Proust Updates

If you will be in Chicago on July 9th, consider celebrating Proust's 134th birthday by participating in a four-hour seminar on "Proust Among the Animals," sponsored by the Chicago Chapter of the Proust Society of America and the Newberry Library; by joining for lunch, following the seminar, at Chicago's Bistrôt Zinc; or by doing both!

And no, I will not be going. Why? The entry fee is $65 that's why. It's rich man's world you see. I am just wondering what the seminar will be about. I fail to remember any animal characters or pets of any significance whatsoever in the Novel. Or perhaps, they mean animals in the Darwinian sense of the term. That way, it does make a lot of sense to me. Proust, more than a great artist, was temperamentally also an anthropologist or a human ethologist. Just as Darwin had painstakingly observed the minute gradations on finches' beaks in the Galapagos islands - an observation which would turn into the most earth-shattering scientific theory ever propounded - so the young Proust observed the peculiarities of our social species and weaved those into his Novel, which is his own Grand Unified Theory of life. The seminar must be about the human animals I guess.

In case you are feeling despondent and left out by the injustices of materialist and capitalist society and you have five dollars to spare and you are in New York City, you can attend the day long reading of Swann in Love, a chapter in the first volume of the Novel. More details here.

And by the way, in case you are in Paris on July 5th, a letter from Proust to his mother is being auctioned at the Christies. Yeah, I know, it is a rich man's world.