Proust in Prison

And much more--a miscellany

“This essay on Proust was dictated in the winter of 1940 – 41 in the cold refectory of an abandoned convent that served as the mess hall of our prison camp in Gryazovets in the Soviet Union.”

Creatures, there are certain books that so entirely do what one asks of them that little further comment is necessary. Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, by Józef Czapski (tr. Karpeles), does exactly what it says on the tin. Czapski was imprisoned with fellow Polish officers—highly-educated men, but also seemingly-random survivors of Soviet massacres. They were allowed to organize lectures in the camp, under surveillance, for when they got done with days of hard labor in temperatures far below zero. This is what Czapski wanted to say.

What do you want from a book like this? I haven’t read Proust, and I think I wanted it to whet my appetite for his work. I also wanted, and I think Proust-heads will want this as well, a deeply personal engagement. I wanted to see what it means to love Proust and his writing, to be shaped by it and to swim in it the way one swims in the best parties, that fluent conversational movement from theme to memory to image to effusion. All this Czapski does with such lightness and grace. Loss and death are always shadowing these lectures—uncertainty, time bearing all his sons away to destinations unknown, you won’t forget that Czapski is speaking under duress to fellow prisoners—but they are also suffused with light.

I also have to note the single beautiful detail that although Czapski usually gets his quotations from Remembrance of Things Past word-perfect, there is one mistake he made consistently throughout these lectures: He always says “brioche” when the text has, famously, “madeleine.”

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Watchin’

“The Dark Half”: George Romero adapts Stephen King. I wrote about the King novel here—the first novel King finished in sobriety, the tale of a meek English professor whose alter ego, a violent pulp author, comes to life and seeks revenge on his creator. Romero really rolls around in the pulp elements; Timothy Hutton, in the spaniel/killer role, is just having a blast. Gorgeous use of sound; terrific editing. Wholehearted endorsement of everything “James” says at Kindertrauma. Probably impossible to make the ending of this story really work on film, but everything else is terrific.

“The Invisible Man” (2020): Brutal and relentless tale of a woman escaping a stalker who can hide in plain sight. Phenomenal use of the camera to show us where the Invisible Man isn’t. Ferocious performance from Elisabeth Moss. Slamming from silence or quiet diegetic sound to hard music and back. You’ll know in the first ten minutes of this film whether it’s for you, since it starts with the fear and tension dialed up to 11 and rarely slackens. I found it genuinely frightening and heart-wrenching.

There are some fairly large loose ends left dangling, but this film feels more like a fable than a procedural, so I didn’t need it to answer practical questions. (Kindertrauma notes that it could also be a “superhero origin story”….) My only real criticism is that I know the blue-washed greigescape is intentional—it’s set in Silicon Valley, this is tech wastescape, it’s a marker of both time and place, emotional coldness, cultural commentary blah blah blah. It still looks bland and too dark.

I also enjoyed the Screen Drafts 1980 episode a lot. The top four are especially interesting: I came out of the discussion of “The Shining” willing to boot it out of the canon entirely! That’s a personal reaction—the movie exploits all the possibilities of its art form, the use of sound and framing and color, everything a book can’t do; but then the book exploits interiority, hidden terrifying monologues suddenly breaking out into consciousness, something a movie would struggle to convey and Kubrick doesn’t try. And it’s that feeling that gets so deep under my skin with The Shining. Not the fear of something grabbing me by the throat—the fear of something moving inside me. Rising to the surface of the mind, dead alive.

And then the discussion of “The Empire Strikes Back” first convinced me of the film’s greatness, and then swung the other way: Did ESB convince us that Star Wars was a setting, when it’s really just a story? Was there always something Potemkin-village about the promise of its “distant mountains”?

All this, plus much more—a great episode. Discussion of the #1 pick is quite moving, and explores one of the central moral problems of the movies: Will a visual medium always privilege the attractive over the human?

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Eatin’

It’s Lent, so you may need to save this for later, but let me recommend Smitten Kitchen’s summer steak salad as a versatile, easy, light weeknight dinner. Notes: Handle the steak with tongs—the first time I made this, I almost caught myself on fire when the sugar-marinated steak hit the ripping hot grill pan!

We did it the first time with the salad she recommends. This time, we did arugula, red onion, tomato, mango, cilantro, avocado, and frozen fire-roasted corn—cooked the corn and onion together briefly on the stovetop in olive oil, then mixed with the other stuff. We also REDUCED THE RED WINE VINEGAR to one tbsp—original recipe used way too much for my taste. I was skeptical of the arugula but my partner liked it; otherwise this was fantastic and I’d do it this way again.

Workin’

For my day job, I’m surveying people who experience same-sex desire and are, or have ever been, practicing Catholics. This is the first stage in a big project I’m truly excited about, which will ultimately help us guide Catholic pastoral care and create devotional resources for queer Catholics and seekers. We’ve already gotten responses from eight countries on three continents. Please do take it, if it applies to you, and share it widely!

Sellin’

Ave Maria Press is having an overstock sale, offering massive discounts on some books I’d recommend: Leticia Ochoa Adams’s Our Lady of Hot Messes for $3, Leah Libresco Sargeant’s Arriving at Amen for $8, and my own Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love for $4. Get ’em for yourself, get ’em for your pets, get ’em for your parish library.

Also I would be remiss in my duties if I did not note this extraordinary Daniel Mitsui sticker, “Thomas Aquinas Kills a Chatbot,” commemorating a real event:

According to legend, Albertus Magnus had spent thirty years devising an oracular head, a mechanical device that could answer questions posed to it. Thomas Aquinas smashed it to pieces. Different versions of the story say that this was out of annoyance, or of fright; I prefer to think that St. Thomas had prophetic insight into the evils such devices could and would cause.

Yappin’

I did an interview with New Kinship about BCF’s work, and also my own experience of covenant kinship. Listening back over it, I was glad they left in the very rambly section about defining “infidelity” in a covenant friendship. When they asked about that, I was quite hesitant: The term “infidelity” obviously calls up sexual associations, and that’s also obviously one way to be unfaithful to my love for my partner and our call to follow Christ together—and yet I didn’t want to assume that the best framework for understanding my call is a framework drawn from marriage vows. I think with Tyler’s help, we got somewhere important: “Infidelity” in all cases is what draws us away from, or damages, the love that Christ is calling us to share.

Ivory model of a half-head, half-skull from the Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.