June 2013
40 posts
“This love between women was something too unknown: nothing could allow me to picture with confidence, with precision, its pleasures, its very nature.”
—
Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark, p. 356.
At least the Narrator refrains from asking, “How do you have sex, though?”
James Joyce reads from Ulysses
As Open Culture explains, this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel was arranged and financed by his friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. She writes in her memoir, Shakespeare & Company:
Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.
I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–”he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
Pair with these rare 1935 illustrations for Ulysses by none other than Henri Matisse.
I didn’t plan to celebrate Bloomsday by journeying to my Spiritual Home #1 for a solitary vision quest; it just happened that way.
Play
“If my father had a favorite flower, it was the lilac. A tragic botanical specimen, invariably beginning to fade even before reaching its peak. ‘We stopped for a moment by the fence, Lilac-time was nearly over; some of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shrivelled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry and scentless… .’ That’s how Proust describes the lilacs bordering Swann’s way in ‘Remembrance of Things Past.’ [ … ] My father, as I say, had begun reading this the year before he died.”
—Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (via dabacahin)
“Walter Benjamin once observed that Proust, as a man and writer, loved to multiply complications. Benjamin compares Proust’s love of complication to an anonymous letter that goes: ‘My dear Madam, I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter. P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.’”
—Surrender to Proust (via bergmayer)
“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
—―Thomas Mann
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
—Fernando Pessoa (via jaimelannister)
“
How to make a woman beautiful forever:
Take a young raven from the nest; feed it on hard eggs for forty days, kill it, and then distill it with myrtle leaves, talc, and almond oil.
” —Les Secrets de Maistre Alexys, 1555, the earliest French perfumery book known, according to Essence and Alchemy
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
—Adrienne Rich, from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
Colette defined herself as an “olfactory novelist,” according to “Essence and Alchemy.”
The dry down of Eau Sauvage has nestled in to the fibers of my cardigan, and I constantly feel I’m about to get someone pregnant.
