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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monday, April 02, 2007

Ah the old madeleine problem. Last night and today I read short plays of Thornton Wilder, which wildly and intensely evoke childhood memories with my grandparents, not through assocative memory but through artistic evocation; and walking home from the bus tonight after work I sobbed and sobbed. Even though they hated, and I loved, the Beatles (which the nice Lennon vid clip you link to reminds me, Carl). I wish I could remember whether it was Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" or the Beatles' "I'll Follow the Sun" which prompted my grandfather's scornful remark, "They sound like children," referring to their pitch and timbre, an astute bit of music criticism, though it wounded me (not badly).

Of course madeleines remind me of Proust, whom I've neither met nor read, though I did once meet the painter who introduced Ginsberg to Orlovsky, and who later met Dylan through Ginsberg ("Allen brought Dylan to a party at my loft. Dylan was an asshole," this old man told me); he highly recommended Proust's novel; said it was one of life's great experiences; he liked me because it was a party at our mutual friend Joe's house and nobody could remember the 19th century art critic about whom Proust wrote a book, and I reminded him it was Ruskin, whom I have read (he was a huge influence on Gandhi as well as Pater and Wilde and Woolf), though I haven't read that Proust book either.


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