Of all the readings we have done so far this quarter my favorite is pages 253-440 of The Captive. In this section of the book, our narrator, attends the Verdurin party. A party, as it turns out, that is hosted (or taken over) by M. de Charlus. Admittedly, the narrator’s reasoning for attending the party is to find out about Albertine’s whereabouts and whether she has been with other girls. His fears are never quelled, only excited, instead though, he spends a large portion of the party creating wonderful descriptions of the characters within.

Things really get heated, though, when the guests begin to leave the party and our narrator ends up in a private conversation with M. de Charlus and Brichot. At this point, our narrator is prying for information about Albertine’s whereabouts and learns much about homosexuals of his day in France. M. de Charlus is no fool and continues to humor our narrator even though he knows our narrator is obsessed with Albertine’s whereabouts. Still, it surprised him “greatly when he [Charlus] cited among the inverts the ‘friend of the actress’ who was the leader of the little society of four friends” (396). Oh no! The four at Balbec, all of which our narrator would love… if he could have them individually.

As Charlus relates “Two are entirely for women. One of them is, but isn’t sure about his friend, and in any case they hide their doings from each other” (397). I can’t imagine this made our narrator feel any better. Now, if he continues on with his obsessive tendencies, he has to ‘protect’ Albertine from carrying on in the ‘Fab Four’ at Balbec, as it’s quite possible she could have lesbian relations with them.

Charlus, as usual, likes to flaunt his knowledge and relates to our narrator and Brichot, just how many homosexuals there are in their midst: “You yourself, Brichot, who would stake your life on the virtue of some man or other who comes to this house and whom the initiated [‘the initiated’ being one of a multitude of terms used to describe those who partake in homosexual sex] would recognise a mile away, you feel obliged to believe like everyone else what is said about someone in the public”, he goes on “As things are, the average rate of sanctity [those partaking in homosexual sex], if you see any sanctity in that sort of thing, is somewhere between three and four out of ten” (397).

This information shocks both Brichot and our narrator, though they believe him and as the narrator thinks to himself “If Brichot had transferred to the male sex the question of bad reputations, in my case, conversely, it was to the female sex that, thinking of Albertine, I applied the Baron’s words” (397). The real reason our narrator is here, is to find out the truth of what Albertine is doing. The results will, naturally, only make him more obsessive. The fact that he doesn’t come to the conclusion that it’s not within his rights nor abilities to control what another human being does, or that he should find someone who would be solely faithful to him, is beyond our narrator.

This conversation, quite smoothly leads into the revelations about Swann. As Austin explained in his close reading, the narrator wants to know all about Swann, since after Swann’s death, he was recognized as one of the great people of the narrator’s time. Unfortunately, the results are not good for our narrator or Swann. Charlus declares that he was Odette’s lover and that Odette slept with all sorts of men and ‘urged’ Charlus to put together orgies for her. The validity of Charlus’s words are apparently taken for granted by the narrator and conclude the story of Swann’s love in an sad way for Swann and in a quite different way for Odette.

There are other versions but this one was the most moving for me.

ATTENTION: This is not an attack on anyone personally, I felt that I needed to address this issue that came up in our seminar and would not be able to live with myself if I did not.

When I was first prepared to write on Baltimore, I was inspired deep in my soul (and on an empty stomach) with a burning force. As the minutes progressed and I tackled one task after another, I found myself preparing oven-baked potatoes and before I knew it my belly was full of food.

It’s amazing how drastically ones view of the world changes before and after eating. I know I’ve read about this somewhere before… Some French writer, quite possibly in the book Variations On A Theme by Aldous Huxley wherein he reviews the diaries of Maine de Biran. Nonetheless, it is still important I tackle the central issue: Baltimore.

In light of our most recent seminar and the dialogue going on over the internet and across the country I would like to address some key points.

The first being, that the general public, as advanced by the media, views themselves as occupying some highly respectable moral ground by shouting booooo to the “violence” and “destruction” that occurred during the rioting in Baltimore. As evidenced by David in our seminar the indoctrination runs so thick that he imagines himself starting “to envision what the best strategies would be to remain safe, and which self-defense measures would be most effective”.
(http://blogs.evergreen.edu/losttimedavidg/journal-entry-6/).

This comment implies that those rioting are some sort of chaotic murderers looking to hurt anyone and everyone. The whole idea, as again has been advanced by the media, is that the rioters don’t represent any goal and are largely young black men looking to cause violence for the sake of violence. To even explore the idea that there is some larger goal, is to admit, that there are other factors at play.

Part of the function of this is to create a closed dialogue which would bring any participant to one conclusion – that the rioters are creating violence for the sake of violence. As evidence, one person in our seminar stated “they are acting like primates”, I don’t feel I need to share the racial implications sitting in the depths of this comment.

Of course, there is no reason to explore this further, because the people who advance these ideas are benefiting from the white privilege and will continue to benefit from things the way they are, IE business as usual… an of alteration of which would cause those who benefit from their privilege to acknowledge their privilege and thus lose some of the things that they hold most dear.

Furthermore, many of those that do acknowledge that there are goals in Baltimore, still condemn the violence, on the grounds violence = bad. This of course, is the dialogue we get in a society that is so extremely tied to it’s material possessions. Their response is that these people should go through traditional methods, including peaceful protests (which by the way DID happen simultaneously during the riots), through voting or IE all of the methods that won’t actually do anything to damage the status quo.

Of course, again, the use of ‘traditional methods’ relies on assumption that young black youth in America have all of the same opportunities as their white counterparts. This is usually the first illusion ascribed to, that needs to be torn down.

Turning to the Human Rights Watch world report of 2014 for The United States we find “Whites, African Americans, and Latinos have comparable rates of drug use but are arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated for drug offenses at vastly different rates. For example, African Americans are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, even though their rates of marijuana use are roughly equivalent. While only 13 percent of the US population, African Americans represent 41 percent of state prisoners, and 44 percent of federal prisoners serving time for drug offenses.

Because they are disproportionately likely to have criminal records, members of racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than whites to experience stigma and legal discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service, and the right to vote.” (http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/united-states)

As Jamilah Lemieux in Ebony magazine discusses “If the sustained psychological terror of being reared in an economically disenfranchised neighborhood, babysat by a failing school, and abused by aggressive police didn’t leave you with the tools to effectively organize against state sanctioned terrorism in a way that society finds “respectable”—in other words, voting and being polite enough to say, “Please, suh, don’t kill us no mo’!”—then far be it from me to mourn the loss of Nike socks and Remy bundles and exaggerated reports of violence against police that leave out this week’s violence at the hands of police, and of White counter-protesters who attacked and berated people for the past three days on the city’s streets.”

Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/news-views/baltimore-been-burning-503#ixzz3Z19p716s
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BLACK LIVES MATTER. As in fixing the disenfranchisement felt by non-white youth of America is more important than the preservation of material goods of a CVS store, or all that corporate made crap that is fed to us. And that is one of the main objection by individuals, that ‘I agree with their goals, but not the violence’.

Well, when you live in a world where you have no opportunities, you’re continually profiled and harassed by police because of the color of your skin and this is further exacerbated by a rigged economic system… What better way to fight against that system? Read about how these massive inequalities continue to be perpetuated by corporations. –

http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/25/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20100825

In this case, the very system that has disenfranchised the non-white population is the one that faced destruction at the hands of rioters in Baltimore. So of course, the western white privileged world is up in arms shouting out against the violence. Because these riots attack the very system that keeps these people privileged.

Go Baltimore.

During Patrick McMahon’s close reading with the class a lot of in depth and critical ideas were brought up in relation to the text of Within A Budding Grove. In light of this I want to explore the pages of 514-515, a piece which I see as one of Proust’s confession’s.

On page 514 after continuing his meanderings about the “mean girls” strutting through town, Proust writes “All the advantages which, in our ordinary environment, extend and enhance us, we there find to have become invisible, in fact eliminated; while on the other hand the people whom we suppose, without reason, to enjoy similar advantages appear to us amplified to artificial dimensions”. The narrator (or Proust), is suggesting that those whom he judges so harshly share the same advantages, namely intellectual, that he has, thus I suppose justifying his judgments.Then, he says, those who share these advantages of his, appear to him “amplified to artificial dimensions”.

There is no doubt that with many characters, Proust does just this: amplifies them to artificial dimensions. In fact, in the previous passage about the “mean girls”, Proust spends pages, building up these girls into artificial caricatures. They are “birds”, an “exclusive gang”, “noble and calm models of human beauty that I beheld”, with their “bold, hard and frivolous natures”. He slings all sorts of contrasting descriptions and attributes upon them in the span of a seconds and the nature of their true character, we will never know, because it is left in the wreckage. As the narrator explains “I had dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose” (508). He deals quickly and without care and before the reader knows it, we are on to the next topic, broken by the many harsh and beautiful ideas of the characters just described.

In the next paragraph (514-515) he continues “As I had so often thought when Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage bore me away, that at closer quarters, if I had stopped for a moment, certain details, a pock-marked skin, a flaw in the nostrils, a gawping expression, a grimace of a smile, an ugly figure, might have been substituted, in the face and body of the woman for those that I doubtless imagined; for no more than a pretty outline, the glimpse of a fresh complexion, had sufficed for me to add, in entire good faith, a ravishing shoulder, a delicious glance of which I carried in my mind for ever a memory or a preconceived idea“.

Here he is stating outright, that one glance and one feature of a person allows him to create a whole caricature from his imagination. The narrator already has a wealth of preconceived ideas in his head and when he observes one of these girls, he has taken his ideas, whether beautiful or grotesque and in seconds has a spun a whole creature together which he then presents to us.

During Spring quarter I began the development of an idea for a book that I have. It includes both art pieces, poetry and scripts to eventually, be performed.

Naturally, as my project is on Dadaism, I was inspired by all of the manifestos created by Tristan Tzara, whom created 9 or 10. I also get the feeling, that generally, people view manifestos as crass and something of the past. So in defiance of all this I wrote one the other day in the midst of my work on my memory project paper. It will be used in the first few pages of the (albeit homemade) book I am making.

Here is one art print I did, to give you an idea of what the words are supposed to be paired with.

There is something romantic about reading Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano. It’s not the story itself. But the reminiscence of Paris in the 1910′s and 20′s. I want to be there. Maybe, only because I have never been there. This time seems almost ancient to me. Ah, to be in a Jewish quarter of Paris in the year 1912. Long before television. We could place our chairs on the sidewalk and smoke cigarettes and drink iced water. Is this even before cars? People walking down the street. I often walk alone on the sidewalks now. The place itself isn’t necessarily romantic. But to think of it is romantic. And the woods then. So many more trees, such a vast forest. Kisses and lipstick.

When I finally get the chance to take a walk in the woods, my world relaxes and I wonder to myself “what is so important?… that I spend all of this time away from the woods, a forest, nature, laying in a field, hiking, etc?”. How could these things I fill my day up with be SOO important?

After all, I do have ambition. I want to create this and participate in that, But my life gets filled up with all of these obligations and ambitions and I lose all of the time I COULD USE to sit quietly or to take a walk in the woods. To lay in a field and feel the ferns rustle and the planes fly overhead.

I will even walk in the rain! I enjoy it just as much! (I am not a fan of the destructive being known as John Lennon but I do appreciate some of his words) “When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. They might as well be dead. When the rain comes. I can show you that when it rains and shines. It’s just a state of mind. I can show you”

April 11th, 2015

There is something about those first few seconds when the rain lets up and the sun bursts through; You can feel the suns warmth while at the same time those cold rain drops are crackling on your jacket. At this moment, the brightness of the cherry blossom’s can truly be seen. They shine with a glistening pink that releases joy inside of me. All of these flowers that burst from the trees and the plants, but, especially the white flowers and the pink flowers. They stand out to me. They are beautiful. I kiss the trees and meditate.

It’s amazing how I can walk down a city street and be the only one on it. Then I pass by a woman, probably twice my age smoking a cigarette. Her face looks to be the texture of a catcher’s mitt. It’s not a negative thing. It’s a positive. She has lived. She has done things she wasn’t supposed to do. Her parents probably told her don’t smoke cigarettes and she smoked ‘em anyways. Because who’s to tell? The kid who doesn’t smoke cigarettes could get hit by a car at the age of 18, while the kid who starts smoking at 16 lives until 62.

I am not advocating smoking cigarettes. I am just advocating the taking of a risk. I want to take risks. I’ll take a risk and talk about something I don’t know even know about ;). Should I be in fear of looking a fool? I am not perfect. I am a flawed human being. So I’ll do it. I’ll make statements people may not like, I’ll eat ice cream and I’ll smoke cigarettes. I won’t do these things all of the time. There’s no need in being wreck less. But what’s the fun in doing exactly what your supposed to do?

I realize that no matter how different we want to make things look, we are not in control of the world. And it’s a positive thing. Because now I see it. And I am free of it. I will do everything in my power not to participate in it. I’d rather be homeless. Once I can recognize I am powerless and I have no control of the world I am finally free of the burden of the world. Now, I can focus on sharing love. Ah! And I love you!