Who’s afraid of Marcel Proust?

Patrick McGuinness beschreibt ganz ausgezeichnet, was an der Recherche von Marcel Proust so wunderbar ist – besser als ich es konnte.

„Proust’s people and places seem rooted in reality even as they float free of it. Even his narrator, a dilettante in search of a vocation, writes the book we are reading in order to find out whether he can write the book we are reading. No other novel includes and enacts so much, and yet, for all its profligate length, we feel as we read that we are dealing in essence and distillation. (…)

We organise our lives in terms of past, present and future, and we have three tenses with which to speak of them. Our bodies live according to them: we have come from, we are going to, and we are currently in. (…) It is the borders between tenses that interest Proust, because that is where living gets done. Proust is a novelist of borders: between inner and outer, self and other, individual and society, feeling and thought. (…)

Forgetting, or half-remembering, what happened in the book is part of the experience of the book, part of living with it. In this respect, it’s an oddly realistic novel too, in that it uses what it writes about – time – as a material as well as subject. We read in time, with time, about time, and time is the substance or the condition in which we live. This is what makes it, despite its frightening length, its overload of detail and its relentlessly intricate style, a profoundly truthful book. It is made of what it describes.“

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

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24 Hours of Happy

Das erste 24-Stunden-Video der Welt: gefühlt acht Millionen Mal Happy von Pharrell Williams hintereinander. Es macht irgendwann süchtig. (Um 5 Uhr 35 morgens kommen die Minions.)

(via @dogfood)

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“Take a seat & make a friend”

Fremde Menschen reden im Bällchenbad über wichtiges und unwichtiges Zeug. Sehr schön.

(via Serotonics FB)

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“I wouldn’t even if I could”

Melissa McEwan reagiert auf den beknackten Rat „Ignorier doch einfach den Dickenhass um dich rum.“

„Ignore dehumanizing and eliminationist campaigns against fat people. Ignore the ones that are not overtly eliminationist, but simply ask fat people to make our bodies do things they cannot do so we can turn ourselves into people we are not. And ignore the ones that are explicitly eliminationist—the ones that suggest fat people should be rounded up and dispatched, before we ruin the country.

Ignore fat hatred at my doctor’s office. Ignore it when I’m shopping for clothes. Ignore it when I’m eating in public. Ignore it when I’m grocery shopping. Ignore it when I’m getting on an airplane. Ignore it when I’m sitting on a bus. Ignore it when I’m standing in line at the post office, or buying coffee, or doing any one of the dozens of ordinary tasks that any person does which can turn into a gauntlet of glares and stares and sneers and comments just because I am fat.”

(via Mädchenmannschaft, bei denen eine deutsche Übersetzung zu finden ist)