Michael Barry > Recent Status Updates

Didi-Huberman is urgently concerned with the totalitarian and soul-deadening aspects of our world. He got me thinking about ‘the horizon’ and ‘the image’ in new and frightening ways. If nothing else, he made me want to watch more Pasolini movies, read more Walter Benjamin, and dance naked more on Italian hillsides.

Only rich people in their twenties can day-drink like this. Made me want to fish and I hate fishing.

Fuck this is refreshing. It’s Philip Roth for the post-gender generation. This guy is the real deal. He’s still honing his craft but it’s a fine craft indeed. So good.

This is fucking great. DFW lives!

Gorgeous book. It’s a window onto the young Marcel’s Louvre-fired imagination.

I don’t want to finish. I’ve been reading this series of books for almost two years. Recherche has become a life raft for me.

This is so intensely rewarding after the first five (six) volumes. Something happened (World War I) in between the writing of The Fugitive and Time Regained. There’s a fluidity to the language that wasn’t there before. Maybe he started getting laid? Anyway, a life altering and religious experience, as I keep saying. This is all I will continue to care about. Contemporary fiction is rubbish.

To be honest, there is not much, apart from my boyfriend and our cats, my family, music, and my health, that I care about more than Proust.

This is my favourite volume so far and not just because of the gay stuff in this one.

Less than one hundred pages left in this truly mind-altering but also epically long and endurance-testing third volume of Marcel’s tome. I shall scale the peaks of this majestic prose and live to tell the tale! Almost halfway baby.

He does go on. I’m deeply hooked.

Someone recommended “letting Proust’s prose wash over you” but I disagree strongly with this approach. One must cling to the object in the main clause of his sentences like a life-raft. One must focus hard to understand at all what the hell he is on about. Reading this is by far one of the most delightful experiences I have had on earth but it’s much harder work than just ‘letting it wash over me’.