Word: proust
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Marcel Proust wrote "the idea of popular art...if not actually dangerous seemed to me ridiculous." Locked far away from society in his cork-lined room (why cork? Why not? It blocked out useless sound and probably had a strong enough smell to evoke memories abound), Proust wrote and wrote (and wrote and wrote) about the inanities of modern society, the limitations of "the now," the importance of feeling and experiencing. Proust spent a good chunk of his 51 years (and several thousand pages) observing just how frivolous popular culture was. And yet, 93 years after he began his massive...
...influence of Proust in the film Little Miss Sunshine made me wonder: why is everyone Proust-obsessed? Steve Carell's character in the film, Uncle Frank, is a depressed, suicidal homosexual who also happens to be the self-declared number one Proust scholar in the U.S. At first I figured this was a completely random association; the writers could have just as easily picked Balzac or John Donne or some other semi-obscure, all-but-forgotten philoso-poet. But maybe these arbitrary snippets of Proust in current popular culture amount to something. In Search of Lost Time is six volumes...
...Proust, genius as he may have been, was a bit of a whackjob; even those who have devoted their lives to the study of his literary leviathan have to take him with a tiny grain of salt. There is a website that poses the challenge of summarizing In Search of Lost Time in as few words as possible - seemingly inspired by the brilliant Monty Python sketch "The All-England Summarize Proust Competition." Some brave attempts from this website include "Society Sucks", "Mmmm...cookies", and "Marcel's not gay." So what have we learned? What does Proust teach us about time...
...dreary nine-step program that asks people to banish their inner losers. Chubby little Olive (Abigail Breslin) is determined to become a prepubescent beauty queen, the Little Miss Sunshine of the title. That goal is not particularly advanced by her brother (Paul Dano) or her uncle (Steve Carell), a Proust scholar coming off a suicide attempt. Mom (Toni Collette) is loving but too distracted to cook. At the Hoover house in Albuquerque, N.M., it's all KFC all the time...
...every kiss is an imitation.The media can’t take away the pain of a funeral or the thrill of a kiss, but it robs us of our authenticity; how many of our actions, consciously or not, are based on what we’ve seen done before? Proust can insist “not only upon suffering, but upon respecting the originality of my suffering,” but that perspective vanishes beneath the weight of life previewed. Of course, we aren’t the first generation to grow up with movies and television. This effect existed...