I've seen a lot of speculation about the bad effect that smartphones and social media might be having on people's thinking; the other day, I asked cleI've seen a lot of speculation about the bad effect that smartphones and social media might be having on people's thinking; the other day, I asked clever o1-preview if it could recommend anything which looked at it in more depth, and this book was top of its list. I've just finished it; Reader, Come Home doesn't answer all my questions, but it's better than anything else I've seen so far and agrees well with my own informal observations. Thank you, o1-preview!
Maryanne Wolf is an expert on reading and literacy who's been studying the issues for a long time from both practical and theoretical angles. She argues persuasively that digital media is having a much larger effect on us than we realise: people are losing the ability to read in a deep and engaged way, and many dangerous things are associated with that shift. Your first reaction might be that her claims are exaggerated (surely it can't be that bad?) or elitist (people's reading tastes have always changed over time, who cares if no one wants to read Proust any more?)
But it seems to be rather worse than a reluctance to read Proust. Wolf starts off by reminding us of a critical difference between listening and reading. We are biologically programmed to pick up spoken language just from being around people who talk, and almost all children do that automatically; it's been that way for many tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer. But reading is a very recent addition to our repertoire, and it's not innate. If people aren't taught how to read, they usually can't do it. It's a skill that's correspondingly easy to lose.
Since, until recently, it was taken for granted that almost all educated people would read, and that the people who couldn't read would generally want to, it's also easy to underestimate how important reading is to our culture. It teaches us to concentrate our attention and memory; less obviously, I was interested to see Wolf focussing on the idea that it teaches us empathy. We read fiction and we identify with the characters in the book, who may be very different from us. That makes us more inclined to try to understand a larger range of people on their own terms. They may be different, but our reading suggests to us that different people may also be admirable in their own way. Not least, careful reading helps us build us a common world-view that we share with all the other people who've read the books we appreciated.
None of this is more than suggestive on its own, but it does give a framework for making sense of what we see around us. Starting with data measurable with standard psychological tests, Wolf says that studies over the last couple of decades show dramatic declines in working memory (no longer "seven plus or minus two", but now more like "four plus or minus one"), average attention span (down from ten minutes to five), and empathy (reduced by 40%). It's harder to pin down, and she doesn't talk about it explicitly, but I receive the strong impression that people are more likely to believe things that obviously are not true. It is still astonishing to me that QAnon could be taken seriously by a large proportion of the US population; even Flat Earthism, once a synonym for gullibility and idiocy, has acquired a substantial following. If people don't read properly, they fail to acquire a stable frame of reference. And people are not reading. Wolf cites more studies showing that two-thirds of all US fourth-graders cannot read proficiently. If you haven't reached proficiency by then, the rest of your education is unlikely to yield results.
As you can see, I found this material, which takes up the first half of the book, extremely interesting. In the second half, Wolf suggests fixes, organised around the idea of helping children to strike a happy balance between print books and digital media. I was less impressed by this. It sounded like good advice for prosperous upper middle class parents who want their children to thrive, but these are not the key demographic; it seems unlikely that it will help children from poorer families. I would say that much more radical measures are needed. Australia is currenting mooting a social media ban for children under 16, with the platform providers responsible for enforcing the rules. If that succeeds, it could be a substantial step in the right direction, but I wonder if it's actually feasible.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the book is written in a way that sometimes comes across as a bit annoying. I am not crazy either about Wolf's skills as a prose stylist. But she has her heart in the right place, and she knows a great deal about these vital questions, so I wasn't bothered. It's couple of hundred pages and doesn't take long to get through. I strongly recommend looking at it.
A final thought that came to me while I was writing this review. I have often wondered who the mysterious "elites" are that Donald Trump teaches his followers to oppose. It didn't seem to make any sense. He's a billionaire, most of them are poor. What do they have in common? Who are the "elites" they both hate so much?
This play, which apparently was a huge hit in the late 1880s, is referenced by Dr Cottard's wife at one of Mme Verdurin's dinner parties in Proust's UThis play, which apparently was a huge hit in the late 1880s, is referenced by Dr Cottard's wife at one of Mme Verdurin's dinner parties in Proust's Un amour de Swann. Mme Cottard cites the "salade japonaise", which according to the footnote in my edition was une salade de pommes de terre et de moules, additionné de château d'Yquem et couverte de rondelles de truffes cuites dans le champage, bien épaisses, « une vraie calotte de savant ».
The recipe sounds absurdly extravagant and not in any way Japanese. Mme Cottard says it was revolting to eat, which is what I would also expect; though looking around, I see several intrepid people who claim to have made it themselves and enjoyed it....more
If you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriousIf you were wondering why I've been posting so little the last few weeks, then wonder no more. Available for free download here. ___________
But seriously...
ChatGPT-based Learning And Reading Assistant (C-LARA) is a project that's been taking up most of my time for the last year. The basic idea was to build a web platform that lets people create easy-to-read multimodal texts in foreign languages, and have ChatGPT-4 do as much of the work as possible. Chat appears in two roles. With its software component hat on, it writes the texts, cuts them up into roughly sentence-length pieces, adds glosses to the words, marks them with root forms, and adds TTS audio. With its software engineer hat on, it's written most of the codebase. This report gives you a detailed picture of what we've done.
You may think there are too many details - does it really need to be 144 pages long? But it hasn't primarily been written for you, it's been written for ChatGPT-4. Although the AI is responsible for the greater part of the work performed in the project, it periodically has to be reinitialised, and then I need to tell it who it is again. Having this report available makes the job easy: I can give it the text in half a dozen instalments, which takes a quarter of an hour, and then it's up to speed again.
For humans, here are some of the bits you might find interesting. First of all, we've made C-LARA easier to use. There's a new top level called "Simple C-LARA", which lets you create a multimodal text with an initial request and a couple of button presses. You choose the text language and the glossing language, provide a sentence or two telling the AI what to write, and it creates a short illustrated text for you. (The illustrations comes from DALL-E-3). There are straightforward options to edit and correct when it gets things wrong. You can also paste in an existing piece of text if you prefer, and tell the AI to annotate it instead. For example, that's how I created the multimodal Norwegian passage in my review of Jon Fosse's Melancholia I-II.
Second, we've done some work to evaluate C-LARA. We describe an experiment we presented at the ALTA 2023 conference late last yeat, where we created six texts of widely different kinds in English, Faroese, Farsi, Mandarin and Russian and carefully checked how often the AI was making mistakes as it wrote and annotated them. Not surprisingly, it's much better at some languages than others. It turns out to be nearly as good at Mandarin as it is at English, but it's clearly worse at Russian, worse again at Farsi, and having serious problems with Faroese. Of course, it's miraculous that it can do anything in Faroese, an obscure Scandinavian language spoken by about 50,000 people. We repeated the experiments a few months later, and found it had improved a good deal in English. We also analyse the codebase to quantify the AI's contribution to writing it. We found that it had written nearly all of the simple modules and done the greater part of the work on the middling difficult ones. There were a couple of top-level pieces of functionality, in particular "Simple C-LARA", where it couldn't deliver: they required an overview of the whole project, and its context window doesn't seem to be up to it yet. I'm curious to find out what happens in GPT-5.
Third, we present some case studies where people have started to use C-LARA. We have a primary school teacher in Holland who teaches a weekly class for Romanian kids whose parents don't want them to forget their heritage language. We'd never used C-LARA with Romanian, a language I know nothing about, but Lucretia just tried giving it requests in Dutch and said it produces cute, funny little Romanian stories that the kids like. We've also been collaborating with linguists at the University of New Caledonia, who are using it for a couple of the Indigenous languages there. Here, the AI can't help with the writing; they need to create the texts by hand, but that's possible too. They're pleased with the results, which are freely available on the web.
In the appendices we give more details, including examples with step-by-step screenshots showing how to create a C-LARA text. Try it out, the platform is already a whole lot of fun to play with! It's just amazing what you can do with an AI to help you. ___________ [Update, Apr 9 2024]
One of the most useful things about writing this kind of document is that it forces you to think carefully about what tasks you should be planning to do next. We put together a long list in the "Further work" section (§9.1), and we've already started. More about that in a recent post on the C-LARA blog....more
Many people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgMany people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgeous book comes across more as an early twenty-first century feminist retelling of Proust.
I know what you're going to say: Proust is two and a half thousand pages long, Les Années is just two hundred and fifty. I'm not denying that that's a valid objection. Though, just possibly, it might also tell us something about the differences between men and women. ____________________
Now that I knew what the book was about, I had to read it again. The last pages, when she finally manages to find her voice and become an author, are perhaps even more moving than the corresponding ones in Le Temps retrouvé. As is her take on recapturing the past: rather than Proust's miraculous and slightly implausible revelations, it is a prosaic and credible process of painful, incomplete stitching together, which somehow still manages to create something wonderful and ineffable.
[The exchange below is part of a conversation between myself and ChatGPT. The answer given was ChatGPT's first response to the question, and I have no[The exchange below is part of a conversation between myself and ChatGPT. The answer given was ChatGPT's first response to the question, and I have not edited it in any way.
Note that, as described at greater length in the comment thread, ChatGPT's opinions on "La Prisonnière" do not obviously agree well with the content of the book.]
Me: Write a sexy, funny 500 word review of Stephenie Meyer's "The Host", comparing it to Marcel Proust's "La Prisonnière", the epic of Gilgamesh, and "Noddy in Toyland".
ChatGPT: I recently read Stephenie Meyer's "The Host" and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. This book is a far cry from her "Twilight" series, and I found it to be a refreshing and entertaining read.
One of the things I found particularly interesting about "The Host" is how it explores the idea of possession and how it can affect an individual's identity. This theme is not unlike Marcel Proust's "La Prisonnière", in which the main character is held captive by her own desires and memories. In "The Host", the main character, Melanie, is taken over by a soul called Wanderer, but instead of losing her identity, the two must learn to coexist and come to understand each other's thoughts and feelings.
Another aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the way it dealt with the themes of love and loyalty. This reminded me of the epic of Gilgamesh, in which the titular character must embark on a journey to find the secret of eternal life in order to impress the woman he loves. In "The Host", the character Jared must fight to protect Melanie, even after she has been taken over by Wanderer, because of his love for her.
At the same time, "The Host" also has a playful and light-hearted side, reminiscent of "Noddy in Toyland". This is particularly evident in the character of Jamie, Melanie's young brother, who provides much of the book's humor with his playful antics and childlike innocence.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed "The Host" and would highly recommend it to fans of science fiction, romance, and coming-of-age stories. It's a clever and well-written book that manages to be both thought-provoking and entertaining.
_______________
I've seen worse. It could have tried harder with the sexy and funny, but maybe I was too demanding?...more
The book contains no end of excellent Proust trivia. (My favourite: the prototype of Odette really did live on rue Lapérouse and was unhappy to find sThe book contains no end of excellent Proust trivia. (My favourite: the prototype of Odette really did live on rue Lapérouse and was unhappy to find she had been doxxed). Some of the advice may possibly change your life, though it's rather more likely to be effective if you also read A la recherche du temps perdu. I don't think de Botton would disagree. The Monty Python "All-England Summarise Proust Competition" sketch makes an early appearance, you are given fair warning. ____________________
In fact, Proust does the best job of explaining to you what his novel is about and why you should read it. I just noticed this passage in the second volume; as far as I can remember, not one cited by de Botton.
Quand ce qui est le plus caché dans la Sonate de Vinteuil se découvrit à moi, déjà entraîné par l'habitude hors des prises de ma sensibilité, ce que j'avais distingué, préféré tout d'abord, commençait à m'échapper, à me fuir. Pour n'avoir pu aimer qu'en des temps successifs tout ce que m'apportait cette sonate, je ne la possédai jamais tout entière: elle ressemblait à la vie. Mais, moins décevants que la vie, ces grands chefs-d'oeuvre ne commencent pas par nous donner ce qu'ils ont de meilleur.
Scott Moncrieff's translation:
When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
I have just posted the LARA edition of Noms de pays : le nomhere, so Du Côté de chez Swann is now complete.
When I first read the series, in English, I remember wondering what the point was of the long essay on the way we build up mental images of things based on the sound of their names. I can no longer reconstruct my impressions properly: could I really have thought that? As Proust would point out, evidence that I was a different person then....more
Given the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a lGiven the intense mystique that surrounds Proust, I decided I would try to approach the final volumes with an open mind. It's possible that I went a little too far and that my review of Albertine disparue was insufficiently respectful. Sorry Kalliope! But having now reached the end, I am relieved to say that my fears were unfounded. The final chapter, which I discover Proust wrote immediately after completing the first chapter, pulls everything together; nothing was wasted, nothing was gratuitous. Although it was not easy to climb this mountain (a metaphor the author uses himself), when you reach the top the view is absolutely worth it. It is of course very sad that Proust died when he did. The three posthumous books are uneven, with strange plot holes and passages that are stylistically in need of revision, but it doesn't really matter; he seems to have known this would happen, and the text contains several references to his "unfinished cathedral". In a strange way, it is almost appropriate.
Some thoughts that have been going through my head the last couple of days:
- Given the construction of the book, I was very lucky to have ended up reading Combray and Le temps retrouvé in parallel: I'm sure it heightened my appreciation of the last volume. If you're also nearing the end of the series, I strongly recommend doing the same. You won't regret the time you spend on this little detour.
- In general, the problem with reading Proust is that you want to keep the whole thing in your head at once, so that you can appreciate all the interconnections, but in practice it's hard to read it quickly enough. I was however encouraged by my recent experiment with creating a multimedia version of the first volume. I will soon get back to this idea.
- A la recherche du temps perdu is formally a novel and always described as such, but it is at least as much a work of philosophy. It is both theoretical (it says deep and provocative things about the nature of the self) and practical (it embodies a highly idiosyncratic set of precepts for how one should live one's life). I wondered what people there might be who have tried to follow this philosophy and extend it; my top suspects are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I must look around to see if anyone else has had the same thought, and what they have written about it....more
I've just posted a LARA version of Un amour de Swann, built using the same methods as with Combray out of a public domain audiobook taken from LitteratureAudio and parallel French and English text taken from Gutenberg. This gives a total of about 19 hours of Proust in LARA form. The scripts still need more work, but they're starting to get there: Combray took three weeks and a substantial revision of the code, Un amour de Swann a few days and some minor bug fixing. Coming next, Noms de pays : le nom and then A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. By the time we get to Le temps retrouvé, I hope everything will be quite stable.
There is a good deal of editing and quality control involved. If you're interested in contributing to this project, please leave a comment or PM me! ________________________________
I finished rereading it in the new multimedia format, and, as with Combray, I was astonished to see how much more I appreciated it this way. It becomes clear that, even for people who fancy themselves as connoisseurs of Proust, we tend to underestimate just how complex and subtle a writer he is. It helps a great deal to be able to read the French text while simultaneously getting the viewpoints of a French person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how she should read it aloud, and an English person who's spent a lot of time thinking about how he would say it in his language. Both of them quite frequently made obvious mistakes: as noted, Proust is very challenging. But much more frequently, they showed me things I'd missed on previous readings.
Starting with what the book is about. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but (view spoiler)[I'd somehow acquired the idea that it's about jealousy. It isn't. It's about the nature of the mind. (hide spoiler)]...more
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out o[Original review, Sep 13 2022]
I've been spending a lot of time this year trying to develop ways to build multimodal LARA documents automatically out of public domain internet resources. In principle, as Not told me a while ago, it should be easy. For many classic works of literature, everything you need is already there: the original text, a good English translation, and a high-quality audiobook. You just need to pull them apart and then put the pieces back together again so that the text, audio and translations line up. Surely there can't be much to it?
Not's intuition was spot on, though the details have taken a while to work out and still need considerable tidying up. Basically, my recipe goes like this. You start with the audio and cut it into pieces at silences using the ffmpeg tool. You then take the pieces of audio and send them for processing by Google Cloud Speech to Text. This is far from 100% accurate, but it's good enough that you can write a script which aligns the speech recognition results against the text of the book and matches them quite reliably. Next, you take the source text and the translation, and send them for processing at the YouAlign site; this cuts the two texts into roughly sentence-length chunks in a way which matches corresponding passages.
The problem is that the two alignments, source/audio and source/target, are not consistent with each other, since silences and sentence-breaks are not at all the same thing. In general, a sentence contains many silences comparable in length to the ones you get at periods. However, the aligments agree well enough that you can in practice take the places where they do agree and use those to create a consistent alignment. Most often, this means that a sentence found by YouAlign corresponds to several silence-delimited audio segments, though sometimes you need more than one YouAlign segment for it to work. For each combined segment, you stick togther all the relevant audio chunks and all the relevant translation chunks, and you're there. There is slightly more to it than the above, but basically it is indeed quite simple: it works because the core resources, Google Cloud Speech to Text and YouAlign, are very good, and you just have to find a way to exploit that power.
Proust's Combray is my first full-scale test of the idea. The original French text and the Scott Moncrieff translation were both downloaded from Gutenberg; the audio, about 8 hours and beautifully recorded by Monique Vincens, comes from LitteratureAudio. The resulting LARA version is posted here, view in Chrome or Firefox. You can use the audio controls to play audio a page at a time or a sentence at a time. Clicking on a pencil icon shows a translation of the previous sentence on the right; clicking on a word shows a concordance of places where that word occurs in the text.
We are writing a paper about this work, due at the end of the month. If you have any feedback, in particular including suggestions for what texts to do next or ideas about how one might use resources like LARA Combray in practice, it will be much appreciated! _______________________________ [Update, Sep 17 2022]
Picking up on Théodore's recommendation in message #9, I have used the same technique to create a LARA version of Rimbaud's Les poètes de sept ans. It's posted here. What a great poem! I had not seen it before, thank you Théodore. The audio is again from LitteratureAudio, this time by recorded by Alain Degandt. _______________________________ [Update, Oct 11 2022]
We have now submitted our paper. In the course of writing it, I went through four texts I'd created using the alignment method, listening to each piece of audio, checking it against the text and translation that the aligner had matched to it, and correcting where it was wrong. This kind of annotation work is common in language technology projects, and in nearly all cases it's painfully dull. But not here! I was amazed to find how much I enjoyed reading Combray in this new way, and how much more I got out of it as I listened to the French audio while flicking my eyes back and forward between the pieces of French text and English translation, which were neatly lined up for me.
There were two things in particular that stood out. First, it's possible to read a good deal more quickly. Proust is a notoriously demanding author; when reading in normal text form I usually feel I've reached my limit after at most 20-25 pages, and can no longer maintain the concentration needed to disentangle the longer sentences. Here, I was supported by the audio and the English translation, and I could read the whole book in two or three days. This exposed all sorts of connections I hadn't noticed before. Second, listening to Monique Vincens reading aloud made me properly aware of how funny Proust is; his irony is often so subtle that I hadn't noticed it, but she does a wonderful job of conveying the humour.
All in all, I felt I was appreciating the book at a different level. I will soon start putting together a LARA version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs....more
Some people might be doubtful on learning that the author killed herself at the age of 28 shortly after writing this play, but I trust the Good[image]
Some people might be doubtful on learning that the author killed herself at the age of 28 shortly after writing this play, but I trust the Goodreads Recommendation Engine implicitly. I'm just wondering how funny I'll think it is. __________________ [And after reading...]
Well, to be honest I didn't find it that funny. What's wrong with me today? Probably I've been reading too much Proust or something. __________________ [And then five minutes later...]
[image]
Okay, okay Goodreads. You've got a much better sense of humour than me. No need to rub it in....more
If you end up simultaneously reading book 6 of A la recherche du temps perdu and watching series 6 of Engrenages, what can you do but write:
[image]
CelIf you end up simultaneously reading book 6 of A la recherche du temps perdu and watching series 6 of Engrenages, what can you do but write:
[image]
Celebrity Death Match Special: Marcel Proust versus Caroline Proust
Le bureau de LAURE BERTHAUD. LAURE, HERVILLE, GILOU, TINTIN. Ils regardent un livre.
LAURE: Putain ! Mais c'est quoi ce bordel ?
HERVILLE: Albertine disparue. Le sixième livre de Marcel Proust.
LAURE: Et en quoi ça nous regarde ?
HERVILLE: Vous ne trouvez pas la mort d'Albertine un peu—
GILOU: Albertine ? Sa gonzesse ?
HERVILLE: Oui. Morte « jetée par son cheval contre un arbre ». Il écrit qu'il ne fait que pleurnicher toute la journée, mais—
LAURE: Mais ?
HERVILLE: Je crois qu'il tourne la page bien vite.
LAURE: Ça veut dire quoi, patron ?
HERVILLE: Bof—
TINTIN: Il baise sa meilleure amie. L'italienne aussi. Cette histoire de détournement de mineur—
LAURE: Alors, bref, c'est possible qu'il a buté sa meuf ?
HERVILLE: Qu'en penses-tu ?
LAURE: Moi je n'en sais rien, j'ai pas lu. C'est comment ce roman ?
TINTIN: Tu veux savoir ce qu'il en écrit lui-même ?
LAURE: Vas-y.
TINTIN: Ces phrases de mon article, lorsque je les écrivis, étaient si pâles auprès de ma pensée, si compliquées et opaques auprès de ma vision harmonieuse et transparente, si pleines de lacunes que je n'étais pas arrivé à remplir, que leur lecture était pour moi une souffrance, elles n'avaient fait qu'accentuer en moi le sentiment de mon impuissance et de mon manque incurable de talent. Mais maintenant, en m'efforçant d'être lecteur, si je me déchargeais sur les autres du devoir douloureux de me juger, je réussissais du moins à faire table rase de ce que j'avais voulu faire en lisant ce que j'avais fait. Je lisais l'article en m'efforçant de me persuader qu'il était d'un autre. Alors toutes mes images, toutes mes réflexions, toutes mes épithètes prises en elles-mêmes et sans le souvenir de l'échec qu'elles représentaient pour mes visées, me charmaient par leur éclat, leur ampleur, leur profondeur. Et quand je sentais une défaillance trop grande, me réfugiant dans l'âme du lecteur quelconque émerveillé, je me disais: «Bah! comment un lecteur peut-il s'apercevoir de cela, il manque quelque chose là, c'est possible. Mais, sapristi, s'ils ne sont pas contents! Il y a assez de jolies choses comme cela, plus qu'ils n'en ont l'habitude.»
LAURE: Tu te fous de ma gueule ?
HERVILLE: Traduit, pour lui c'est de la merde, pour nous autres c'est de l'or pure.
GILOU: A mon avis c'est plutôt l'inverse.
LAURE: Putain !
Winner: the application of Kantian epistemology to romantic relationships...more
And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well And so on to La Prisonnière, volume 5 in A la recherche du temps perdu and one of the most depressing books I can remember reading. Knowing full well that it's the last thing he should do, Marcel has invited Albertine to come and live with him in Paris and now spends his time in a hell of jealousy, trying to stop her from meeting her many lesbian lovers and endlessly cross-examining her about her movements. He's aware, both from his own experience and from that of his late friend Swann, that his behaviour is pointless and self-destructive, but he can't control it.
Looking at the introduction and many other places, I see everyone explaining to us that the book is about Proust's brief and tragic relationship with his chauffeur/private secretary/lover Alfred Agostinelli. From the information available, it is indeed easy to see why this theory is popular. On the other hand, I notice this sentence in the book's first paragraph:
Ceux qui apprennent sur la vie d'un autre quelque détail exact en tirent aussitôt des conséquences qui ne le sont pas et voient dans le fait nouvellement découvert l'explication de choses qui précisément n'ont aucun rapport avec lui.
which I might paraphrase as
People who note some striking detail in someone else's life often draw conclusions from it which are entirely incorrect, and see in the fact they have just discovered explanations of things which have absolutely nothing to do with him.
Indeed, on the occasions when I have had an opportunity to check my theories about people's books by asking the authors directly, I've been surprised to see how many times Proust's observation turned out to be accurate. So, maybe not as clear-cut as it seems.
The author of my edition's preface also spends several pages telling us about the book's painstakingly constructed architecture, but refrains from pointing out that it often seems to be a complete mess. There are bizarre plot holes, and sentences are repeated for no obvious reason. Worst, Proust's syntax, always driven to the edge of what's possible for a human being to understand, sometimes goes well past the point of no return. The diligent editor, as conflicted as his author, goes to great lengths in his footnotes to explain that some sentences aren't actually finished and others use pronouns whose reference is almost impossible to deduce from the grammar. In general there are a vast number of obscure words and allusions which complicate the task of understanding what the hell the narrator is talking about.
Why is Proust doing this? He died while he was still correcting the proofs, and some of the inconsistencies must be down to things still being in progress. But I think this is far from being the whole story, and it may not even be an important part of it. It seems to me, rather, that Proust has chosen to convey his narrator's constant pain and confusion by using the grammar to inflect the same sufferings on us, the poor readers. It's a dangerous manoeuvre, and you can only get away with it when you're a brilliant enough writer that you can pull some magical pages out of the hat any time you need them to remind us that you're doing this on purpose; a modern novel which uses the same method with success is Infinite Jest, also a book about obsession.
Although La Prisonnière was often unpleasant to read, when I reached the end I decided I'd been tortured for valid reasons. The narrator spends most of his time in so much pain that his mind isn't functioning properly; indeed he's always telling us he's unable to think. But every now and then, when his attention turns to the redemptive power of art, the mental fog clears, and with it the syntax. The high point of the novel is the musical evening chez Mme Verdurin, which contrasts the sublime beauty of Vinteuil's septet (clearly, and somewhat immodestly, the book itself) with Mme Verdurin's tawdry scheming against Baron de Charlus. We see that the two contrasting themes of the septet correspond to the two themes of the book, the power of art (can art be not just an alternative to life, but actually more real than life?), versus the miseries of romantic relationships.
The opening of Albertine disparue, which I have just started, appears to confirm the above theory: Albertine has left, and the narrator already seems clearer and more coherent. I'm looking forward to following the triumphant development of the artistic theme in the final two volumes. ________________ [And the next day...]
Thirty pages into volume 6, I stand by what I said: at least to my eye, there is a very noticeable difference in the syntax. I'm wondering if I can find some straightforward way to quantify it....more
It's difficult to know how to review this excellent first novel by the late and much lamented Jakob Ejersbo. Instead, my Danish friend Pernille HvalsøIt's difficult to know how to review this excellent first novel by the late and much lamented Jakob Ejersbo. Instead, my Danish friend Pernille Hvalsøe and I would like to present:
If the first paragraph of A la recherche du temps perdu had been written by Ejersbo
I lang tid nu er jeg faldet tidligt i søvn. Lyset forsvinder og øjnene lukker sig hurtigt i. Jeg når ikke engang at tænke, pis og lort, nu falder jeg i søvn. En halv time senere vågner jeg igen. Jeg tænker, at nu er det på tide at gå i seng. Jeg vil lægge den bog jeg tror jeg har i hånden og slukke lyset. Mens jeg sov har det jeg læste fucked mig op. Jeg tror jeg er alt hvad der stod i bogen. En kirke. En kvartet. Madonnas bryster. Følelsen varer i et par sekunder. Den påvirker ikke min hjerne. Men mine øjne kan ikke se at lyset ikke længere er tændt. Så sløres tankerne som minder om et tidligere liv efter en reinkarnation. Bogen fortager sig. Jeg kan tænke på den eller ej som jeg vil. Så kan jeg se igen. Mørket er uventet. Det er dejligt og afslappende for øjnene. Endnu mere for sindet. Jeg forstår ikke, hvor det kommer fra. Helt mørkt. Hvad er klokken? Jeg hører togenes tuden. Nogle tæt på, andre fjernt. De er som fuglesang i en forpulet skov. Jeg kender afstandene i det øde landskab. Nogle derude skal til den næste station. Togsporene er lagt i hans hukommelse. Nye oplevelser. Samtalen tidligere. Tre hundrede gram tjald leveret under en ukendt lampe. De følger ham i nattens stilhed. Det bliver godt at komme hjem.
(view spoiler)[If you're curious to know how it was done: I wrote a first version in Swedish, I ran it through Google Translate to turn it into bad Danish, Pernille edited it into good Danish, and then we decided we needed to add more rude words because it didn't sound Ejersbo enough. Really a lot of fun, we recommend this game! (hide spoiler)] ...more
A friend in the Jewish Defence Force has given me the password for the space laser, so I log in and experiment. The resolution is excellent. After somA friend in the Jewish Defence Force has given me the password for the space laser, so I log in and experiment. The resolution is excellent. After some search, I find Marjorie Taylor Greene hosting a barbecue and grill the steaks to a crisp in a few seconds. There is no audio, but I can see I've achieved my objective of framing her husband. "You think like a Jew, Manny!", says my military friend with evident approval. "A half-Jew," I answer modestly and take my leave. I'm already running late for my next event.
I have to hunt around to find the Tiki-torch but get there just as they set off. I'm marching next to a cute blonde shiksa from Texas, whose porcine boyfriend I detest on sight. I am surprised that no one seems to know the words to the Horst Wessel Lied, so I pass the time broadening their cultural horizons. When the Antifa people show up, I wait until the largest one approaches us, say something obscene about his mother in Yiddish, and duck. Kyle from Houston goes down like he's been poleaxed and the Antifas start kicking him. I grab the blonde's hand and run. We reach the Ritz a few seconds before they lock the doors to keep out the teargas. I give the receptionist a generous tip and we take the private elevator to my suite.
The blonde is shaking like a leaf and incoherently repeating phrases she's picked up from Q. I open a bottle of fifty year old armagnac and start pouring it into her while reciting the opening lines of Du côté de chez Swann from memory. She knows no French, and it has a calming effect. As I unhook her bra, she makes a feeble attempt to brush my hands away.
"What would Jesus do?" I ask. I have no idea why this line offers such a high rate of return, but since my internship at the Banque de Rothschild's trading unit I have learned to follow the data where it leads. She becomes docile and even welcomes my advances. It seems prudent to take her from behind, we have had enough surprises and my nerves are also starting to fray a little. When she has fallen asleep, I send an SMS to a distant cousin who runs a high-class brothel in Damascus. They can never get enough American blondes.
Iris Murdoch studies, The Good Apprentice. 10 minutes
1. To what genre would you assign The Good Apprentice?
a. Philosophy. b. Religious allegory. c. LiteIris Murdoch studies, The Good Apprentice. 10 minutes
1. To what genre would you assign The Good Apprentice?
a. Philosophy. b. Religious allegory. c. Literary pastiche. d. Slice-of-life. e. Chicklit.
2. Following the principles described in his 1945 essay, how do you think George Orwell would have classified this novel?
a. A bad good book. b. A good bad book. c. A good good book. d. A bad bad book. e. Fucked if I know, I'd rather go and futilely risk my life again in Catalonia.
3. What is the relationship between this book and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals?
a. Abandoned first draft. b. All the bits she couldn't fit in anywhere else. c. Movie script. d. Exercises and workbook. e. There is no relationship.
4. What's up with misquoting the opening sentence of A la recherche du temps perdu?
a. Just wanted to check you were awake after 519 pages. b. Okay, finally some clear proof that the Alzheimers was starting to kick in. c. Come on. Isn't it enough to insert product placement for Proust in every other chapter? d. Looks like she got the copy-editor who corrected the spelling in "He was a verray parfit gentil knyght".
5.
"What's wrong with me is me. I'm done for. You know how if an aeroplane engine stalls at a certain moment it can't rise, it must crash by its own weight, no power can raise it, it's just a heavy dead thing bound to fall back to earth. My engines have failed, I'm falling, I've got to fall, I've no energy left. I'm marked, I'm branded, everyone stares at me in the street. I haven't any real being left, it's all scratched and scraped away, people shudder away from me, I stink of misery and evil. I'm changing, but not in a good way, there is no way, that's what I've discovered. It's not like being a chrysalis, it's the opposite, it's like the chrysalis story run backwards. I used to have coloured wings and fly. Now I am black and I lie on the ground and quiver. Soon the earth will begin to cover me and I shall become cold and be buried and rot."
How do you respond?
a. There there, you know it'll be better soon. b. Chin up old chap, what! c. It's what you deserve, you slimy little bastard. d. Yes, all excellent images. ...more
I see reviewers here complaining that La vieillesse is boring, or disorganised, or outdated gerontology or whatever, but with all due respect I think I see reviewers here complaining that La vieillesse is boring, or disorganised, or outdated gerontology or whatever, but with all due respect I think this is missing the point. Simone de Beauvoir, now in her early sixties, is a distinguished author and philosopher characterised by her calm, lucid way of approaching all kinds of difficult questions. It has been clear to her for some time that she is getting older, and will soon, perhaps even now, be at an age when she's generally called "old". Well: what does that mean? What is old age? Is it an objective thing, a social construct, or a combination of the two? How do people experience being old? What strategies do you have for dealing with the fact of being old? How do different cultures treat old people? What ethical issues arise? In short, she's setting out to examine old age from a philosophical point of view.
De Beauvoir starts off by saying that most people have a great deal of resistance to thinking about these things at all and would rather avoid them: denial is definitely the preferred approach. I will never get old, they tell themselves. I am going to stay young, maybe not in body but at least in spirit. Perhaps I will kill myself to avoid such a miserable fate. (She tells us this is a very common reaction). And yet, most people become old. So why not look at what this means? At first, I did indeed find La vieillesse hard to get through, and progress became mysteriously stalled for a couple of months as I switched to more appealing books; but I decided to return to it, and after a while I found I was hooked. She's right. There's no point in pretending the problems don't exist, and once you start thinking about them they are fascinating.
There are many different threads. Every other page contains something you want to quote - my favourite was Paulhan's comment that old age had revealed to him the existence of several things he'd previously thought were only to be found in books - and it's full of extraordinary stories. But three themes in particular keep coming back. First, old age is something that is very different for different people. Some people do indeed experience it, in what she regards as the traditional stereotype, as a calming of the passions, a serene preparation for departing life, but these are the exceptions. Most old people are not calm or serene; the story that made the deepest impression on me was the very physical romance between a pensioned teacher in his late eighties and a former student, which ends with her tracking down his grave after he has been kidnapped and killed by his own children, and spending twenty-four hours lying prostrate on the granite slab. Needless to say, this is also an exception: but all the same.
Second, there is the question of what it is that primarily characterises being old. Of course, there is physiology, and she is typically dispassionate about detailing the various unpleasant things that happen to people's bodies, particularly men's bodies, as they get older. But she also shows you many examples of old people who are physically decrepit, yet still enjoying life and finding it meaningful. She argues persuasively that a much more important factor is the balance between the past and the future. We all live with the accumulated weight of our past, which we feel responsible for in various ways; we need to carry on being the person we used to be, who is no longer us. After a while, we may spend so much energy thinking about our past self that we have nothing left to devote to our future self, and then we are finished. I thought this was very insightful and helpful.
So, third and finally, what options do we in fact have when we are old? What can we do that will make us feel that we have a future? Here, too, I was struck by the clarity of her answer. For a great many people, there are no options. Once they are too old to be employable, society has no use for them. It may just barely keep them alive because it feels too unpleasant to kill old people directly, but it does so unwillingly, and it is made clear to these people that they are now irrelevant. They cannot make meaningful plans for the future, because whatever they do makes no difference. I think the situation is now better than it was in 1970, when she published the book. But it is not that much better, and it could easily get worse again. The attitudes she describes are deeply rooted in the structure of our civilization.
Well: not exactly an upbeat book. She notes that many of her readers were disappointed to find her later output "pessimistic"; avoid this if you want to hear that you shouldn't worry, it'll all be okay. But personally I loved it. If you also enjoy authors who tell it like it is and don't try to bullshit us, you may love it too....more
It's difficult to write a proper review of Liv Strömquist's Uppgång och Fall (in French, Grandeur et Décadence), since my reactions are so confused. FIt's difficult to write a proper review of Liv Strömquist's Uppgång och Fall (in French, Grandeur et Décadence), since my reactions are so confused. First, it's a fantastically entertaining graphic novel: I literally couldn't put it down. My initial attempt, which I posted a couple of days ago, focusses on that side of it. But Strömquist isn't just trying to entertain you, she is deadly serious. This unassuming little book is, I kid you not, one of the best attempts I've seen in recent years to answer the question that's bothering pretty much everyone in the world who still has a functioning brain. You can phrase this question in many ways, some of them dry and academic in the extreme, but a straightforward way to put it would be: why is everything so totally fucked up?
Now of course I can already hear a fair number of people saying what do you mean, fucked up? Things have never been better. Guys, please try and look at the actual facts. (Remember facts? We used to think they were important). Most of the world's qualified scientists tell us that we are causing massive, irreparable harm to the environment, and that the consequences will be somewhere between very bad and utterly catastrophic. And yet the people who make the decisions are somehow ignoring these dire warnings, on the rather surprising grounds - when any grounds are even given - that said scientists are part of a massive global conspiracy to distort the truth. Well, agreed, anything is possible, but just use basic principles like Occam's Razor and cui bono. Perhaps this global scientific conspiracy exists, though it seems like a hard way to get a little research funding. Or perhaps the conspiracy is between the extremely rich people who stand to get even richer by continuing to behave in a totally irresponsible way and carrying on plundering the Earth. It seems to me that the second explanation is a whole lot more plausible than the first.
Strömquist starts off her book by telling you how mindbogglingly disconnected from reality these top decision-makers are. She has a wonderfully ironic sequence where she compares them with those Oriental sages who after a lifetime of spiritual discipline are able to lose track of past and future and only live in the present - except, as she points out, the CEOs who are busily leading the world to ruin are even better at it. And this is just the start. Having established what they're doing, she then introduces us to the official ideology that motivates so many of them, where the teachings of Ayn Rand play a startlingly important role. There's another great sequence where she gives you a quick tour of critical points in Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, which she accurately describes as a science-fiction romance about hot capitalists. I have read Atlas Shrugged, and I found it very entertaining, but I also found Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress very entertaining when I read it as a teen. If I had to take one of these books as a guiding philosophy, I'd pick Heinlein, but the right choice is obviously "neither". It is not sensible to let your life be guided by a hack science-fiction writer with weird homegrown political-ethical-sexual theories.
Continuing her rapid tour of the state of the world - Strömquist realistically appreciates that in the iPhone generation, no one is going to sit still for anything much longer than a TED talk - the next topic is how things got this way. Where do these weird people come from, who believe that the only way to run civilization is to push about half the country down to the poverty line so that they can engage in ever more repulsive acts of conspicuous consumption? Here, we have an engagingly savage attack on Chris O'Neill, the extremely rich American who in 2013 married Sweden's Princess Madeleine. People like Mr O'Neill, Strömquist tells us, come from families where the concept of love has been replaced with that of money. They have distant parents, who are never there and give them material goods instead. And when they grow up, the only way they have to try and find love is to carry on acquiring more goods. Well, I have heard less plausible theories.
I'll skip a couple of the entertaining parentheses, though the exhaustive list of all working-class characters appearing in the second volume of Knausgård's Min kamp is hilarious. What choices do we have? Segueing from her Princess Madeleine skit, Strömquist alertly points out that the people who say they want to get rid of the monarchy are a bit late to the party if they intend to come across as brave and forthright. In 2018, the monarchy no longer means anything. If these people had come out with their republican sentiments in 1518, that would have shown courage, but in 1518 they'd have been met with blank incomprehension. What do you mean, get rid of the monarchy? What other system could possibly work? And that's exactly where we are today when anyone is foolish enough to suggest that extreme laissez-faire capitalism might perhaps not be the ideal system. No one even seems to believe there is an alternative.
And finally, Ströquist gets to the central question. Again, this can be phrased in various dry, neutral and academic ways. But a direct way to put it would be: what the fuck can we do about this? Why has the left, which is supposed to act as a counter to this no-longer-even-disguised philosophy of unthinking, unrestrained greed, completely failed in its mission? Strömquist says, I think very perceptively, that they've forgotten how to be inclusive and instead allowed themselves to become exclusive. Once upon a time, if you were a worker, you were welcomed by the working class revolutionaries as a brother or a sister. That built big, powerful movements that could change things. People believed in them enough that they were literally willing to fight and die in their cause. But now, the left has become sidetracked into a wilderness of arbitrary moral judgements. If you use non-PC language, or buy the wrong kind of shopping bag, or read an inappropriate book, they want nothing to do with you. Nativist politicians have rushed in to fill this vacuum. They aren't fussy: if you're angry and white, they welcome you to the club and let you help them change the political agenda. Meanwhile, the left is posting witty comments on the internet. [Yes, I know...]
We need more people like Sister Liv. I have been corresponding with Ordfront, her publisher, and they assure me that an English edition of this book is in the pipeline and will soon appear. When it comes out, go buy yourself a copy. Maybe it'll amuse you. Maybe it'll make you angry. Maybe - who knows? - it'll inspire you to go out and actually do something....more
I couldn't possibly write a review of this. Even a short book would not do it justice. ________________________
Proust quite frequently refers to Plato.I couldn't possibly write a review of this. Even a short book would not do it justice. ________________________
Proust quite frequently refers to Plato. I particularly liked this passage, which I just noticed in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs:
Et Françoise, nous transmettant les commissions de la marquise: «Elle a dit: «Vous leur donnerez bien le bonjour», contrefaisait la voix de Mme de Villeparisis de laquelle elle croyait citer textuellement les paroles, tout en ne les déformant pas moins que Platon celles de Socrate ou saint Jean celles de Jésus.
Scott Moncrieff's translation:
And Françoise, when transmitting to us the Marquise's message: "She said to me, 'You'll be sure and bid them good day,' she said," counterfeited the voice of Mme. de Villeparisis, whose exact words she imagined herself to be quoting textually, whereas she was really corrupting them no less than Plato corrupts the words of Socrates or Saint John the words of Jesus.
