It's Friday - Siouxsie And The Banshees, Keats, Proust

I went to work. I went to the doctor. Then I came home ate dinner and worked my way through the email and this post. I waited for a response to several more questions about the lease for the new property. Now, I am bleary-eyed. Good-night.

This is the weather we are having here:

Winter Weather Advisory issued January 19 at 3:​13​AM EST until January 19 at 10:​00​AM EST by NWS Indianapolis IN

* WHAT...For the Winter Weather Advisory, snow expected. Total snow accumulations of 2 to 4 inches expected across north- central Indiana. Total snow accumulations of 1 to 3 inches are possible further south near the I-70 corridor. For the Wind Chill Advisory, very cold wind chills expected. Wind chills colder than 15 below zero are possible. * WHERE...Portions of central, east central, north central and west central Indiana. * WHEN...For the Winter Weather Advisory, until 10 AM EST. For the Wind Chill Advisory, from 7 PM this evening to 10 AM EST Saturday. * IMPACTS...Plan on slippery road conditions. Patchy blowing snow could significantly reduce visibility. The hazardous conditions could impact the morning commute. The cold wind chills could result in hypothermia if precautions are not taken.

TJ loved poetry, I am too much of a lunkhead, but I have read a piece or two by Keats. I have been spending time that should have gone to more practical matters than Susan Eilenberg's Hooted from the Stage (London Review of Books). Only it was fascinating to read the biographical details and then the critical response to John Keats.

Keats continually passes and repasses the border between the living and the dead, interested in what it would be like to be a statue or an urn, knowing that no crossing is free of ambiguity:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

Except for the as yet unfallen Adam’s, no dream is safe. Dreams are to be woken from, and dreamers wake to sorrow. This too is everywhere in Keats. Madeline prepares for the ritual vision of her destined husband in ‘Eve of St Agnes’ but falls unritualistically asleep dreaming of Porphyro; Porphyro, watching secretly from her closet as she undresses and goes to bed, takes her lute and plays ‘La belle dame sans mercy’ until she begins to rouse from slumber. Weeping and confused at the sight of him, so unlike the ideal figure of her dream, she moans: ‘How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!’ ‘Into her dream he melted’ before they wake again to the storm into which they flee, like phantoms, ‘ay, ages long ago’, beyond memory or imagination, leaving the reader stranded in a realm of death. The dream of the ‘pale kings, and princes too’ into which the knight of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ falls in the elfin grot of the fairy and from which he wakes on the cold hillside is still more disturbing, and its uncanny dreaming, too, has made it come true.

I cannot find anything I disagree with in Sonny Bunch's Why Not Have ‘True Detective’ *and* ‘Night Country’? And I do know a bit about marketing - T1 taught me and then I had my own business - but I do hate how names have been appropriated for marketing purposes. Dikd Denzel Washington with the title "The Magnificent Seven" - it would have been a much better movie without the associations.

For something completely different in several ways, Ryan Ruby's Reading and Time addresses reading Marcel Proust. While in prison, I read two volumes of Proust. I did not expect much. I found him lovely. Mr. Ruby captures my own thoughts better than I could about the charms of Proust:

It is because of its length, which Proust hoped would rival the numerical-temporal One Thousand and One Nights, that In Search of Lost Time has acquired a reputation as a difficult book. Yet Proustian difficulty is not Joycean, Steinean, or Beckettian difficulty. Unlike Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, or The Unnameable, In Search of Lost Time is not a book that challenges our sense of what a novel is, only our sense of what a novel can do. Although it makes not inconsiderable demands on the concentration, memory, patience, and perseverance of its readers, it is roughly continuous with the form that the novel has taken since the days of Austen and Balzac. Its ultra-complicated sentences still follow grammatical rules; and while a certain degree of prior familiarity with French literature and history is helpful, understanding them at least does not require the reader to decode neologisms or catch recondite allusions. Although there is some critical controversy over the precise relationship between the first-person narrator and the book we are reading, it can still be fairly described as a Kunstlerroman, the familiar plot of a writer discovering his vocation. The nature of time and memory are its central concerns, and while one of the things the book asks us to do is to rearrange our conception of temporality, the order of the narrative does not depart radically or unexpectedly from the order of events. One is never at a loss to say precisely what is going on in any given scene, which are set in a series of recognizable and historically specific locations — bedrooms, drawing rooms, kitchens, theaters, churches, brothels, public parks, boulevards, train carriages, the countryside — all of them more vividly realized than anywhere else in the history of the form. 

Mr. Ruby then goes into how our making a living interferes with our leisure for reading. This alleviated some of my own disgust at the time lost to other things than finishing Carlos Fuentes or my own writing. I endorse his conclusion about the value of Proust:

Just as everything about market society seems designed to get in the way of reading Proust, reading Proust gets in the way of participating in market society. As long as you buy it, Proust’s novel remains a commodity, but as long as you are reading it on paper — and reading yourself in the meantime — you are not generating further material profit. Indeed, while you are reading Proust you and your time are quite literally operating at a loss. In the grand scheme of things, regaining your time from the market may amount to a negligible act of resistance to it, but one could find a worse benchmark for what constitutes a free society. A free society will be one in which everyone, if they so choose, has the time to read In Search of Lost Time.

I will point to Why Are We Here? On the Philosophical Possibilities of “Cosmic Purpose” - it is an interview too deep, and too important for inserting the quotable bits here. The subtitle, "Philip Pullman, Philip Goff, and Nigel Warburton Ponder the Big Questions of Our Existence", says much and not enough. I joined the Orthodox Church in prison. I had never been an atheist, not even much of an agnostic, but I had no faith in the Church. Orthodoxy overcame my objections to the church for many reasons, but the principle one will mention here is its admission of its own shortcomings, which is part and parcel of its trying to imitate the humility of Christ. Like Mr. Goff, I think something was missing, which God provided the answer.

I am catching up on bands I knew of back in the day but never got to hear. This seemed appropriate for my life.

 sch