Playing to the Gallery, Grayson Perry
- So art has become this incredibly baggy idea. When I think of the sort of bag that art might be, it's one of those very cheap dustbin liners--the ones that, when you drag them out of the dustbin and you're walking towards the front door, you're praying that all the rubbish won't spill out all over the hall carpet. That's what kind of bag art is. It's become this incredibly permeable, translucent, fuzzy bag.
V., Thomas Pynchon
- Perhaps they may have felt like the last two gods--the last inhabitants--of a watery earth; or perhaps--but it would be unfair to infer.
"[...] If in this craze for amusement Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and wring our heart. They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image inversely projected, a negative of our sensibility. So that a novelist might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love-affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial novelty is never so effective as a repetition that manages to reveal a fresh truth." - Marcel Proust, La recherche du temps perdu, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
I have always felt that if I were to read Proust, it would have to be with the assistance of a support group, as recorded in the delightful issues of Proust Said That. The website is, sadly, offline, but the Wayback Machine kept an archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20160124184338/http://zacker.info/pst/ From Issue 1: As the birthday of one roommate rolled around, I asked him what he would like for a present. He thought about it for a few days, and then he said, "What I would really like for my birthday is for you to read Proust with me. I've tried to get through Remembrance of Things Past three times now, and I just don't think I can do it without a support group." I myself had tried to read Proust twice that many times. "Okay," I answered feebly, "anything for you." "Don't look so miserable," he said, "we only have to read ten pages a day. It would only take about eleven months, and maybe we could get some other people to do it with us. It'll be fun." I asked myself where we could find a bunch of people who would subject themselves to eleven months of purple prose, and then the obvious response suggested itself: The San Francisco Cacophony Society. Cacophony is a group that devotes itself entirely to the creation of outrageous entertainments of all sorts; some have an element of danger, others whimsy, many have a literary bent and all of them require participation. So I sent the following notice to the Cacophony newsletter: "We have tried on innumerable occasions to read through to the very last pages of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past, some among us reaching well into the third volume of this prodigious work of literature, but succumbed to that inevitable, narcoleptic, helpless block which prevents the much-valued completion of this classic of introspective cultural history, and so we have profoundly wished to share this epic endeavor with others of like debility, gathering together in a solemn pledge, not untouched with a tinge of good-humored irony, to plough together through these three volumes at the sensible pace of ten pages a day, agreeing in advance to use the Vintage Books, 1982 edition, so we might proceed at an identical pace, and therefore, at our bimonthly meetings, be able to share the delights of the literary bliss within at an equal rate of discover... blah blah blah."I live in a grand, crumbling Edwardian in the geographical center of San Francisco, in a two-story, 14-room flat with six friends and an endless succession of delightful houseguests. The inmates are, without exception, arty in one way or another; we have lived together and creatively fermented side by side for years. We are family, dysfunctional but nonetheless mutually supportive.