My Years With Proust - Day 737

   I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old arch-bishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eighty-three years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall. And I was terrified by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far.  But at least, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the results were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure - for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days - in the dimension of Time.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1106-1107

Wow, I can't believe that I've reached the end, if it is the end, of my clumsy, ill-considered commentary on Remembrance of Things Past.  When I began this two years ago I didn't really think that I'd bang away for seven-hundred thirty-seven posts, although, considering that Proust's work of over three-thousand pages I should I figured that it would a challenge.  I don't know if I'm prepared for it to end, if for no other reason than I don't feel qualified to comment on what I think of Proust or how the process has changed me.  I told someone the other day that there are a small number of books that definitively made me a better person: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, the Qur'an and Remembrance of Things Past.  There are books that changed me, such as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or W. Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence or Haruki Mirakakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Charles Dickens's David Copperfield or Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden because I read them at times of my life when I was growing or in a state or change or even a state of crisis, and they helped me understand myself and grow - or even just survive - but I don't think that's the same as definitively making me a better person.   The Qur'an and the Meditations were very obvious choices on that front, but why Proust?  Maybe it's a reflection on the mental discipline that it took to get all the way through the novel and to comment on it every day for two years, but it's certainly more than that.  In the process of accompanying Proust on his journey through the past, I was forced to address my own, and it has often been an uncomfortable experience.  I've had to come face to face with so many of my own failings and the damage that I've done to people I love, but maybe in the process of facing these problems, even if I'm positive I have not been nearly hard enough on myself, I can find ways to address these shortcomings and make it up to them.  I think I've learned that the essential human drive is the quest for beauty, and that every other possible answer to that question is a subset of that greater need.  And to understand and reach that beauty, and I'm not nearly there yet, I had to address a lot of ugliness.  In the end, as Proust reminds us, it is in vain that we linger before the hawthorns.

My Years With Proust - Day 736

   In this vast dimension which I had not known myself to possess, the date on which I had heard the noise of the garden bell at Combray - that far-distant noise which nevertheless was within me - was a point from which I might start to make measurements.  And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it.  A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1106

We've reached the high point of the party, at least for Marcel, and almost the end of the novel.  He understands the adventure and also the challenge that awaits him.  In a moment of pristine clarity he realizes: "And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it."  We've talked before about the Things We Carry (and that is a novel I need to reread) and it sometimes staggering when you consider the weight of them.  They're sort of like the chains that Jacob Marley, and Ebenezer Scrooge, carried around in A Christmas Carol.  When I was engaged to the LBG she would sometimes get puzzled/angry at the complexity of my life and its concomitant relationships, and I could only tell her that I was over fifty and I was decades into a life well and messily lived.  And, unlike Proust, I wasn't even trying to make sense of it, just survive it.

And we've reached the penultimate post on this two year journey.  So, if anyone ever asks you how blog posts it takes to comment on all of Remembrance of Things Past, the Correct Answer is 737. Having said, that, I suspect there will be additional posts as I come to terms with all this, especially when I embark on the great Re-Read.

"One . . . two . . . three . . . seven hundred thirty-seven [crunch]."

My Years With Proust - Day 735

On the contrary, having forgotten the exact manner in which they faded away and wanting to re-learn this, to hear them properly again, I was obliged to block my ears to the conversations which were proceeding between the masked figures all round me, for in order to get nearer to the sound of the bell and to hear it better it was into my own depths that I had to re-descend.  And this could only be because its peal had always been there, inside me, and not this sound only but also, between that distant moment and the present one, unrolled in all its vast length, the whole of that past which I was not aware that I carried about within me.  When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself.  And it is because they contain thus within themselves the hours of the past that human bodies have the power to hurt so terribly those who love them, because they contain the memories of so many joys and desires already effaced for them, but still cruel for the lover who contemplates and prolongs in the dimension of Time the beloved body of which he is jealous, so jealous that he may even wish for its destruction.  For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1105-1106

Proust is still fixated on the bell, the ferruginous sound (see, I did make an effort to use that word more in polite company, or at least the company that reads this blog) of which keeps bringing him back to his childhood. "When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing, from thinking, from being conscious of myself, since that moment from long ago still adhered to me and I could still find it again, could retrace my steps to it merely by descending to a greater depth within myself." It wasn't simply that the bell reminded him of the first time he heard it, and the person that he was then, but that the bell had never stopped sounded and that person in the past had never stopped existing; this is because Marcel himself had never stopped existing and thus the memory had never stopped existing, which meant that that moment had not stopped existing. It's like there are little Russian nesting doll versions of ourselves living inside of ourselves, just as the earlier reptile brain continues to exist within our modern brain.  So all of these different versions of ourselves negotiate with each other as we work through each day to construct a new reality?

"For after death Time withdraws from the body, and the memories, so indifferent, grown so pale, are effaced in her who no longer exists, as they soon will be in the lover whom for a while they continue to torment but in whom before long they will perish, once the desire they owed its inspiration to a living body is no longer there to sustain them." Oddly, this passage reminds me of a conversation that we had today in my Heroines & Heroes class about the nature of being a heroine/hero, and the externality of heroism.  Essentially, if no one saw you carrying out a heroic act were you actually a hero, and thus your heroism died with you.  I favored a more internal sense of a heroic (read moment of sacrifice/selflessness) deed, but I granted that in a godless universe no one would know your heroism and thus it would die with you.  With that in mind, what happens to the wealth of memories which you have carefully squirreled away over the years if there is no afterlife?  Do they simply disappear.  Marcus Aurelius suggested that soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you.  What a pity that those memories are gone, unless you, like Proust, record them in detail in your own version of Remembrance of Things Past or your own blog.  It's not as if you can download them all, at least yet.

Blending Totally and Effortlessly

I have a million things to do, so, what am I do?  Naturally, I'm culling through thousands of student pictures from the recent trip to Zanzibar.  I started for a perfectly legitimate, and fairly innocent, reason: collecting pictures to use in the preparation for next year's poster (we'll be out pitching the trip this week) and also to share them with parents on the Facebook page (students always mean to share pictures with their parents, they just never quite do so). Here's a picture one of the student sent along from the traditional bullfight on Pemba.  Everyone else was sitting on a raised platform that had been built for the crew, and, of course, I was the one contrary one who hung around on the ground, joined the crowd, and talked to folks.  There's a metaphor here somewhere.

I'm the one up front.

My Years With Proust - Day 734

   This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasise as strongly as possible in my work.  And at this very moment, in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents' footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal - resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill - of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past.  And as I cast my mind over all the events which were ranged in an unbroken series between the moment of my childhood when I had first heard its sound and the Guermantes party, I was terrified to think that it was indeed this same bell which rang within me and that nothing that I could do would alter its jangling notes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 1105

Proust has his own style, obviously.  And who else has Proust's style? When I read John Irving or Rohinton Mistry or J.K. Rowling I always hearken back to Dickens (as much as everybody tries to tie Rowling to Tolkien I think Dickens is the better fit).  I guess this popped into my head when I read this because it initially sounded very Dickensian.  But again, who has Proust's style?  Sometimes you'll hear books described as having a somewhat Proustian scope or attention to detail or level of psychological exploration, but I don't know if I can think of anyone whose writing style itself was compared to Proust's. Anyway, I guess I thought of Dickens because of the use of the word ferruginous, which just seems appropriately Dickensian [note to self: use the word ferruginous more in polite company].

In this passage Proust is once again taking us back to the first pages of the novel and those earliest childhood memories.  I joked earlier that I was not going to follow the example of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and immediately reread Remembrance of Things Past after finishing it, but I'm now rethinking that decision.  I promised that I would hold off because I have so many other projects I need to tackle, but whenever Proust includes one of these references to his childhood, and the earliest sections of the book, I feel that I missed so much and need to go back.  Obviously, there are worlds within worlds in this novel.  It would also be nice to go back freed of the need to write notes to myself throughout the entire novel, and just immerse myself in it for the joy of reading (not that it wasn't lovely the first time through).  That said, of course I'd end up writing all over it again and I reconsidered things.  Oh, and speaking of Breyer, I feel that as a culture celebrate idiocy - and our president is an unlettered moron - the age in which public officials were actually undeniable literate scholars is coming to an end.  I feel so much of my career has been a long fight against the dying of the intellectual light (hence we read the epics in my class while my much cooler colleagues read graphic novels) but retreating into the house I'm thinking of buying in Zanzibar and simply reading and writing sounds better with each passing day.

Discography Year Two - Week 21

At the end of The Big Chill, a pleasant but pretty dramatically overrated film, it is revealed that Nick and Chloe (Alex's girlfriend) are going to stay in the house to do some work.  One of the characters (sorry, I can't remember which one) says, "There's a certain symmetry to that."  This is my odd way of announcing that Kevin Andrews is joining the Irrational League, the fantasy baseball league that we've been running for over twenty-five years (truthfully, I don't know if any of us know exactly when we started it).  We've suffered a loss, and GB is irreplaceable, but we are all blessed to have such an extraordinary community of great friends to lean on, but also to spend time with and enjoy. KA, like GB, is a great soul who, like all Right Thinking Individuals, loves baseball and music.  There's a certain symmetry to that. [Oh, and I told Kevin that when we fly into the Natti for the draft to mention mention fucking scrapple]

* * * * * THEME WEEK ANNOUNCEMENT * * * * *

From the Excellent Alice Neiley

For Week 23

Hello Music Enthusiasts! 

Because I know artistic appreciation runs through all our veins, I likely don't have to explain, or even express, the value of good T.V. and movies. Contrary to some of my writing/intellectual colleagues, I LOVE television and film, especially when it's good, but even sometimes when it's 'bad', whatever that really means. Like any piece of art, however, the quality of a good movie scene or television scene is complex. There's the acting, the script, the cinematography and...of course...there's the soundtrack--that specific, PERFECT song chosen to highlight a specific emotional moment. 

A few months ago, I discovered one of my favorite shows (either good or 'bad', depending on your affinity for nostalgia) was on Netflix: The Wonder Years. Back when I was in college and needed some warm and fuzzy TV support, it wasn't even on DVD, and in desperation I bought an illegal bootleg copy of entire series. Anyway, I digress. The Wonder Years appearing on Netflix was really exciting. Until it wasn't. 

Unfortunately, probably due to copyright issues, the soundtrack on Netflix is not the original! FOR SHAME. Without the original soundtrack, Netflix shouldn't have agreed to air the show. Now, the songs chosen to replace the original ones are objectively just fine, but once you know the perfection of the initial choices, those songs that highlight specific emotional moments the way no others can, anything else is a little nauseating...which brings me to the theme for Week 23. 

Choose a song that, without which, a movie or television scene would have been RUINED (or at least completely different). Choose a song that made a TV or film scene, made it exact in its truth, its humanness, its excitement...whatever. Then...knock yourselves out with the commentary. 

I already know which show holds the song (and scene) I'm choosing...take a wild guess. ;)

[editor's note: Cyndi Brandenburg is responsible for choosing the next theme week]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Dave Wallace

Ride - Leave Them All Behind

 I've previously mentioned my affection for the shoegaze movement that came out of England in the early '90s, and one of my favorite shoegaze bands was Ride, who put out a couple of excellent albums around that time.  As with many bands from back then, they broke up after a brief period of modest success.  However, they reunited a few years ago and, last year, they put out a new album which is surprisingly good.  I've really been enjoying it, and I considered choosing a song from that album for my blog entry.  However, I wound up going with Leave Them All Behind, the lead track on their second album, and my favorite song by them.

Kevin Andrews

Ricky Lee Jones released Girl at Her Volcano, her third album — actually an EP with eight songs, in 1983. It’s mostly left-over studio tracks from previous sessions, some live songs and a few new studio tracks, most of these are covers. This was a transitional time for her after the success of her first two albums and the requisite touring and before moving to Paris to write new material.

There are some real gems here if Ricky is your thing, she’s not for everybody. She covers The Drifters Under the Boardwalk, and June Christie’s Something Cool which, to me, is a fascinating peek into the popular jazz song culture of the late 1950’s. The entire album is on the YouTube and is worth your time.

Given last week’s submission of Miles Davis’s My Funny Valentine and that Valentine’s Day is just a few weeks away, here is my favorite version from Girl at Her Volcano.

Cyndi Brandenburg

I know it has been a while since I contributed to the blog, and since for some reason I decided to binge-listen to Mazzy Star all morning, I am offering up this link to a live performance of Fade Into You from 1994.  I had never seen it before, which is weird, because I pretty much love everything about her and everything about that song. The cut-aways to all the other people around in the crowd are rather annoying, but when it's just her, it's excellent, and it sounds amazing either way. I'm excited to hear about the upcoming theme week.  It's good to remember that even when you are having a long day and the world seems bleak, there is always something more to look forward to.

Dave Mills

Cyndi, you've been binge-listening to Mazzy Star all morning? Did Bill bring back more edibles from Colorado, or what?

Whatever the motivation, Cyndi's contribution of her binge-listening content today inspires me to do the same, since it's been a very long while since I've contributed and I've got to kick-start the habit again somehow.

This afternoon, I've been listening to David + David's 1986 album, Boomtown. My college roommate and I found a cassette of this album in a used music shop in 1989. It caught our eyes because we were both named David. People referred to us as Dave Squared. We insisted on Dave to the Second Power, as that just sounds better. Anyway, we bought the album without knowing anything about it other than the obvious name connection. Luckily enough, the music was actually good. David + David were David Baerwalds and David Ricketts, two LA studio musicians who came together for this album, which is, to date, their only output. There were rumors of a 30-year reunion album in 2016, but so far, I haven't seen anything. But, happily, I was rummaging through the LP shelves at Resource on Pine Street a few weeks back, and there was Boomtown in gloriously unscratched vinyl. What more could you want for $1? I hadn't listened to the album for years, the cassette being long gone. So I've had the LP cranked this afternoon, fondly revisiting my sophomore year of college. Here's a track that I had totally forgotten, but which came back instantly as one of the coolest tracks on the album. Give a listen:

Alice Neiley

My post is late this week, too! I had entirely something else in mind yesterday, and had planned to write it up when I got home last night, but on my drive, I listened to an episode of the Malcolm Gladwell podcast, Revisionist History. It was Episode 6 from Season 2, about the 'invisible emotional line' between people who listen to country music and people who listen to rock music. To be honest, other than interviews with the amazing country music writer Bobby Braddock, I thought Gladwell's whole theory was rather bogus and entirely unsubstantiated, but I'll leave that to you all to decide for yourselves if you choose to listen to it. However, there was one line I LOVED, that I think rings really true about what makes a sad song sad enough to induce tears. Gladwell said: 'it's where heartbreak and specificity meet.' Oh my, what an accurate line. He's only talking in terms of lyrics, which is part of my disagreement with his theory --  some songs are entirely tear-inducing simply by the specificity of an instrumental solo (french horn in Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now;), or the timbre of someone's voice (Randy Newman's in 'Losing You').

With that in mind, my song choice this week is "Conversations with a Ghost" by Ellis Paul -- the version where Patty Griffin duets with him. It embodies Gladwell's line no matter which way you slice it, or...perhaps more accurately...when you slice the line both ways. The lyrics are devastatingly specific -- "Have you been to the races?/Did you take my mother/Is your sister in braces?" -- and there's Ellis Paul's breathy, pebbly voice, and then Patty Griffin's voice enters over the top like a gorgeous, sharp-winged, bird. I mean...can you get any better? Or sadder? I'm crying right now. Where heartbreak and specificity meet, indeed. Sigh. 

Phillip Seiler

Everything But the Girl

Only Living Boy in New York

If you are going to do a cover and you choose one of the most influential acts in music, you had better bring it. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt absolutely do in this luscious cover of Simon and Garfunkel's Only Living Boy in New York. Paul Simon's unsubtle but earnest song to his partner Garfunkel has always struck me as one of the more beautiful pieces of music about feeling alone and isolated. Tracey and Ben do just enough to make this song their own without spoiling its simple message and melody. I know we go back and forth on the value of music videos on this blog but in this case, I think they again do a masterful piece of design by providing just enough visual support to amplify the song without distracting from it. "Here I am" we scream out to the universe but so often that is just the message in our head, never spoken aloud, and what we actually say to the world may be nothing at all. 

"I get the news I need on the weather report

I can gather all the news I need on the weather report"

The rest really is just noise, isn't it.

Kathy Seiler

Citizen Cope ft. Carlos Santana – Sideways

I’m a fan of collaborations and Carlos Santana has done some good ones. This song is a collaboration between Citizen Cope and Santana. I like some of Cope’s music, but not all of it. He’s got a blues edge but I’m not quite sure how to categorize his music, although iTunes calls him “Rock.”  He’s come to perform locally but I never felt quite strongly enough to go see him in concert. I get a little annoyed at slurred words in songs, and he’s hard to understand at times. But I like this particular song a lot, particularly when I’m in need of some “chill” music after a long week.

Dave Kelley

"Lover's Spat"  Lydia Loveless

"So don't go running around naked by the side of the road

Honey, you look ridiculous

with that cut on your eye

and your dick hanging out."

This verse alone justifies the inclusion of "Lover's Spat" on the blog IMHO.  It is also just a fantastic tune by one of my current favorite Americana artists.  Loveless hails from Ohio's own capital Columbus.  Despite that and the fact that she used to regularly open for the Drive By Truckers, I have never seen her live.  Damn, I need to fix that in 2018.  Her first album was produced by the great Cincinnati musician David Rhodes Brown who currently plays in Nate and Miranda's favorite band 500 miles to Memphis.  One critic has said that her music is marked by its "utter lack of bullshit".  I would totally agree.  She weds country, Americana, and rock with a punk sensibility.  If you are not familiar with her, I encourage you to check her out.

Gary Scudder

The Cranberries, Sunday

For some reason that passing of Dolores O'Riordan hit me really hard.  It made me go back and listen to a lot of early Cranberries, and I'd forgotten how much I loved their first couple albums.  They, especially Everybody Else Is Doing It, Why Can't We?, are the soundtrack of a particularly insane part of my life.  I can remember almost wearing out the tape of the album on a road trip from Atlanta to Memphis (which DK remembers all too well).  Few songs express the helpless/hopeless nature of love better than Sunday or Linger.

My Years With Proust - Day 733

Other errors, though of a more serious kind, I might continue to commit, placing features, for instance, as we all do, upon the fact of a woman seen in the street, when instead of nose, cheeks and chins there ought to be merely an empty space with nothing more upon it than a flickering reflection of our desires.  But at least, even if I had not the leisure to prepare - and here was a much more important matter - the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face, if only because of the different eyes which look at it and the different meanings which they read into its features, not to mention, for the same eyes, the different emotions of hope and fear or on the contrary love and habit which for thirty years can conceal the changes brought about by age, and even if I did not attempt - though my love-affair with Albertine was sufficient proof to me that any other kind of representation must be artificial and untruthful - to represent some of my characters as existing not outside but within ourselves, where their slightest action can bring fatal disturbances in its train, and to vary also the light of the moral sky which illumines them in accordance with the variations in pressure in our own sensibility (for an object which was so small beneath the clear sky of our certainty can be suddenly magnified many times over on the appearance of a tiny cloud of danger) - if, in my attempt to transcribe a universe which had to be totally redrawn, I could not convey these changes and many others, the needfulness of which, if one is to depict reality, has been made manifest in the course of my narrative, at least I should not fail to portray man, in this universe as endowed with the length not of his body but of his years and as obliged - a task more and more enormous and in the end too great for his strength - to drag them with him wherever he goes.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1103-1104

There is a reason why someone can make reference to Proustian detail and an educated person will nod knowingly (and not simply that academic nod we learn in graduate school where you nod in a subtle but convincing fashion even though you have no idea what they're talking about).  Even if Proust was not able to prepare "the hundred different masks which ought properly to be attached to a single face" he did strive to dig deeper with his characters.  Obviously, this is a tremendous, and necessary, challenge for any writer, because when you're writing there are characters in your work who are clearly just plot points.  Granted, Dr. Watson was more than simply a plot point in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but in the end his role was often just to just record events and to, more importantly, ask Holmes how he figured things out.  Now, the beauty of the Sherlock Holmes stories is that Watson does have a backstory and he's not simply that guy who asked his brilliant friend to explain it once more again and a bit more slowly.  Now, the irony of this, ans this is a point I've made several times, is that I still think Albertine, Marcel's greatest foil, remains maddeningly out of focus in the novel.  Maybe if we understood her personal motives better we'd find her less interesting, and, knowing human nature, Marcel would have found her less interesting.

My Years With Proust - Day 732

   In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier, and like him too, before I died, I had something to write.  But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person.  My task was long.  By day, the most I could hope for was to try to sleep.  If I worked, it would be only at night.  But I should need many nights, a hundred perhaps, or even a thousand. And I should live in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of my destiny might not prove less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, whether in the morning, when I broke off my story, he would consent to a further reprieve and permit me to resume my narrative the following evening.  Not that I had the slightest pretension to be writing a new version, in any way, of the Thousand and One Nights, or of that other book written by night, Saint-Simon's Memoirs, or of any of those books which I had loved with a child's simplicity and to which I had been so superstitiously attached as later to my loves, so that I could not imagine without horror any work which should be unlike them.  But - as Elstir had found with Chardin - you can make a new version of what you love only by first renouncing it.  So my book, though it might be as long as the Thousand and One Nights, would be entirely different.  True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them. And only if you faithfully follow this truth will you sometimes find that you have stumbled again upon what you renounced, find that, by forgetting these works themselves, you have written the Thousand and One Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age.  But for me was there still time?  Was it not too late?

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1101-1102

"In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier, and like him too, before I died, I had something to write.  But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person.  My task was long.  By day, the most I could hope for was to try to sleep.  If I worked, it would be only at night."

Once again, I'm interested in Proust's reference to the Thousand and One Nights, and not simply because I'm using it for my Heroines & Heroes class this semester.  I am planning on bringing in my well-marked copy of Remembrance of Things Past to read this section in class on Tuesday (anything to get more Proust in the curriculum).  Now that I've finished, and before the next big reread - and after the stupid epics book is finished - I need to do more research on Proust himself, and part of that is learning more about his relationship to the Thousand and One Nights.  In this particular passage I think it's fascinating how he mentions the fact that he only wrote at night, which is certainly part of the Proustian mythology, certainly, as he slept most of the day and wrote most of the night, living a life of isolation as he rushed to finish his novel.  It's appropriate, and more than a bit heartbreaking, that he is essentially comparing himself to Shahrazad, with the spinning of tales keeping him alive for another day.

I was also struck by these words: "True, when you are in love with some particular book, you would like yourself to write something that closely resembles it, but this love of the moment must be sacrificed, you must think not of your own taste but of a truth which far from asking you what your preferences are forbids you to pay attention to them. And only if you faithfully follow this truth will you sometimes find that you have stumbled again upon what you renounced, find that, by forgetting these works themselves, you have written the Thousand and One Nights or the Memoirs of Saint-Simon of another age."  Writers, like any person who loves to read (as all right-thinking individuals do), have their own favorite works and it's doubtless human nature, and a dangerous trap, to try and and rewrite our favorite books.  Of course, as Proust warns us, that would not be our truth, but if we pursue our own truth then we have a chance to produce works that will also resonate and transcend the centuries.

My Years With Proust - Day 731

   The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does.  Not that I loved death, I abhorred it.  But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self.  And, on that day on which I had become a half-dead man, I do not think that it was the accidents characterising this condition - my inability to walk downstairs, to remember a name, a get up from a chair - that had, even by an unconscious train of thought, given rise to this idea of death, this conviction that I was already almost dead, it seems to me rather that the idea had come simultaneously with the symptoms, that inevitably the mind, great mirror that it is, reflected a new reality.  Yet still I did not see how from my present ailments one could pass, without warning of what was to come, to total death.  Then, however, I thought of other people, of the countless people who die every day without the gap between their illness and their death seeming to us extraordinary.  I thought also that it was only because I saw them from within - rather than because I saw them in the deceptive colours of hope - that certain of my ailments, taken singly, did not seem to me to be fatal although I believed that I would soon die, just as those who are most convinced that their hour has come are, nevertheless, easily persuaded that if they are unable to pronounced certain words, this is nothing so serious as asphasia or a stroke, but a symptom merely of a local fatigue of the tongue, or a nervous condition analogous to a stutter, or the lassitude which follows indigestion.

   No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die.  But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to.  We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist.  Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1100-1101

Proust finds himself fascinated with death, not because he loved it, far from it: "The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does.  Not that I loved death, I abhorred it." I think Proust had a much longer, and more stable relationship with death than he ever did with Albertine.  He certainly understood death in a way that he never understood her, and he and death were certainly more faithful to each other. "But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self." I keep coming back, not surprisingly, to the Sherwood Anderson chapter "Death" from Winesburg, Ohio.

It is very rare that I disagree with Proust, but I'm afraid I need to do so this time.  Of course, I have the advantage of history on my side.  He opines, "No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die.  But death is a thing that we must resign ourselves to.  We accept the thought that in ten years we ourselves, in a hundred years our books, will have ceased to exist.  Eternal duration is promised no more to men's works than to men." It's a hundred years down the road and people are still reading (although, sadly, not as many as should be reading) Remembrance of Things Past, and that will still be true a thousand years from now.  Granted, it will be in the rest of the world as we in the US get dumber and dumber by the day, and, who knows, Proust may end up on the wrong side of the burgeoning Trump police state (I wonder if anyone uses the hashtag #policestate on Twitter as much as I do?).

Nairobi Milkshake

As I've often opined, for all the amazing destinations which inspire travel, in the end it's the quiet little moments that make for a memorable trip.  At the end of the recent way too stressful trip to Zanzibar - and side trip to Nairobi - I found myself killing time in the Nairobi Airport.  Since the trip had been so fraught with disasters, both big and small, I made the decision to get to the airport way too early (even by my standards).  I plopped down at the Hardee's, probably drawn by the fact that we don't have Hardee's in Vermont.  Plus, I suspect that after an exhausting trip I was drawn to some comfort food.  Here's a picture of the vanilla milkshake I happily consumed, and to the left is my ancient Kindle which made it through another trip in one piece.  It all made for a nice little quiet moment as I re-calibrated. 

I also had a massive cheeseburger, which had its own dodgy charm.

The college wanted to fly me back directly to Burlington but I told them to just route me back to Dar Es Salaam so that I could surprise Steve and the students at the airport.  We were all happy to see each other, and Steve and I had a pretty embarrassing bromance moment (which the students found oddly touching).  Plus, Steve owed me a birthday Kilimanjaro, and even if I didn't get it at the African House in Stone Town, and instead at the twenty-four hour restaurant in the Dar Es Salaam international airport, it was still a cold Kilimanjaro.

My Years With Proust - Day 730

The best minds of posterity might think what they chose, their opinions mattered to me no more than those of my contemporaries. The truth was that, if I thought of my work and not the letters which I ought to answer, this was not because I attached to these two things, as I had during my years of idleness and later, in that brief interval between the conception of my book and the day when I had had to cling to the banister, very different degrees of importance.  The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming.  But even my work had become for me a tiresome obligation, like a son for a dying mother who still, between her injections and her blood-lettings, has to make the exhausting effort of constantly looking after him.  Perhaps she still loves him, but it is only in the form of a duty too great for her strength that she is aware of her affection.  In me, in the same way, the powers of the writer were no longer equal to the egotistical demands of the work.  Since the day of the staircase, nothing in the world, no happiness, whether it came from friendship or the progress of my book or the hope of fame, reached me save as a sunshine unclouded but so pale that it no longer had the virtue to warm me, to make me live, to instil in me any desire; and yet, faint though it was, it was still too dazzling for my eyes, I closed them and turned to the wall.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1099-1100

I can remember when I was writing my dissertation and how it seemed to be hovering over me the entire time, whether I was actively writing or whether it was just plaguing me like a ghost when I wasn't.  If I were optimistic I guess I could make the argument that even when I wasn't working I was still "working" because the dissertation was percolating along beneath the surface.  Of course, following that same logic I'm actively "working" on the epics book while I'm tinkering with Proust.   Considering how my witless dissertation plagued me I can't imagine how Remembrance of Things Past haunted Proust, not only because of the immense size of it but also because of how crucially important that it was to him (whereas my dissertation was clearly a means to an end to get to a place where I could teach college).  Proust tells us, "The organisation of my memory, of the preoccupations that filled my mind, was indeed linked to my work, but perhaps simply because, while the letters which I received were forgotten a moment later, the idea of my work was inside my head, always the same perpetually in process of becoming." I wonder how anybody survives writing a dissertation - or writing a novel - because everything else, including the very social activities that are keeping you sane and allowing you to work, seem like a major distraction.

My Years With Proust - Day 729

Then suddenly a word in my letter reminded me that Mme Sazerat had lost her son and I wrote to her as well, after which, having sacrificed a real duty to the factitious obligation to appear polite and sympathetic, I fell back exhausted and closed my eyes, not to emerge from a purely vegetal existence before a week had elapsed.  During this time, however, if all my unnecessary duties, to which I was willing to sacrifice my true duty, vanished after a few moments from my head, the idea of the edifice that I had to construct did not leave me for an instant.  Whether it would be a church where little by little a group of faithful would succeed in apprehending verities and discovering harmonies or perhaps even a grand general plan, or whether it would remain, like a druidic monument on a rocky isle, something for ever unfrequented, I could no tell.  But I was resolved to devote to all my strength, which ebbed, as it seemed, reluctantly and as though to leave me time to complete the periphery of my walls and close "the funeral gate." Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world. Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail.  What, in any case, was I hoping to achieve?  In my youth I had had a certain facility, and Bergotte had praised as "admirable" the pages which I wrote while still at school.  But instead of working I had lived a life of idleness, of pleasures and distractions, of ill health and cosseting and eccentricities, and I was embarking upon my labour of construction almost at the point of death, without knowing anything of my trade.  I felt that I no longer possessed the strength to carry out my obligation to people or my duties to my thoughts and my work, still less to satisfy both of these claims.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1098-1099

"Before very long I was able to show a few sketches.  No one understood anything of them." According to the legends associated with Remembrance of Things Past three different publishers turned down the first volume of the work before Proust himself decided to pay for the publication for what we become Swann's Way.  The editors just didn't know what to make of it.  Later Andre Gide, one of the editors, wrote a personal letter to Proust and told him, "For several days I have been unable to put your book down . . . The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the NRF and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life." Even those who "got it," clearly didn't get it.  As Proust tells us, "Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them "with a microscope," when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world." As we've discussed, one of my pet theories is that one of the hallmarks of genius is the individual who comes along and completely changes the rules, not simply because they're trying to do so (although sometimes that is true, Cezanne being a great example), but because they cannot not change the rules.  However, in the process of sharing this new world view the artist almost inevitably asks the audience, and the critics, to think a dramatically different way and to do more, to bring more to the artistic interchange, and thus people either don't get it or they are actively opposed to it.  Clearly, people didn't understand Proust, and in many ways still don't, but that doesn't alter the fact that he changed the world forever.

Sunday Mosque

Here are a couple pictures of what the director of the museum in Pemba called the Sunday Mosque.  They are ruins that stretch back around five hundred years, although I need to do more research on them because things were a bit chaotic at the moment and I didn't have as much time there as I wanted.  The story that the director told was heavy on intrigue, deceit and murder in the local royal family, focusing on two wives and their favorite mosques.  As nearly as I could tell the family was of Persian origin so I asked if that meant that the mosque was initially Shia, but the director said no, which is not implausible because Persia/Iran didn't go officially Shia until around the same time period.  Either way, I need to look into it more.  It was a lovely spot, and I wanted to spend a couple hours there.  When everybody was heading to the bus I asked for a couple minutes to go back.  This allowed me to grab a quick prayer inside the ruins.  When I'm overseas I try and wander into different mosques at various times during the day to pray, but this trip was so packed/stressful that my only other option was at the Istanbul airport both ways.  So, praying at the Sunday Mosque was very meaningful to me.

The outside of the ruins. You can get a sense of the rural nature of Pemba, and the ocean was only a couple hundred yards away.

Again, I needed more time there.  You can clearly see the mihrab, which marks the qiblah (the direction) towards Mecca for prayer, that one finds in every mosque.  The rectangular niches on either side of the mirhab interested me, and the director said it was to hold copies of the Qur'an, which would make sense in a modern mosque, but I somehow think there was more going on there.  We'll build in more time next visit.

My Years With Proust - Day 728

   And something not unlike my grandmother's illness itself happened to me shortly afterwards, when I still had not started to work on my book, in a strange fashion which I should never have anticipated.  I went out to see some friends one evening and was told that I had never looked so well, and however it was that I had not a single grey hair.  But at the end of the visit, coming downstairs, three times I nearly fell.  I had left my home only two hours earlier; but when I got back, I felt that I no longer possessed either memory or the power of thought or strength of existence of any kind.  People could have come to call on me or to proclaim me king, to lay violent hands on me or arrest me, and I should passively have submitted, neither opening my eyes nor uttering a word, like those travellers of whom we read who, crossing the Caspian Sea in a small boat, are so utterly prostrated by seasickness that they offer not even a show of resistance when they are told that they are going to be thrown into the sea.  I had, strictly speaking, no illness, but I felt myself no longer capable of anything, I was in the condition of those old men who one day are in full possession of their faculties and the next, having fractured a thigh or had an attack of indigestion, can only drag on for a while in their bed an existence which has become nothing more than a preparation, longer or shorter, for a now ineluctable death.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1096-1097

Proust has already informed us that he's afraid that he won't have time, that his body won't cooperate, to finish his novel.  Almost on cue he suffers a moment of physical weakness, almost falling down the stairs three times.  Not only does it leave him physically shaken, but also intellectually shaken: "But at the end of the visit, coming downstairs, three times I nearly fell.  I had left my home only two hours earlier; but when I got back, I felt that I no longer possessed either memory or the power of thought or strength of existence of any kind." I'm falling apart physically, and, well, truthfully, I've always been a bit of a wreck considering that I had my first hip surgery at age fourteen.  Still, I plow away, and go to the gym everyday (including today).  My hip will still sometimes give way, causing me to stumble, and my left shoulder hurts so much that I often have trouble reaching over for a cup of coffee.  I'm not ignoring them, I just can't seem to convince the doctors to operate on them (I think they assume I'll just die on one of my overseas adventures and it would be a poor investment of time and effort).  I know that me losing my balance physically is not the same as me losing my intellectual abilities, but it is also true that the former impacts the latter.  I know that I'm not what I was, and what I was wasn't that impressive in the first place.  That said, I suppose we should be thankful for these little physical stumbles because it reminds us to get on with life.

Sylvie, Safe Yourself

The Vikings are playing the Eagles today in the NFC Championship game, so, of course, many of my friends are texting me to offer support and/or early condolences.  Essentially, I'm a national synonym for a long-suffering Vikings fan.  I'll be watching the game today with my son at Smitty's.  Actually, we'll be there insanely early because he's a Patriots fan so we're required to watch both games.  I think he's showing up mainly to look after me after they break my heart again (always in dramatic fashion).  Even when they do something dramatic on the positive side I miss it.  On the way back from Africa last week I was able to stream the NFL playoff games on the plane, but had to get off just before the wild end of the Vikings/Saints game - and only found out about the Stefon Diggs play when Jack Schultz and Dave Kelley texted me as I waited for my luggage to arrive.  A couple years ago when Blair Walsh infamously missed that 19 yard field goal against the Seahawks I had told my son in advance that he would miss it.  He said, "That was weird.  You were so certain."  I said, "It never occurred to me that he would make it."  Ah, life as a Vikings fan.

Here's a picture that my dear friend Andy Burkhardt sent me from last week's game as he and his new daughter Sylvie watched the excitement.  All I can say is this: Sylvie, save yourself.  It's too late for your father or me, but you can have a great life if you make the correct choices, and one of them is following a better team.

My Years With Proust - Day 727

   But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death.  But by dint of repetition this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence.  So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves, for a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death.  For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times. To take a comparatively recent period, had I not clung to Albertine more tenaciously than to my own life?  Could I at the time when I loved her conceive my personality without the continued existence within it of my love for her?  Yet now I no longer loved her, I was no longer the person who loved her but a different person who did not love her, and it was when I had become a new person that I had ceased to love her.  And yet I did not suffer from having become this new person, from no longer loving Albertine, and surely the prospect of one day no longer having a body could not from any point of view seem to me as sad as had then seemed to me that of one day no longer loving Albertine, that prospect which now was a fact and one which left me quite unmoved.  These successive deaths, so feared by the self which they were destined to annihilate, so painless, so unimportant once they were accomplished and the self that feared was no longer there to feel them, had taught me by now that it would be the merest folly to be frightened of death.  Yet it was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indifference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death, under another name, it is true, as a threat not to myself but to my book, since for my book's incubation this life that so many dangers threatened was for a while at least indispensable.  Victor Hugo says:

Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent.

To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 1094-1095

As Proust decides to undertake the writing of his novel he understands that his poor health, and Time itself, may keep him from completing his quest.  He discovers that he is not afraid of death as an end, but rather death as something that would keep him from finishing his novel.  Proust tells us, "But by a strange coincidence, this rational fear of danger was taking shape in my mind at a moment when I had finally become indifferent to the idea of death.  In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the "I" who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death." There are simply things that are far more horrible than death, and for Proust the worst option was to not finish writing Remembrance of Things Past.

When I reread Proust's words I can only think of the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian who, in his writings, had unintentionally insulted the emperor, and was ordered to be castrated.  Since this was a shameful (and obviously extraordinarily painful) punishment it was essentially an unofficial order for him to commit suicide.  Instead, Sima Qian accepted the castration so that he could finish his history of early China (which, by the way, is required reading, not only because it is interesting, but also because he takes time out at the end of every chapter to include some insightful analysis on what it all means).  In explaining his decision Sima Qian wrote, "A man has only one death.  That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather.  It all depends upon the way he uses it . . . It is the nature of every man to love life and hate death, to think of his relatives and look after his wife and children.  Only when a man is moved by higher principles as this not so.  Then there are things that he must do . . . The brave man does not always die for honor, while even the coward may fulfill his duty.  Each takes a different way to exert himself.  Thought I might be weak and cowardly and seek shamefully to prolong my life, yet I know full well the difference between what ought to be followed and what rejected.  How could I bring myself to sink into the shame of ropes and bonds?  If even the lowest slave and scullery maid can bear to commit suicide, why should not one like myself be able to do what has to be done?  But the reason I have not refused to bear these ills and continued to live, dwelling among this filth, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am shamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity."

In addition, Proust writes, "For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times." In COR 110 we talk about identity and how we create, destroy and recreate ourselves many times in the course of a lifetime.  Certainly the women we love come and go, and the death of each love affair brings its own death of the self.  I have trouble believing that in the end the death of my bodily self will be as painful as the death of my marriage. "To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their dejeuner sur l'herbe."

Proust quotes a Victor Hugo's line, "Il faut que l'herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent," which translates out as (and thanks for my excellent friend Sanford Zale for the translation) "grass has to grow and children have to die."  It's from a long poem that Hugo wrote on the banks of the Seine where his nineteen year old daughter had drown.  I was quite taken by the beauty, and sadness, of the poem so I transcribed the first half:

Now that Paris, its cobblestones and marble,
and its mists and its roofs are quite far from my eyes;
now that I am under tree branches,
and can daydream of the beauty of the skies;

Now that I am coming out, pale but victorious,
from the mourning that made my soul dark,
and I feel the peace of great Nature
entering my heart;

Now that, seated at the edge of the waves,
moved by this superb and tranquil horizon,
I can examine deep truths inside me
and look at the flowers that are on the lawn;

Now, O God! that I have the somber calm
to be able from now
to look with eyes on the stone where I know in the shadow
she is sleeping forever;

Now that, touched by these divine sights,
Plains, forests, rocks, little valleys, silvery river,
seeing my smallness and seeing your miracles,
I come back to my senses before their immensity;

I came to you, Lord, father who must be believed in;
peaceful now, I bring you
the pieces of my heart all full of your glory
that you broke;

I came to you, Lord! confessing that you are
good, merciful, indulgent and kind, O living God!
I admit that you alone know what you do.
And that man is nothing but a reed that quivers in the wind;

I say that the tomb that closes upon the dead
opens the heavens;
and that what we here below take for the end
is the beginning;

I acknowledge on my knees that you alone, awesome father,
own the infinite, the real, the absolute;
I acknowledge that it is good, that it is right
that my heart had bled, since god willed it!

I resist no more whatever happens to me
by your will.
The soul from grief to grief, Man from shore to shore,
rolls to eternity.

We never see but a single side of things;
the other plunges into the night of frightening mystery.
Man bears the yoke without knowing why.
All he sees is short, useless and fleeting.

You make loneliness return always
around all his footsteps.
You did not want him to have certainty
nor joy here below!

As soon as he owns something, fate takes it away.
Nothing is given to him, in his speedy days,
for him to make a home and say:
Here is my house, my field and my loved ones!

He must see for a short time all that his eyes see;
he grows old without support.
Since things are so, it's because they must be so;
I admit it, I admit it!

The world is dark, O God! the unchanging harmony
is wrought of tears as well as of songs;
Man Is but an atom in his infinite shadow,
night where the good rise, where the bad fall.

I know you have far more to do
than to feel sorry for us all,
and that a child who dies, to its mother's despair,
is nothing to you!

I know that fruit falls to the wind that shakes it,
that birds lose their feathers and flowers their fragrance,
that Creation is a great wheel
that cannot move without crushing someone;

months, days, billows of the sea, eyes that weep
pass under the sky;
grass must grow and children die;
I know it, O God! . . .

Discography Year Two - Week 20

Week 20 is a very quiet week on the Discography.  I think we're all deeply, although hopefully not irreparably, bruised from the passing of our dear friend and brother Gary Beatrice.  Later, when we're in a better place, we'll arrange some sort of tribute week (in addition to the Kathy Seiler organized GB-themed trip to New Orleans, which will happen).  Yesterday several of us were involved on an email chain discussing the woebegone Cincinnati Reds.  A couple people made the point that it hurt to talk baseball without Gary, who, like all right-thinking individuals, was a devout baseball fan.  Nevertheless, in the midst of the exchange a couple of us proposed that in the great fantasy baseball league in heaven GB was going to get caught running up the bidding and end up with Hal Morris on his team, again, and then get chastised for excessive profanity.  That's how healing comes to us: quietly and randomly, and usually in the presence of friends.  Let's continue to lean on each other, and we'll get through this painful stretch.

And while I'm thinking about it.  KS has proposed a Memorial Day trip to New Orleans.  We'd be arriving on Friday 25 May and staying through Monday 28 May.  I know a couple folks have already said that it conflicts with their schedule so it would be impossible.  What do the rest of you think?

Dave Wallace

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Friends - Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Gary Beatrice, our fellow blogger, died on Monday evening, January 8.  In April 2015, Gary was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, an especially virulent form of the disease, and he was told at that time that the average period of survival from the time of diagnosis was nine months.  It was a bittersweet joy for those of us who knew him and loved him that he lasted much longer than that.  For me, the silver lining in the cloud of the last three years has been all of the time that we got to spend together and enjoy our friendship.  It's easy to take friendship for granted, and Gary's cancer was an unwelcome and vivid reminder to never do so.

I met Gary when I was twelve years old, and he has been one of my best friends since that time.  It's natural, and sometimes misleading, to laud the recently-departed, but I think that I can say with clear eyes that he was a terrific father, a wonderful husband, a fantastic friend, and one of the best people I've ever been lucky enough to know.  He was smart, wise, and compassionate, and you could always count on him whenever you needed support, encouragement, or comfort.  And he was funny ... really funny!  As I get a little farther away from his death, I think the thing that I'll remember the most is his humor and all of the laughter that we shared over the years.  

I send out Will the Circle Be Unbroken to Gary today.  Gary loved authentic bluegrass and country music, and he introduced me to its virtues when I was slow to appreciate it.  The sincerity and genuine nature of this music was also a reflection of Gary, and I will always think of him when I hear songs like this.  Will the Circle Be Unbroken is a song about mourning and death, but this version feels jaunty and upbeat.  It seems about right as I mourn the death of my friend but also celebrate the joy of his life.

Dave Kelley

"Boots of Spanish Leather"  Written by Bob Dylan, covered by Mandolin Orange

So my choice this week is an audible called in honor of my beloved friend Gary Beatrice.  Gary was the biggest Bob Dylan fan that I have ever known, and somewhere he is giving me grief for choosing a cover of this Dylan song instead of the original version.  I fear his wrath, but not enough to change my mind.   :)

This is certainly not Dylan's greatest song and may not even be in his top twenty-five, but I have always found it to be his most melodically beautiful.  It really cries out to be performed as a duet between a man and a woman, and I think Mandolin Orange's version is just amazing.  Two fantastic voices and simple instrumentation with just a violin and an acoustic guitar.  (Oh please Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires, you need to do a version.)

This is a song about love ultimately lost.  In that aspect, it has absolutely nothing to do with GB.  He was fortunate enough to meet and marry the love of his life Margie.  They did not quite make it to the forty years mentioned in "If We Were Vampires", but they came close.  DW and I were talking about Gary a few days after his funeral.  Hell, we will be talking about that amazing son of a bitch for the rest of our lives.  We agreed that along with all of the great, solemn, and important things that have been said about him since his passing, somewhat lost in the shuffle is that Gary was a funny, irreverent, and fun loving guy.  The vast majority of my memories involve laughing and having fun.  He was always happy to give you shit and poke fun at himself.  To paraphrase The Truckers, "he danced on his own grave, thank you."   

Even though this is an audible, I am in keeping with my January theme based upon the fact that there is a female singer/ violin player in this selection.

P.S.  Fuck Cancer  

Miranda Tavares

I had the excellent fortune to meet Gary in person just once, and had I not known who he was it would have figured it out immediately. His sharp wit and gentle humor are ever present both in the blog and in casual conversation. I am thankful he shared his wisdom, insights, and love for Bob Dylan with all of us; my life is better because of it. I am not a religious person, but I think it is obvious that we leave part of ourselves with those we love. Gary was generous in spirit, and left much of himself with all of us, even those he never met in person. He lives within all of us, and as long as we exist, so does he. I'm glad his suffering is over, I am glad to have known him, and I am glad to know his friends who keep him alive in memory. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jATthXzPpIc

Kathy Seiler

Naughty Boy Ft. Emile Sande – Wonder 

The last few weeks have been incredibly stressful, with far too many big, heavy things going on with different parts of life; some professional, some personal. This week was the height of the professional stress that culminated with a high-stakes event, for which I was ultimately responsible, that could either positively or negatively affect my work colleagues. I’ve been going at such a fever pitch for so long leading up to this week that it was getting hard to keep the energy I needed to get through each day. There’s always a song that helps. In grad school, it was Nine Inch Nails “Head Like a Hole” because I felt like a slave to my advisor (science graduate school is a lot of physical labor along with reading and writing). Listening to Head Like a Hole was the only way I could get through having to do someone else’s bidding, both physically and mentally, for 60+ hours a week.

Now that I’m older (although whether or not I’m wiser is arguable), the songs that get me through aren’t quite so angry. Enter the song Wonder – it has a very life affirming, uplifting message, with a beat that can keep you going if you are exhausted or if you are sad; both things I’ve felt a lot of lately. This song helped get me through this week and kept me in the mental space I needed to be in. Another song to add to the soundtrack of my life. 

Phillip Seiler

October Project

Falling Farther In

Mary Fahl has one of those voices that seems beyond this world. There is so much restrained power and it exists across the breadth of her vocal range. It is astounding. I have no idea why she split from the band after their second album. I suspect that the label had no idea what to do with this music as it fit no popular genres for the early 90s. Which is a shame as something different can be something very good. And October Project was very good.

No real deep thoughts on this track and the band's lyrics certainly slide to the pretentious. But so what. It's a good song and I love the gorgeous harmonies. This is a song I unapologetically sing at the top of my lungs whenever it comes on. 

Alice Neiley

I Loves You Porgy -- Miles Davis 

https://youtu.be/GV2K1Y407fk

First of all, my deepest, most sincere apologies for neglecting the blog these last two weeks--I was laid flat with a cold, and also I hadn't written any posts in advance, which made everything even more confusing in my clogged up mind, especially with Scudder out of the country etc. etc. Excuses, excuses. 

Anyway, I know I've mentioned my obsession with Porgy and Bess before, likely the Nina Simone version of "I Loves You Porgy" still, without question in my opinion, the best version). Lately, though, I've re-immersed myself in Miles Davis music for a class I'm teaching, and his version of that tune (arranged by Gil Evans), is breathtaking. 

The melody itself is flawless--notes of long, elastic sorrow--especially those first five notes. Once I hear them, I cannot, under any circumstance, turn it off. 

It's extra interesting in the context of Miles Davis's career, because he was really coming into his own style (one of the many): a mix of bebop where he cut his teeth, the more spacious, modal jazz Gil Evans was known for, and the 'cool' rather than 'hot' improvisation. Even MORE interesting was how, after quitting Julliard, he remained so tied to classical music, at least the intellect of it, because partnering with Evans was certainly a shout out to the necessity of theory and 'big ears' (aka listening hard to everything from Shostakovich to Jimi Hendrix). 

Anyway, the only thing better than Miles's trumpet moaning up the scale of those first few bars of "I Loves You Porgy" is the first few bars of another Porgy and Bess tune he and Evans knocked out of the park: "Bess You Is My Woman Now"  https://youtu.be/X8nK9PDB_jE   --mysteriously even more heart-bursting than the one I've always named as my favorite. I mean, the first three notes have me actually aching. 

Miles, man. He's done it again.

Gary Scudder

Miles Davis, My Funny Valentine (Live)

I absolutely love this live cover of My Funny Valentine from a 1964 live Miles Davis album of the same name and recorded at Lincoln Center.  It featured Davis on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on double bass, and Tony Williams on drums.  The entire album is epic and a must-own, although there are only a couple places in this song where I can actually hear My Funny Valentine (especially if you're used to the classic Chet Baker version, which I also love and think that it somehow should make it's way into a David Lynch film).  I've always thought that one of Davis's greatest attributes was how he would trust a song and respect its integrity, even when improvising. This cover of My Funny Valentine works beautifully, although in this case he goes pretty far afield from the original.  In light of GB's passing I was going to going to switch to another song but somehow this all worked as a metaphor for me at this moment.  We are a deeply flawed species but one of our most extraordinary attributes is our ability to hope in the face of hopelessness.We all knew that Gary was dying, but in our heart of hearts we assumed he'd get that one free pass and beat this particularly terrible form of cancer.  Essentially, in spite of everything else, I don't think we thought we'd be here, and we'll just improvise week to week as best we can.  Life won't always be recognizable as life, but eventually we'll be able to pick out the familiar strains and learn to appreciate the new forms it takes.