tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74144996191648665742024-03-08T08:42:12.807-08:00My Year of Turning 40: In Search of Lost TimeAlison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-22758176757450700692011-09-05T12:43:00.000-07:002011-09-05T12:43:28.604-07:00The End<strong>The transformations effected, in the women particularly, by the white hair and the other new features, would not have held my attention so forcibly had they been merely changes of colour, which can be charming to behold; too often they were changes of personality, registered not by the eye but, disturbingly, by the mind. For to "recognise" someone and, <em>a fortiori</em>, to learn someone's identity after having failed to recogise him, is to predicate two contradictory things of a single subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person whom one remembers, no longer exists, and also that what was here, and also that what is now here is a person whom one did not know to exist; and to do this we have to apprehend a mystery almost as disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as it were the preface and the harbinger.</strong> <br />
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The narrator here is returning to Paris society after years spent in a rest home. As he walks through the rooms crowded with the fashionable people he had mingled with long ago, he has trouble putting names and identities to faces, which have metamorphosed from those of blushing beauties and distinguished gentlemen into the decrepit visages of old age. It's as if he were attending his fiftieth high school renunion and were unable to fit the haggard face with the name tag.<br />
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I thought of these lines when I visited my mother in the Alzheimer's facility yesterday. She was in a back room sitting with other residents in a circle and singing a song that went "Holy, holy, holy." I couldn't locate her at first, and then finally, (was this my mother?), I saw a woman dressed in loose clothes I didn't recognize and who had the slightly tired, immobile expression of someone who has been institutionalized. This happens every time I visit. <br />
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Happily, as soon as she saw me, she recognized me, and came out to give me a big hug. Her hair had been cropped "Jean Seberg-style" (a link she would have appeciated since <em>Breathless</em> used to be her favorite movie), and and the extra weight she was holding, in addition to her plain, scrubbed face, made her look anonymous. <br />
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Is this still my mother? Who is this woman who looks so different from her former self? She eats her lunch--a turkey sandwich with chips and then cake with ice cream--with obvious relish. This is my athletic mother who starved herself to fit into extra small, fashionable clothing. She would have been horrified to see this new version of herself who no longer looks like my strikingly beautiful mother. <br />
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What is she thinking? I've learned to avoid questions and stick with positive statements. Questions lead to dangerous, uncharted territory and usually are answered with a blank, frustrated stare. I miss her so much. Her lively sense of humor, her love of literature (and the mystery novels she used to go through like water), her attention to nature and the changing of the seasons, her endless delight in various neighborhood dogs, and her green thumb. I wish I could tell her things about my life and get her reaction and advice. Like Proust's society friends, she has in one sense disappeared forever. <br />
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I still have her in a sense, but I'm not sure who she is anymore. She has changed so much since I started reading Proust. This year's journey has been about my mother and my gradual loss of her--first to a higher stage of Alzheimer's and then to a facility. Just a year ago, she was violently in love with Paul McCartney. Now she is almost without affect. There's something frozen about her that I would love to nurture and thaw out.<br />
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I will always associate Proust with my mother. Now that I have finished <em>In Search of Lost Time</em>, I will return to it with a whole set of associations stemming from the loss of my mother: her love of songs, the diapers, and her fiery crushes on everyone from Jean-Paul Belmondo to the Beatles to the group leader at our visits to MOMA. <br />
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Proust's narrator explains:<br />
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<strong>...a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled. For things--and among them a book in a red binding--as soon as we have perceived them are transformed within us into something immaterial, something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and the brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it.</strong><br />
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For me, tackling <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> isn't about turning forty or making up for lost time. I'll reread it with thoughts of my mother who lost her memory while Proust was delving into special sensations set in time. It has been a year jammed with crisis and joy--like any other year in my life. It's ultimately a book about finding a vocation and becoming a writer. My only hope is that soon I can put pen to paper and come up with something half as personal and euphoric and lovely as Proust's book. And perhaps there will be a piece of me set in a red binding that someone will pick up in a used bookstore many years from now and that will become part of her inner vocabulary. <br />
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Proust's ending links back to the beginning. I hope to spend the rest of my life tracing and retracing that loop. Because there is no end to <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> until the Final End. What a friend I have in Proust--just as one might sing, "What a friend I have in Jesus!" In fact, I wish every motel in the country had a copy of Proust on the bedside table. A map, a poem, a dream. And above all, how beautiful this life is and how quickly it passes! Yet what we find in art rests infinite and renewable and everlasting.<br />
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Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-13112137009239660122011-05-30T08:50:00.000-07:002011-05-30T08:50:32.817-07:00The Writer and the Reader<strong>...I was carried back on the wave of sound towards the old days at Combray...when I myself had wanted to be an artist. Having in practice abandoned this ambition, had I given up something real? Could life make up to me for the loss of art, or was there in art a deeper reality where our true personality finds an expression that the actions of life cannot give it? Each great artist seems so different from all the others, and gives us such a strong sense of individuality, which we seek in vain in everyday life!</strong> (from <em>The Prisoner</em>)<br />
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<strong>After reading a great novel, I am not the same person I was before I read it. Now all that stuff we take for granted--great story, great structure, good language--that all makes for a really good novel. But a great novel is not the one that transforms the character but the one that transforms the reader.</strong> (Rabih Alameddine in <em>The Secret Miracle: The Novelist's Handbook</em>)<br />
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How do we find our true selves? I think the answer is through art, whether we are creators of it or witnesses to it. The reader and the writer share a special bond through which they are both fashioned into something new and undiluted. What a solace in today's world, when we are bombarded with financial doom and gloom and the environmental catastrophes that rock every shore. What a solace for the ages.<br />
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We left my mother off at the Alzheimer's facility on Wednesday, and that night when my father and I came home to our apartment, empty except for our dog, Phoebe, I felt a real sense of mourning for the mother I would never have again. All the things that used to drive me crazy--begging her to prepare for a shower, changing her clothes, remembering to triple bolt the door so she wouldn't wander--now seemed like special rites meant to be missed. I miss her delight when walking outside and spotting a shaggy dog or a purple flower. I miss the way she used to talk to Phoebe, who, since puppy hood, has shared a special bond with her. Nothing can fill that void. Except, perhaps, for art, though as I write it I only half believe it.<br />
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We've had some reports that she's participating in the activities at the facility and even has made a gentleman friend who holds the chair for her in the dining hall. But last night when I spoke to her on the phone, she could only say tearfully over and over again, "I love you, I love you so much." We're not allowed to visit for a couple of weeks so that she can acclimate herself to her new surroundings. This is especially hard on my father, who has spent the last forty-five years with her, through all of their ups and downs, and who has been especially tender with her in these past months when her mental health has been declining rapidly.<br />
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Proust has been a comfort, as usual. And so is pursuing my own writing. But I am saddened to think my mother will not be able to locate that pleasure in reading that she used to enjoy. Years ago, we used to regularly swap books and our bond, as readers, deepened our ties as mother and daughter. And now, to think that she is no longer able to read or even sign her own name, no longer able to escape in a mystery novel or a Jane Austen book, seems like an especially harsh blow. It seems like a cruel and undeserved fate, one that divorces her from her true self. One that erases her true self. One that devours her true self. And for this, there is no solace. Even if art may be the closest I ever get to a religion. <br />
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Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-23150274351422264812011-04-17T13:00:00.000-07:002011-04-17T13:00:59.738-07:00We'll Always Have Paris<strong>Too often we talk about our memories as if they were banks into which we deposit new information when it comes in, and from which we withdraw old information when we need it. But that metaphor doesn't reflect the way our memories really work. Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past.--</strong>from <em>Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything</em> by Joshua Foer<br />
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How Proustian! <br />
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<em>Moonwalking with Einstein</em> is a gripping, inspiring read about the capabilities of the human mind to remember (and how as a culture we tend to forget more and more). The book follows Foer's entrance (and ultimate triumph) in a high-stakes memory championship. I highly recommend it!<br />
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The "continuous feedback loop" of information from our senses gets me to thinking <em>Rashomon</em>-style that no two people remember the same event in exactly the same way. As I am finishing the memoir I've been working on, I've realized that it is impossible to remember scenes from the past verbatim. How accurate is my memory? My collection of journals helps. Yet undoubtedly, the people I write about will probably say "that's not what happened" when they read the manuscript.<br />
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Proust teaches us that the act of remembering can provide brief flashes of insight into parts of ourselves that we don't usually tap into, parts of ourselves we didn't know existed in our conscious, slumbering state. And each memory changes over time, takes on new colors, new contours.<br />
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What we see, hear and smell over time adds to this subjective soup that we call memory and shapes our point of view.<br />
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I'm reminded of <em>Before Sunset</em>, one of my mother's favorite movies (partly for its scenes of Paris, partly for Ethan Hawke) and I put it on often because it soothes her. I love that scene in the beginning where Jessie--the bestselling author played by Ethan Hawke--is at the Shakespeare Bookstore in Paris during a Q&A session about his book. The first question is, "Do you consider the book to be autobiographical?" Jessie answers:<br />
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<strong>Isn't everything autobiographical? I mean, we all see the world from our own tiny keyhole. I always think of Thomas Wolfe--have you ever seen that little one-page "note to reader" in front of <em>Look Homeward, Angel</em>? Do you know what I'm talking about? Anyway, he says how we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, that anybody who writes will use the clay of their lives, that you can't avoid that. I remember he says he can't imagine anything more autobiographical than <em>Gulliver's Travels</em>.</strong><br />
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How can we connect if we are constantly having conversations with ourselves? "We'll always have Paris," goes the famous line. But our versions of Paris are as different as our DNA.<br />
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I think Proust believes that our memories are what it most beautiful about ourselves and that this solitude we all suffer is a small price to pay for the spectacular fireworks of what we experience when we go within. <br />
Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-49981904563952285732011-03-30T16:44:00.000-07:002011-03-30T16:44:15.841-07:00On Bouts of Unexpected SadnessOn Sunday, I took in Tom Stoppard's <em>Arcadia</em> with a friend. It's a play that celebrates, most of all, the intellectual hunt, the visceral search for truth, and the joys and sorrows of our insights into understanding ourselves and the world we live in.<br />
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I was so inspired, I went home buzzing with ideas and caught within the mealy mouth of the writing bug, ready to conquer the world. Yet the sight of my parents--whose health is declining--put a catch in my throat. I could see my father's angular shoulder blades jutting out from under his thin grey sweater. I could see my mother's glazed expression she gets when her meds kick in, or conversely, her loony antics and outbursts of agitation. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a hospital. Three years ago, I moved in with my parents to help take care of them. <br />
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When I started Proust's fourth volume, <em>Sodom and Gomorrah</em>, I expected a racy volume full of "decadent" scenes of sexual bravado. What I got was a heartbreaker. Marcel's belated grieving over his grandmother's death is the heart and soul of the volume. I rushed over these passages before they could register in my heart. Later on, in rereading them, I was emptied of all light, all hope, all beauty. <br />
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In my front row seat to my parents' decline, it's not comedy or mindless escapism I crave, but Proust's words. The prospect of losing my parents is like thinking of being shipwrecked and homesick for the rest of my life. I've always had an unusually close relationship with my parents. We're a pack of four, including our dog Phoebe. The only thing more cruel than having to watch my parents' decline would be to leave the earth before they did.<br />
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My father has a friend for whom <em>Moby Dick</em> is her solace, her bible, her <em>I-Ching</em>. Everyday, she takes it out and opens to any random passage, and this comforts her and gives her direction. <br />
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I have a feeling that this is what <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> will be like for me--my book of inspiration and introspection. My guidebook to the wilderness of life, of the human mind, of relationships.<br />
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As my father always says, as long as we are alive "there are no bad days." I would amend this to say, as long as I have Proust by my side there are no bad days...no days in which some beauty or mystery or blessing can't be salvaged, however fleeting.<br />
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And in the meantime, onwards! Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-25883633484468231152011-02-22T17:48:00.000-08:002011-02-22T17:48:30.833-08:00The Progress of Civilization<strong>The progress of civilization enables each one of us to manifest unsuspected virtues or new vices, which make us either dearer or more unbearable to our friends.</strong> (from <em>Sodom and Gomorrah</em>)<br />
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Here Proust is referring to the telephone, though he might have been speaking of Facebook or Twitter. On the one hand, we are increasingly distracted by technology and the 24/7 nature of the information age. We text while crossing the street, missing the small things that make up our world: eye contact with the alluring stranger who passes us for the first and the last time of our lives, the sight of a gaggle of school girls in uniform, an elderly woman inching her way to the other side. We practice the release of TMI ("too much information") on a regular basis so that everyone on Facebook knows that we committed such and such transgression. It's hard not to blurt it all out on our blogs and Facebook pages. (I'm sure I've sunk many a ship with my own loose lips.) Where is the mystery? Where is communication as an art form, slowly dealt out card by card, instead of tipping our hand from the start? Where is the seduction that takes place at the beginning of both friendships and romantic entanglements?<br />
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On the other hand, I recently heard that a young father in Egypt has named his newborn "Facebook" in honor of the truly unsuspected virtue of the social network in the Egyptian revolution.<br />
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So with all of these new vices--the very things that isolate us in a non-stop stream of information that makes our immediate surroundings so much less vivid and robs us of pockets of silence--we are also better able to please our "friends" and unite in a wave of protest, crying, "Together, united, we'll never be defeated!" Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-77981966383787219692011-02-17T18:46:00.000-08:002011-02-17T18:46:42.095-08:00Driving LessonsLike a lot of people who grew up in New York, I found myself turning 40 without a driver's license. So for the last six weeks I've been taking Saturday morning classes with ten other sleepy students at a hole-in-the-wall driving school where we get to sit in simulators. Each simulator has a full dashboard complete with steering wheel, gear-switcher, accelerator and brake. As we watch the film at the front of the room, we signal and change lanes, stop at intersections, and remember IPDE (Identify, Predict, Decide, and Execute) in every situation we encounter on the road. We've driven through the driving snow and sheets of rain, we've driven down peaceful yet danger-ridden suburban California streets where kids on skateboards lurk in the shadows, ready to dart out at any time. We even had a session with distracting backseat drivers (fellow carpoolers) who chatted nonsense and then gave faulty, conflicting directions.<br />
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These films are from 1980. I can imagine them at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a performance piece. The cars are as long and flat and silver as sharks. The instructors are upbeat but authoritative, dead serious about safe driving. They wear suits in neutral tones with wide lapels. The voiceover praises us for breaking quickly and avoiding an accident. "Remember IPDE!" we are told, those four letters forming the skeleton key to becoming a good driver.<br />
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Every twenty minutes or so, our teacher pauses the film and walks up to the front of the classroom holding a venti cup of tea and gives us the straight dope. Don't sleep and drive. Stay two seconds behind the car in front of you. Did you see that woman dashing across the street? Another thing, always assume the other driver doesn't know what the hell he's doing.<br />
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I've had twelve hours of this, and now I've graduated to outside lessons. We'll see how it goes on Saturday morning in a real car in NYC traffic.<br />
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We had an amusing time during the mandatory five-hour talk given by a man who appeared completely loony. In his introduction, he told us he also taught firearms. Next came several crazy hours of a car wreck of a monologue. He was the tough-love sergeant you see in war movies. First on his agenda was a diatribe against "aggressive women drivers," with the assertion that if Hilary Clinton had been elected, the number of traffic accidents would have gone up. "I'm a fish in water," he commented at one point. "I keep on swimming."<br />
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The class concluded with a couple of old, snowy video tapes. The first one diagrammed how Princess Diana would have lived if she had worn a seatbelt. The next one addressed falling asleep at the wheel. Weeping parents help up photos of their dead children as they recounted the day Billy was mowed down by a sleep-deprived driver. Already apprehensive about driving, this video scared me silly. I only hope I can learn my lesson and someday steer an automobile with plenty of caution and Red Bull. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-13088624659623460182011-01-30T14:32:00.000-08:002011-01-30T14:32:36.800-08:00Lapses<strong>We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semi-darkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, these transitions are unconscious. For the intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the right name, are themselves false, and bring us no closer to it.</strong> (from <em>Sodom and Gomorrah</em>)<br />
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I've been forgetting a lot of names lately. Mostly those of actors. I couldn't think of Rip Torn's name for several days or, later on, Isabelle Adjani. Why not consult the IMDB, you might say. Of course, while attempting to retreive these names perfectly unsuitable syllables came to mind. It was like hitting a brick wall. Then, suddenly, the name appeared and, though it was as if the truth had finally shown itself, the name was totally foreign to the concept I had of it when I was stumbling in the dark.<br />
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My first fear is that, like my mother, I have early onset Alzheimer's. There is now a test that determines whether one has the disease or not. I don't think I'll take it. How would that information help me now?<br />
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Maybe it's my age. I remember talking with a Classics professor years ago who told me the story of a successful businessman who had retired and enrolled in Ancient Greek lessons. He was determined to blaze through his studies in a firestorm of glory just as he had built himself from the bottom up on Wall Street. However, he just could not commit the required declensions to memory and, instead of A's, he barely earned C's. There is a certain age past which it is close to impossible to become proficient in Ancient Greek or Latin, the professor concluded.<br />
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I hope that's not the case. Though I played hopscotch with different graduate programs through my twenties and early thirties, I still have a yen to really master Latin the way I never have. I even bought the first volume of Harry Potter in Latin but haven't sat down to decipher it yet.<br />
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There is a part of me that is elated not to be in graduate school anymore and to be able to enjoy books for the plot and the suspense and the characters instead of tearing them apart with scissors or, as that dreadful phrase goes, "unpacking their meaning."<br />
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I haven't written much this past month. It's been full of ups and downs with my parents and their health. Yet I'm committing to five blogs a month from now on instead of the usual three. <em>Sodom and Gomorrah</em> is already moving in more interesting directions than the overly starched <em>Guermantes Way</em>, and I hope there will be much to discuss--even if my mind is a sieve. But memory is a complex affair that Proust keeps returning to, telling us there as much to learn in forgetfulness as in remembering (and searching for) the past. <br />
Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-32740382196575677862011-01-17T19:00:00.000-08:002011-01-17T19:00:48.869-08:00Black Swann<em>Sodom and Gomorrah</em>, the fourth volume of <em>In Search of Lost Time</em>, begins with Marcel spying on the Baron de Charlus and the shopkeeper Jupien as the two men share a quick afternoon tryst.<br />
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<strong>For, to judge by what I heard in the early stages from Jupien's, which was simply inarticulate sounds, I assume few words were uttered. It was true that these sounds were so violent that, had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat close beside me, and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the traces of the crime.</strong><br />
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On the one hand, despite the narrator's judgmental curiosity, the scene is as open and natural as society life is fundamentally false and repressed. On the other hand, there are definitely some sinister undertones to this "love scene."<br />
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In the next section of the book, what lurks underneath the pageant of nobles at the Princesse de Guermantes' well-appointed party and isn't allowed the light of day becomes warped and threatening.<br />
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<strong>As she walked beside me, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but undirected, so as to avoid the people with whom she was not keen to come into contact, but whom she could sometimes make out in the distance like a menacing reef. </strong><br />
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Proust calls homosexuals "inverts," as if to emphasize that whatever is not expressed turns on itself.<br />
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I couldn't help but think of this as I watched the film <em>Black Swan</em> yesterday. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a prim ballerina who is adept at technique yet lacks the dark sexuality that the role of the Black Swan requires. Nina has no self-knowledge and she is imprisoned by an adolescent desire to be perfect. What she leaves unexpressed festers in real and imagined wounds that reach what a friend of mine called <em>Grand</em> <em>Guignol </em>for the film's over-the-top violence. (The <em>Grand-Guignol</em> was an actual theater in Paris that opened in 1897 and featured gory horror plays.)<br />
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Nina has a claustrophobic home life, surrounded by girlish stuffed animals and an overbearing mother. What's more, the ballet world is self-punitive. We see her strenuous exercises at the <em>barre</em>, and we hear the popping crunches of her toes, and yet these are scenes of self-starvation and a turning-against herself. <br />
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Watching <em>Black Swan</em> was a cathartic journey. When Nina morphs from an overprotected, innocent young woman to a mature force of darkness, there is a final release to all of that pent-up emotion. It reminds me of the emptiness of striving for perfection...just as the people at the Princesse de Guermantes' party fight tooth and nail to make their way into the inner sanctum, the creme de la creme of society, only to pose as total strangers to themselves. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-6958133334580432742011-01-05T18:55:00.000-08:002011-01-05T18:55:03.949-08:00Memoir or Novel?<em>Just as essayist and memoirist Andre Aciman wrote of his experience of reading Proust: "The seductive power of a novel such as the </em>Search<em> lies in its personal invitation to each one of us to read Marcel's life as if we, and not Marcel, were its true subject."</em><br />
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<em>Mention of Proust brings us back around to the question of genre. What special reach or access does memoir have that the novel does not? Given the enormous suppleness and variability of fiction, the answer can only have to do with the reality status of the subject matter. What gives memoir its special title--and, I think, its growing rather than diminishing place in our literary culture--is the constraint of the actual.</em><br />
--From <em>The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again</em> by Sven Birkerts<br />
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As I have been reading Proust, I've also been preparing a memoir. It's a coming-of-age story about a difficult period in my life. (Hell, who doesn't have a difficult coming-of-age story?) Along with a few examples of involuntary memory (mostly olfactory), I've ransacked the journals I kept for years, mining for the "truth."<br />
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Why not write a novel? And why didn't Proust just make the <em>Search</em> a memoir? After all, the narrator refers to himself as "Marcel" at times. Some of the details--such as the famous madeleine episode in which the taste of the big toe-sized buttery pastry dipped in tea evokes an entire lost world--are so immediate that they have to have been experienced by the author. It's like listening to a song and wondering if the sorrow of the country crooner has really been lived or if it's just another conventional ditty about drinking and parting and feeling like your heart might bust open.<br />
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I think that to the novelist, it's easier to tell the truth with the broader brush of fiction than it would be if he or she wrote a memoir. Kafka wasn't a bug; Flaubert wasn't an adulterous woman. But what these authors could say about the human condition surpasses what they could probably convey with the stuff of their daily lives. <br />
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To the memoirist, fiction is for those who choose to wear a mask. It's from the rubble and confusion of life that the memoirist shapes a narrative. The "truth" of date, time, place--and the people we were and the people we have become--allows for a stark investigation into the beautiful strivings we have as human creatures into the realms of death, sex, and love. The memoir earns its immediacy like a needle pricking the surface of a finger and drawing blood. Yet the memoirist also uses the novelist's tools of detail, description, structure, etc.<br />
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I'm glad that the <em>Search</em> is a novel because its that much more universal--and yet the point of view is distinctly that of the memoir. We are nodding off when the adult Proust is struggling with sleep, and we wait for his mother to come kiss him goodnight just as the young Proust cannot find solace in his empty bedroom. Throughout the <em>Search</em> there is a double take that works well in memoir. We see the author as the protagonist and also the current narrator who leads us by hand through the things a child can't understand. In the end, this is the great appeal of the <em>Search</em>--it is both literal in time and place and weaved from dream life, random impressions, and a sense of eternity. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-2802947174626714502010-12-25T17:57:00.000-08:002010-12-25T17:57:36.080-08:00The Sense of Relief<em>Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine--with great urgency, in case she was already engaged--she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise--"Quite fascinating, my dear!"--of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstruck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.</em> (from <em>The Guermantes Way</em>) <br />
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I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.<br />
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When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.<br />
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I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"<br />
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I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).<br />
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Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.<br />
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Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.<br />
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I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be? Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-77464344769911245872010-12-15T17:53:00.000-08:002010-12-15T17:53:32.044-08:00Down and Out<em>Madam Monce: "Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else?"</em><br />
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<em>...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs.</em> (<em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> by George Orwell) <br />
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I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in <em>The Guermantes</em> <em>Way</em>, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)<br />
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Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)<br />
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Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.<br />
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The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.<br />
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In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.<br />
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It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading <em>US</em> magazine.<br />
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But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.<br />
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In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:<br />
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<em>Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.</em><br />
<em>Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!</em><br />
<em>Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.</em><br />
<em>Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.</em> Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-23932958672765626502010-12-08T18:51:00.000-08:002010-12-08T18:51:59.217-08:00Men Who Write About WomenCan male novelists portray female protagonists convincingly?<br />
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This is the question I had in mind when reading Proust and Larsson side by side for the past couple of weeks. To compare Larsson's Lisbeth Salander to Proust's character the Duchesse de Guermantes is to compare an alienated, fiercely boyish outcast to a voluptuous social insider, privy to the upper echelons of Parisian high society.<br />
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Lisbeth, with her piercings and tattoos, has odd looks compared to the more conventionally beautiful Duchesse de Guermantes, whose eyes "captured like a picture the blue sky of an afternoon in the French countryside, broad and expansive, drenched in light even when there was no sun." Instead of old t-shirts with quirky statements printed across them and leather pants, the Duchesse wears a "ballooning skirt of painted blue silk."<br />
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Yet, Salander has a strong moral code that leaves the petty-minded Duchesse in the dirt. "I thought at least that, when she spoke, her conversation would be profound and mysterious, strange as a medieval tapestry or a Gothic window," Proust writes. Instead, "'What a bird-brained woman!' I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. 'So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart!'"<br />
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Does the male author's sexual orientation help or hinder him when conjuring up his female characters?<br />
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Proust, as a homosexual, is often accused of having created female characters by simply prettifying the men in his life. In fact the (heterosexual) English critic Cyril Connolly wrote in his 1938 book <em>Enemies of Promise</em> that "homosexual novelists who are able to create mother-types and social mother-types (hostesses) and occasionally sister-types (heroines) have trouble with normal women and may often make them out worse or better than they are."<br />
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Hogwash! Think of Henry James' Isabel Archer in <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em> or Michael Cunningham's Clarissa Vaughn in <em>The Hours</em>--the first two examples that come to mind. They may be heroines, not "normal women," but they are characters I've lived in. <br />
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As Edmund White wrote, "It would be a mistake to see all of Proust's women as disguised men...some of the female characters are unquestionably, quintessentially womanly, such as Odette...or the Duchesse de Guermantes or the actress Berma."<br />
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Is Larsson's Lisbeth Salander a man disguised as a woman?<br />
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Luisita Lopez Torregrosa writes for Politics Daily, "She's set a new standard: a lesbian/bisexual geeky girl with a bad attitude, a knack for violence, a steel-trap mind, and best of all, she's not a vampire. Could it be that androgynous, industrial-strength macho girls will become role models for women in the second decade of the 21st century?"<br />
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And what does it mean that it took a man to create a 21st century feminist icon?<br />
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Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a Swedish man created Lisbeth, as Nordic countries like Sweden are the most egalitarian when it comes to gender roles. You wouldn't have a character like Lisbeth spring from a more traditional society like Nigeria or Pakistan or India.<br />
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That brings me to a question from Gender Studies 101: What does it mean to be a woman? Does womanhood=motherhood? Pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding...these are foreign territories for me. Am I any less a woman?<br />
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At forty, I am "unmarried and childless," which sounds like a wail of misery, but really suits me for the moment. Am I a spinster or a bachelorette? The origins of the word "spinster" go back to the Middle Ages when women who spun wool were able to support themselves on a decent wage. "Bachelorette" brings up images of reality television shows with ten women piled high in a hot tub vying for the attention of the alpha male.<br />
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Neither am I Eleanor Rigby who "picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been" and "waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door...who is it for?"<br />
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Still, I yearn to find...someone. The tenderness of a long partnership.<br />
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In sum, I don't identify fully with either character. I am neither an aggressive loner like Lisbeth nor conventionally "womanly" in conduct or appearance like the Duchesse. Yet I find these female characters compelling enough to keep reading, no matter that they leapt out fully formed from the minds of men. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-91473044743189033712010-11-24T16:23:00.000-08:002010-11-24T16:23:13.292-08:00Can Proust Compete with Larsson? Part One<strong>The telephone was not so commonly used as it is today...I found it too slow for my liking, with its abrupt transformations, this admirable magic that needs only a few seconds to bring before us, unseen but present, the person to whom we wish to speak...suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all the surroundings in which he remains immersed) to within reach of our hearing, at a particular moment dictated by our whim. And we are like the character in the fairy tale at whose wish an enchantress conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed as they turn the pages of a book, shed tears, gather flowers, very close to the spectator and yet very far away, in the place where they really are.</strong> (<em>The Guermantes Way</em>)<br />
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I've seen it everywhere, its florescent cover bobbing all over the subway system like bait on a hook, rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists, even for sale at my neighborhood Duane Reade. I'm talking about Stieg Larsson's <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>. During the short time it took to read it, I was zoned out on an adrenaline rush that made me feel keenly alive--over caffeinated, really--and focused outwards as if on autopilot. It was closer to the experience of watching a movie than reading Proust. Its simple, uncluttered prose meant that nothing distracted me from the thrill of surging forward, pedal to the floor--so far from the experience of savoring Proust's dizzying verbosity.<br />
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And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a Larsson novel. I remember a former writing teacher quoting Kurt Vonnegut as saying, "All writers are in the entertainment business." But why can't I find Proust at my local Duane Reade, sandwiched between the deodorant and the plastic containers of caramel popcorn?<br />
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Proust wrote about a time in which the telephone seemed fantastical. Larsson's protagonist, Lisbeth Salander--an expert computer hacker and shit-kicking Goth gamine--experiences life with a technological immediacy that would be absolutely foreign to Proust. In fact, I think that if Proust had picked up a copy of <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, it would be a full-on assault on his senses.<br />
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Not that the accelerated pleasures of reading a thriller only date from the invention of the internet. Certainly there was tabloid journalism and many other "low brow" sensationalist entertainments a century ago.<br />
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But can Proust compete today with an opponent who speaks the language of the 21st century?<br />
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There are certain authors who know us better than we know ourselves. Technology may have changed, the average person has the attention span of a gnat on crack, but Proust relates to the stories we tell ourselves about life and love, our innermost secrets, in a way that Larsson, with his appealing tattooed heroine, doesn't come close to.<br />
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Today, a friend (an extremely well-read friend, by the way) compared reading Proust to drinking molasses. I think this verison of Proust as stuffed in mothballs is dangerous. My life is so much richer with Proust in it. (And I probably only retain 10 percent of it my first time through!) He may be a difficult pleasure, you wonder why he carries on about one topic or another, but then there is a dazzling moment when everything is laid bare--the stunning beauty of life when one accepts it as it is, and then transcends it, into a dreamlike state. It's a different kind of pleasure than reading Larsson, but no less contemporary and immediate. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-30323521489479293462010-11-16T17:18:00.000-08:002010-11-16T17:18:38.234-08:00Franzen and MooreI attended a reading at the 92nd Street Y last night. Jonathan Franzen (<em>Freedom</em>) and Lorrie Moore (<em>A Gate</em> <em>at the Stairs</em>) took the stage.<br />
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Moore's editor introduced her in ravishing terms as the literary "it girl." "Only a fool would take the stage after that kind of introduction," Moore opened. "I am the warm-up act for the lovely and brilliant Jonathan Franzen." She performed a short ditty on this topic (that I imagine she had scribbled on a damp cocktail napkin on her flight from Wisconson), ending with a few rounds of "We Shall Overcome." Like the voice of her novels and short stories, Moore was both nutty and sophistocated in her keen love of the absurd. Then she read aloud dreamily, giving a refreshing, ironic lilt to every line she read.<br />
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In his introduction, the visibly nervous Jonathan Galassi (an editor I admire for his translations of Eugenio Montale's poems) stressed the theme of marriage throughout Franzen's work. He remarked that Franzen had started his career wanting to change the world, and has ended up trying to capture it, represent it. <br />
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Franzen bounced on the stage with his satchel like a tardy schoolboy. Murmuring that he should have marked his place earlier, he finally opened to a fresh scene at the middle of his novel. He read this excerpt while punching the air with obvious relish. For the record, there wasn't anything smug about him.<br />
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It was in hearing them read aloud that I could see the sheer beauty of their words, suspended in the air like poetry. It made me want to go back and reread their novels more slowly (three pages a day) instead of the binge-like way I had plowed through them initially. In fact, I wish I could do all my reading this way, hovering over each phrase like a shuddering butterfly.<br />
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When answering questions from the audience, Franzen would stutter a bit at first as he organized his thoughts. Both seemed flummoxed by the inanity of the questions. At the announcement of each question, they both rolled their eyes and gave a hollow chuckle. <br />
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Q: How do you know how to end your books? Moore was eloquent on this topic. The end of a short story arcs back towards the beginning like a radiant light, she said, while the end of a novel looks forward to a future continuation of its events. <br />
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Q: Is it a challenge to write about contemporary society? Both books take place around 9/11. Writing about contemporary events was not a challenge, they both concluded, but a necessity. "It would be harder to write about the 18th century," Moore said. What's more, it's a challenge to write, period.<br />
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Q: Why are Midwesterners so funny? Apparently, all of the late night talk show hosts are from the Midwest.<br />
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Then the reading was over and they both disappeared from the stage to thunderous applause, presumably to marinate briefly in these celebratory juices before returning to their lairs as ordinary scribes, back to page one. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-65744528717924494392010-11-10T17:34:00.000-08:002010-11-10T17:34:09.069-08:00New York, I Love You (Or, Hello to All That)<strong>And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Francoise.</strong> (from <em>The Guermantes Way</em>)<br />
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Proust's third volume, <em>The Guermantes Way</em>, begins with a move. Marcel's grandmother needs a cleaner, quieter arrondissement for the sake of her health. This is pure torture to their old servant, Francoise, who is loyal to their former abode where they had been "'so well thought of by everybody.'" In exchange, she is now in a place where "the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits."<br />
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Neighborhoods in New York are in a constant state of flux, as if a painter were applying layer after layer of paint to the map, obliterating what came before.<br />
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I grew up in that section of Lower Manhattan called TriBeCa (short for "Triangle Below Canal Street"). At that time, the neighborhood was a ghost town full of empty lofts. The only restaurant was the Delphi, where we ate <em>moussaka</em> and <em>backlava</em>. As there was no supermarket, my mother took me on errands to Morgan's, a butcher shop with sawdust on the floor, and Bell Bates, a crowded corner store full of exotic spices.<br />
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Today, my mother is my charge in the Saturday morning procession of parents and strollers at the farmer's market outside the park I remember as a vacant dirt lot. "Mama, stick with me, kid!" I say. We pick up loaves of bread dusted with flour, seven varieties of apples, bulbous avocado squash. No shortage of playmates here, as in the late seventies. In fact there must be something in the water--every woman in the neighborhood is a mother or on her way to becoming one. There are so many people here now that the neighborhood houses a Whole Foods and a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and scores of restaurants at every turn.<br />
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In Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," she concludes that "All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not young anymore." She is sick of the incessant parade of "new faces" at parties in a city only for the very poor and the very rich and the very young. For her, New York is an experiment one soon tires of. But what about the quiet pleasures?<br />
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Quiet pleasures: the room of Degas pastels at the Met, any production of a Eugene O'Neill play, long walks along the bridal path in Central Park, low-key classes at Integral Yoga, lining up at the Film Forum, avocado rolls at Zutto.<br />
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I love the scene with Wallace Shawn at the end of <em>My Dinner with Andre</em> in which he treats himself to a taxi ride home and every building he passes is connected to a memory from his childhood. The city by night has become more beautiful than it was before he sat down to dinner, its lights blurred by nostalgia.Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-84322916079290407122010-10-31T18:06:00.000-07:002010-10-31T18:06:45.409-07:00On Friendship (with an Apology)<strong>"But it really is time to join the others, and I've mentioned only one of the two things that I meant to ask you, the least important one. The other is more important to me, but I'm afriad you will say no. Would you mind if we were to call each other <em>tu</em>?"</strong><br />
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<strong>"Mind? I'd be delighted. 'Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of happiness!'"</strong><br />
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<strong>"Oh, thank you...thank you...After you! It's such a pleasure to me that you needn't bother about Mme de Guermantes if you'd prefer--calling each other <em>tu </em>is enough." (from <em>The Guermantes Way</em>) </strong><br />
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Here, the fictional Marcel is making a formal declaration that his friendship with Robert de Saint-Loup has reached a more intimate stage. They'd been close buddies for months. Marcel (initially motivated to drop in on his friend so that he could somehow break into the honeycombed world of Saint-Loup's aunt, the Duchesse de Guermantes) has found the perfect friend. Saint-Loup caters to the sickly Marcel's every need with remarkable sincerity and understanding. Marcel, in turn, seems divided between the love he has for the Duchesse and the intense affection he has for Saint-Loup.<br />
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I sometimes wish that we had a formal mode of address in English with this little stepping stone of the informal "you." How you come about this decision to eliminate the distance between yourself and another person and how you choose to communicate this without getting the cold shoulder has something in common with a marriage proposal. It's an elaborate social ritual that puts friendship on the same level as romantic love. And why not? Why shouldn't friendships be cultivated with the same delicacy as one's love interests?<br />
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<em>Mon dieu</em>! I have an apology to make. I confused the Princesse de Guermantes with the Duchesse de Guermantes in my last blog entry. The description of the woman in her loge at the theater was that of the Princesse de Guermantes, not to be confused with the Duchesse who is Marcel's ideal love interest. She's the one he saw as a young boy in the cathedral at Combray. And the Duchesse is also the one who is deliciously<em> jolie</em> <em>laide </em>as you can see in the following description: <br />
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<strong>...I caught sight of the profile, beneath a navy-blue toque, of a beaklike nose against a red cheek, barred across by a piercing eye like some Egyptian deity...Mme de Guermantes was dressed in fur to the tip of her toque...Amid this natural plumage, her tiny head curved out its beak, and the prominent eyes were piercing and blue.</strong> Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-22072753373145403822010-10-20T19:06:00.000-07:002010-10-20T19:06:10.004-07:00On French Women<strong>Like a great goddess who presides from afar over the sport of lesser deities, the Princesse had deliberately remained somewhat to the back of her box, on a side-facing sofa, red as a coral rock...The beauty that set her far above the other mythical daughters of the semidarkness was not altogether materially and inclusively inscribed in the nape of her neck, in her shoulders, in her arms, or in her waist. But the exquisite, unfinished line of this last was the exact starting point, the inevitable origin of invisible lines into which the eye could not help extending them, marvelous lines, engendered around the woman like the specter of an ideal figure projected against the darkness.</strong> (from <em>The Guermantes Way</em>) <br />
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It's no accident that Proust is often quoted for saying, "Let's leave the obviously pretty women to men with no imagination." The Princesse de Guermantes, described above, would make a good example of <em>jolie laide</em> ("unconventionally good-looking woman: a woman whose facial features are not pretty in conventional terms, but nevertheless have a distinctive harmony or charm.")<br />
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We first meet the mysterious Princesse de Guermantes in <em>Combray</em>, when the young Marcel spies her in the town's Gothic cathedral, as the light spilling through the stained glass windows illuminates "the little pimple flaring up at the corner of her nose." Courtly love is very much alive and well two volumes later in <em>The Guermantes Way</em>, as the protagonist, now a man in his early twenties, continues to worship her to the point of stalking her by visiting her favorite Parisian haunts every day.<br />
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I thought of the topic of French women when I saw an article in the New York Times on October 11th ("Where Having It All Doesn't Mean Having Equality"), in which the editor-in-chief of French <em>Elle</em> says: "We have the right to do what men do--as long as we also take care of the children, cook a delicious dinner and look immaculate. We have to be superwoman."<br />
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Debra Ollivier, author of the scholarly tome (okay, guilty pleasure) <em>What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind</em>, adds her own interpretation when she writes, "Readers, let us bite into the Big Camembert with this: In France men and women actually like one another. A lot. There is no American-style war of the sexes going on. French men and women actually want to be together. They enjoy their mutual company. They spar. They debate. They flirt. They seek out one another's company in a multiplicity of social settings." (Unlike American women who are sex-starved and prickly, I assume.)<br />
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What is it about French women, besides their scarves and their thinness (attributed on alternate days to cigarettes, delighting in small portions of <em>foie gras</em>, and peer pressure), that makes them so unique?<br />
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I think Jeanne Moreau summed it up when she said, "One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you." This is a tall order when you grow up in a "haveaniceday" culture in which it is not only important to be liked, but well liked. French women (at least in Eric Rohmer films) share a blend of self-possession, self-knowledge, and poise. These women are as intelligent and acutely emotional as they are individual. The American woman in popular culture is childlike, doughy and half-formed in comparison. Superwoman or not, the French woman shoots out at sharp angles, like the Princesse de Guermantes and her "marvelous lines." Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-36436989516516791692010-09-30T18:51:00.000-07:002010-09-30T18:51:11.177-07:00On Flow<strong>The metaphor of "flow" is one that many have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as "being in the zone," religious mystics as being in "ecstasy," artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture. Athletes, mystics and artists do very different things when they reach flow, yet their descriptions of the experience are remarkably similar</strong>.--<em>Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life</em> by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi <br />
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Here, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high") has written a self-help book that is truly helpful. He shows how people are often in flow when playing at games and sports, which have clear goals and immediate feedback, and much less so when watching television, which, obviously enough, requires much less ability and isn't intrinsically rewarding. The aim is to maximize the amount of flow you get out of every day. <br />
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Clearly, Proust was in flow when he wrote <em>In Search of Lost Time</em>. He needed quiet and solitude in order to concentrate, so he worked night after night in a cork-lined room. In a letter to a friend, he describes his writing regimen: "Never have I lived like this, eating once every forty-eight hours, never before three in the morning, etc., etc." (Notice the telltale mark of "flow" in a lack of awareness of bodily needs.)<br />
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In turn, in reading Proust, I am in a state of flow. The last one hundred pages of <em>In the Shadow of Young</em> <em>Girls in Flower</em> passed as if a dream of a dream. A cloud of Lolita-like nymphs of summer frolicked on the grassy knolls of the fictional seaside resort, Balbec. In my concentration, I lost track of time and self...<br />
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Csikszentmihalyi cites "love of fate" as necessary for a good life. He quotes Nietzsche, who wrote: "My formula for greatness in a human being is <em>amor fati</em>: That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity...Not merely bear what is necessary...but love it."<br />
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Proust's character Marcel might writhe in pain over a troublesome love affair or express disappointment at some long-anticipated event or encounter, yet he sees beauty in everything.<br />
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In the last lines of the second volume, the summer at Balbec doesn't simply end, but becomes a relic in itself. Marcel recalls his maid, Francoise, unpinning the blinds in his windows after he has taken a nap:<br />
"the summer's day that she uncovered seemed as dead and immemorial as a mummy, magnificent and millennial, carefully divested by our old servant of all its wrappings and laid bare, embalmed in its vestments of gold."<br />
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As Allen Ginsberg would say: holy, holy, holy... Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-24374717029323408642010-09-14T15:39:00.000-07:002010-09-14T15:39:08.991-07:00Franzenfreude<strong>"...a well-read man hearing of the latest 'great book,' can give a jaded yawn, assuming the work to be a sort of composite derived from all the fine works he has ever read. But the fact is that a great book is not just the sum of existing masterpieces; it is particular and unforeseeable, being made out of something which, because it lies somewhere beyond that existing sum, cannot be deduced simply from acquaintance with it, however close. No sooner has the well-read man discovered the new work than he forgets his earlier indifference and takes an interest in the reality it sets before him."</strong> (<em>In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower</em>)<br />
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This is a great example of how we make books our own. When we finally read a book thought of as a masterpiece--such as <em>Anna Karenina</em> or <em>Madame Bovary</em>--it sheds that generic quality and becomes part of our private universe. It's like getting to know someone well you have only seen from afar or going from a vague sketch to sharp focus. From then on, the book belongs to us, to the most private place within us.<br />
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Speaking of masterpieces, Jonathan Franzen's new novel <em>Freedom</em> is already hailed as the novel of the decade. The <em>Observer </em>calls it "the novel of the century" and Sam Tanenhaus in the <em>New York Times</em> declares it "a masterpiece of American fiction." Even Michiko Kakutani, whom Franzen once called "the stupidest person in New York," has conceded that it is "an indelible portrait of our times."<br />
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On the cover of <em>Time</em> (next to the words "Great American Novelist" printed in bold), Franzen stares off into the distance with a certain unease, while the windswept hair, English professor glasses and face peppered with stubble cry out "boyish charm."<br />
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I've had two Franzen sightings since he published <em>The Corrections</em> nine years ago. Once in that fall of 2001 on a subway platform at 96th Street waiting for the 1 train, where he stood in a raincoat and carried a briefcase, cloaked in anonymity. The second time was at a Citibank on the Upper East Side. I can report that he is surprisingly tall and wore faded black jeans.<br />
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I suspect his discomfort in public is to a certain extent misinterpreted as self-satisfaction or conceit. If you Google "Jonathan Franzen smug," you get 7, 250 results. "Jonathan Franzen is a great writer," <em>Newsweek</em> declares. "Should it matter if he's not a great guy?"<br />
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Bestselling author Jennifer Weiner defines "Franzenfreude" as "taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen." (Even though it was quickly pointed out that "freude" means joy, not displeasure.) The <em>Herald Scotland</em> rallies against those women authors who feel unfairly overlooked: "They may be justified in ranting against the cliche of the white male darling, but they are in danger of being seen as that even worse creature, the shrew."<br />
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This entry has the unfortunate second-hand quality of being about book reviews instead of books. I'm looking forward to the pleasure of reading <em>Freedom</em>. I remember the evening in 2001 when I went to three different bookstores where <em>The Corrections</em> was sold out. I finally ordered a copy from my favorite bookstore, Three Lives, and read it compulsively for most of a day and a half.<br />
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I also have a sinking feeling. I end with one final quote, this one from Virginia Woolf on Proust: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry...One has to put the book down and gasp." <br />
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Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-28097762270115721832010-09-07T17:30:00.000-07:002010-09-07T17:30:02.871-07:00On Beauty<strong> The fact was, he could still see her as a Botticelli. Odette herself, who always tried to conceal things she did not like about her own person, or at least to compensate for them rather than bring them out, things that a painter might have seen as her "type," but which as a woman she saw as defects, had no time for Botticelli. Swann owned a wonderful Oriental stole, in blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly the one worn by the virgin in the <em>Magnificat</em>. Mme Swann would not wear it. Once only, she relented and let him give her an outfit based on La Primavera's garlands of daisies, bellwort, cornflowers, and forget-me-nots. In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel's inkwell, before writing in the holy book where <em>Magnificat</em> is already inscribed. Then he would add, "Be sure not to mention it to her! One word--and she'd make sure it wouldn't happen again</strong>!"<br />
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Here, Swann ponders the beauty of his wife (and former mistress/courtesan) Odette. Throughout <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> so far, Swann has a habit of comparing women to famous works of art. We talk about "types." ("She's not my type.") It's both charming and a little creepy to see Swann compare Odette to a Botticelli right down to her fingertips. (At least he doesn't find his inspiration in Victoria's Secret catalogues!)<br />
Today's equivalent might be to reference movie stars. For example, I am convinced that my dog Phoebe looks like Elizabeth Taylor. (She has a glossy coat of black and tan, white gloves, soft pointy ears and big worried eyes.)<br />
I saw the beginning of the Farelly brothers' <em>Shallow Hal</em> on television the other day. Possibly one of the worst movies ever made, it stars Jack Black as someone who suddenly sees women for their inner beauty. He doesn't realize that the woman he finds gorgeous (played by the very blonde and very svelte Gwyneth Paltrow) is actually overweight and ordinary looking. I assume he gets his comeuppance in the end and learns not to judge women by their measurements. Yet every frame the model-thin Gwyneth Paltrow is in contradicts such a lesson.<br />
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Walk through any museum and you can see that there are few universal standards for beauty.<br />
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My mother is enrolled at the Meet Me at MOMA program. Once a month, groups of Alzheimer's patients convene at the Museum of Modern Art to look at, and talk about, art. In front of a Klimt painting called "Hope, II," my mother recently described the oval shapes embedded on the gown of the pregnant woman who is the focus of the piece as "donuts," and added, "They're making me hungry!" She is clearly excited about the art, even if what she is able to express doesn't live up to her emotional impressions.<br />
Like Rita Hayworth, someone else with early onset Alzheimer's, my mother was a great beauty. Growing up, that's all I ever heard: your mother is gorgeous! Though she is still pretty, people now look at her as if she were a fossil and say, "I can see from her bone structure that she must have been quite beautiful." Yet my mother transcends age and time. She still has mad crushes on people such as Amir, a striking group leader at the Meet Me at MOMA program. "There he is!" she said to me conspiratorially at our last tour. "Let's get him!"<br />
And why not? After all, he kind of looks like someone I saw in a film once... Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-73066527763057593672010-08-29T14:01:00.000-07:002010-08-29T14:01:27.484-07:00On Not Writing<strong>If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow, where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready--and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days...Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours.</strong> (from <em>In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower</em>) <br />
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How easy it is to justify not beginning to write. My favorite method of stalling is to read books on writing. I confess to having read <em>The Courage to Write</em> twice already. This is symbolic writing. It's a little like reading a book on weight loss with a pastrami sandwich in one hand, telling oneself the diet will start on Monday.<br />
A great way of procrastinating is to read about the rituals of famous authors. Kent Haruf, for example, sits in front of a typewriter blindfolded and types as quickly as possible. As in an Catholic church service, there are a lot of smells and bells.<br />
Some authors, like Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron, are better known for their books on how to write than for their other works. My favorite guide is Francine Prose's <em>Reading Like a</em> <em>Writer</em>. These books can be as helpful as they are seductive, yet in the end nothing but putting pen to paper will suffice.<br />
It seems that a great many people feel they have a book in them (as opposed to a painting or a song or a dance) and they are just yearning for a stretch of free time to kick back and set to work. The novel is almost complete--it just hasn't been written yet.<br />
Part of the problem is having such high standards: "I must wake up at 4 am to work on my novel" or "I must sit in front of my computer for 5 hours a day." Everyone at least marginally interested in writing has heard the advice to write at the same time each day, everyday, for at least an hour. Why is this simple prescription so hard at times?<br />
I think many people are unknowingly afraid of what the act of writing will stir up. It's a form of perfectionism. If they abandon themselves and lose a minimum of control, they may end up broke, drunk, or crazy.<br />
In the end, not writing is quite difficult. Once you plunge in, even for a few minutes, there is a great sense of relief.Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-14472213931642343192010-08-24T14:46:00.000-07:002010-08-24T14:46:26.370-07:00Celebrity Crushes My mother is in love with Paul McCartney. "Oh, Paulie!" she says. In her youthful sixty-nine-year-old face is the first flush of adolescence, the breathless "I would die for him!" swoon. This is my mother, the seventies disco queen, the eighties jogger, and the nineties horseback rider, the former school psychologist who now cannot shower or dress by herself. <br />
Alzheimer's crept up on my mother unexpectedly and damaged her orbito-frontal cortex and thalamus and hippocampus, making it difficult for her to control her impulses. Maybe this can explain the sort of Beatles fan she is today, the boy-crazy alter ego who would like to tear her hair out, stomp her feet, and scream the way lovesick girls do, in a horrific frenzy.<br />
I'm a little embarassed by this woman who says, "I hope Paul visits today" and carries around old CD liners with his picture on them. "Look at Paul," she says in doctors' waiting rooms and in the supermarket line. All she has to do is fish into her purse or coat pockets and Paul appears as unexpected as if he had just made a fresh entrance into her life. Paul is more real to her than her husband or her daughter. To her, we are rude, nonsensical creatures who help her dress and undress in a tug of war over arm holes and buttons and the subtle differences between right and left.<br />
It reminds me of my first celebrity crush. I was a young girl at summer camp and my cousin in another cabin had a poster of Tommy Howell (the centerfold in <em>Teen Beat</em>) taped to the wall of her bunk. I had to have one just like that and I kissed my glossy flat poster boy with quick, shy pecks on the mouth. He was my practice boyfriend.<br />
The adolescent Marcel experiences something similar with the actress La Berma. He yearns for "the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams." While Tommy Howell doesn't necessarily compete with La Berma as a masterwork of dramatic art, there is still that unfulfilled desire for a well-known actor.<br />
At its absolute best, my relationship with my mother is a form of "karma yoga" or selfless service. I try to perform some small kindness. Sometimes that means offering her a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes that means talking about Paul as if he were a dinner guest. And sometimes all that means is putting on a Beatles CD and watching her sway back and forth like a fish swimming upstream, mouthing all the lyrics. For a moment, she is a boy-crazy teenager, biting her knuckles and screaming through her tears. And then the moment passes and we have to navigate the rest of the day as mother and daughter. Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-61289425000128099682010-08-17T18:00:00.000-07:002010-08-17T18:00:47.494-07:00Proust for Pleasure <strong>I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid had just shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles in a game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet--still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed--with an iridescence that is not of this earth. It seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm, edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner at which I had eaten them, they played, in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume.</strong><br />
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I was first attracted to this passage found in the first section of <em>In Search of Lost Time</em> because it appeared to be a still life for vegetarians, not a routine carnivorous description of <em>bifteck aux pommes</em>. This is truly Proust for pleasure: the voluptuous passages ignite all the senses. Certainly no one reads Proust for plot, yet his detail and description can be so flowery at times that his words border on purple prose. Not so here--every bit of paint applies itself to the canvas.<br />
In this passage, we get a sense of what it feels like to be asparagus. You could say he masters asparagus psychology. They are "creatures" with "feet" and "firm, edible flesh." Yet, at the same time, they are not what they appear; they are not of this world.<br />
He depicts more than a pretty picture. There is a certain sexual undercurrent to his fascination with asparagus. What's more, his vegetables have undergone an Ovidian metamorphosis. <br />
He begins with what seems calm and collected in English ("what delighted me were the asparagus"), yet sounds more emotionally charged in French ("mais mon ravissement etait devant les asperges"). Besides "delight," "ravissement" can mean "ecstasy," "rapture," and even "rape." And in his ecstasy (almost drug-induced in its intensity), he sees it all for the first time as in a case of <em>jamais vu</em>--as if he had never seen a countertop of raw asparagus before.<br />
And his ecstasy in seeing the asparagus has something to do with young Marcel's first stirrings of sexual pleasure. A little further on, we see the secret life of asparagus exposed "in those early hints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in the extinction of blue evenings" ("en ces couleurs naissantes d'aurore, en ces ebauches d'arc-en-ciel, en cette extinction de soirs bleus"). This is the climactic phrase in the passage: we go from dawn to evening, from birth to death.<br />
What is this build up to a beautiful death? I suggest it has to do with <em>la petite mort </em>("the little death," a metaphor for orgasm). Looking the term up in my trusted Wiki, a more far-reaching definition of <em>la petite mort</em> refers to "the spiritual release that comes with orgasm, or a short period of melancholy or transcendence, as a result of the expenditure of the 'life force.'"<br />
Roland Barthes, the literary critic, spoke of <em>la petite mort</em> as the main goal of reading literature. When I began writing, I wanted to show Proust as hearty and vital, not as stodgy and quaint. Presumably, we all experience a little death in reading Proust through the portal of his attention to detail and description.<br />
And this is truly Proust for pleasure. <br />
Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7414499619164866574.post-56653941015449680932010-08-08T16:29:00.000-07:002010-08-08T16:29:33.948-07:00My Year of Turning 40: In Search of Lost Time (Introduction) To my surprise, I turned 40 one month ago. Where did the time go? In this youth-obsessed culture, 40 feels like a turning point. The grim reaper appears, licking the tip of his pencil. <em>Married</em>? No. <em>Children? </em>No. <em>Successful career as a bestselling author?</em> No comment. <em>Live boldly or else.</em><br />
<em> </em>Two years ago, I moved back home to help take care of my parents. My mother has Alzheimer's. Just dressing in the morning is an exercise in frustration: putting her arms through the right holes in her shirt, pullling up underwear facing the correct way, lacing up shoes that match on the proper feet. At night, she is confused about why her daughter and husband are telling her to take her clothes off and put on a nightgown. It just doesn't make sense.<br />
As my mother loses her memory, I am reading Proust. Finally. The last time I was in Paris, I bought a knapsack to smuggle all of Proust's masterpiece (in a dozen paperbacks) out of the country. They remained untouched until a year ago. I read the first section--"Combray"--twice in French before I read it in English. To my dismay, I realized that because I had missed so many nuances, I needed a translation. Now I'm just past the "At Madame Swann's" section of the second volume (<em>In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower</em>).<br />
My task: to read 50 pages in English (and then in French) each week and write two pages that will provide a taste of Proust as seen through my own warped lens.<br />
Proust turned 40 in 1911. In January of that year, he wrote in a letter that he existed "suspended between caffeine, aspirin, asthma, angina pectoris, and in six...days out of seven (between) life and death." He had just started a book. "God knows if I shall ever finish it."<br />
And what do I have to show for myself? Two short plays, some poems, an unfinished (yet not abandoned) novel, and a memoir I'm in the middle of completing. Mere lines in the sand. (Disclaimer: not to compare myself in any way with the budding master novelist.)<br />
How will my blog differ from two recent popular books on Proust? Alain de Botton's <em>How Proust Can</em> <em>Change Your Life</em> is clever and makes for a fun read, but it doesn't focus on the language. And Phyllis Rose's <em>The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time</em> left me stranded by chapter two, in which she devotes many pages to a blow-by-blow account of channel surfing that has little or nothing to do with Proust.<br />
I pledge to keep on topic, to share what it is I love about Proust without being doctrinaire. I pledge to illuminate the crosshatching where my life and Proust's words intersect without too many sentences like, "Of course, what Proust is trying to say here has everything to do with what happened to my cousin three years ago on the A train." I pledge to make this blog accessible to everyone, whether they've never read a word of Proust or if they read him every year. I pledge to find my way lit by the headlights two feet in front of me as I drive through the night, seeing where this experiment takes me.<br />
The year I turn 40 will be the most bold yet. I won't sit safely by the hearth, remembering things past, but I will go in hungry pursuit of lost time. So as I type this, I am dipping a madeline in my tea and mumbling a prayer I used to hear at Unitarian services: <em>Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.</em> Alison Oatmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889143941736704991noreply@blogger.com1