Last night I saw my favorite band, the Mountain Goats, in concert. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them, but it was just as amazing and moving. There is something incredible about seeing a band, especially one with a really deeply passionate fan base, live. And of course, because I’m a big nerd who spends too much time thinking about this program, I couldn’t help but relate it back to Proust and Schopenhauer. All I know about Schopenhauer is what Stacey said in her lecture, but I remember something about art as the only way to transcend individual, isolating subjectivities and wills and get in touch with the universal Will, and music as the best art for that purpose, as illustrated by Proust and the Vinteuil sonata. Stacey mentioned that the music he was talking about was primarily orchestral music, free of the individuating force of lyrics.

So I was thinking about this at the concert, where I was lucky enough to be at the front of the bar section, raised a few feet up from the main pit, looking across the crowd diagonally towards the stage. I could see everybody moving and singing and shouting and cheering, and I also had a great view of the band: the music being loved, and the music being made. The Mountain Goats, if you’re not familiar, are a folk-rock band whose greatest strength, probably, is their lyrics (singer-songwriter John Darnielle was called “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist” in the New Yorker), and how well those incredible lyrics play with the instrumentation, which ranges from a single guitar or keyboard to a full band. This tour it’s a full band, with guitar, drums, bass, rhythm guitar/saxophone/oboe(?)/keyboard (all primarily played by one extremely gifted musician).

Their lyrics run the gamut of themes and topics, ranging from extremely personal and confessional to narratives and ballads to who knows what else. Their latest album is about wrestling, but the concert wasn’t limited to the new wrestling-themed songs, and the wrestling theme doesn’t stop those songs from being personal. In addition, however, they have some hits and fan favorites that touch deep, personal nerves, like “Never Quite Free” (a song about trauma recovery), “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1” (a song about Amy Winehouse, addiction, and mental illness), and the very popular “This Year” (a song about being young and overwhelmed, to put it in as few words as possible). These songs are certainly musically beautiful and powerful, but I believe it is the lyrics that pack the greatest punch. The evidence of this, to me, is the incredible fervent passion with which the crowd sings along. A lot of this passion can be heard here, in an out-of-order iPhone recording of the concert (it’s better quality than it seems from that description).

Of course the crowd always sings along at a concert; that’s part of the fun. With bands like the Mountain Goats it’s also part of something more than fun, a nearly spiritual, nearly transcendent experience. There’s singing along, and then there’s singing along with your hands clutched to your chest, tears running down your smiling, screaming face. That’s how I found myself last night, looking out across a crowd of people doing variations on the same thing. So I don’t think lyrics get in the way of getting in touch with something more universal. Or maybe there are degrees of universality– not everybody likes the Mountain Goats. But the people in that room last night were definitely in touch with something greater than ourselves, if not truly Universal, then definitely less individual than our typical daily experience.

The other thing that occurred to me was that in Schopenhauer’s time, and even in Proust’s youth, recorded music did not exist. Every time they experienced music, they were experiencing some semblance of what I experienced last night. Even when it isn’t your absolute favorite band, it’s different to see and hear someone playing music while physically sharing space with you than to play it back off a computer, a CD player, a cassette tape, a record. Even when it’s someone I don’t know playing a song I don’t particularly like in someone else’s living room, there’s something different and transcendent about live music. Not that I don’t feel transcendent when listening to certain songs or albums recorded; I do. But it’s better when I’m with someone else who feels that way too, and even better when it’s lots of people, and even better still when it’s live. So I don’t know that lyrics were what differentiated Schopenhauer and Proust’s experience of music from the typical contemporary experience of music– I think the difference that is more important to note is recorded vs live.

Basically: see more live music, get in touch with the universe.

Though I am not really writing about Proust in my paper, in my research I could not help but make connections between In Search of Lost Time and research texts, including one of my YA lit primary sources, John Green’s Looking for Alaska. I have a theory that LFA is a simplified, contemporary retelling of the story of Marcel and Albertine. Here are my reasons, some more superficial than others:

• Green’s characters are named Miles and Alaska. In my experience, the retention of first letters is a common practice when changing characters’ names for a retelling.
• The overall story arc and some characterization: Miles is obsessed with Alaska from first sight, though she is not particularly interested in him except as a friend. Alaska is incredibly charming to all around her. Miles’s obsession grows and grows over a relatively short time: September to February of a single school year. Then, Alaska dies ambiguously—maybe an accident, maybe suicide. Miles’s obsession grows exponentially as he tries to solve the mystery of her death, and the mysteries of her life that eluded him when she was still around. Sound familiar?
• Miles’s flattening of Alaska from a complex and subjective individual into a two-dimensional image of Woman and Romance (a topic of my essay) parallels Marcel’s treatment of Albertine.
• The story takes place over a limited time, at a remove from parents, though instead of being summer at a resort it is a school year at a boarding school in Alabama.
• Alaska is not orphaned, but she did lose her mother very young. Meanwhile, Miles has a very secure and stable family that he is merely temporarily separated from. Familiar again.
• The book’s attempt to put pressure on the concept of romantic obsession and romantic (rather than sexual) objectification, though it is not very successful (another topic of my essay), is similar to some of the larger themes permeating not just the Albertine storyline, but also ISOLT as a whole.

Of course, it is also possible that the trope of romantic obsession is simply old and common enough that Green need not have intentionally or even unintentionally retold Marcel and Albertine’s story for these commonalities to emerge. Certainly at least Alaska falls into the category of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” character, a trope that is very common in contemporary media and may have earlier roots. Albertine is arguably too well-developed as a character to be categorized as an MPDG, but Marcel’s perspective on her is definitely related to that trope. So perhaps these commonalities are not specific enough to make a case for LFA as a retelling. Maybe I will try to ask the author since he has a fairly responsive online presence. It’s worth a try. I will update if anything comes of it!

After reading Kindred, I came up with my perfect program: Proust + Faulkner (+ Butler). It would have to be at least 2 quarters long, and have less of an overarching project element than this program, so we could really get involved with such a huge amount of text. I’d want it to be all of In Search of Lost Time, or at least selections throughout like we did here, and at least a few volumes of Faulkner, with whom I’m not familiar enough to guess what would make a good program (I read Go Down, Moses in high school, and that’s it, but I know that they pretty much all overlap and intertwine). It would be great to do it with faculty with expertise in French and American history and literature, a lot like this program. I’m kind of sad now that I’ve already read the Proust so it won’t be fresh to take this imaginary program! It would be so great: memory, history, time; the events of the mid 19th through early-mid 20th centuries and how there were world events but also totally different national and regional preoccupations (which is much less true in our highly globalized modern world); the difference between telling a long story with one narrator and telling it in a fragmented, multi-perspective, multi-generational way…it would be so cool.

This is the type of thought process that makes me feel sure I have to go to grad school and be ‘an academic’ forever because this is one of the few things I get really excited about (others include contemporary folk-rock music, television, and food, none of which are really futures for a non-musician, non-filmmaker who would much rather eat than cook). I know some academics view teaching as a drudgery to be endured in order to research and write but teaching excites me too! Like as much as I want to take this program I imagined, I would also love to teach it, even though I know how frustrating undergraduates can be, because I am already frustrated by my peers a non-zero amount of the time. But sometimes they’re also impressive, exciting, invigorating, surprising, and inspiring, so I don’t think teaching could be all bad; probably far from it.  Most of the time I dread the future, because that’s just how my brain is wired (thanks, anxiety disorder), but sometimes, like now, I get hopeful and excited and super, super nerdy. Yay books! Yay the future!

1. I have too many other schoolwork-type-things to do: reading, reading, and more reading; research and writing for the Memory Project; reading and writing for Cultivating Voice, writing center appointments for Cultivating Voice practicum, academic statement, etc.
2. I have too many non-schoolwork things to do. This feels like a pathetic excuse when I know that many of my classmates have jobs and families in addition to their schoolwork and I have no such entanglements. Still, life seems to be composed of infinite errands, chores, phone calls, appointments, etc, and something has to give.
3. I don’t prioritize the journal. It doesn’t seem important to me when I’m not doing it. When I am actually engaged in reflective writing, it feels valuable, but when I’m not, it’s very easy to write it off as not enhancing my learning at all.
4. I am not a journal-er. I used to be, and I was obsessive about it: writing down every detail of my days and every thought I could hold onto long enough to bind it to paper. But I think I used all of my journaling energy in those years. Now I’d often rather think in conversation.
5. I have trouble with class journals or any type of ongoing assignment with no/few due dates. In eighth grade my math teacher only required homework to be in by the end of the month. You could turn it in every day, receive a stamp on your homework calendar, and probably improve your learning, but I always ended up leaving it all for the end of the month. Not coincidentally, eighth grade was also the first time I got less than an A in math. It’s very hard to do 20 homework assignments in one weekend, and also very hard to actually learn math concepts and skills without practicing. Though this journal is not exactly like those algebra problems, I should probably consider that the same principle may apply, that I might be depriving myself of an opportunity to learn and develop.
6. Trying/allowing myself to not care: when I understood that my attendance will probably prevent me from earning full credit, I gave up a little. I have always been a perfectionist, and for a perfectionist, “it won’t be perfect” is often followed by “so stop trying.” Giving up also allowed me to zone out when I am bored in seminar or lecture, to continue to hit snooze too many times, to turn in my project outline late. The thing is, though, that I do still care. I am trying to care less about perfection and credits, and more about learning, growth, and making good work, but I know in my wiser moments that showing up, paying attention, and writing and thinking reflectively and critically will help with both kinds of achievement.

[I wrote this during seminar today in response to a comment about the protesters who rioted in Baltimore. I intend this post to serve as an open letter of sorts.]

Since the early interactions of white Europeans and Black Africans, white people have questioned the humanity of black people. The belief that Black people were less than human, closer to monkeys than to people, is one of the factors that allowed Europeans and Euro-Americans to colonize, enslave, and commit acts of genocide against them. This belief, among others, was used to justify hundreds of years of slavery, lasting nearly a century more here in America than even in Europe. Though slavery and the treatment of Black Americans as property was legally ended 150 years ago, these prejudiced beliefs are far from dead. Obviously they also ‘justified’ a hundred years of legal segregation and the ongoing de facto segregation of schools, housing and most of the economy.

Even more significantly, these beliefs were at the core of the system that allowed lynching, that continues to allow, or at least neglects to punish, vigilante ‘justice’ against Black people, even vigilante death penalties, without evidence, trial, or jury. Teese killings have been doled out by civilians, as in the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and by police, as in the more recent cases of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Even if you believe that these men may have been guilty of crimes, certainly you must also believe in the American imperative of a fair trial and fitting sentence, decided by an experienced professional judge, not a civilian or police officer. Even if you believe that police have been operating strictly in self-defense or according to procedure, surely you can understand that the disproportionate number of killings of young Black people is traumatizing for their communities and for Black Americans overall. Just as hundreds of years of lynchings were traumatizing. Just as enslavement and genocide were traumatizing. All of these communal traumas are implicit in the comparison of Black Americans to primates.

When you compare Black Americans to primates, regardless of their behavior, you are perpetuating that trauma, participating in that ongoing violence, sustaining the existence of hateful, incorrect beliefs. So…don’t do that.

I am finding more connections between the Proust and my project than I anticipate, both in my research texts and in In Search of Lost Time, both oblique and direct. For instance, in Within a Budding Grove, the narrator says “adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything” (423), which I might use as an epigraph for my paper/memoir/project/thing. And of course Proust is used as a reference point in all my books on memory, and he’s either cited or should be in the book I’m currently reading, a psychoanalytic perspective on adolescence called Boy Crazy, by Janet Sayers. I didn’t realize how much the novel would focus on the narrator’s adolescence until it was happening. It’s good though. I’m very interested in adolescence (obviously, or I wouldn’t be doing the project I’m doing). I have second-guessed this interest a lot—like when I wanted to be an adolescent therapist, or when I’ve wanted to write about my own adolescence. I worry that I’m stuck in the past, some kind of semi-conscious refusal to grow up, a Peter Pan thing. My memoir is going to be about a moment in high school, a moment with a girl who was really important to me, but now we barely keep in touch. I can imagine her laughing disparagingly at me for still being stuck on this stuff that was so long ago now– seven and a half years, for the moment I’m thinking of. For me, three cities ago, at least a billion lives ago. For her, something similar. But she emailed me the other day, our first contact in ages, so I know I’m not the only one looking back. And Proust gives me real reassurance—that it’s okay to look back, important even, or at least worthwhile. This program gives me reassurance. Of course I still have questions—what is the importance of my own story, what is the importance of a story at all, or should I just give up those lines of inquiry and accept the soothing assumption that they are important for some unknown unknowable but totally valid reason? Should I just let go of thinking about it altogether, and let it be enough that in this program I am invited to read and write stories of time and memory? What else is there to do, really?

Reading Dora Bruder was an experience. It seemed connected to everything—Proust, Benjamin, docupoetry/Green-Wood, my own future, my near future with regards to the Memory Project—in a really satisfying way, and simultaneously, I found it incredibly frustrating as far as authorial/editorial choices went, like when to show documents and when to paraphrase, when to speculate or imagine. The slipperiness of the reality, or of the relationship between real and imagined. I kept asking, is this really real? I haven’t looked it up yet to find out. My guess is it’s somewhere between real and fiction, kind of like Stories We Tell or The Things They Carried—accessing the truth (or “truth”) through a level of fictionality that works much better than just fact to tell the essential thing. But I don’t know—it could all be true. Either way, it’s a masterpiece of editing, of slow revelation. It drove me crazy. I wanted it laid out straight, or I wanted to be absorbed by it, as I was with Stories We Tell, and not notice the questions of reality/imagination/editing, let the story turn off my critical faculties. It was almost like an itch, these questions. And the pronouns, the person of the narrator—mostly first person telling a story in third, and then this occasional, unannounced, casual slip into second. Putting us into Dora’s shoes, mostly, but sometimes the narrator’s, or some unknown third party.

…

Well, I gave in and looked it up. Dora Bruder does not have a Wikipedia entry, but Patrick Modiano does. He really did write a book called La Place de L’étoile, so that’s factually true, at least. Dora Bruder is classed as a novel—a work of fiction. But The Things They Carried is classed as a memoir, despite having known, disticnt elements of untruth, of fiction. So I don’t know, still. The New Statesman ran a piece in 2014 called “Why nobody knows what to think about Patrick Modiano winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” that might have more answers, or at least further questions.  It calls Dora Bruder (or, apparently in some English editions, Search Warrant) “a documentary account.” Then why are there no citations of any kind, no Notes in the back? The NS piece also makes the connection to Proust, noting that all of Modiano’s works are connected/ongoing, like the volumes of In Search of Lost Time.

The Kirkus Review listed on Amazon describes the book as “Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of life that strides the two genres.” It’s funny that this ambiguity pisses me off so much, because this is close to the kind of work I adored last quarter—documentary poetry, specifically Allison Cobb’s Green-Wood—and to the kind of work I want to make, I think, in the future. I think what gets me is the opacity. What I loved about Green-Wood was its transparency, except as I write that I remember it’s not true. I remember feeling puzzled there, too: though there were notes and clearer citations, it wasn’t line by line or footnoted, it wasn’t always clear what was borrowed and what was original. Which I guess raises its own questions about the nature of ‘originality,’ but that’s a whole other story (or blog post). So then what is the difference, if not transparency/opacity? Or would I find myself peeved at the books I loved last quarter, if I reread now, in light of the questions of identity, narrator reliability/stability, memory/imagination/reality, that have been raised by and around the texts in this program? How do I reconcile these questions and frustrations with my own desire for genre-bending, documentary or research-based creative work? Where do I find my place in this conversation as a writer and as a reader/student/thinker? I don’t think answers to any of these questions are ready to come out of me yet. I think I need to stew in them for a while. But I had to isolate the questions to start stewing, so…here we go, I guess.