webcowgirl

Well, I've made it to page 1018, the end of the Penguin/Kilmartin translation of Remembrance of Things Past. But I had to be honest with myself: I have only finished the first two of six volumes (two of them in this one book). And so, today, I also got a new book: The Guermantes Way, in the new translation Viking put out a few years ago. I have to say, silly or not, I'm looking forward to starting it, in part to see how someone else handles the occasionally convoluted grammar in this book.

Quote for the end: It is, after all, as good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to get near enough to the things and people that have appeared to us beautiful and mysterious from a distance to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have neither mystery nor beauty.

Does anyone want this now? I think it's got one more read left in it before it disintegrates. The binding has held up really well, all things considered.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was a complete hoot and made me wish my brother were here and could have seen it with us - the humor would have been very much to his liking. And the £12 TKTS tickets made it a perfect Friday night. I recommend it.

First: Proust at page 965 (I finished yet another book this weekend that was not Remembrance), and this quote deserves to make it to the LJ as a marker of all of the unspoken stuff he writes about: "And one of their cousins, who was only 15, had scandalised the Casino by her unconcealed admiration for Mlle. Lea, whose talent as an actress M. Block Senior rated very high, but whose tastes were understood not to be primarily directed toward gentlemen." Priceless!

It's hard to believe I came across this site while looking at someone's user pictures ... a little more free time and I would be surfing it all day long.
( Now cut tag for the doll sensitive. Next stop: pictures of clowns! )

General announcement: I have pretty much nothing planned from Thursday until Sunday. Anything going on I should know about? Anyone dying to see me (especially on Friday)? I think we may be entertaining friends of shadowdaddy's on Sunday night, but otherwise I've got just NOTHING on the books.

I don't know how they planned it, but the Fulham cemetary is gorgeous again. The middle is full of these trees that look like their branches are swathed in pink cotton candy, with just a few white ones (vanilla?) to add variety. I can see that the trees will all turn to leaves in a week or two, but it's wonderful to go by (in the double-decker bus) and see this fantasy land of puffy flowers floating by.

In other "marking the seasons by the timing of blooms," I've been seeing lots and lots of wisteria around. shadowdaddy even pointed out a building to me while we were on the train to Waterloo that had so much frothy purple covering the walls it completely overwhelmed the building underneath it ... in a good way, of course. I also saw a clematis climbing out of its pot when I was walking to work in the neighborhood nearby. It really is pretty here in the spring!

I continue wearing the heart monitor thing until 11 today. I think I've given it rather a lot of erroneous readings - since it goes off on the hour and half-hour, I frequently found it kicking in as I was walking to a meeting or something. Also, it seemed to be getting kind of ... sweaty underneath the cuff when I woke up this morning (yes, I wore it while I was sleeping). I'm looking forward to being done with it.

Proust has been stuck in a long passage in which he's been describing someone's paintings. AAARGH. Finally, while I was waiting for my hair to finish processing last night, on page 903, he has finally met Albertine, referenced most memorably in Fun Home (try the "search inside" feature and you'll see what I mean), but, unfortunately, I'm at page 909 and he's still in the artist's studio (and I have a hundred pages to go still to finish the book!). I did like this passage last night, though: When a mind has a tendency toward day dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them ... If a little day dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time."

Proust is coming along nicely - got to page 796 yesterday, which feels like it's nearing the finish line. Only 200 more pages to go! I'm finding the lead character rather irritating as he heads toward adolescence - rather like Harry Potter in Goblet of Fire, but, um, better written and with more sex and astute insight into the nature of man.

Needs must get more sleep tonight than last as I'm not at 8 and tomorrow is work. So ... no movie tonight, but will have a nice dinner at home instead.

A few updates:

I have had no panic attacks since about January 1st ...

I am at page 726 (of 1018!) of Remembrance of Things Past ...

This is the six month anniversary of my moving to England, and I'm not homesick. Yay!

Happy Thursday, y'all, I'm going to celebrate by taking a walk along the Thames to work.

Man, I spill my guts out day after day and I get more responses to a post about Team America than anything else! You guys! For the record, I was basically drawn to see it by the puppet sex scene, which was featured in This Movie Is Not Yet Rated, the documentary about the MPAA film censorship board. TMISNY had the cut scenes from sex bit, which cracked me up because the guys who wrote it basically put these scat and golden showers scenes in just so the censors would have something to cut. This made me very curious about the rest of the film, and it was, indeed a hoot and a holler. I also recommend TMISNY.

Meanwhile, in High Culture Land, shadowdaddy is off trying to get us some £10 tickets for Coram Boy, prior to heading off to the Spitalfields' Pancake Race (some kind of English Shrove Tuesday thing). I'm still working my way through Remembrance of Things Past and have made it to page 660 after taking a total break over my vacation. He really seems to have a good understanding of human nature, at least Western humanity. "The last time! To me, that appeared as something of immense significance, because I loved Gilberte. On her it would doubtless have made just as much impression as those letters in which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country, requests which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect." The translation is frequently a bit stiff, but I am completely absorbed in it the second I pick it back up.

I want to talk about my really great evening and the fine (and cheap) place we went for dinner (Shalimar in Brick Lane, great meal for two for 11 pounds) ... but what I really want to talk about is photography. So. An essay, like I used to write back when I wrote.

There's an exhibit up right now at the Barbican, In the Face of History, that I think every photographer should see. It hit for me on a few of those ongoing questions about photography: what makes photography great? What makes an individual photographer's work notable? How is photography quintessentially different from other art forms? - and gave me some ideas about answers to those questions, and, most importantly, inspiration to Make Art.

Photography has had problems since its inception with whether it is an art at all, because, in truth, photography was created to document, faithfully, the reality that our eyes perceive. In the late 1800s the Photo-Secessionists decided that they would try to make photography "art" by manipulating the image, or, if you prefer, making it worse than a clean, focused mirror of what the eye sees. They put vaseline on the lens, they shot out of focus, they printed on heavily textured paper that just couldn't get all of the detail that the negative was utterly capable of faithfully reproducing. (I once heard Bill Jay say they were later dismissed as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy School of Photography," and, even though it's a very cruel moniker, it's not entirely undeserved. In fact, it's totally deserved, but I love their pictures anyway.)

This dichotomy between "is it or ain't it art" has continued today, getting, I think, worse in the age of the digital camera. I keep seeing what I see as two different approaches to photography that mirror the original split: is it about making art or is it about making a faithful image? The faithful image school tends to be a more "masculine" arena, more Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, focused on the perfect shot, and the perfect set of equipment (and production techniques) needed to get that image. I feel, however, that this (to my mind) obsessive focus on tech and technique skips the vital element of the content of the photos and the ultimate making of (what I can't help but see as) art. I see piles and piles of people out there cranking out photos and fussing over their lenses and color balancing and yammer yammer blah blah blah (lots of magazines out there for these folks), but they are NOT talking about art to me.

I start from the presumption of art, and then I looked (tonight) at a group of photographers and thought about their practice and what made each of them artists. For photographers, it seems that the oeuvre is the thing, and to understand how an individual saw the world, you want to see many of their photos. One person shows images from a studio he does not dare to leave; another, portraits of people whose inner lives he cannot understand; a third, nearly microscopic images taken while he was a soldier. Each of them left me with insights into the artist, but, more importantly, things for me to think about caused by the generally pleasant assault of so many pictures.

But which of these images are compelling? Compositionally, many of them are doing interesting thing; but I was faced with the tyranny of the label! Art, I like to think, does not need a "label" to make it enjoyable or understandable; in fact, I often prefer to avoid reading the information next to displays in a gallery in order to have a purer appreciation of the work. But ... photography is utterly contaminated by being pictures of things at a certain place in history! It can barely get away from the labels! Sure, Westie's green peppers and Stieglitz's nudes break free of time and place, but when you are looking at the work of Henryk Ross, how can you not go, "Ooh, secretly made photos of Jews in the Polish ghetto that were stuffed in a can and left behind when he finally ran for it!" I hated that I was being (as I felt) emotionally manipulated by these declaration of time and subject. Couldn't I just enjoy the images as they were?

Well, heck, you know, I think I just have to accept that this is part of the medium, that it is affected by its ability to document transience and historicity. Some images go beyond this; but some images are, in fact, far more moving because they grip on to their point in time and refuse to let go. And thus we have the dark and gorgeous shots of Brassai's Paris, with its prostitutes and lesbian couples and transvestite sailors; Anders Petersen's pictures of the poor habitues of a sleazy bar in Hamburg; and, again, the shots of the Polish ghetto. If we accept that this ability to be stuck in time is a part of the power of photography, then art may in fact be created by loving and obsessive documentation of what it means to be here, now, in a time that will not be forever. Christer Strömholm, I believe, is the artist who said, "Photograph what matters to you," and I think that this passion very clearly comes through in these photographs. So I, in order to create art, should photograph the things that are happening at this moment, the people and the life that matters to me; and somehow, in the struggles of composition and balancing light and dark and pattern, I think that this will create art, an oeuvre worth remembering, far more than 5000 perfectly lit pictures of quaint New Mexican towns or spiral staircases or seashells could ever hope to do.

At any rate: see this exhibit. And go, people, go make art, and don't beat yourself up because you don't have the best lens out there or the spiffiest camera. You can make objects of lasting beauty with what you have right now. I went to the museum tonight, and I know that what I say is true. (And the narrator in Remembrance of Things Past got a stiffie tonight - how could I not share that, too?)

Hmm. I can't manage to get off of the couch today. My enthusiasm is just non-existent. It just seems like too much bother and not worth the effort. I think we'll still go to the museum, though, as the tiny bit of juice my system gets from knowing the exhibit is closing this week seems like it will be enough to force me to do it.

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust spent nearly half a page just talking about watching the light and shadows changing on the balcony of his room. That guy is such a card! Who'd think you could read about something so stupid and find it so interesting, anyway? In some ways it makes him seem like the most arrogant of authors. Dan Brown would have had at least one mention of a self-flagellating albino dwarf in there, and Raymond Chandler would have surely tossed in a broad with legs up to her waist, and they would have both had a murder. Instead, I got some sun and clouds and a little bit of rain.

I should figure out where my phone is.

J and I did dishes this morning (after I ate the pancakes he made me) and talked a lot.

Unfortunately I slept really poorly last night and even though I went to bed at midnight and didn't get out of it until 11 I still look like a raccoon.

And yes, it's raining today. There was a dark circle under one of the pilings of the bridge that seemed to be attracting seagulls. I thought maybe it was an oil spill and there were a bunch of dead fish around it, but maybe it was just some runoff hitting the river.

Geez, still three more days with no work after today. This is great!

I seem to have done nothing today besides clean (still working on unpacking, now I'm trying to reduce the sense of explosion in anticipation of tomorrow's party) and cook (made: Dutch apple pancake - breakfast, lamb and squash bisque - lunch, and beef stew - whenever, probably not tonight). I'm going to take a shower and nap in a bit, I think - giving up any hope of being outside before the sun sets. Oh well, that's life when you wake up at 11, and THAT is what I get for going to bed at 1:30 AM again.

Dutch Apple Pancake recipe (since I liked it so much)
( And who knows, maybe cooked apples aren't your thing. Wechsler likes them well enough. ) Anyway, I've had this recipe sitting on my fridge for about five years and just made it today; it was great!

I finished Delia Sherman's Changeling and enjoyed it quite well. It got my "numbers" up to 33 for the year; anyone else want to read it now? Looking at the, er, well, not "nightmare" of books, but shall I say "house eating monstrosity" of library in this house, I intend to stick to my plan of moving books along as I've read them. booklectic? lilithmagna (not that you read LJ at all)?

I also got my copy of Remembrance of Things Past back last night (*swoon!*) and we got to have some private time alone late in the evening (note bedtime above). Oooh man. So good. But I'm still only at page 350! When will I finish this thing?

Big excitement of the day: we're heading from the Pic to the District line at Earl's Court, and we've kind of gotten behind the crowd in general. We're walking toward the escalators. An elderly couple is a little bit ahead of us, with about two rollie suitcases each. Suddenly, as the flat metal starts to morph into stair steps, the woman, lower down, gets caught up in her suitcases and starts to fall over. Her husband turns to help her, and of course HE then starts falling, and OMIGOD it's like a bad Disney cartoon or a dream where you just keep falling down the steps over and over

only I drop my bag and book and run forward up the stairs and grab the woman as she is spinning around and catch her and keep her from falling any more

and Jason, behind me, rushes to the edge and pushes the button

and the stairs stop and the people are almost upside down and there is luggage all over the place and I'm holding on to an oldish American woman who's scared and startled and getting her readjusted so she's not falling onto me any more

but she seems to be okay. Two other people run up past me to the old man and check in on him (apparently he got a bit of a gouge). My lady sits up and tells me she's been travelling since 10 AM and she's very tired and the luggage just started slipping. I help her get upright. She's fine. Jason (now carrying my stuff) gets a little further ahead to help the man with his heaviest bag; I hold onto the woman's elbow and walk her up the now-stopped escalator. The man turns and looks at us and says,

"Can you get this thing to start again?"

No, I tell him, we all have to walk now, but it's not that far to go. All the people are now helping them up the stairs with their stuff, checking in on them, assuming (incorrectly) we're with them because we're also American. I tell the woman it's better to walk now because she won't lose her balance, but that she'll be fine when she gets to the hotel, and that she should go right to bed. Nobody is pushing or being impatient, everyone is helpful. The old couple is alright.

Ballet was also good, great value at £7.50 considering that the first one (Chroma) blew my mind away (like best ballet in about three years), the second had Carlos Acosta *swoon* and the third had music by Michael Nyman.

It's late. I'm worried that I'll wind up not finishing any books this month because I've been caught up in Remembrance of Things Past, so now I'm trying to finish up some short stories by Connie Willis and feeling a bit embarassed at the fact I'm not savoring them as if they were a box of chocolates. Remembrance is more like a meal, the kind you get served over three days. I did manage a few more pages tonight but I feel like I'm shorting Connie. Oh well, Proust will probably be keeping me company until spring at this rate. And I'm still kind of cooking on adrenaline.