I was in Texas a couple of weeks ago and found myself walking, walking: along highways, round cul-de-sacs, up and down Austin’s downtown boulevards. There is something lovely about long, aimless rambles in the heat, but the girl in me was looking sidewise in longing at the trucks and cars passing me by. That experience, together with Vanessa Veselka’s essay on female road narratives, has put me in the mood for a road trip. I discovered Orange Blossoms years ago, and it remains one of those perfect, twangy, rambling songs that, for me, epitomize my dream-idea of the top-down, open-road playlist selection.
—Uzoamaka Maduka
It’s our song. It’s a clichéd, trite idea–that one couple’s love can be summed up by a three minute pop ballad, that someone else’s creative work can be appropriated and held up as a signifier of two people’s (often short-lived) love for each other. And yet, in Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust wrote of a “petite phrase” in a sonata by the fictional composer, Vinteuil, that was precisely their song.
This little phrase becomes a symbol of Swann’s love for the somewhat undeserving, soon to be unfaithful Odette, a key to unlocking the space necessary for “a bliss that assumed for Swann a reality superior to that of concrete things.” The snippet of sound comes to represent a sum truly greater than its parts, while being the impetus that inspired this expansive love in the first place. Vinteuil’s sonata was inspired by Camille Saint-Säens’s Violin Sonata No. 1, in D, Op. 75. (You can hear the little phrase at 1:24 in the clip above.) Saint-Säens returns to this little, almost too-sweet melody throughout this stormily romantic sonata in a way that reflects Swann’s own relationship with Odette; Swann struggles with his conflicted feelings about love and his beloved, but at moments his love swells up and overwhelms his better judgment.
“And since he still searched the little phrase for a meaning to which his intellect could not descend, what strange drunkenness he felt, as he divested his innermost soul of all the help of reason and forced it to pass alone through the sieve, through the dark filter of sound! He began to become aware of all that was painful, perhaps even secretly unappeased in the depths of the sweetness of that phrase, but it could not hurt him. What did it matter if it told him love was fragile, his own love was so strong!”
This last thought, of course, proves short-lived in later parts of In Search of Lost Time. And yet, I find it comforting still to know that even then (and this year is the 100th anniversary of Swann’s Way’s release), people haven’t changed very much. We’re all still looking for love; we all still want our song.
(The rest of the sonata can be found here and here.)
—Lauren Leigh
I first read Richard Hell’s autobiography in excerpts while working as an intern at the Brooklyn Rail in October of 2007. His reputation as a writer of journalism, poetry and two novels was something else I would have to learn about on my own. Hell is unique as a true 20th (and now 21st!) century Renaissance man, and his newly minted autobiography I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp stands tall alongside his better records and the other books. Easily the best thing he has ever written. It reminded me a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, another inspirational tale of being young, poor, and somewhat crazed but determined throughout it all. He has plenty to say—not just about music, CBGBs and the notion of “punk” as a movement, but about poetry and the nature of creativity in any form—and he says it all in clear, colorful terms.
—Benjamin Tripp
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
For me, there is no other poet who can quite capture the essence of spring in the way that e.e. cummings can. His poems, like these early spring days, remind me of the possibility for renewal and the pleasure that can be found in planting oneself firmly in the present moment. His words tumble in a drunken euphoria and describe a simple state of being I find utterly refreshing after the heaviness of winter…
—Elianna Kan
These photographs contain a New York City that exists in living memory, but as we drift further from 1979, they take on an increasingly unreal quality—at least to me, still fresh-faced to the city. My father, a child of New York, talks about these years with the same hushed quality that you might hear from a man who’d made it through a war. When I first saw these images, they seemed like depictions of a bombed out city. The graffiti covering the cars is so total—so looming—that they seem to hold the place hostage.
I mentioned this graffiti to a friend of mine who grew up in Queens. He interrupted me, saying that what has happened to New York is a shame, that the graffiti was so beautiful. He spoke as if a part of his own body had been erased from the world. The photographs were imbued with a new quality for me after this exchange. The New York depicted must bring forth an ache to everyone old enough to remember it.
I wonder how Bruce Davidson remembers these years. After Giuliani and Bloomberg struck this chapter from the city’s physical memory, we’ve pushed forward, leaving this place further and further behind us. We’re not going back, it seems, ever. All a boy like me can do is gaze at these photographs—in sadness and in longing and in ignorance.
—Peter Augerot