Three Interesting Reads Not About Race, Guns, Cops, or Obama

“Fat. Single. Christian. In church, being overweight and dating feels like a sin” by Joy Beth Smith in the Washington Post for June 27, 2016.

“Mr. [Garth] Brooks” by Drew Bratcher in the Paris Review  for July 8, 2016.

“What It’s Like to Be Sober in Austin, Where Alcohol is Pretty Much Everywhere” by Ashley Lopez in KUT.org Austin News for June 30, 2016.

Commentary on Proust – No. 3

It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire which shaped and crowned and consecrated every occupation, every hour of the day, every point of view in the town. From my bedroom window I could discern no more than its base, which had been freshly covered with slates; but when on Sundays I saw these, in the hot light of a summer morning, blaze like a black sun I would say to myself: “Good heavens! nine o’clock! I must get ready for mass at once if I am to have time to go in and kiss aunt Léonie first,” and I would know exactly what was the colour of the sunlight upon the Square, I could feel the heat and dust of the market, the shade behind the blinds of the shop into which Mamma would perhaps go on her way to mass, penetrating its odour of unbleached calico, to purchase a handkerchief or something, of which the draper himself would let her see what he had, bowing from the waist: who, having made everything ready for shutting up, had just gone into the back shop to put on his Sunday coat and to wash his hands, which it was his habit, every few minutes and even on the saddest occasions, to rub one against the other with an air of enterprise, cunning, and success.

And again, after mass, when we looked in to tell Théodore to bring a larger loaf than usual because our cousins had taken advantage of the fine weather to come over from Thiberzy for luncheon, we had in front of us the steeple, which, baked and brown itself like a larger loaf still of ‘holy bread,’ with flakes and sticky drops on it of sunlight, pricked its sharp point into the blue sky. And in the evening, as I came in from my walk and thought of the approaching moment when I must say good night to my mother and see her no more, the steeple was by contrast so kindly, there at the close of day, that I would imagine it as being laid, like a brown velvet cushion, against—as being thrust into the pallid sky which had yielded beneath its pressure, had sunk slightly so as to make room for it, and had correspondingly risen on either side; while the cries of the birds wheeling to and fro about it seemed to intensify its silence, to elongate its spire still further, and to invest it with some quality beyond the power of words.

Even when our errands lay in places behind the church, from which it could not be seen, the view seemed always to have been composed with reference to the steeple, which would stand up, now here, now there, among the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared thus without the church. And, indeed, there are many others which look best when seen in this way, and I can call to mind vignettes of housetops with surmounting steeples in quite another category of art than those formed by the dreary streets of Combray. I shall never forget, in a quaint Norman town not far from Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses, dear to me and venerable for many reasons, between which, when one looks up at them from a fine garden which descends in terraces to the river, the gothic spire of a church (itself hidden by the houses) soars into the sky with the effect of crowning and completing their fronts, but in a material so different, so precious, so beringed, so rosy, so polished, that it is at once seen to be no more a part of them than would be a part of two pretty pebbles lying side by side, between which it had been washed on the beach, the purple, crinkled spire of some sea-shell spun out into a turret and gay with glossy colour. Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest ‘prints’ which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome.

–Proust, “Combray”[1]

When I first read this passage from Proust, early in the “Combray” section, about the steeple to the church in Combray, I was immediately reminded of two things:

(1) The steeple to Hyde Park Baptist Church in Austin, Texas (off of Speedway, not far from the Jason’s Deli on Red River):

And (2) this scene of a church from The Omen (1976):

NOTES

[1] Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. (In Search of Lost Time.) Vol. I. Du côté de chez Swann. (Swann’s Way.) Translated by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin. § “Combray.”

5 Things to Read for Tuesday

From the looks of these first three links, it appears the New York Review of Books is celebrating things Italia this month:

1. Andrew Butterfield writes on some Botticelli exhibits in Berlin: “Botticelli: Love, Wisdom, Terror,” May 26, 2016.
2. Tim Parks writes on “How Italy Improved My English,” May 10, 2016.
3. Matt Donovan discovers that tourists used to climb the Pantheon in “Climbing the Eye of God,” May 13, 2016.
4. Sam Jordison of The Guardian writes about Delillo’s work, both old and new, in “White Noise is an outsider’s look inside small-town Americana,” May 17, 2016.
5. Sarah Boxer of The Atlantic has an article “Reading Proust on My Cellphone,” June 2016.

Commentary on Proust – No. 2

“There was no time for memory.”

–Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947)[1]

For critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Proust’s involuntary memory is not based neither on one’s experiences nor the cues that trigger such involuntary memory. Instead, Proust’s involuntary memory is much closer to the act of forgetting.[2]

Benjamin also maintains that Proust’s asthma contributed to his long, windy sentences:

Proust’s syntax rhythmically, step by step, enacts his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the crushing weight of memories.[3]

Victor E. Graham (1965):

One of the fundamental aspects of Proust’s style is his use of metaphor or images. He believed that beauty or truth can only be expressed obliquely and this is why he used clusters of images or strings of morphemes to focus on the truth by a sort of stylistic convergence….[4]

Robert Soucey (1967):

Proust felt strongly, however, that books should not be approached as if they provided definitive answers to all life’s questions, as if they were Holy Writ….[5]

Proust believed that reading as a spur to day-dreaming was one of literature’s most vital functions….[6]

There is no glorification of speed-reading in Proust; for one thing, it would allow no time for day-dreaming….[7]

Proust suggests that good reading rather than being an escape from reality is a means of experiencing it more fully, a means of sharpening one’s intellectual and emotional awareness of life. In this, the act of reading is not unlike the act of creating. [8]

NOTES

[1] Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. NY: Random House. 1953. (1947.) “Chapter 18” 294.

[2] Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. NY: Schocken Books. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. 1968. “The Image of Proust” 202.

[3] Benjamin, “The Image of Proust,” 213–14.

[4] Graham, Victor E. “Proust’s Alchemy.” Modern Language Review. Vol. 60, No. 2. (April 1965.) 197–206 at 199.

[5] Soucy, Robert. “Proust’s Aesthetic of Reading.” The French Review. Vol. 41, No. 1. (October 1967.) 48–59 at 49.

[6] Soucy, “Proust’s Aesthetic of Reading” 50.

[7] Soucy, “Proust’s Aesthetic of Reading” 50.

[8] Soucy, “Proust’s Aesthetic of Reading” 59.

Commentary on Proust – No. 1

Because my bookclub is reading Proust this month, I thought I would start posting some portions of my notes. Let’s start with what other artists and critics have had to say:

Paul Valéry in 1913:

For every man, and from the same materials, several ‘personalities’ are possible. Sometimes coexisting, more or less equally.––Sometimes a childish personality re-emerges during one’s forties. You think you’re the same. There is no same.

We believe that we might, from childhood, have become a different person, lived a different life––We picture ourself being quite different. But the possibility of re-grouping the same elements in several different ways still remains––this calls into question how we see time. There’s no lost, past time, as long as these other persons are possible.[1]

J. Murray in 1926:

What Proust aims at is a mental reconstruction of his past. He tries to recapture all the forgotten sensations that constitute his past life. In this ‘novel of memory,’ as his work has been called, the greatest innovation is Proust’s conception of memory itself. He maintains that, in reconstituting the past, it is not conscious memory but involuntary memory that is the most important factor. It is not the things we have always remembered of the past that keep the past alive in us, it is the things which, having been completely forgotten, are recalled in all their original vividness by some trivial sensation, and not by an act of the intelligence at all….[2]

If we can only recapture the past by recapturing the actual sensation belonging to it, Proust concludes that our past joys and griefs are not always in our possession. But if by any chance we are brought into contact with the whole framework of sensations in which our past joys and sorrows are stored away, then these past sensations can again exercise a great power over us, because for the time being they instal [sic.] within us, as it were, the being we were at the time when they first affected us….[3]

Proust reduces love at most to a mere series of ‘intermittences’ of the heart. He regards it as something relative, and denies its existence as an absolute reality. It is only because we are forgetful or ignorant of the extent to which we are creatures of change that the illusion of love is possible. [4]

Henry Miller in 1934:

I find myself in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. I have the sensation of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from whatever place, position or attitude I take my stance. Lost as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight and touch. Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art. [5]

NOTES

[1] Valéry, Paul. Cahiers = Notebooks. Vol. I. Translated by Paul Gifford et al. Edited by Brian Stimpson. Based on the French Cahiers edited by Judith Robinson-Valéry. (1913. N 13, V, 92.) [p. 329].

[2] Murray, J. “Marcel Proust.” The Modern Language Review, Vol. 21, No. 1. (January 1926.) 34–43 at 38.

[3] Murray, “Marcel Proust” 40.

[4] Murray, “Marcel Proust” 40–41.

[5] Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. 1934. NY: Grove Press. 1961. VIII, 162–63.

3 Reads for Friday

“Organic Before It Was Cool” by Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative

“ ‘Gnarly, Weird Songs’ Suit Ray Wylie Hubbard Fine in Waco Trip” by Carl Hoover, Waco Tribune Herald

“Narrative Power: On the Writings of Robert Caro” by Kevin Haworth, Michigan Quarterly Review

5 Interesting Things to Read

German Chancellor Angela Merkel toasts 500-year-old beer purity law (Deutsche Welle)

“George R. R. Martin’s Never-ending Story” by Steven Malanga (City Journal)

“UT Murder Coverage Misses the Point” by Chase Hoffberger (Austin Chronicle)

“Unfriendly Climate: Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most respected experts on global warming in the country. She’s also an evangelical Christian….” by Sonia Smith (Texas Monthly)

“Why Dale Watson has Disavowed Country Music” by Glen Burnsilver (Phoenix New Times)

Interesting Reads Over the Weekend

• “If American Jews and Israel Are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?” by Elliot Abrams. Mosaic Magazine.

• “Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason: the linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words.” by Ryan Bradley. The Paris Review.

• “Vanishing Languages, Reincarnated as Music.” by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim.  New York Times.

• “Nights of Terror, Days of Weird: [Review of Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern.” by Will Stephenson. Oxford American.

What I Read to Prepare for Italy

It’s almost time to head to Bologna! Here’s what I read since January to prepare. (FYI, I read Divina Commedia last year.)

Alighieri, Dante. De vulgari eloquentia. 1321. Translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 1996.

Allsop, Peter. “Secular Influences in the Bolognese Sonata da Chiesa.” Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association. Vol. 104. (1977–1978.) pp. 89–100.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Vita di Dante Alighieri. (Life of Dante.) 1355.

Bologna. Cultural Crossroads from the Medieval to the Baroque: Recent Anglo-American Scholarship. Eds. GianMario Anselmi, Angela De Beedictis, Nicholas Terpstra. Bologna, Italy: Bononia UP. 2011.

Braccidini, Poggio. The Facetiae of Poggio: and other Medieval Story–Tellers.

Buonarroti, Michael Angelo. The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti. Translated by John Addington Symonds. Second Edition. NY: Scribner’s Son. 1904.

The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel. Eds. Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2003.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture. Edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2001.

Cavazza, Marta. “Bologna and the Royal Society in the Seventeenth Century.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Vol. 35. No. 2. (December 1980.) 105–23.

Clarke, Georgia. “Magnificence and the city: Giovanni II Bentivoglio and architecture in fifteenth-century Bologna.” Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 397–411.

Culture, Censorship, and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy. Eds. Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon. Leeds, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. 2005.

Dean, Trevor. “Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages.” Social History. Vol. 29. No. 2. (May 2004.) 217–31.

Deleldda, Grazia. Chiaroscuro: and other stories. 1912.

Dumont, Dora M. “Rural Society and Crowd Action in Bologna, c. 1796–1831.” The Historical Journal. Vol. 48. No. 4. (December 2005.) 977–97.

Eco, Umberto. Kant e l’ornitorinco. (Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition.) Translated by Alastair McEwen. NY: Harcourt. 1997.

Eco, Umberto. Il nome della rosa. 1980. (The Name of the Rose.) Translated by Martin Secker. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983.

Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Charles V in Bologna: the self-fashioning of a man and a city.” Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 430–39.

Gendler, Paul F. “The University of Bologna, the city, and the papacy.” Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13, No. 4. (December 1999) 475–85.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italienische Reise. 1816–17. From Goethe’s Travels in Italy: Together with his Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy. Translated by A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet. London, UK: G. Bell and Sons. 1892.

Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere. 1929–1935. (Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.) Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. NY: International Publishers. 1971.

Guinizzelli, Guido. Al Cor Gentil (In the Gentile Heart) 1250.

Herzig, Tamar. “The Demons and the Friars: Illicit Magic and Mendicant Rivalry in Renaissance Bologna.” Renaissance Quarterly. Vol. 64. No. 4. (Winter 2011.) 1025–58.

Hughes, Steven. “Fear and Loathing in Bologna and Rome the Papal Police in Perspective.” Journal of Social History. Vol. 21. No. 1.  (Autumn 1987.) 97–116.

Killinger, Charles. Culture and Customs of Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 2005.

Kolneder, Walter. Antonio Vivaldi: His Life and Work. 1965. Translated by Bill Hopkins. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. 1970.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “Petrarch’s ‘Averrosists’: a Note on the History of Aristotelianiam in Venice, Padua, and Bologna.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance. T. 14. No. 1. (1952.) 59–65.

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il Gattopardo. (The Leopard.) Milan. 1958.  Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. NY: Pantheon. 1960.

Libby, Dennis. “Interrelationships in Corelli.” Journal of the American Musicological Society. Vol. 26. No. 2. (Summer 1973.) 263–87.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. Il Principe. (The Prince) 1532.

Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi Sposi (Betrothed) 1840.

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP. 2007.

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873. London, UK: Macmillan and Co. 1910.

Petrarcha, Francesco. Petrarch’s Letters to Classical Authors. Translated by Mario Emilio Consenza. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1910.

Pincherle, Marc. Corelli et son temps. (Corelli: His Life, His Work.) 1954. Translated by Hubert E. M. Russell. NY: W. W. Norton & Co. 1956.

Rogachevskii, Andrei B.  and Milena Michalski. “Social Demcratic Party Schools on Capri and in Bologna in the Correspondence between A. A. Bogdanov and A. V. Amfiteatrov.” The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 72. No. 4. (Oct. 1994.) pp. 664–79.

Ruskin, John. Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies Christian Art for English Travellers. Kent, UK: George Allen Sunnyside. 1875.

Schossberger, Emily. “Many-Splendoured Bologna.” Prairie Schooner. Vol. 30. No. 1. (Spring 1956.) 62–68.

Talbot, Michael. “Vivaldi and Rome: Observations and Hypotheses.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Vol. 113. No. 1. (1988.) 28–46.

Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge UP. 1995.

Terpstra, Nicholas. “Civic self-fashioning in Renaissance Bologna: historical and scholarly context.” Renaissance Studies. Vol. 13. No. 4. (December 1999.) 389–96.

Timberlake, Craig. “Evviva Vivaldi: Still Vital after Three Hundred Years.” Music Educators Journal. Vol. 64. No. 7. (March 1978.) 68–71.

Tuttle, Richard J. “Against Fortifications: the Defense of Renaissance Bologna.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Vol. 41. No. 3. (October 1982.) 189–201.

Verga, Giovanni. Il Malavoglia  (The House by the Medlar Tree) 1881.

Vico, Giambattista. New Science: Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. Third Edition. Translated by David Marsh. NY: Penguin. 1999.

Vico, Giambattista. Vico: the First New Science. 1725. Translated by Leon Pompa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. 2002.

Wicksteed, P. H. and G. E. Gardner. Dante and Giovanni Del Virgilio. London: Archibald Constable & Co. 1902.

Zamagni, Vera. Dalla periferia al centro. 1988. (The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990.) Oxford, UK: Clarendon. 1993.

From the UK’s Fortnightly Review: Joan of Arc strikes again! And this time she didn’t need Morrissey.