My Years With Proust - Day 392

   Another incident focused my preoccupations even more in the direction of Gomorrah.  I had noticed on the beach a handsome young woman, slender and pale, whose eyes, round their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation.  I thought how much more beautiful she was than Albertine, and how much wiser it would be to give up the other.  But the face of this beautiful young woman had been scoured by the invisible plane of a thoroughly depraved life, of the constant acceptance of vulgar expedients, so much so that her eyes, though nobles than the rest of her face, could radiate nothing but appetites and desires.  On the following day, this young woman being seated a long way away from us in the Casino, I saw that she never ceased to fasten upon Albertine the alternating and revolving beam of her gaze.  It was as though she were making signals to her with a lamp.  It pained me that Albertine should see that she was being so closely observed, and I was afraid that these incessantly rekindled glances might be the agreed signal for an amorous assignation next day.  For all I knew, this assignation might not be the first.  The young woman with the flashing eyes might have come another year to Balbec.  It was perhaps because Albertine had already yielded to her desires, or to those of a friend, that this woman allowed herself to address to her those flashing signals.  If so, they were doing more than demand something for the present; they invoked a justification for it in pleasant hours in the past.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 880

Marcel grows more and more jealous, and more and more fixated on Albertine's sexuality.  Here he paints a picture of a young woman, beautiful, "much more beautiful than Albertine," but one who who possessed a face that "had been scoured by the invisible plane of a thoroughly depraved life."  He convinces himself that this woman is focused on Albertine and exchanging glances that promoted a signal, doubtless agreed upon, "for an amorous assignation next day."  That is, of course, if they haven't had already met to make love countless other times.  We've talked so often about the brain's ability, essentially uncontrollable, to create a narrative, since that part of the brain never sleeps.  What amazes me is how, at least in the waking world and especially with women with love, the narrative we weave is never a positive one.  We can't find her and immediately our constructs a sweaty assignation with someone younger, thinner and more successful than we are.  Our brains, who I think we all know our not our friends, never construct a narrative wherein our loved ones is donating at the food bank.

My Years With Proust - Day 391

No doubt they did not go so far as to repeat the public exhibition which had revolted everybody.  But gradually they returned to their old ways. And one evening as I came out of the Casino, which was half in darkness, with Albertine and Bloch whom we had met there, they came by, linked together, kissing each other incessantly, and, as they pass us, crowed and chortled and uttered indecent cries.  Bloch lowered his eyes so as to seem not to have recognised his sister, and I was tortured by the thought that this private and horrifying language was addressed perhaps to Albertine.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 879

Apparently Marcel is now seeing homosexuals everywhere.  Of course, as we all know, if you're looking for something you will inevitably find it.  Bloch's reaction is interesting, although not particularly surprising.  However, the presence of the two women together in the evening seems to contradict Marcel's earlier suggest that maybe the two women were merely trying to cause a scandal, as compared to a sincere relationship.  Of course, all of this is overshadowed by his own growing jealousy and paranoia about Albertine, even going so far as to  propose that "I was tortured by the thought that this private and horrifying language was addressed perhaps to Albertine."  More on this front tomorrow.

My Years With Proust - Day 390

   Francoise was considerably impressed when she learned that the two brothers of these humble women had married, one the niece of the Archbishop of Tours, the other a relative of the Bishop of Rodez.  To the manager, this would have conveyed nothing.  Celeste would sometimes reproach her husband with his failure to understand her, and I myself was astonished that he would put up with her.  For at certain moments, raging, furious, destroying everything, she was detestable.  It is said that the salt liquid which is our blood is only an internal survival of the primitive marine element.  Similarly, I believe that Celeste, not only in her bursts of fury, but also in her hours of depression, preserved the rhythm of her native streams.  When she was exhausted, it was after their fashion; she had literally run dry.  Nothing could then have revitalised her.  Then all of a sudden the circulation was restored in her tall, slender, magnificent body.  The water flowed in the opaline transparence of her bluish skin. She smiled in the sun and became bluer still.  At such moments she was truly celestial.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 878-879

So many characters pass in and out of Remembrance of Things Past and I've never tried to keep track of all of them, either in this blog or in my own reading of the novel.  Granted, I guess this is a balancing act that we all do when we read, but it is especially daunting with a work as monumental as Proust's.  However, sometimes I find myself noting a character who seems like a bit player, and who is probably just going to pass off stage rapidly, for no other reason than their Proustian description.  And so we have Celeste.  Her temper sounds much like mine, with the obvious difference that mine does not erupt from a "tall, slender, magnificent body."  I think we've all met people over the years who seem almost elemental, like the marine biologist who might be a mermaid in Local Hero.

Discography - Week 46

On Friday night several members of this esteemed group met at the home of the most excellent Kathy and Phillip Seiler for comradery, convivial splendor and Nepalese food.  In the midst of the chicanery there was talk about upcoming international trips and also the idea was floated about renting a house for a long weekend in New Orleans (you are all, of course, invited).  It was just another reminder of how blessed we all are to have such amazing friends. The country may be run by a lying/delusional sexual predator (who will at least thankfully be replaced/impeached soon) and a junta of alt-right racist lunatics, but we can at least rely upon each other and find pleasure in our safe little cocoon (at least until Cyndi and I are not allowed back in the country).

Gary Beatrice

Isley Brothers, Who’s That Lady?

Every once in a great while The Isley Brothers show up on the radio and when they do I stop what I am doing and tune in. They made several fantastic songs but to me Who's That Lady tops them all. Funky as hell but with a fantastic fuzzy lead guitar, the call and response vocals, catchy if meaningless lyrics. One of the great things about the sixties and seventies was that radio made no distinction between funk and rock. Sadly today radio is as segregated as we are and if there are bands like the Isley Brothers in 2017 I am very unlikely to know about them.

Dave Wallace

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - My Girl Is Gone 

My favorite musical genre may be soul music from the 60's and 70's.  If I was presented with the "desert island" choice of only being able to listen to one kind of music, I may even pick soul music over rock, although I consider myself a "rock" guy at heart.  I've looked over my list of possible remaining songs to write about for this blog and there are several soul songs begging for inclusion, so I've decided that March is "soul" month for me.  I start with Smokey Robinson, whom I adore.  When I was younger, I went through a phase where I pretty much listened to Smokey non-stop for about a year, and I think that he's one of the greatest songwriters in the history of popular music. The number of classic songs that he wrote, for himself and for others, is unbelievable.  Of course, I previously blogged about a song (Cruisin') from his solo career.  This one is from his days leading the Miracles.  Other Miracles songs are better known (Tracks of My Tears, Shop Around, Goin' to a Go Go, Tears of a Clown), but My Girl Has Gone has always been a personal favorite.

Dave Kelley

"Every Picture Tells A Story"  Rod Stewart

After appropriately dissing Rod Stewart for his putrid cover of "Downtown Train", it is time to give the man his props.  Steve Van Zandt recently opined on Twitter that Rod Stewart has the best voice of any rock singer in history.  Other favorites come to mind, but Stewart is certainly in that conversation.

The lyrics to this classic are misogynistic in places, but the music is the key here along with the vocals.  I find the song to be propulsive and liberating which are keys to much great rock music.  The drumming is particularly amazing.  The Who were by far my favorite band for many years, and I am an absolute Keith Moon fanatic.  I think the drumming in this song is trhe best "Keith Moon like" by any drummer not named Keith Moon.  This is a song that is perfect to enjoy at top volume while driving by yourself on a pretty day.

Kathy Seiler

Clipping, Story 2 

Warning: Experimental Rap 

Phil introduced me to Clipping months ago, after he had introduced me to the earworm that is the Hamilton soundtrack. Daveed Diggs, lead rapper of Clipping, played both Lafayette and Jefferson in the original Hamilton muscial on Broadway. Daveed can rap faster than anyone I have ever heard - and both Eminem and Busta Rhymes can rap pretty damn fast.  I often listen to "gangsta rap" which can be pretty nasty and misogynistic. I don't like the misogyny but I don't take it personally either. It's art and art can be offensive, and I'm okay with that.

Clipping music is not gangsta but experimental and really interesting and weird sometimes. The song I've posted this week is literally a tragic story. It's easy to listen to and understand (not always the case with rap) and crushes your soul at the end. The video echoes the differences in cadence in the music as the story progresses. The incredibly smooth variation in rhythm that Daveed is able to accomplish is one of the things I find so compelling about many of Clipping's songs. 

Consider yourself eased into experimental rap now if you haven't been exposed before. There will be more to come.

Phillip Seiler

Neil Finn “Silent House”

This song, co-written with the Dixie Chicks who also have recorded it, is just a simple, beautiful portrait of someone taking in the pieces of a life lost not to death but to Alzheimer's. You cannot help but think they see their own possible future fate as they observe and remark on all they see. 

“I will try to connect
all the pieces you left
I will carry it on
and let you forget.”

That is a touching turn of phrase as our protagonist picks up the burden and releases  the subject. Hopefully, one day, someone will do the same for them if it is required.

Neil Finn is one of those artists I usually buy everything from: sound unheard. I am rarely disappointed. 

Must be a hell of a song to perform with your son, too.

Gary Scudder

Kathleen Edwards, Oil Man's War

There are a lot of reasons for promoting Oil Man's War this week, beyond the obvious one that I'm a huge fan. Truthfully, I don't know if Oil Man's War would make my top ten Edwards songs, but I suspect that's more a testament to the strength of her discography than a reflection on the song itself (which I think is fantastic).  It's off the album Asking For Flowers, which I sometimes unfairly overlook (mainly because I love her first two albums so much).  It seems like the perfect song for this particular moment in time, a week when Trump proposed adding another $54 billion to the bloated defense budget while cutting reduced price lunches for poor students.  And the Trump administration is, as authoritarian governments always do, conflating questioning the government with insulting the memory of dead soldiers (who are seemingly always sent to die in an oil man's war). The song in and of itself is touching and thought-provoking as it chronicles a couple fleeing to Canada to avoid getting drawn into yet another oil man's war.  Like many Edwards' songs she's able to walk the razor's edge of emotional and sexual and metaphorical worlds when she has the protagonist, while driving north, say "I won't change my mind/ so keep your hand on my thigh tonight."  I remember telling someone a couple years ago that I thought the song sounded like one that Lucinda Williams and Bruce Springsteen would have written together, but that's really unfair.  Kathleen Edwards has her own legacy; it sounds like a Kathleen Edwards song.    It also got me thinking about the song's protagonists fleeing to Canada.  One of the times I was considering moving overseas my wonderful friend Cinse said she would support whatever I did, but that I should ask myself whether I was running towards something or running away from something; and at the time I had to admit that I was running away from something, and so I decided to stay here and battle my own demons.  This, in turn, made me think of the couple from Edwards' song.  Years ago Rolling Stone, when it was a music magazine, published a great Cameron Crowe interview with Neil Young  entitled "Neil Young: The Last American Hero."  I remember thinking, at first blush, that it was odd that Crowe chose the descriptor American for a Canadian, but then realizing that 1) he was making a point about Young's place in what is often thought of as an "American" art form, 2) that Young, in his typically roguish and unpredictable fashion was often playing the quintessential "American hero" by doing what he thought was best, both for good and bad, 3) but it also made me think of why I too often only associate the term American with the US (as my Canadian friends do not tire of reminding me).  Now, is Canada perfect?  Of course not, as Edwards herself laments in her Oh Canada, but it seems to be trying to grow and improve, as compared to entrenching in anger, paranoia, racism and xenophobia.  Essentially, I think Canada has become America (which I suspect many Canadians would consider either a step down if not an actual insult).  What I mean by this is that I think Canada has become what America was, or at least what America was supposed to be, in the world's eyes.  I remember talking to a guy in Jordan one time and he pointed out that when America was truly loved overseas it was because we were considered to be the one who played fair and stood up for the little guy, both internally and externally (again, maybe always more mythology than reality, but we don't even have the mythology anymore).  We can all remember the threat that many people made to move to Canada during the election cycle in the unlikely (oh, those halcyon days) event of a Trump win.  I do think more and more Americans are going to move to Canada, but less and less because they are fleeing an oil man's war or to get away from our lunatic president, but because they are moving towards something, a country which seems to still believe in the future.

I can still remember passages from this Cameron Crowe interview almost forty years later, which is sort of amazing.  When Young abandoned Stephen Stills in the midst of a Stills-Young tour because he thought it was bullshit he left this note: "Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously, end that way. Eat a peach. Neil"  When I almost left Champlain a couple years ago, this, with only mild modifications, was the resignation note I wrote.  Somehow I don't think they would have got the reference.  That said, I'm saving it.

My Years With Proust - Day 389

   Since that day, M. Nissim Bernard had never failed to come and occupy his seat the lunch-table (as a man might occupy his seat in the stalls who was keeping a dancer, a dancer in this case of a distinct and special type which still awaits its Degas).  It was M. Nissim Bernard's delight to follow round the restaurant, as far as the remote vistas where beneath her palm the cashier sat enthroned, the gyrations of the adolescent in zealous attendance - attendance on everyone, and less on M. Nissim Bernard now that the latter was keeping him, whether because the young altar-boy did not think it necessary to display the same civility to a person by whom he supposed himself to be sufficiently well loved, or because that love annoyed him or he feared lest, if discovered, it might make him lose other opportunities. But this very coldness pleased M. Nissim Bernard, because of all that it concealed; whether from Hebraic atavism or in profanation in the Racian ceremony, were it Jewish or Catholic.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 872-873

My ex-wife's theory of relationships was based on one simple formula: the worse you treat them the better they love you.  This line came to mind when reading Proust's description of M. Nissim Bernard and his young kept waiter, who would wait on everyone with "zealous attendance," with the exception of M. Nissim Bernard now that he was keeping him, "whether because the young altar-boy did not think it necessary to display the same civility to a person by whom he supposed him to be sufficiently well loved, or because that love annoyed him or he feared less, if discovered, it might make him lose other opportunities."  And, of course, this made M. Nissim Bernard love him all the more.  With the exception of her ability to choose a good man, my ex-wife is a very brilliant woman.

I always forget how much I love Degas, and somehow when I'm discussing 19th century art with my students he gets overlooked.

The Prima Ballerina by Degas.  Somehow the figure in black in the black speaks to me of the older rich man looking for a dancer to "keep", as Proust described in the passage above.

The Tub by Degas, which somehow seems the somewhat inevitable conclusion of the previous scenario.

My Years With Proust - Day 388

And finally, one evening, in a corner of the big ballroom that was not even dark, on a sofa, they made no more attempt to conceal what they were doing than if they had been in bed.  Two officers, who happened to be nearby with their wives, complained to the manager.  It was thought for a moment that their protest would be effective.  But they suffered from the disadvantage that, having come over for the evening from Nettehome, where they lived, they could not be of any use to the manager.  Whereas, without her even knowing it, and whatever remarks the manager might mkae to her, there hovered over Mlle Bloch the protection of M. Nissim Bernard.  I must explain why.  M. Nissim Bernard practiced the family virtues in the highest degree.  Every year he rented a magnificent villa at Balbec for his nephew, and no invitation would have dissuaded him from going home to dine at his own table, which was really theirs.  But he never lunched at home.  Every day at noon he was at the Grand Hotel.  The fact of the matter was that he was keeping, as other men keep a dance from the corps de ballet, a fledgling waiter of much the same type as to pages of whom we have spoken, and who made us think of the young Israelites in Esther and Athalie.  It is true that the forty years' difference in age between M. Nissim Bernard and the young waiter ought to have preserved the latter from a contact that could scarcely have been agreeable.  But, as Racine so wisely observes in those same choruses:

          Great God, with what uncertain tread
          A budding virtue 'mid such perils goes!
          What stumbling-blocks do lie before a soul
          That weeks Thee and would fain be innocent.

   For all that the young waiter had been brought up "remote from the world" in the Temple-Caravanserai of Baltec, he had not followed the advice of Joad:

          In riches and in gold put not thy trust.

   He had perhaps justified him by saying: "The Wicked cover the earth."  However that might be, and albeit M. Nissim Bernard had not expected so rapid a conquest, on the very first day,

          Were't in alarm, or anxious to caress,
          He felt those childish arms about him thrown.

   And by the second day, M. Nissim Bernard having taken the young waiter out,

         The dire assault his innocence destroyed.

    From that moment the boy's life was altered . . .

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 871-872

I suppose if you name one of the books of your novel Cities of the Plain it should not be particularly surprising that so much of the story revolves around homosexuality, and here is another episode.  It picks up where we left off yesterday, with the fleshing out, no pun intended, of the affair between Mlle Bloch and the retired actress which had caused such a scandal.  The women had been unable to keep their hands off each other in the ballroom, which Proust, rather cavalierly, had attributed to a desire to scandalize, or at least for attention.  From there we delve into the love life of M. Nissim Bernard and his fascination with a young waiter, with the result that the "dire assault his innocence destroyed."  We'll talk more about M. Nissim Bernard tomorrow.  At this point the thing that amazed me was Proust sprinkling in these references from other works into his story.  It's not the desire to include passages alone that impresses me, because I am very guilty of that.  Over the years I've had several different versions, most of them lost, of little versions of nothing but quotes from literature that grabbed me when I was reading.  I always take extensive notes in all of my books, which is why I'm so averse to loaning them out (although I do all the time, witlessly) for fear that my annotated version won't find it's way home.  Sometimes I harvest these notes and create little compilations, partially because I want to capture beauty and also, certainly, out of sheer vanity.  So, does this mean that Proust is that big of a nerd?  Well, on one level, yes, as all scholars are, even pseudo-scholars such as myself.  The thing about this particular example is that I'm assuming that Proust is not carrying around his personal library every place he goes, and he's not doing a quick Google search on his smart phone, which means this is doubtless another example of his extraordinary memory.  All of these literary and cultural worlds were perpetually floating around his mind.

My Years With Proust - Day 387

   About this time there occurred at the Grand Hotel a scandal which was not calculated to alter the trend of my anxieties.  Bloch's sister had for some time past been indulging, with a retired actress, in secret relations which presently ceased to suffice them.  They felt that to be seen would add perversity to their pleasure, and chose to flaunt their dangerous embraces before the eyes of all the world.  They began with caresses, which might, after all, be attributed to a friendly intimacy, in the card-room, round the baccarat table.  Then they grew bolder.  And finally, one evening, in a corner of the big ballroom that was not even dark, on a sofa, they made no more attempt to conceal what they were going than if they had been in bed.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 871

Proust finally gives us more detail about the scandal featuring Bloch's sister which has referenced previously.  I've talked before about the two female students I taught at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi who couldn't keep their hands off of each other during class.  I suppose Proust would suggest, "They felt that to be seen would add perversity to their pleasure, and chose to flaunt their dangerous embraces before the eyes of all the world."  However, is it that perverse to want to touch and be touched, especially by someone that you love?  How does the wall that keeps you from doing something as simple as touching the face of the person you love cripple you emotionally?