Word: proust
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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...
...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...
...realize he was gay and seducing his young students, and she certainly didn't expect him to kill himself at 44 years old. In this brilliant, bleakly hilarious memoir in comic-book form, Bechdel combines stories from her emotionally barren but weirdly fascinating childhood with elegant allusions to Proust and Joyce to make a gripping story of filial sleuthery and, in the end, hard-earned acceptance of how much of her father she finds in herself...
...from New Orleans have savored that Proust-bites-into-the-madeleine moment when a stray taste, sound, smell or sight brings remembrances of things past. It happens whenever I hear the badly rhymed but beautifully mournful--now even more so--first few bars of "Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?" It can even happen with a single chord. A friend gave me a CD of a local band called Jonas Rising, and at the sound of the very first Neville Brothers--inspired piano chord, I was back inside Tipitina's, where Napoleon Avenue meets the Mississippi...