À la recherche du temps perdu

[mangaman]

one would be surprised, should one wander through the 2200 pages of 'Remembrance...........' how little time Proust (or, rather, the narrator) has for food. Of course the real Proust was a man of energetic tastes. Paying a milkboy to masturbate in front of him, or having two starved rats set upon each other and finding in their shrieks a delight so profound that he ejaculated within a minute. The point is....the book is fiction. It's about a man who is in love with one woman, then another, and then another, (I'm leaving Grandma out of this). It's an endless source of joking references, and that's a good thing (my fave is in Transporter, and I dare to suggest it's more complex than one might think) but..........it's not a memoir. So, when Proust writes about these little cakes he's making it up

Sorry.............as you were.

Sorry to be a pedant Simon, but have you read the whole thing? If so, is it worth a read?

I confess to having read the whole of Finnegans wake, which was more of a chore (And a small wager) than a pleasure.

 

[mangaman]

For the sake of detail, the chair was wooden, on a plastic sheet on the floor. The plastic sheet was in fact a plastic table cloth from when my sister and I were little, and featured various printed boards for games like snakes and ladders and ludo. I think it also had bits you could colour in with felt tip, and then wipe clean.

It's funny now, to think how much effort we put into staying up a few more minutes. Now, I can go to bed when I choose, and most nights I'm happy to go. Some days, I'm ready to sleep about 9pm!

Thanks Arch - my mental picture of the Arch childhood home is even clearer!

I remember my Mum, in a bid to save a few quid, buying a haircutting device that resembled something from the Spanish Inquisition.

It basically ran along the principle if you can't cut hair, then pull it out by the root.

After several agonising and terrifyingly bad haircuts my parents gave up.

 

[Arch]

It basically ran along the principle if you can't cut hair, then pull it out by the root.

I think my hairdresser used that on me last week! She was in both a hurry and a bad mood, and it was one of the less relaxing experiences of my life...

 

[yello]

The Dr Who theme takes me back to Sunday evenings, bath night and school tomorrow.

We were allowed to watch Dr Who because my father liked it but not Monty Python. He thought that was rubbish. He was right of course but that's the point.

 

[Night Train]

These sorts of chairs bring back memories.

When I was really little we had a few of these chairs in the take away my folks were running.
My brother and I used to play with them.

One game was lying the chair on its back to make it a car with a bonnet and we would sit between the legs of a chair, each, and pretend to drive.

Another game, one brother came up with I hasten to add, was to use the chair as the counter of a bank serving through the bars of the back rest.
The game seemed to revolve around the change we 'borrowed' from the take away's till. My brother had all the silver ones as he was older and I had all the brown ones. He would sit on the floor and put all his money on the chair seat and I would be a bank customer changing money. Not only did his money have bigger numbers on, there was also an exchange rate. The exchange rate varied depending on what I had to exchange for his money. Exchanging brown coins for silver ones had a higher exchange rate then silver for brown and so whatever we both started with it would, somehow, all end up on his side of the chair!

I was never that good with money.

 

[Arch]

The Dr Who theme takes me back to Sunday evenings, bath night and school tomorrow.

We were allowed to watch Dr Who because my father liked it but not Monty Python. He thought that was rubbish. He was right of course but that's the point.

We didn't watch Dr Who, my Mum or Dad would turn it off after the first few notes. I only knew that it was because it was scary. This made it all the more terrifying, because I never saw what it was that I was supposed to be scared of. For a long time, just the opening of the theme terrified me.

I eventually got to see an episode aged about 12 (Tom Baker, by then), and found I could cope with it after all. But the music from that era still makes the heart race a bit.

(So does the arrangement from the David Tennant era, but for entirely different reasons... )

NT, remind me at the weekend, I need to exchange some money....

 

[ASC1951]

Sorry to be a pedant Simon, but have you read the whole thing?[A la Recherche...] If so, is it worth a read?

Yes, it is. But there are similar and more relevant chronicles - for instance, A Dance to the Music of Time.

I confess to having read the whole of Finnegans Wake, which was more of a chore (And a small wager) than a pleasure.

It's a difficult read, but IMO more interesting and more worthwhile than the Proust. And Ulysses is better, as well as being more accessible.

 

[Arch]

On the subject of TV themes (perhaps as strong a memory jogger for our generations as the taste of food for those before), I just heard an advert for Churchill pet insurance using the tune I now know to be 'Linus and Lucy's Theme' from Peanuts. (I always thought of it as the general Charlie Brown theme, apparently a mistake many have made on youtube).

Instant transportation back to Sunday afternoons, when they'd put that on as a filler if the cricket finished early or something....

 

[Maz]

The opening 'screech' noise of the closing theme music for Dr.Who used to send shivers up my spine...especially when combined with a suspenseful ending point to the episode!!

 

[dellzeqq]

Yes, it is. But there are similar and more relevant chronicles - for instance, A Dance to the Music of Time.
.

well, it takes all sorts. I tried to read A Dance to the Music of Time after it was dramatised on Radio 4 (or was it the Home Service) and failed utterly. On the other hand I picked up Ulysses just a couple of months back and my eyes almost started out of my head - the book is a rush! Sentences pop and fizz like Red Bull and Coke. Sometimes I found myself thinking 'stop, this is too much all of a sudden'. Lonesome Lane a-gogo.

I started A la recherche sitting beside a lake in Guatemala in 1976. I finished it on the Trans-Siberian Express two years later. (Yeah, I know, just suck it up, Tea-peeps). I doubt a month has gone by since when I haven't picked it up. These days Project Gutenberg is my friend - remember that the chapters can be over a hundred pages, so the bit you hanker after is hard to find. I type in a word or two, PG finds it for me, I wander downstairs and sit in the dining room, which is a room without distractions, and spend an hour or more just reading for the sake of reading. It's something you give yourself to - the text rules the reader rather than the other way around.

Is it worth it? Well, not if you think 'I'm going to read this and I'll be the better for it'. For me it's part of life. I don't read around the book - I've got an excellent volume that discusses all the paintings that are mentioned, and there's no doubt that Proust saw a great many paintings, knew a lot of artists and collectors and was very discerning - but the learning isn't what moves me. It's a story (people forget this) and it's written in a way that is just such a delight to read. It's not the most insightful or rigorous of books, nor anywhere near the most analytical. It's a waterfall of language conveying an intensity of meaning that doesn't have a parallel.

Proust's writing makes you look and look and look and look at everything, without getting (hopefully) precious about it. It's the perfect antidote to architecture (or, more generally, the worship of objects) because the subtlety and vitality of the language can't be matched by things. It's the finest accompanyment (sp?) to love, to respect, to inquiry, to enjoyment, to the appreciation of simple stuff, and, there, I think, lies the gain. It won'\t make you a cleverer person (obviously) and it won't make you irresistible to women (dammit) but it will keep you on your toes and add light and shade to your life.

That's an anti-intellectual appreciation, but, hey, I'm in the fortunate position of not having to be learned. There's an industry devoted to literary analysis, but, happily, that's all a bit more than I can manage. I just read the book.

 

[hoopdriver]

I started to read the book but all that talk of madeleines made me hungry and set me to thinking of the maple sugar candies of my youth in far away New England and then I began to write, on the table cloth at first and now I that have written eight hundred and twenty three thousand four hundred and nine words, i am taking a break while I try to figure out where the paragraph indent key is...

 

[dellzeqq]

^^ nice bar bag! Fings like that a chap like me don't easily forget.

 

[theclaud]

Sorry to be a pedant Simon, but have you read the whole thing? If so, is it worth a read?

I confess to having read the whole of Finnegans wake, which was more of a chore (And a small wager) than a pleasure.

Good Lord. But have you read Clarissa?

 

[User169]

I somehow feel that life has passed me by. As an undergraduate, I spent my time between the covers of Leninger's key text book on biochemistry learning pathways, genetics and mechanisms. For my postgraduate studies and doctorate I devoured organisational sociological tombs by such luminaries as Richard Scott and Mintzberg. No Proust, no Freud, no Satre, no De Beauvoir, no Spinoza........

I think it's time I got a life ........... anyone?

More of a Stryer man, myself.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

For my post-graduate studies I did what I always do, the bare minimum - mediocrity in all things.