Merry Christmas!

Sean and I went to bed around 2am last night, and I meant to set the alarm for 10 so I could get 8 hours of sleep, but instead I set it for 8am. Waaaay too early. However, the alarm is across the room, so there's not even the option of whacking it and going back to sleep. So I'm up! I'm switching between the Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation, though, so it's not a total loss.

Sean's going to get quite the Christmas surprise in a few hours. Last night I bought us tickets to Turkey. May 9-19th, Constantinople, here we come!!!

Hm

So, I just finished reading Swann's Way (which my friend Amy had dared me, last week, to do by tomorrow; I may not have finished grading even half of the students' papers like I'd planned, but I accomplished something!).

I liked the second half less than the first. The theme of obsessive love crops up again, but we've moved from the young narrator to Charles Swann of the title, and from maternal love to the more amorous kind. This part of the book tells the story of Swann's love affair with Odette, a woman of the demi-monde who has almost nothing to recommend her to Swann except the picture of her that he's created in his head, to which he stubbornly clings despite mounting evidence of her sordid background and lax morals (including bisexuality). Along the way he gives up his friends and his interests in order to join her at her lower social and intellectual level, believing that this kind of sacrifice only proves how much he loves her. His idea of "love" is disturbingly immature and delusional. He acknowledges that he gets absolutely no enjoyment out of his actual meetings with his mistress, but he's in a constant state of anxiety and passion whenever he's not with her. She treats him like crap, cheats on him, and still he supports her with money and slavish devotion, even as he recognizes her low worth and almost looks forward to the day when he'll be free of loving her. Woof.

All this takes place in dense, searching prose, that traces over and over Swann's thousand inconstancies--his brief flare-ups of independence and his desire to escape her, followed inevitably by the resurgence of his belief in her goodness and beauty (again, despite his repeated acknowledgement that she's not really very pretty, and, at one point, his astonished realization at seeing a picture of her earlier in their relationship that she's gotten worse-looking over time!). Being that deep in someone's head for that long (two hundred pages or so) gets old pretty quickly, especially when you don't like them, and I don't like Swann, just like I didn't like the narrator. I kind of wanted to slap, him, actually, and tell him to get a damned job or something--anything but mope around Paris being cuckolded! For example, when he thinks of his desire to visit the Netherlands so he can finally finish an essay he's writing on Vermeer (the only sign of occupation of any sort of this wealthy member of the French bourgeoisie), he quickly realizes that not only can he never, ever leave Paris while Odette is there, he can't even go while she's gone on one of her many trips without him (trips that he's paid for, but which she takes with other men), just in case she might come back early. Seriously. It's that level of pathetic-ness.

By the end of it (and I acknowledge, I was reading far less intently by this point), he's pretty much gotten over his love for her, but he's still obsessed with her. As you find out in the book's final section, though (something that's apparently supposed to be a big reveal but which I knew already thanks to an overview of the novel) the woman he ended up marrying, of whom the narrator's parents disapproved, turns out to be Odette herself. According to what I've read, the second volume explains that he was able to marry her once he no longer loved her. Oh, and he's still obsessed with her, even though he doesn't love her and cheats on her. Yay!

The young narrator, back again, embarks in the final pages on an obsessive crush on their daughter, Gilberte, that follows in many ways the caprices of Swann's passion for Odette--the obsessive need to see her, the belief that any moment she's going to proclaim her love, the near-stalking. Arghhh. Proust's men are so stupid! No, that's wrong, his women are stupid too, we're just not treated to their self-absorbed interior monologues for 462 pages. Any desire I had to read the remaining parts was dimmed when I read that a lot of the rest of it is about, you guessed it, the narrator's obsessive affairs with women! Apparently, in one part that is fittingly entitled "The Captive," he keeps a young woman, Albertine, prisoner in his Paris mansion. Oh, holy Jesus. I am not putting myself through that, no thank you.

Many books can be easily enjoyed on your own, without needing to talk about them with other people, but Swann's Way is one that I think is probably best read in the context of a seminar or book group, with a chance to bring out, through discussion with other people, themes and ideas that my own reading might have passed over. Looking at other people's discussions of Swann's Way online reminded me that this is not a book to be glossed easily, and is undoubtedly one that would repay a closer re-reading, but honestly? I'm just not interested enough to attempt it.

At any rate, I did like the last lines, which return again to the theme of memory and how it can neither recreate nor recapture the past:

"The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

Adieu, Proust!

Reading Swann's Way

The first volume of Proust's epic novel has been on my "to read" list for quite a while. Sara's boyfriend Zach is a Proust aficionado, going so far as to have a quote from the author tattooed on his arm (note to self: ask what the quote actually says), and while I was visiting their apartment last weekend I looked at his bookshelf-worth of Proust and decided it was finally time to give it a try. He assured me that if I read the first one I'd want to read all of them. He also opined that it's the greatest work of fiction ever written.

I'm halfway through Swann's Way now, and while I can't say that I agree with either assessment, I don't have a terribly strong opinion about it yet; or rather, I should say that I have a bunch of small opinions, but not a generalized opinion of the whole book. I was certainly surprised to find it fairly readable, though; when a thing reaches 1.5 million words and seven volumes and yet still insists on being called a single novel, you expect that there are going to be all manner of strange, impenetrable digressions. Well, digressions there certainly are, but they're musing, melancholy, and philosophical rather than indigestible. I was expecting stream-of-consciousness writing in the manner of Joyce, I suppose, and have been pleasantly surprised on that score.

There's an incredible amount of feeling in this book, and by that I mean that the young narrator, who is a semi-autobiographical reflection of Proust himself, is incredibly sensitive to beauty in the world around him. Sometimes it made me feel like I must be a little bit of a dull block not to be able to share this absolute, over-powering sense of presence within nature, to be able to lose myself for hours, as he claims to be able to do, in contemplating the play of sunlight over the slates of a distant church steeple, or a carpet of buttercups in a meadow. I admire things like that, too, but clearly not to this depth. At other times, however, the extended, rambling passages in which the narrator goes into ecstasies over some kind of flower or another were frankly a little much, and I skipped forward.

I had a vague idea that this was a work of fiction without a real plot, a novel turned inward, on the memories and feelings of its narrator. In that sense it reminds me of Montaigne, who wrote "I myself am the subject of my essays." Proust has an incredible facility with language (and I'm reading the old translation, not the Modern Library one that Zach recommended, which wasn't available in the local library), and so even though there's nothing much happening, I'm interested to see where he's going to go next, what scene or character he's going to sketch vividly in just a few paragraphs. I dog-eared the page with the following passage, which deals with the book's prominent theme of memory--in this case, a memory of the steeple of the church in Combray, the town he knew from his childhood:

"And so even to-day if, in a large provincial town, or in a quarter of Paris which I do not know very well, a passer-by who is "putting me on the right road" shows me in the distance, as a point to aim at, some hospital belfry or convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray, may be amazed to see me still standing there, oblivious of the walk I had planned or take or the place where I was obliged to call, gazing at the steeple for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of the Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more anxiously than when, just now, I asked him to direct me, I seek my way again, I turn a corner...but...the goal is in my heart..."

I do have certain negative feelings toward the novel, though. I'm not sure I really like this narrator,this sort-of-Proust-child. Sensitive he may be, but he's also neurotic and self-obsessed. The first section of the novel (the individual volumes themselves even have queer internal structures) focuses around his recollections of his inability to sleep alone as a child, and his obsession with his mother coming in to give him a goodnight kiss before he faced the darkness--to the extent that he was willing to undertake an elaborate plot to lure his mother upstairs on one of the occasions she remained at the dinner table rather than come up to see him. It's difficult to describe here the level of pathological obsession that this kid seems to have with his mother kissing him goodnight; on nights when he knows she won't come up, because they have guests or for another reason, he's plunged into utter despair for hours preceding his bedtime. As in, he says that he wishes he were dead rather than go to sleep without her kissing him. What? It's not clear exactly how old the narrator is supposed to be at this point, and this is terribly gendered, but I can't help it: man the fuck up.

His twisted attitude toward women is expressed obliquely elsewhere; he notes offhand, for example, that you can never trust your mistress, even when you are inflamed with passion, the way you can trust your mother:

"...one has doubts of them even at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone."

Now, I know that children are selfish, but this to me smacks of a self-involvement verging on solipsism; perhaps because it echoed an earlier passage I took issue with. The narrator, wandering in a wood near Combray, is so overcome with his love of the place that he desires nothing so much as to meet a local peasant girl in order to understand, through her (and implicitly, through having sex with her) its beauty more completely:

"...to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl...was to me herself a plant of local growth, and one whose structure would enable me to get closer...to the intimate savor of the country."

This really irritated me, because he sees this girl not as an actual individual with feelings but as a fantasy-object onto which he could project his own desires. She's a tool and not a person--no matter how poetically it's all phrased. Of course, it doesn't help that he goes immediately on to talk about being at:

"that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not yet reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the interchangeable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same." So women are structures and instruments, not people? Nice.

These reservations notwithstanding, I'm glad to be reading it, if only for its importance in the general literary canon. I still refuse to read Joyce, though. On principle! I'm still scarred from my high school attempts to read Portrait of the Author, also known as the only time I BSed my way through an English exam.

Finish Line!

OK, I'm not 100% done with the semester quite yet; I still have to hand in my paper to Dr. Braddock and grade AWW papers and then the exam on the 17th, but at least classes are over! This semester was more stressful than others, for some reason, and I'm grateful that it's done. I like to think I carried everything off well...except for that online archival translation class, which, let's be honest, I definitely let fall by the wayside when I got overwhelmed with my project for the Caravaggio class. Oh well. I'm not a genius at reading archives, so what?

I was in New York this past weekend, where I stayed at Sara and Zach's apartment, with their adorable new dog Oscar:

He's exactly the kind of dog I can take to immediately: totally non-aggressive, doesn't bark, doesn't enthusiastically jump on you in a manner that I always perceive as semi-threatening, loves to cuddle, soft ears...the works. I actually threw a tennis ball for him for the better part of an hour after Sara and Zach left on Sunday morning, which is saying something, because a) I find dog-drool-covered toys disgusting, and b) it freaks me out to have to get near their teeth to get the toy away from them.

Saturday night, we went with Heather to see Peter Greenaway's Last Supper project at the Park Ave Armory. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was really cool to see a digital reproduction of Leonardo's masterpiece, projected into a space that duplicated the size and scale of the actual refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie (which I'm not sure when I'll get around to visiting, if ever). Also awesome was the way Greenaway used digital rendering to turn the flat scene into something that seemed, briefly, three-dimensional; the entire scene would go dark, and then lights would play around the figures, making them seem almost to be moving and breathing in the dim light, or he would highlight just the feet, or the hands. I know part of his goal is to make the viewer look at a masterpiece in detail, instead of just absorbing it all at one go, and I felt that was successful. (There's a bit of video here, but it's really not the coolest parts.)

Once this little light show completed after 15 minutes or so and began to loop, though, it sort of lost its flavor. A NYTimes review complained that it lacked any kind of crescendo, although knowing even just a little bit of Greenaway's weirdness (we watched one of his films, The Draughtsman's Contract, during the Rome program) I'm not too surprised.

The odder thing was that despite the event being billed as his Last Supper project, they also threw in his work with Veronese's massive Wedding at Cana, which he projected onto the wall of the church of S. Giorgio in Venice, where it used to hang before Napoleon's soldiers cut it down and took it to France.

This project was much less successful than the Last Supper bit. One reason might be that it's just not as much of a hyper-familiar piece as Leonardo's, even if it is a beautiful spectacle. Greenaway seems to be fascinated by the sheer number of figures present (I forget the number, but maybe 150?) so repeatedly, he would show the scene with numbers superimposed over every single figure. That got old quickly. He also made up dialogue, mostly snarky, for many of the figures, but that veered from amusing to cheesy. Finally, there was an unnecessary voice-over at the beginning about theories that the Wedding at Cana was really Jesus' own wedding to Mary Magdalen, and that that's why Veronese showed him at the center and the married couple off to the left. Now, Veronese had already gotten in trouble with the Inquisition for painting a rowdy Last Supper that featured a bunch of unsavory characters (he wiggled out by re-naming it Supper in the House of Levi). If he'd really painted anything that could be interpreted as mildly heretical in a painting hanging in the biggest church in Venice, don't you think the Inquisition might have taken note? It was unnecessary and made me less interested in the rest of the project.

The Times review called this show, overall, a "dud," and I would almost be tempted to agree, if not for the experience of feeling like I really was standing in that refectory looking up at Leonardo's painting. That was definitely worth it.

On Sunday, I got to check out Heather's new apartment in Carroll Gardens. Her subway stop is elevated, so you get a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline in one direction, and the Statue of Liberty in the other. The apartment had a lot of light, which is not something I generally associate with urban dwellings, and the neighborhood was really cool--a bunch of (expensive) vintage and antique shops, a couple of Italian markets, a brunch place with delicious, delicious bacon (There was a lot of red meat-eating this weekend. I regret nothing.) One of the vintage stores, where Heather admired a necklace that turned out to cost $275, also sold old timey candy, which we agreed was a good way to make people feel they could come in and poke around without that awkward "I'm totally not going to buy anything" feeling you sometimes get in small shops. (Of course, it can also lead to one friend saying "I can't afford anything, I'm unemployed...maybe I'll get a Sugar Daddy," and the other friend saying "Oh, do they have those?" and then realizing that her friend meant the "wealthy older man" variety and not the candy variety. But I did come out of there with a Sugar Daddy.) Heather really seemed to light up in her new surroundings, which was great. She also just got a three-month position with MacMillan, the publishing company, another sign of new beginnings.

After New York it was off to Connecticut. My wonderful mother-in-law picked me up from the train station in New Haven and whisked me off to her house for dinner, then dropped me off with Jen at a parking lot in Rocky Hill. My sister, wearing pajamas, naturally, ordered me to drive her car. Ah, sisters. We actually shared her bed that night, which was a little weird, since we haven't done that in, oh, more than a decade? Everything was fine, though, until I woke up at 6:15 to Jen yelling "Bob, do you want my cat?" I really have no idea what her damage is. When I asked her later why she thought she had to ask me that right then, when I was sleeping, when it was 6:15 in the morning, she just shrugged and said "I dunno." On the plus side, I got to cuddle with the other cat she wasn't trying to foist onto to me, Sapphire. I'd forgotten that she purrs like a freight train.

There was quite a lot of hustle and bustle, squabbling, yelling, you name it, involved in getting Jen to Hartford for the swearing in. My sister can be insane at the best of times, and she was definitely worked up that morning. More than once I wanted to choke her. It's just a natural reaction to us being in close quarters for any length of time, I'm afraid. We were joined by her boyfriend, Vinny, with whom she was celebrating a year's anniversary, together with my aunt and cousin, our nosy former neighbor Mrs. Long, one of Jen's friends, and Monica's mom, since Monica herself couldn't be there. After the swearing-in Jen dragged us to her office to meet her coworkers, and from there we went to Dom's. My mom's picture was hanging up at the waitress station, and Joanne and the other waitresses who knew us were there. I even ran into Mrs. Caruso, the secretary from St. Gabriel's. She was really friendly, but she asked me, rather presumptuously (even if I didn't think of that until later) if I was married; obviously I could say yes, but later I wondered, "How many people at 25 would be able to say yes to that? How many people would even ask that of someone they haven't seen since they were 14?") Then she asked me if I had kids! Maybe she thought I was a lot older than I am; I don't know. I am proud of what Jen and I have accomplished, though; her road has been a lot harder than mine, and I'm really impressed by how well she's done.

Success!

My presentation to my Caravaggio class yesterday went swimmingly! I still don't think it was the best work I've ever done, but my visuals, if I do say so myself, were pretty fabulous, like my poster for my fake exhibition above, and the gallery mock-ups below. Here we have a room dedicated to Carlo Saraceni (with Caravaggio's Omnia Vincit Amor on the left wall, made a lot bigger than its actual size):

And a gallery for Nicolas Regnier:

I was lucky enough to find high-resolution images of the Caravaggio show that is currently on in Rome right now, to which I simply added the paintings I wanted to use for my exhibition. It did require some fiddling and duplication of parts of the images to have enough correctly sized frames, and I'm not skilled enough with Photoshop to know how to get rid of the line that pretty clearly divides the Saraceni image down the center, but hey, not bad for a first-timer, I'd say. When I saw Dr. Cooper smiling and nodding the first few minutes, I was like, "Ok, this is not going to crash and burn, awesome sauce!" One of classmates told me after that my presentations are always a pleasure just to listen to and that this one was even more enjoyable, which was a really nice compliment. Not too shabby for a project that I started working on, oh, three weeks ago!

I ended up making two exhibition posters, actually, using the one above, Carlo Saraceni's alluring Judith with the Head of Holofernes for my first slide, and the one below, Nicolas Regnier's Carnival Scene, for the last: