h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Effers,

I know what you mean about -iness and art. I can understand the maths behind musical scales quite well (well, I'd have to brush up) but I'm still working on being able to actually play a damned instrument though!

I knew that Proust was gay (well, he was French </controversy&gt but I didn't know some of the women in his book were guys he fancied.

I was quite surprised about how open he was in talking about lesbianism in the first book.

Gif

Ooh, meant to mention...

There's an article in this month's Fortean Times on Vaughan Williams. Apparently, he was a vocal atheist who wrote several well-known hymns and masses. It seems he had a love for the "numinous", even though he didn't believe in God.

I read most of the article thinking "I wonder whether he's met Effers?"

Gif

Hi Gif,

I wondered how ROTP is coming along? Last night I searched and searched for bloody hours all through the thousands of pages for that cliff top view bit I mentioned to you. I've marked so much of the book but for some reason I don't seem to have marked that bit, unless I've missed it..it wouldn't be difficult - mind you I found quite a few wonderful descriptive passages in my searches, that I'd forgotten.

I wondered if you've read it yet? I can't remember which volume it is in. It's only a few lines...well what goes for a few lines in Proust A description of a ship out to sea and two flowers in the foreground, on the cliff top, and the way the ship appears to be sailing between one flower and the next. I love it. So when you get to it, please could you let me know?

Man, I just got in and turned straight to it. And you will have read it, because it's in volume one. He's supposedly referring to some young women he has been oggling earlier, almost certainly actually, attractive young men...and then going off on one like he does...

'For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist's satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender hedge, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorning a cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of the flower which the ship's hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing but the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering.'

***

Sorry, to quote that short little sentence But I just had to. That completely obsessive observation of the complexity of the smallest details and seeing relationships and connections in all nature and reality through metaphor, is just so.....It's just so languid and affecting to me...

Hi Effers,

I'm definitely enjoying Book 2 more than Book 1. To my surprise, that bit about the musical phrase has come up again and again, which is pretty .

I'm going through it pretty slowly - which probably isn't a bad thing. I'd kind of head that it was about Art, and with the bits about Berma (the actress he likes) and Vinteuil (the musician), I'm starting to se why...

Didn't spot your clifftop bit, sorry

Gif

>Didn't spot your clifftop bit, sorry<


Yes but I am utterly besotted with that book, I mean *really in love with it*

I'm really glad you are enjoying book2, that will set you up nicely for the road ahead. Yes a certain slowness of reading is called for I think, because it's just soooo rich and wonderful.

Yeah, but at the rate I'm going, by the time I get to the end of a description I've forgotten who it was he was talking about!

Gif

Yes that's *exactly* what happened to me, and I suddenly realised I should stop trying to read it like any other book I'd ever read. I just got on board the ride of the sentences and hugely pleasurably went the round and round the twist with them...

You're gotta remember though - I need to keep track of the plot so I can work out whodunnit.

(There is going to be a murder soon, right?)

Gif

So how goes the marathon?

Apropos your reply to me on TGD thread, yes I agree....it is essentially the pathetic wallowing in 'mystery' that gets me by some faithers. Like some sort of delight in cul-de-sacs. Often with the best mysteries if you get your teeth into them they lead off into completely other mysteries, from my POV.

I'm replying here to you because I have unsubbed for the umpteenth time from that thread. Usual thing for me of a feeling of profound boredom with an essential lack of creativity on that thread, ie *my conception* of trying to think outside the box. Which kind of relates to my feelings of irritation that all the other mysteries that I would like to get my teeth into on TGD thread just don't seem to happen, in that same old fundamental rut as I perceive it...but I'll probably return at some point as I always do.

My mood is quite low at present so my patience levels are even lower than normal.

Anyhow happy new year to you, Gif

Hi Effers,

Ah, when I saw your reply here I thought at first that you had some comment you didn't want someone to see. I was going to say that anyone interested to read a Proust thread probably won't be put off by wading through a mere 30 posts!

I haven't read a lot more of My Mate Marcel of late - I'm wading through a textbook on management protocols (it's a page-turner) and I've just been volunteered for a book club. I'll definitely get back to RoTP though. (For a start, my favourite bookmark's in it, and there are Rules about that sort of thing )

Sorry to hear you're low, and yes, TGD thread can get repetitive. Your off-beat contributions (and Ed's aphorisms) are one of the things that make it interesting to me, so I hope I'll see you back there soon. Yes, I know I don't tend to respond to what you say any more than anyone else does, but don't mistake that for me not being interested in reading it anyway! You have a kind of wonder at nature that I find hard to express - I'm much better at the logical, factual stuff (and prone to be sidetracked by details)

Gif

Hi Gif, and yes I very much enjoy reading your posts too. I admire your superb ability to address the details. I didn't make that clear.

I missed your presence of late on TGD thread. I am well aware of the very real substance and lovely intelligence you have in your thinking, although it is often quite different to my own preferred approach. But I do very very much appreciate where you are coming from, and I like your dry humour.

I just wanted to make that clear to you. It's really good to have a variety of ways of coming at things.

I'm just a bloody moody so and so. especially of late.

I very much think of you as a 'friend' here on h2g2..and it's so nice the way you recognise me and appreciate my often different approach.

Hi Effers,

I'm still dipping in and out of young Mr P. I've accidentally joined a book club, so not had the time to devote to him that I probably should have.

Prior to starting RoTP, I was systematically working my way through the Doctor Who novels, of which there are many. So I'd got into a nice system of sticking a CD on and reading 50 pages in an hour. That was great for cracking through relatively light reading like that, but it really didn't work for Proust.

So now I'm just reading a few pages at a time when I get a chance. I've completely lost track of what's happening in the novel (it's taking me weeks to get through a simple conversation!) but reading at a slower rate I'm getting much more time to pick up on all the small details of Proust's writing. I'm actually starting to enjoy the book a lot more now.

Gif

>I've completely lost track of what's happening in the novel<


Well yes, naturellement, for a novel essentially about the subjective nature of consciousness. And volume 2 goes absolutely nowhere, very very slowly.

Damn, I was really getting into the fast-paced action of Vol 1!

My edition has a 'synopsis of Vol 1' at the end of book 3 - which will be useful to work out what' actually happened!

Gif

Yes I have a synopsis of the whole thing at the end of my volume 3 as well. It's a really action packed affair, just begging to be made into a Hollywood movie...

Though I did see a comic-book version. Really.
http://www.readingproust.com/prcomix.htm

Gif

Did you see the link to the duelling madeline translations?

My translation is Terrance Kilmartin, an updated Moncrieff version. I thought the Lydia Davis version sucked about as much as the modern bible translation

'...An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. ...' Moncrieff

'...A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause...' Davis

She's trying to be a bit scientifically modern I think in speaking about 'cause' but Proust is literature, and gives you 'god' as do all great artists.

And god I hate that word, 'notion'; 'suggestion' is far more mysterious.

More from Prousty-babes:

"But after all the attraction of the journey lies not in our being able to alight at places along the way and to stop altogether as soon as we grow tired, but in its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, so that we are conscious of it in its totality, intact, as it existed in our mind when imagination bore us from the place in which we were living right to the very heart of a place we longed to see, in a single sweep which seemed miraculous to us not so much because it covered a certain distance as because it united two distinct individualities of the world, took us from one name to another name; and this difference is accentuated (more than in a form of locomotion in which, since one can stop and alight where one chooses, there can scarcely be said to be any point of arrival) by the mysterious operation that is performed in those peculiar places, railway stations, which do not constitute, so to speak, a part of the surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as upon their sign-boards they bear its painted name."

Gif

OMG That takes the biscuit