Michael Chapman

Journal 1 March 31- I have just started reading Swann’s way and so far I am enjoying it. I think that the detail that the narrator goes into describing personal relationships is fascinating. I have never read anything like Proust before. Reading Combray makes me think about my own experiences as a child and makes me think back on times that I spent with my own family and the very minute details that made those times important to me. It makes me think back to my trips to Oregon when I was a young boy. Reading this has made me look back and think critically about things that I have not really thought about in years and in some cases ever. Another interesting aspect of the reading is the detail the narrator goes into while explaining his own childhood experiences. This was a new experience for me because I do not think that I have read anything before that delves into the mind of a child quite like Swann’s Way does.

Journal 2 April 4- I really enjoyed watching boyhood in class this week. I found it very interesting and I found a lot of the comparisons to my own childhood growing up in the 90s and 2000’s. In some ways I kind of saw myself in the main character. I think this was because of the experiences that we have both shared. I really identified with the main character in many ways. One thing that really struck me from the film was the technology and how it progressed throughout the movie. There was scene where he is playing a Gameboy and I thought that I was probably doing the same thing around the same time period. I thought the way that the movie used technology was really on point with the time period. I remember playing that Gameboy for hours and how cutting edge it felt at the time. As well, I thought that the music was very well done. There is a scene when the main character is riding his bike with friends and the hip- hop song Soulja Boy was playing and it reminded me of my freshman year in high school when this song was extremely popular. It was and still is just a horrible song but it really had a way of transporting me to the past. There were other examples of music in the movie that were really important to exact periods but I am having trouble remembering them.

Journal 3 April 7- I have continued my reading of Swann’s Way and I have found the narrator’s Aunt Leonie to be a fascinating character. She is so grief struck by the death of her husband that she believes that she herself is physically ill and on the verge of dying. From this I made a direct connection to how the narrator feels about himself and how he becomes to feel like an invalid in the eyes of his parents. It seems that he may have inherited the same hypochondria as his aunt. I personally connected to this feeling because I was also a somewhat sickly child, I suffered from really bad asthma attacks when I was young and I still feel like that same boy even though I am now 22 years old. On a different note the part of the reading that discusses the character Vinteuil and his love for his daughter was very sad and I definitely felt for his character even though he was portrayed as being somewhat of an off putting person.

Journal 4 April 10- I really enjoyed watching The Stories We Tell this week. I thought that it was very well done and had a lot of emotion in it. I though it was a very interesting premise for a documentary. I thought that the way Sarah Polley explored and deconstructed her family experience was heart wrenching on many levels. It definitely took a lot of courage for her to set up this whole project and then have it open to the public audience. The movie really made you feel for Sarah, her family and her desire to learn more about where she came from. I think it is very natural and important for a person to have a definitive narrative about their life and you could see throughout the movie how important this project was to her and her family. A scene that was especially poignant and gripping was the scene when her older brother talks about losing his mother. Even though I have not had any experiences similar to that I found that particular scene to be the most moving in the documentary.

Journal 5 April 14^th– I have found it interesting to learn more about Swann. We met him early in the book and I found him to be compelling from the start, so I was eager to read more about him. The relationship between Swann and Odette is fascinating. Swann is hard to place, he is an aristocrat but in some ways but he seems to disdain the aristocracy that he belongs to and feels more at home among more common folk. Maybe this is a reason why he is attracted to women of a lower class than himself, which would explain his growing infatuation with Odette. Their relationship is fascinating and complex. In a way it seems that Swann’s love for Odette is one sided. It is obvious that he loves her but the way in which he loves her is more like the love of an object than the love of a person. He does not view her as an equal but as something to be possessed, which can be typical of men in general. It was interesting for me to see the relationship unfold because I became interested in learning more after Gilberte and Odette are introduced in Combray, in the scene when the narrator and his family are walking across Swann’s property. Swann to me seems to be a vain and insecure man if he puts that much stock into just one woman. I understand the importance that women play in a man’s life, his confidence, his contentedness, but Odette does not truly love Swann and because of this he is a fool. But I can relate because I have previously felt reliant on a woman for happiness, which I admit is inherently weak.

Journal 6 April 17^th– I found the Sorrow and the Pity to be a fascinating look inside World War 2 France. A part of the film that I found of particular interest was the men of the French Resistance. I found their accounts of war- time France to be particularly compelling. The way that they described the war was a narrative that I was not previously familiar with. I definitely had a stilted view of the French during this time period; I thought they were all a bunch of pushovers because France was under German occupation. But after hearing of the trials and tribulations of the French Resistance fighters it really made me reconsider what I thought I new. These guys were total bad asses, they fought and died for what they believed in. It was also interesting to hear the German perspective of wartime France. It is easy to demonize the Nazi’s but they were just people to and it is hard for me to believe that they were all evil. It is fascinating to think of the mentality of the German’s because what they did was heinous. I would like to learn more about the German and Nazi mentality and how this happened. Growing up it World War 2 felt like a million years ago but as I have gotten older I have realized that people haven’t changed that much in the last 75 years, so it is just crazy to think about the realities of the Holocaust. In the scheme of things this all happened not that long ago.

Journal 7 April 22^nd– I have just started reading Within A Budding Grove and so far I have found it not as engrossing as Swann’s Way, I found Swann in Love particularly engrossing. The first ten pages were interesting. The conversation between M de Norpois and the narrator’s father was interesting because it is just gossip about Swann. For me the train ride to Balbec was a little tough to get through.