Marcel Proust: Du côté de chez Swann (1913)

All right! Du côté de chez Swann / Swann's Way  (1913) hits one hundred today. This calls for remembrance of things past, the search for lost time, and time regained. I raise high my glass in salute. 

One of my most memorable reading pleasures remains finishing Proust's complete cycle, À la recherche du temps perdu. And I'm certainly not alone in this the world over. 

For the record, traces of Proust are revealed in films ranging from Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1945)* to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine (2006) -- and the beat goes on. 

Du côté de chez Swann / Swann's Way is a good place to start Proust, come to think of it. Swann and Odette de Crécy and l'amour fou ~ a most memorable start, indeed.

Proust's intricate, finely wrought sentences are a wonder even in English translation. For example, from Du côté de chez Swann / Swann's Way:

"When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection" (Wikiquote translation).

An easy way to sample Du côté de chez Swann / Swann's Way is to check out Volker Schlöndorff's Un amour de Swann / Swann in Love (1984). But beware: sensuality is depicted! 

Today's Rune: Joy.   *William Faulkner, a Proust admirer, was one of the screenwriter-adapters of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel.

I Love Banned Books!

In the USA, George Carlin was the man when it came to pointing out the absurdities of word censorship, with nods to Nat Hentoff and many others.

As a librarian and writer, I love banned words. I love banned books displays, too. And of course, I love banned books.

Taking on censorship is a piece of cake -- unless that censorship has government and secret police backing. Unless that censorship is enforced by Italian fascists, North Korean "communists," Iranian Basij, Puritan freaks, Ku Klux Klansmen, Nazi brutes, Syrian interior ministry stooges or totalitarian/authoritarian goon squads in general. Even then, crackdowns add weight to the importance of words, texts, art of all kinds, even more so -- precisely because made rare and precious, subversive and free.

Back in 1997 while doing research, I visited the Special Collections at UVA's Alderman Library in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had amazing displays, things like William Faulkner's typewriter, coat, chair and other accessories; if memory serves, it had samples of Thomas Jefferson's red hair, too, and artifacts from US and Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. UVA's Special Collections also had on display banned materials like S.C.U.M. Manifesto and William S. Burroughs' (aka William Lee's) Junkie. Hell, even Homer's The Odyssey was banned by morons somewhere on Earth.

Love it: the Power of the Word.

Today's Rune: Movement. [Adapted from an earlier post dated July 18, 2009].

Jean-Luc Godard: Le gai savoir, Part 1

Jean-Luc Godard's Le gai savoir (1969) mixes in many late 1960s cultural and political icons and touchstones, ranging from texts and images of the 1968 unheavals, the US-Vietnam War, the Black Panthers, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the Pentagon, the Beatles, Mao, William Faulkner, Noam Chomsky, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, competing maps of the world and its conflicts, Bertolt Brecht, pop advertisements, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mozart. Even if it had no other value (it does), Le gai savoir remains a vibrant document still hot off the press from more than forty years ago.

Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto): "No, listen, we study links, relations, differences. . ."

If everything seemed to connect in 1968-1969, it still does in 2011. A of people in the know about the workings of the world just got tired, I guess, or are almost forgotten. All one has to do, now as then, is look and listen, with curiosity, and pay attention. Where there's a will, there's a way; where there's no will, there's no way -- in or out of a big ball of confusion.

Today's Rune: Strength.

Jean-Luc Godard: Pierrot le fou

Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965): one of the strangest variations on Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise that you may never ever see. It deconstructs and reconstructs itself from opening image to the FIN that never comes. As in the Big Lebowski, there's even bowling. "Allonsy, Alonzo! / Let's go, Daddy-O!"

What's it all about? The arc: a cross-country flee spree sparked by the chance repeat meeting of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who is married with kids and bored, and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), a past flame and femme fatale, at a party that unfolds like a series of advertisements.

Godard's imaginative stirring of "reality" and "surreality" with literature, pop culture and museum art is weird enough to inspire dreams in primary colors, the palette of this movie, which has the breadth of a novel, albeit a Postmodern one replete with hyperlinks. Godard as prophet, torchbearer and time traveler.  
 

Snippet One:

Ferdinand: Too much going on. There's a little harbor like in a Conrad novel.
Marianne: A sailboat, like in Robert Louis Stevenson.
Ferdinand: An old brothel, like in Faulkner.
Marianne: A steward turned millionaire like in Jack London.
Ferdinand: With you it's always so complicated.
Marianne: No, it's simple.
Ferdinand: Too much going on. Two guys beat me up like in Raymond Chandler . . .

Snippet Two:

A woman can kill lots of people easy. Full breasts and soft thighs don't mean she can't kill everyone to remain free or protect herself. Just look at Cuba or Vietnam or Israel.  

Finally, let's not forget other allusions to the Vietnam War, to Yemen and Lebanon, and brief scenes -- spookily contemporary in the twenty-first century -- of waterboarding and a suicide bomber. Yes, dreams will come forth, and perhaps nightmares, too.

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Mae West's Babe Gordon or: The Constant Sinner

Almost done with Mae West's novel first published in 1930 as Babe Gordon and then as The Constant Sinner, which she also adapted into a play in 1931. It's remarkable for a number of reasons: the main character, Babe Gordon, despite being only eighteen and nineteen years old during the action, is a strong antihero (or heroine, if you prefer) who is able to work her magic despite all sorts of edgy and highly charged racial, gender, sexual and socio-economic conflicts. 

The text. A reader having no clue about historical or literary context will be presented with a society that seems unhinged about race, gender, sex, money and power, and will probably wonder why social relations are so deranged. Babe Gordon is unquestionably out for herself, seeking good times but also security and self-preservation. She divides and conquers, but not without challenges, setbacks and enemies. Strange lingo peppers the text, slang, racial, gender and class slurs and epithets included, yet a 2011 reader will certainly recognize many social realities that seem familiar. One must come away from the text and ask: what is the same, and what has changed?

One place to look is at word usage, technology employed and attitudes made evident by what is contested and what is subverted in Babe Gordon's arc.

As a social document, Babe Gordon / The Constant Sinner remains compelling -- and incendiary -- in many ways. The text, the language and cultural attitudes revealed are fascinating. On the other hand, this novel also fits within the context of other writings published around the same time. A lot of dialogue shifts gear and employs clashing perspectives as in James Joyce's Ulysses (1920-1922) and Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), and let's not forget Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen and many other of Mae West's contemporaries. Nor should we be particularly shocked by Babe Gordon's bold attitudes: one need only consider some of the great blues singers of the 1920s to perceive the contesting of power in many social spheres at a time when Prohibition was the law, segregation was almost universally pervasive, and adult women could finally vote across the USA.  

Today's Rune: Harvest.    

Jean-Luc Godard: Breathless

To backtrack one step, I want to lay out a snapshot of Godard's first feature film, À bout de souffle / Breathless (1960; US release, 1961).  First, the movie itself as a text. It revolves mostly around two characters: Michel Poiccard  (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a petty hoodlum and scoundrel, and Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American living and working at miscellaneous jobs in Paris, intent on studying at the Sorbonne. Michel needs money, he is owed money, and he is pursued for having killed a motorcycle patrolman while on the way to Paris after stealing a car in Marseille. Having previously hooked up briefly with Patricia, once back in Paris he tries to expand on their earlier encounter and coax her away to Italy. That's the basic setup. We see a lot of naturally lit Parisian urbanscapes in black and white and a lot of deft hand-held camera work by Raoul Coutard, Godard's cinematographer; there are many jump cuts in evidence. 

What I usually find with Breathless is an initial aversion to the two main characters, or at least to Michel, but by the time he's hanging out with Patricia in her little longterm hotel room, everything comes together beautifully. I don't know exactly why it always seems to work that way, but it does. Which brings us to some snippets of the film's dialogue, all delivered by Patricia (Jean Seberg, pictured above) except for where noted.

The French always say one second when they mean five minutes.

[Michel]: Where we going?  [Patricia]: Anywhere. The Latin Quarter.

Soon means soon.

Enough games for today.

Do you prefer records or the radio?

I’m very independent, you know.

But you don’t know what I think, you don’t know.

I want to know what’s behind your face. I’ve looked at it for ten minutes and I still know nothing.

Say what you like, I don’t care. I’ll put all this in my book.

Do you know William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms? Listen. The last section is beautiful. "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief." Which would you choose?

We look each other in the eyes, but what for?

So that’s that.

[The Writer,  Parvulesco (Jean-Pierre Melville)]: Two things matter in this life. For men, it’s women, and for women, money.

[Patricia]: Why bother writing? To have money and not rely on men.



Today's Rune: Joy

Interzone: Lost and Found in the Cosmos

Now might be a good time to round up a copy of Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983). I used to have one, but gave it away to someone who wanted a crash course in Existentialism. I barely remember the details, though I do recall enjoying its contents more than any particular Percy novel. One thing that stuck was how people -- we humans -- can't help but be mesmerized by disasters and epic events, especially if they are far away. There but for the Grace of God go I.  When you're in the middle of such things, on the other hand, you have to deal with them directly and immediatetely. By the Grace of God or by simple twist of fate, here I am and how do I get outta here as fast as possible? I swear I'll be good!

Also, happy birthday to William S. Burroughs (1914-1997);  a new documentary is in the pipeline (William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, 2010). And finally, RIP to Reynolds Price (2/1/1933-1/20/2011), who died in Durham, North Carolina.  He was a favorite of my high school "Southern Writers" English teacher, Mrs. Vick, who dared not utter the name of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman (she was originally from Mississippi and was also a big Faulkner and Shelby Foote fan; we read Walker Percy's 1961 novel The Moviegoer in her class). She cracked me up every time. 

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.  

Banned Books: The Power of the Word

George Carlin was the man when it came to pointing out the absurdities of word censorship, with nods to Nat Hentoff and many others.

As a librarian and writer, I love banned words. I love banned books displays, too. And of course, I love banned books.

Taking on censorship is like shooting fish in a barrel -- unless it has government and secret police backing. Especially unless it's enforced by Italian fascists, Iranian Basij, Puritan freaks, Nazi thugs or totalitarian authoritarian goon squads in general. Even then, crackdowns add weight to the importance of words, texts, art of all kinds, even more so -- precisely because made rare and precious and subversive and free.

Back in 1997 while doing research, I visited the Special Collections at UVA's Alderman Library in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had amazing displays, things like William Faulkner's typewriter, coat, chair and other accessories; if memory serves, it had samples of Thomas Jefferson's red hair, too, and artifacts from US and Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. UVA's Special Collections also had on display banned materials like S.C.U.M. Manifesto and William S. Burroughs' (aka William Lee's) Junkie. Hell, even Homer's The Odyssey was banned by morons somewhere on Earth.

Love it: the Power of the Word. Just like in the Bible.

Today's Rune: Strength.

Desegregation: Watts to Walltown, 1970

From 1965 to 1970, I attended six different schools in four states. When my family arrived in Durham, North Carolina, in 1970, there was George Watts Elementary School (school number five), maybe a mile's walk from our house on well-tended city sidewalks. That was mid-year. In the fall, I was assigned to Walltown Elementary School, about a mile in another direction from my family's abode. Durham was beginning to put real desegregation into effect, and Walltown had been up until then a black school. It's shameful to think, but only with desegregation did the city begin to pave the still-dirt streets of much of Walltown.


Watts School was a real change from Minnesota. On my first day attending during a recess on the school grounds, a kid about my age said, "I lost my pencil over yonder," gesturing. Imagining he meant over the horizon or far away, it took me a minute to realize he meant he'd dropped his pencil in the grass a few feet away. Out front, girls played hop scotch and during lunch, hot cornbread was served. In the spring, the building was hot and humid. But the principal was nice and this is where I became friends with Crafton Keller and an older black kid named Charles Faulkner. Crafton was a bit of a hellion, while Charles was just a big guy, having been held back, year after year.


Going to Walltown was even more of a change, enough for a separate post. I remember clearly the drainage ditches ringing the playing fields behind the main building and in those trash-filled ditches, big rats. Kind of like a moat. Also remember turning my ankle playing football. But as far as timing, got to experience desegregation in the Upper South, and got to compare that with my former already integrated schools in the North.

Today's Rune: Self.

Flags in the Dust

Woke up this morning, what did I see?
A big black cloud hanging over me
I switched on the radio and nearly dropped dead
The news was so bad that I fell out of bed
There was a gas strike, oil strike, lorry strike, bread strike
Got to be a superman to survive

Gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, phone bills
I'm such a wreck but I'm staying alive . . . . .

(The Kinks, "Superman," 1979)


Heather Locklear. Amanda Woodward, her character in Melrose Place, shares the same name as one of my great grandmothers. That always makes me chuckle. These blondes did have more fun. Advice: unless you want a world of hurt, never marry a rock star.


Michael Madsen -- Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), etc.


Catherine Zeta-Jones -- not only is she married to Michael Douglas (same birthday, different year); apparently she is also a "woman with a past." Ha!

Today's Rune: Defense.

Birthdays: Fletcher Christian, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, William Faulkner, Robert Bresson, Mark Rothko, Silvana Pampanini, Aldo Ray, Barbara Walters, Shel Silverstein, Michael Douglas, Cheryl Tiegs, Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, Michael Madsen, Heather Lcoklear, Aida Turturro, Will Smith, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Bridgette Wilson, Chauncey Billups.

Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document: A Novel (N.Y.: Scribner, 2006) derives its title from a bootleg film about Bob Dylan's 1966 tour (D. A. Pennebaker's re-edited version is reportedly called Something Is Happening). My friend Joe McGeary recommended this, and as I already had it in a stack to read, I went ahead and read it yesterday in one sitting. As Joe and others have noted, it has the feel of a Don DeLillo novel.

Eat the Document is about a lot of things, starting with the radical anti-Establishment movement(s) of the 1960s and 1970s. It is about identity, and secrets, and capitalism. Vietnam is in there, and the market trick of absorbing radical ideas into the mainstream.

The structure is cut up into chapters from several points of view, reminding me at times of Faulkner (ex., his Vardaman's "My mother is a fish"). Near the end, some chapters are as brief as a short paragraph.

Mary Whittaker is the primary character. After a botched bombing in 1972 by her little group (akin to the Weather Underground), she must truly disappear, changing her name and identity again. From "Freya," Mary becomes Caroline Sherman. Later, she changes again, assuming the identity of Louise Barrot, a girl who died in infancy. Bobby DeSoto, a co-conspirator, also goes underground, becoming Nash. He befriends a guy who may or may not have been a Vietnam Vet poisoned by Agent Orange. The novel seemingly ends before 9/11/2001, with everything plausibly tied together.

Music and advertising are peppered throughout the novel, things ranging from the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, the band Love, and even, near the end, the Kinks. The bands and albums discussed are real, even the bootlegs. Some corporations and their lethal products are real; some are, apparently, made up. By the end, the internet has become a major facet of the younger characters' lives. There's a lot to ruminate about. My head is still spinning.


Today's Rune: The Blank Rune.

Birthdays: Maria Theresa (Mária Terézia, Queen of Bohemia and Hungary, Archduchess of Austria), Zebulon Baird Vance, Georges Braque, Georgios N. Papanikolaou, Daphne du Maurier, Gil Evans (b. Ian Ernest Gilmore Green), Jim Jones, Harvey Keitel, Mary Wells (of Detroit), Armistead Maupin (UNC-Chapel Hill grad.), Stevie Wonder (b. Stevland Hardaway Judkins, Saginaw, Mich.), Alan Ball, Stephen Colbert.

Do we really need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows?

Happy Mother's Day!

1973 Nervous Breakdown

Andreas Killen's 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2006) delves into the watershed year 1973 and looks at the 70s, perched between the end of American involvement in Vietnam and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. To Killen (and others), "the Sixties" as we think of them stretched from the assassination of JFK in 1963 through Watergate. He gives the reader a lot to absorb and think about.

I particularly like his exploration of how Andy Warhol's reality became a sort of national reality. He intertwines politics, events, books (Fear of Flying and Jonathan Livingston Seagull), movies (Last Tango in Paris, Deep Throat, The Godfather, The Exorcist), and musicians (Lou Reed, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls), and "reinventing the Fifties," a nostalgiac Vietnam-blind vision that Reagan exploited and the plurality of voting Americans embraced.

Among other things happening in 1973, consider Roe v. Wade; the suspension of the military Draft; Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement; the death of Pablo Picasso; the World Trade Center dedicated; the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet coup in Chile and assassination of Salvador Allende; the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East; gas lines; Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs; the forced resignation of U.S. VP Spiro Agnew; Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Stockholm Syndrome (which Killen suggests affected whole swaths of Americans in various bad ways) -- and one catches some idea of the bewildering swirl that caused the vast collective socio-political "nervous breakdown."

There are other books about watershed years, too --1968 is a good one for that and I suppose 2000 and 2001 are, as well.

By comparison, I wonder how are things going to go for the rest of the current president's term in office through early 2009? So far, it's been a nice White House visit for all of us! I wonder what else they have cooked up and ready to serve?

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. Philip Roth won the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman.

Today's Birthdays: Longfellow, John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, Dexter Gordon, Ralph Nader, Nancy Spungen.

Another year for me and you
Another year with nothin' to do

William Styron: Lie Down in Darkness

The death of William Styron (b. Newport News, Virginia, 6/11/1925-d. 11/1/2006, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts) throws my mind back to my high school years in Durham, North Carolina.

Given that every English teacher I've ever taken classes with has ranged from eccentric to outlandish and sometimes outrageous, Mrs. V. stands out as a moody mix of them all, only with a very Southern twist. Hailing from Mississippi, she taught an outstanding class called "Southern Writers." Mrs. V. loved her people and championed their work, had met Faulkner, the master, and had us read his novels, plus Tennessee Williams' plays, Flannery O'Connor's writings, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, and also her friends Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price (who came to class once). Anne Tyler was in the mix somehow, too. For a special research paper, I was given William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which I found alternately absorbing and nauseating, and certainly memorable.

Styron was an intense guy, masking depression with various addictions I suppose, but also, perhaps, because of his sensitivity, perceptiveness and depth. After attending Davidson College, he graduated from Duke, with stints in the Marine Corps before and after. Before he died yesterday, he completed five novels (including Sophie's Choice, 1979) and three other books, including Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).

I thank Mrs. V for making me read Styron early. I don't remember a Mr. V, but she had a son who suffered from a wasting disease. In class, she alternated between fussy propriety to whispered enthusiasm at "Freudian symbolism" like cigars, hot lava, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Mrs V. refused to ever mention General William Tecumseh Sherman's name ("that awful man") because of Vicksburg and Atlanta, and always referred to the American Civil War as "The War of Northern Aggression" or "The War for Southern Independence." Since I was born in Yankee Pennsylvania, I found her observations highly entertaining and a bit Mississippi crazy. In her mind, very little of importance happened in the world since "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Except, of course, for Southern writers -- America's saving grace in the twentieth century.

Today's Rune: Journey.

Adieu, William Styron.