhabit someone else’s skin.  In this case, James becomes a waitress in Wyoming in late middle age with a bad back and an abusive husband.  Yes, it’s all there in six minutes and forty seconds.

What is it about singer/songwriters that fascinates middle aged white guys so much?  Is it the allure of Dylan?  The curly headed rogue who took over New York’s early sixties folk scene with his midwestern jewish off kilter brand of decidedly earnest, but not sounding it, lyrics.  The man has become a myth.  Despite 50 some odd years of running in any direction he chose, people still revere that initial burst of genius.

Maybe you don’t need to know this (sorry, I’m a librarian), but there are at least 983 books on Dylan.  Look it up.  Why?  Why do we want to know?  What does it tell us about ourselves if we ask, much less answer, this question?  

I come not to praise or bury Dylan, but to blabber on about his musical descendants.  There are so many, and some who don’t even know they are.  James McMurtry may or may not disagree about his lineage (his literal father is Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove, etc.) and it’s really pointless in his case, because he shines in his own right, with his own light.

I’ve seen JM play several times now.  He uses a set list, and screams from the crowd requesting other songs are told “people know what they wanna hear, but no one knows what they’re gonna hear”.  He doesn’t so much sing as sneer the songs; like Dylan, he doesn’t have a singer’s voice (think “vocalist”).  But he criticizes singers who don’t enunciate properly.  He’s cantankerous as hell, and as opinionated as any Texan (see the track Max’s Theorem on Live in Aught Three).  Yet he knows what singling live is about (“I used ta think I was an artist...turns out I’m a beer salesman!”) and encourages people to dance at his shows.  And it’s hard not to.

And so.  Here we are at Lights of Cheyenne.  Not at all danceable, but the details in this song are exquisite:

Now take a crumpled up

soft pack and give it a shake

Out by the dumpster on a cigarette break

The imagery is just as amazing.  

Look off down the highway

at the glittering lights

Like windshield glass

on the shoulder tonight

As the diesels come

grinding on up from the plains

All bunched up like pearls on a string

Later, we hear poetry as accusation:

You stand in the sky with

your feet on the ground

True songwriting artistry can make you not only see what the creator sees, but feel what they feel.  It’s an amazing gift really.  If you, the reader/listener, need more proof, look at “Ruby and Carlos”, another vignette of a complicated relationship between Ruby (a veterinarian), and Carlos, a drummer (perhaps with chemical poisoning, if not PTSD, from the Gulf War).  She’s older, he’s sadder.  Neither can guess how it will turn out:

“You can't unclench your teeth

To howl the way you should”

James knows how to howl.  Dylan taught them all what howling was.  

Gary Beatrice

Guy Clark, Texas 1947

Initially I thought I'd send a Merle Haggard song but this Guy Clark song better captures my love for classic country music. This song has an infectious melody and is exquisitely sung, but it's all about the remarkable songwriting. Guy wonderfully captures the singer's innocence and youthful excitement, but more amazingly he manages to fully create a whole cast of villagers with simple throw-away lines around a simple event that must have seemed like a miracle in Texas circa 1947.

Gary Scudder

Drive-By Truckers, Lookout Mountain

Like way too many of the songs that I'll be contributing to this discussion, I learned about this song, and this band, from friends and loved ones who have a much broader and more sophisticated sense of music than I have.  If not for folks like my ex-wife Brenda or Dave Kelley or Gary Beatrice or Dave Wallace or Jack Schultz or Bob Craigmile or Mike Kelly (crap, almost everyone who is participating on this blog series) I'd still be listening to almost nothing but Neil Young.  Thank you for taking pity on me.  Over way too many beers in way too many bars I've initiated discussions over what band is the greatest American band.  The stipulations are that 1) they have to be an American band, and 2) that they have to sing important songs about the American condition.  After years of thought I've reduced my list to only two possibilities: Uncle Tupelo or the Drive-By Truckers. In the end I side with the Drive-By Truckers, partially because they're still out there somewhere performing as a band, and because they're just dark enough and angry enough to match my sensibilities.  I saw them last summer at Higher Ground here in Burlington for a whopping $20, and they blew the roof off the place as well as finishing the job of making me deaf.  I love this song, not only because it has a great guitar riff, but also because it, like so many of their songs, gets at the angry dark confusion at the heart of so much of the American experience.

Dave Kelley

Johnny Cash, You Are My Sunshine

     So my first pick is an unusual one and not representative of my future selections.  I have been thinking about simplicity lately (being a simpleton myself.)  While complexity, nuance, cleverness, and multiple layers of meaning are obviously all fantastic qualities in art and in life, there is also much to be said for simplicity.  In many ways, conveying something meaningful in a simple and elemental way is the hardest thing to do.  Whatever one might think of The Beatles, I find more quality in "I Saw Her Standing There", than in the entire Sergeant Peppers record.

     Now to my unusual first selection  (It is by no means #1 on my list)  "You Are My Sunshine."  I find both the lyrics and the melody to be very simple and yet very beautiful.  While I believe it was written as a romantic love song, I find that it is most often associated with the love of a child.  That is certainly how I experienced it as a child.  Both my mother and my grandmother sang it to me as a child.  I sang it to my niece and nephew when they were very little on the few occasions I was tasked with putting them to sleep.  When I am senile and drooling on myself (an event predicted for next February), I will probably not be able to recall very many of my future song selections.  "You Are My Sunshine"?  That I will remember.

     Therefore in memory of a great childhood and in an ode to beautiful simplicity, I make "You Are My Sunshine" my first selection. 

Jack Schultz

Lonnie Mack, Further On Down the Road

Shamelessly taking the easy route, I attempt to pay homage to a music icon we lost this week.  I am not speaking of Prince, but of the great Lonnie Mack.  He was a guitar player’s guitar player, revered by musicians but perhaps underappreciated by the public at large.  Ironically, his dying on the same day as Prince is keeping his legacy relegated to the back pages of public consciousness.
 

He brought the Flying V guitar to prominence in the early ‘60s, hitting it relatively big with instrumentals Memphis and Wham.  He did some work as a studio musician, including playing bass on Morrison Hotel by the Doors.  He was the one riffing on Roadhouse Blues.  He drifted back into obscurity during the ‘70s before experiencing a renaissance in the mid-‘80s, thanks to the support of Stevie Ray Vaughan.  SRV cited Mack has his biggest influence.  Many others, including Neil Young, Dicky Betts, and Rick Derringer have cited Mack as a big influence.

During the early 80’s, Mack was living in Aurora, Indiana and playing most weekends at a dive called The Sunnyside Inn.  Gary Scudder and I had the good fortune to enjoy Mack’s performances multiple times in an unusually intimate setting.  Gary worked summers at the local box factory, while I was at the local glass factory.  Many a night we convened after work at Sunnyside, long neck beer in hand, unencumbered by the attention of any local females. 

The clip I’m including is of Mack, Albert Collins, and Roy Buchanan at Carnegie Hall pounding out Taj Mahal’s Further on Down the Road.  My favorite Mack song is Cincinnati Jail, about an incident where Mack was shot and arrested in the Queen City.  I actually wrote the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago about how to get Mack elected.  I received a nicely worked form letter on the process, but did not act on it.  At the end of the day, I haven’t decided if Halls of Fame are intensely relevant or irrelevant.  

Mike Kelly

The National, Start a War

Knowing that there are still bands out there who can sing my life back to me is the finest surprising pleasure of my Dockers-wearing descent into middle age.  While it was never hard to find someone who could echo the urgency of 17 or the trepidation of 22, I thought that the blunted nuance of adult life wasn't something that translated to a song.  The National showed me how I was wrong. In "Start a War", the muted, but present passion doesn't need to be screamed or dramatized, but instead the subtleties of lines like "You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now" speak to the slow, but dramatic changes that happen over time as well as the unsexy ways people make shit work. 

Miranda Tavares

Frank Turner, Love, Ire & Song

I had my first installment pretty much written in my head, a nice, solid, classic song with a nice, solid, classic theme.  But then I binge-watched 2 weeks worth of The Daily Show and had to call an audible. My pick of the week is Frank Turner's "Love, Ire & Song." It depicts the conflict between the pull of idealism and the pull of cynicism, each of which is not just a philosophical idea but has become, I would argue, a thought process necessary to survival. Frank writes about being older and looking back on younger days. He insinuates the young are stupid in their black and white thinking, labeling everything right or wrong, good or evil, being unwilling to compromise. Not only that, but the young believe (also stupidly) that they can change the world, right the wrongs and rid the evil. As one gets older, experiences teach that this is impossible. But he realizes that losing the hope that one has as a young idealist takes quite a bit of joy out of life. His chorus sums it up:

Oh, but once we were young, and we were crass enough to care
But I guess you live and learn, we won't make that mistake again, no
Oh, but surely just for one day, we could fight and we could win
And if only for a little while, we could insist on the impossible

It's hard to be an activist today. Change is hard to come by, and in fighting for change you lose more than you win. And when you do win, you are inevitable greeted by hate. The "smart", practical people take a good look at the odds and give up. But against all odds there remain people who never grew up, never lost that idealism, and truly believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that change is possible. I give heartfelt thanks to those people. And I give heartfelt thanks to Frank Turner for writing this song that helps keep my mind open and my hope alive. 

Nate Bell

Gangstagrass, Two Yards and You Can Go Home Again

Gangstagrass is a wonderful little band that captured many people's attention by authoring the theme song to Justified.  As a mash-up of urban "gangsta" hip hop and bluegrass/traditional, it seems long overdue to appeal to the shared struggles and common themes of 2 our country's major groups of poor underclass:  urban African Americans and rural Appalachian poor.  It helps that the driving force behind the traditional folk element is Rench, a strong proponent and advocate-songwriter in the style of early labor and economic freedom songs

That said, much of their music is just lyrical, catchy and fun.  But frequently, the group touches on very strong shared cords of economic hardship and desperation.

2 songs in point/counterpoint:

2 Yards describes perfectly and infectiously the desperation of the dispossessed and the anger and powerlessness of poor folks everywhere---one that results in a disturbingly catchy little ditty about a bank robbery

"laid off one year today/they won't take my resume, so kiss my a$$ MFer, you're gonna pay"

The chorus refers to the nihilistic conclusion that the singers will either become rich from their heist and

"have a big backyard, sippin' on champagne, or a gravel yard and a number for my name"--all vocalized in almost gleeful anger.  Desperate acts from desperate poor men...

The Counterpoint song is "You Can Never Go Home Again".

Here Gangstagrass describes the life of an ex-convict.  It is sorrowful and penitent, offering no excuses for the unnamed prior misdeeds.  Nonetheless, it is exquisitely painful and mournful as it describes the many after shocks post-prison, from family disintegration, impossibility of finding work, friends dead and passed, opportunities missed and finally, what is sung as almost an inevitable conclusion---suicide.  This song really opens one's mind and speaks to the very real consequences faced even by those who have "done their time", and how their time is never served.  Something to keep very much in the forefront of one's mind when thinking about prison sentences for victimless crimes, property crimes, and prison times for drug possession and the ilk.

Dave Mills

Over the Rhine, Ohio

I discovered the band Over The Rhine when I was a sophomore in college, in Ohio. They were friends of friends, and they often played a hole in the wall bar/laundromat in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone's. If you entered the bar, you paid a cover charge. But if you entered through the laundromat, there was no cover; you just had to do your laundry. As a perpetually underfunded college student, this was an attractive scenario. I was going to pay to do laundry anyway (eventually), and at Sudsy's there was good music thrown in for free. So we sat on the dryers and listened to Over The Rhine play. They were a new band and eager to develop fans, so they would often stay for hours after a show, talking philosophy or whatever. That connection made the music more real and personal for all of us. Some years after those days in Sudsy's, Karin Bergquist, the vocalist, and Linford Detwiler, the songwriter/pianist/bassist got married. They continue today as romantic and musical partners, and have built a music studio and performance venue on a farm in the middle on nowhere down by the Ohio River. Their music has gotten deeper and richer over the years. I could have chosen any number of their songs to share here ("All I Need Is Everything," "Spark," and "All My Favorite People are Broken" come to mind), but I chose "Ohio" because it's where I first discovered their music, it's where I spent my first 20 years of marriage and college teaching, and it's where I attended probably 20-25 of Over The Rhine's concerts. It's a minimalist song -- only Karin's voice and Linford's piano -- so it highlights her vocal talents and his songwriting. Other songs in their deep catalogue draw in a wide range of highly talented musicians to amplify what Karin and Linford have to offer.

Ali G

It's been a pretty sad day, which I'll talk about later when I'm feeling a little less bruised.  In the meantime I guess I need to think about the silly, and thus the transcendent.  Here's a picture of Ali G, the waiter at the Africa House Hotel in Zanzibar who gave us so much joy.  I can't wait to see him again.

Here he is posing at the fashion show that was running at the hotel.  He went out of his way to reserve front row seats for some of our students, who foolishly managed to not show up.  Life is too fleeting to miss anything.

My Year With Proust - Day 116

   "It was about this period that Bloch overthrew my conception of the world and opened for me fresh possibilities of  happiness (which, as it happened, were to change later on into possibilities of suffering), by assuring me that, contrary to all that I had believed at the time of my walks along the Meseglise way, women never asked for anything better than to make love.  he added to this service a second, the value of which I was not to appreciate until much later: it was he who took me for the first time into a house of assignation.  He had indeed told me that there were any number of pretty women whom one might enjoy.  But I could see them only in a vague outline for which those houses were to enable me to substitute actual human features.  So that if I owed to Bloch - for his 'good tidings' that happiness and the enjoyment of beauty were not inaccessible things that we have made a meaningless sacrifice in renouncing forever - a debt of gratitude of the same kind as that we owe to an optimistic physician or philosopher who has given us reason to hope for longevity in this world and not to be entirely cut off from it when we shall have passed into another, the houses of assignation which I frequented some years later - by furnishing me with samples of happiness, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former beauties, that present indeed divine, the only one that we cannot bestow upon ourselves, before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale, and which we can seek from reality alone: an individual charm - deserved to be ranked by me with those other benefactors more recent in origin but of comparable utility (before finding which we used to imagine without any warmth the seductive charms of Mantegna, of Wagner, of Siena, by studying other painters, hear of other composers, visiting other cities): namely illustrated editions of the Old Masters, symphony concerts, and guidebooks to historic towns."

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, pp. 619-620

In this passage, full of both more earthly and more profound mysteries, Proust reflects upon Bloch sharing with him some of the more philosophical and more tangible secrets of women.  Proust makes his first visit to a brothel, which does sound much less tawdry when it's referred to as a "house of assignation."  First off, two bits of wisdom shared with me decades ago by two friends: "I can only imagine how much more enjoyable high school would have been if I had known then that girls actually wanted sex as much as I did" and "The only honest relationship that a man will ever have with a woman is the one he has with a prostitute."  Granted, Hoosiers can't express themselves as eloquently as French geniuses, but I suspect that on some level they're talking about the same thing.

However, Proust, as is his wont, is taking this concept to a whole different dimension.  First off, the obvious disclaimers.  This is clearly a product of a very different age, which is not the same as saying it should be dismissed; rather, we just need to take that into account when providing the context for understanding Proust's universe.  Yes, it brings up issues related to gender and power relationships, and one wonders how misogynistic Proust was, especially in regard to his age.  This passage certainly reeks of privilege, which I guess means that Proust could run for president of the US today.  Having said all of that, I also think Proust is touching upon the mythic nature of sex, almost the sexual act as initiation.  In this case it might be argued that it is an initiation into adult, even if it is a male-dominated and privileged adulthood, but it is crossing a boundary none the less.  However, I think he is also talking about an initiation into beauty.  He proposes that the houses of assignation "by furnishing me with samples of happiness, by allowing me to add to the beauty of women that element which we are powerless to invent, which is something more than a mere summary of former beauties . . . before which all the logical creations of our intellect pale." So, is sex actually that transformative that is acts as almost a liminal space? There is a reason why the French refer to the orgasm as the petit mort, and what could be more of an initiation than that?

More Gravy Than the Grave

There were so many amazing days on the recent trip to Zanzibar - and as I get a little distance from the journey itself it seems more and more unreal.  If I were pressed to pick a best day I might go with our first day in Pemba.  We opened the day with an extraordinary flight on tiny planes from Dar Es Salaam, crossing over Zanzibar itself, and landing in Pemba.  After getting settled in the Seaview Motel we brought the students to a preserve that housed seven thousand flying foxes - and then brought them to a spirit possession featuring a powerful Waganga.  As I've discussed, the origins of this trip go back to me reading about traditional animistic practices which seemed startlingly familiar to voodoo (one of Steve's areas of expertise), except that in this case the shamans are Islamic.  Once I shared this information with Steve, and pestered him a bit, the trip took shape very quickly.  The ceremony itself was fascinating, although I'm sure Steve understood it on a much deeper level than I did.  The students seemed impressed, and since it was carried out in the afternoon and not in the evening, they were not completely freaked out.  I have to admit that at one point in the ceremony, when a student asked me my opinion, I murmured that there was more gravy than the grave about the ceremony (I'm not certain if that got the Dickens reference or not).  However, even if you've commodified the experience it is still a fit subject for study.  Having said all that, as we were leaving the waganga said something very interesting to me, which I might share someday.

Steve telling the crowd how lucky they are to have such a powerful waganga.  He could not have been happier, and I'd hate to predict how many more ceremonies he's going to experience on future trips to Pemba.

The musicians preparing for the ceremony.  The shot is a little out of focus, but I like it simply because it shows that there is no place or no time when cell phone use is not present.

The waganga dancing and leaving this world.  It was impossible to sit there and not immediately revert to the role that music and dance had played at the Hindu temple a couple days earlier.

The students were more worried about the chicken than their immortal souls, which is in itself very revealing.

The offering which was a central part of the ceremony.

As the experience progressed more and more people were inhabited by spirits, with one of most active being a woman at times dominated the ceremony, and who we later learned was the wife of the waganga.

Many people played a role in the ceremony itself, even if they were not possessed.

At one point the waganga began to speak in tongues and went from student to student shaking hands and offering blessings.

At various times the spirits dove face first into the offering plate.

At the end there was an interesting exchange where the spirits didn't want to leave and asked for better offerings.

At the end the waganga allowed the students to enter his personal shrine, which was inside of a massive baobab tree.  For some reason he would not allow me in, allegedly because of time constraints and the schedule - which is an amazing comment in East Africa.

I mainly want to know what she was thinking.