(Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, Jennifer Benka) Award-winning poet Lucie Brock-Broido, author of Trouble in Mind, and acclaimed poet, essayist, and translator Anne Carson, author of Autobiography of Red, present readings from their respective work.

Published Date: October 16, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2013 A W P conference in Boston. The recording features readings by Lucy Brock Brodo and Anne Carson. You'll now hear Judith Baumel and Jen Bank of provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:20):

Welcome to the last great night of this incredible literary party. I'm Judith Bael. I'm the incoming president of the A W P. I want to thank David Zer for running a fantastic conference. I want to thank Christian Teresa and Amber with a comb, both of whom are incredible staff members and everything that you see here is magic that they have built. So thank them a lot. Please,

Speaker 2 (01:02):

On behalf of the poets who are about to read, I'm wondering whoever's controlling lighting, if you could sort of lower these lights down a little bit. They're kind of hard. Thanks. We want to thank the Academy of American Poets very much. They are our literary sponsor who are hosting this event. They are among the very first literary sponsors a W p ever had and they've been loyal ever since and they are an incredible partner in our mission to bring literature to everyone. And I particularly want to thank the former director of the Academy of American Poets, theree Swenson who's here and I want to thank and I want to thank the new director, Jennifer Benca, who's a great seasoned pro who's going to bring great new things. So this is how it's going to go. I'm going to be leaving the podium in a second and Jen Bank is going to be talking about our poets, our fantastic poets, Ann Carson, Lucy Brock, Brodo. You can't get better than that, so give them a first round, turn off your electronic devices. There's going to be a book signing after the reading, so stick around. It's going to be a great and smooth ride.

Speaker 3 (02:44):

Thank you Judy and thank you David Za and all of our friends at a W p. The Academy of American Poets is thrilled to present tonight's reading featuring Lucy Brock Brodo and Anne Carson. Last February, Ann Carson and Robert Curry led a multimedia workshop on collaboration for students at Cornell where Carson is a professor at large. The session began with the question, how would you perform the idea container? We can think of this and its meta nimic counterpart, the performance or presentation of the thing contained as a way to summarize fundamental negotiations that both Carson and Brock Brodo have undertaken in their work over the past 25 years. How are titles Brock Bro's self-portrait with her hair cut off and Carson's town of the sound of a twig breaking, for example, complete but waiting to encapsulate how are poems, text and other parthenogenic and beyond binary, how do their speakers embody body? How is it that the page holds forces or freeze, desire and despair? In her poem, periodic Table of Ethereal Elements, Brock Brodo writes, I was not ready for your form to be cold ever, even in life. You did not inhabit necessarily a form but a mind of rarer liquid element.

Speaker 3 (04:24):

Our first reader, Lucy Brock Brodo, is the author of several highly acclaimed books of poetry including a Hunger her signature, the Master Letters and Trouble in Mind, which received the Massachusetts Book Award. Her honors include the Binner Prize for poetry, the Jerome Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Harvard Danforth Award for distinction in teaching and serves as the poetry director at Columbia University School of the Arts. The critic Stephen Burt has described Brock Bro's poems as works that diverge, allude and evade. They strive to astonish than surprised by their reserve, their heights dizzy listeners and their paraphrases fascinate and of her book. Trouble in Mind, publishers Weekly noted that the book astonishes us afresh with the agility and the uncanny will of language, which Brock Brodo is not afraid to follow as she writes in the poem, some Details of Hell. It is time now to turn off the devices in the wing and listen to the rain. Please welcome Lucy Brock Brodo.

Speaker 4 (06:00):

Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. This is a very large auditorium. I think there should be Seamus behind us on the screen and some unicorn tapestries and I would feel more comfortable. Am I echoing? Tell me when I echo. Okay. Alright, so I want to break the ice by telling you just a brief little tail. I have to be really funny because my poems are deadly, so I'm going to talk a lot and read a little. But Mark Strand, the Clint Eastwood of all poetry once walked into one of our graduate workshops at Columbia and might've been opening day and sat down at the table and leaned toward the students, gathering them closer and said, you may not know this, but I just ate an entire glazed jelly donut and the class was fine. So I wanted you to know that's not true, but I thought I'd say it.

Speaker 4 (07:23):

This first poem is called Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room and I have some things I want to say about it. One in the middle of ages cloth shapes were sewn onto garments for particular designations for the very elevated and for the lowest pariahs. The cleric wore his caustic, the physician, his purple robe, the leper, some kind of crazy hat and coat the harlett, a scarlet dress and the Jew a circle of wool on their tunic. So this poem has a reference in it to my tribe of Ashkenazi Jews and subsequent d n a disorders from ini. Also, there are a couple of spiders in this poem. One is a recluse, the other is a violin and they're both very dangerous. And finally, there are two references in here. One is to locked in syndrome, which many of you must know about. It was written about in the book, the diving bell in the Butterfly, and it's when a person is in a state of absolute stillness, but all they can do if they're lucky is blink an eye and a fourth world is also in here.

Speaker 4 (08:53):

Of course it's a corner of the earth that does not even make it as we do to the first world, to the second world, to the third, it's the fourth, but also a fourth world is a desperately impoverished pocket tucked into a first world nation that's nearly invisible for those who don't care to notice infinite riches in the smallest room, silk spool of the recluse as she confect her final myth mania. If it is written down, you can't rescind it. Spoon and potage bowl, you are starving. Come closer Now what if I were gone and the wind still wreaks of hyacinth? What then who will I be A gaudy arrangement of nuclei, an apple sized gray circle on the tunic of a Jew preventing more bad biological accidents from breeding in I have not bred in. Each child still has one lantern inside lit. May the mother not blow her children out.

Speaker 4 (10:16):

She says her hair is thinning thin, the flower bed is black, sumptuous in emptiness. Blue footed mushrooms lined the walkway to my door. I would soon die as serve them in a salad to the man I love. We lie down in the shape of a gondola. Venice is gorgeous cold three December unspeakable anxiety about locked in syndrome, about a fourth world I cannot presume to say the violin spider. She has six good eyes arranged in threes. The rims of wounds have wounds as well. Sphinx small print. You are inscrutable on the roads. Blue thistles barely visible by night and by these you may yet find your way home.

Speaker 4 (11:21):

This next is called contributors note and it's about many of you will know this being given something to write about in your life that you don't really feel like discussing on the page. I also have a long and spotty history with clarity. I am very plain spoken that's funny and legible and I've been trying for two decades to prove this to world. It's not worked. So in this new book I've just let myself go and I don't know if Dean Young is here, but I wrote him a fan letter after hearing him read for the first time last autumn in New York and he wrote me back these words, I hope you're out from under the snow heap of tenure reviews. I just got done reading 500 applications. Am I as happy as I thought I'd be? That experimental poetry seems dead and gone well after about 200 bundles of poems about grandmothers cooking something in italics and sad little sexual experiences, I really hope for some poems I can at least not understand. So here we go.

Speaker 4 (12:56):

I like talking better. But there is one thing, I had a student in a class at Columbia who was getting his M F A and he was studying to be a hand surgeon. And one thing remarkable about this young man that I found out is in med school you only get one hand and you have to really keep it in good shape over several years and take care of it. And that's what I feel that the material for a poem is you only get one hand contributors note. What if it is true? Now I do not want to speak of that which has been given me to say, see each four-legged rests his face against the fences, slats and asks no questions why or how? How dare you come home from your factory of Autumns, your slaughterhouse, weathered and incurious with your hair bound loosely, not making use of every single part of the horse that was given you what of his hooves, his mane, his heart, his gait, his cello tail, his joy in finding apples fallen as he built his coat for winter every year.

Speaker 4 (14:35):

This is called freedom of speech and it's for the poet Liam Rector who before David Za was also executive director of a W P in the late eighties and nineties. His last book was called the Executive Director of the Fallen World. That about encompasses the 11,000 of us, right? It's called freedom of speech. If my own voice falters, tell them hubris was my way of adoring you. The harrow of the Hulk of you. So feverish in life, cut open reveals 10,000 rags of music in your thoracic cavity. The hands are received bagged an examination reveals no injury. Winter then the body is cold to the touch. Unclonable kept in its drawer of old world harrowing teeth in fair repair will you be buried where? Nowhere your mouth A globe of gauze and gloss, an opening most delt of blue. Your heart was a mess. A mob of hoof prints where the skittish cults first learned to stand catching onto their agility, a shock of freedom. Wild maimed. The eyes have hazel ities and the conjunctive A are pale with hemorrhaging. One lung, smaller, congested with blue smoke the other filled with a swarm of massive ss. Dementia. I adore you more. I know the wingspan of your voice. Whole gorgeous flock of harriers cannot be taken down. You would like it now, this snow, this hour, your visitation here tonight, not altogether unexpected. The night laborers, immigrants all assemble here, aching for to speaking, longing for to work.

Speaker 4 (17:14):

I've had three ages in my life for a long time I was little and then I got to be 16 and then for 20 more years I was 16 and then I woke up and I was 36 and now I'm stuck. I have no place, no appropriate age to be that I feel comfortable with. So this is a poem called a Girl ago also in the a hundred and 11th congress that began with the election of two 10 when the Republicans and tea parties tea party, there's only one took on the mantle of the party of no, this is my personal party of no a girl ago. No feeding on wisteria, no pitch burner traipsing in the nettled woods, no milk in metal cylinders, no buttering, no making small contusions on the page but saying nothing. No one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony coat, no burrs, no scent of juniper on your jacobian mouth, no crush of ink or injury. No lacerating wish extinguish me from this. I was 16 for 20 years. By September I will be a ghost and flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, blinking in the swarm of it and all at once above and on a bare branch in a shepherd sky. No dove. There is no thou to speak of.

Speaker 4 (19:17):

Two girls ago, no exquisite instruments, no dead coming back as rens in rooms at dawn. No suicidal hankering. No hankering for suicide. No 1000 days, no slim luck for the only president I ever loved. No lukewarm bath in oatmeal, no lantern left for Natalie on the way home from school in her Alaskan dark. No I, no Victorian slippers that walked the bogs to mo. No donor bones with cuts on them or not. No horizontal weeping. No weeping vertically, no flipping back. Your black tails at the black piano bench. No elgar, no talu, no post-industrial despair, no French kissing in the field of wild raspberry and thorn, no commissioned earn no threat in the table of contents. I'm not dead yet. I'm going to skip this next poem, but I wanted to tell you the title because I'm really smitten with it. It's called fame rabies. It's a good poem but not worth that time. We all are vaccinated, but it's about we got the fame rabies. This is an elegy for mammals, especially cats. You know when you're sitting on a plane and you're doing student poems, there's scribbling and the person next to you says, oh, what do you do? And you say, I'm a poet. And they say, oh, me too always if you want to seize them, they always say, what do you write about? And I say Pets

Speaker 4 (21:44):

For a snow leopard in October, stay little ounce here in fleece and leaf with me in the evermore where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and mourning came each morning like a felt cloak billowing across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing in an old Venetian sky or of a saint tamping, the grenadine of his heavy robes before the blessing of the animals I've heard tell of men who brought great Pyrenees, a bozo or some pocket mice, baskets of mourning dubs beneath their wicker lids, a chameleon on a leash from the Prussian circuses and from the farthest caucuses some tundra wolves in pears in a meadow I had fallen as deep in sleep as a trial of bite in the red clay of the centuries. Even now just down our winding road, I can hear the children blanketing themselves to sleep in leaves from maple trees. No bad dreams will come to them. I know because once in the gone ago I was a lynx as well. Safe as a tiger iris in its silt on the banks of the Euphrates as you were. Would they take you from me now like Leonardo's sleeve disappearing in the air and when I woke I could not wake you little sphinx. I could not keep you here with me anywhere. I could not bear to let you go. Stay here in our clouded bed of wind and Timothy with me lie here with me in snow.

Speaker 4 (23:57):

I'm going to close with two poems. They both have titles from Kafka which are portable. If you put them at the top of the page, you get a poem and then you take them away and you do it over a period of 10 years you've got, but this one's staying and it's really the title for everyone, every poem. I'm a little bit hyperbolic, okay? It's really a short story by Kafka. It says A cage goes in search of a bird. That's the story. A cage goes in search of a bird, it's in nine sentences and they have little numbers that I'll read. One, the animals are ironed, docile now flat at my feet. Two, I was uncertain of certain mythologies invisible as the milk waiting to happen to the newborn litter of opossums three in a dark violet hour. This time of year, the one winged lapwing tries to fly but stands still on the stain of the small accumulation of what was be good they said.

Speaker 4 (25:21):

And so too I was good until I was not four. It was a time when all the heavens spare used vessels coffin cornered down a narrow well of hills would pour out to the open sea like a swarm of mourning. Cloaks un muffling five in the servants fawn on me. The coachman vexed treats me as a hummingbird outside its whittled cage, six an hour in the afternoon of a lark seven. There I slept in the gold folds of the executioner's robe, all that fabric spilling out before him, like unbundled honey from its jars. I'm alive now. It is the first night of the year the air is salt. Even this far inland. I wish on a planet thinking it's a star on stars you can wish ate. There is little left of this time already some ilk of lemming likes assemble on the hill nine. It is not volitional.

Speaker 4 (26:49):

And the last poem is also from Kafka's notebooks and it's called You have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world. I like that. And there's a pygmy, not that you need to know, but a pygmy marmoset is the tiniest primate in the world. Something you might want to know. You have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world. Tell the truth. I told me when I could not speak sorrows, a barbaric art crude as a viking ship or a child who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer in the 1930s toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census, I am unmarried and unchurched the woman in the field dressed only in the sun too far gone to halt the arctic caps catastrophe. Big beautiful blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice. I am obliged now to refrain from dying for as long as it is possible for whom left am my first. We have come to terms with ourself like a marmoset getting out of her great ape suit. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (28:56):

Thank you Lucy Ann Carson is the author of 17 genre pushing books of poetry, prose and translation, including aeros, the bittersweet, the beauty of the husband, if not winter fragments of SFO Knox and the newly released red dock, the sequel to her renowned autobiography of red novel in verse. Her writing has been described as unlike anything in the English language today the critic James Pollock has remarked on how Carson's syntactical interruptions her rhymes, her sharp enjambment, and especially her vivid and suggestive images give her poems a unique and rare emotional force. Her linguistic invention has garnered her numerous honors and awards including the Land and Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the T ss Eliot Prize, A pen award for translation, a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Speaker 3 (29:57):

Red dock has been noted by multiple publications as one of the most anticipated poetry books and one of the biggest reads of 2013 and by Publishers Weekly as a showcase for Carson's trademark sharpness and uncanny ability to make the strange seem familiar and the familiar strange. In much of Carson's work there is the opposite and the opposite of opposition. She's a visual artist who writes filmically. She can be she or not and sometimes he in love with him. She's a classicist who innovates. An historian of the new critic. Meghan O'Rourke has described Carson's work as an exercise in reinvigorating the cliches of autobiography by refracting them through her vast knowledge of classical literature and her deadpan self undermining. Witt Carson understands personal experience as much through philosophy and spiritual writings as through the register of psychology and interiority Carson herself has said, I never found it possible to think without thinking about myself, thinking her project of self-study as exploration of the human condition or as Carson writes in plain water, who would you be if you knew the answer has left us. Her readers wrapped and grateful. She keeps asking. Please welcome Ann Carson.

Speaker 5 (31:45):

Hi, thank you for coming. It's nice to read with Lucy. I tell you what I want to do is some old stuff and some new stuff, old stuff, the life of towns, which is a sequence of poems I wrote send centuries ago and at the time I was engaged in a still unresolved war with punctuation, which at this time took the form of putting the periods in the wrong places and I for some reason thought that outstandingly radical then and now when I read these, it's so simple hearted of me to have thought that, but anyway, some of them are still okay. Apostle town after your death, it was windy every day. Every day opposed us like a wall. We went shouting sideways at one another along the road. It was useless. The spaces between us got hard. They are empty spaces and yet they are solid and black and grievous as gaps between the teeth of an old woman you knew years ago when she was beautiful. The nerves pouring around in her light palace. Fire wolf town. Let Tigers kill them, let bears kill them. Let tape worms roundworms. Heartworms kill them. Let them kill each other. Let porcupine quills kill them. Let salmon poisoning kill them. Let them cut their tongues on a bone and bleed to death. Let them freeze. Let eagles snatch them When young, let a wind windblown seed bury itself in their inner ear destroying equilibrium. Let them have very good ears. Let them yes hear a cloud pass overhead.

Speaker 5 (34:31):

Town of the sound of a twig breaking their faces I thought were knives the way they pointed them at me and waited. A hunter is someone who listens so hard to his prey, it pulls the weapon out of his hand and impales itself a town I have heard of in the middle of nowhere. Where would that be? Nice and quiet. A rabbit hopping across nothing on the stove town of my farewell to you. Look what a thousand blue thousand white. Thousand blue thousand white thousand blue thousand white thousand blue thousand white thousand blue wind today and two arms blowing down the road. New stuff. I have a friend in California named Kim Ano. She's a painter visual artist and we wanted to work on a project together so we decided it would be a book and that it would be a book about sleep. So I was casting about in my mind for how to approach this and it seemed to me that by far the most provocative sleeper we have in the western tradition is Albertine the girl in Proust in search of lost time or remembrance of time passed or whatever we call his endless novel. There's a girlfriend in it and her name is Albertine. So I did a bunch of research on Albertine

Speaker 5 (36:40):

And wrote up my research in 59 paragraphs, which I numbered and we will read to you I number of paragraphs for two reasons. One, it makes me feel like Stein and two at a long-ish reading like this, somewhat late at night for persons like yourselves to hear the paragraphs zipping by with numbers. 16, 17, 18 gives a sensation of hope it will end the Albertine workout. One. Albertine, the name is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy. Two Alberta's name occurs 2,363 times in Proust's novel more than any other character. Three Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust's novel four. On a good 19% of these pages she is asleep.

Speaker 5 (38:08):

Five. Albertine is believed by some critics including Andre Xi to be a disguised version of Proust's chauffeur Alfred a Agostinelli. This is called the transposition theory. Six Albertine constitutes a romantic psychosexual and moral obsession for the narrator of the novel, mainly throughout volume five of Proust's seven volume in the playout edition work. Seven volume five is called Lap in French and the captive in English. It was declared by Roger Chat, a world expert on Proust in his award-winning 1974 study to be the one volume of the novel that a time pressed reader may safely and entirely skip. Eight. The problems of albertine R from the narrator's point of view, A lying B lesbianism and from Albertan's point of view, a being imprisoned in the narrator's house. Nine. Her bad taste in music all of those several times remarked on is not a problem. 10 Albertine does not call the narrator by his name anywhere in the novel, nor does anyone else. The narrator hints that his first name might be the same first name as that of the author of the novel. That is Marcel. Let's go with that. 11. Albertine denies she is a lesbian when Marcel questions her 12. Her friends are all lesbians. 13. Her denials fascinate him. 14. Her friends fascinate him too, especially by their contrast with his friends who are gay but very closeted. Her friends parade themselves at the beach and kiss in restaurants.

Speaker 5 (40:24):

15. Despite intense and assiduous questioning, Marcel cannot discover what exactly it is that women do. Together this palpitating specificity of female pleasure as he calls it. 16 Albertine says she does not know. 17. Once Albertine has been imprisoned by Marcel in his house, his feelings change. It was her freedom that first attracted him the way the wind bellowed in her garments. This attraction is now replaced by a feeling of ou boredom. She becomes, as he says, a heavy slave of the house. 18. This is predictable given Marcel's theory of desire, which equates possession of another person with erasure of the otherness of her mind while at the same time positing otherness as what makes another person desirable. 19. And in point of fact, how can he possess her mind if she is a lesbian? 20. His fascination continues. 21. Albertine is a girl in a flat sports cap pushing her bicycle across the beach. When Marcel first sees her, he keeps going back to this image. 22. Albertine has no family profession or prospects. She is soon installed indeed captive in Marcel's house. There she has a separate bedroom. He emphasizes that she is nonetheless an obedient person. See above on Albertine as heavy slave.

Speaker 5 (42:19):

23. Albertan's face is sweet and beautiful from the front, but from the side has a hook nose to aspect that fills Marcel with horror. He would take her face in his hands and reposition it. 24. The state of Albertine that most pleases Marcel is albertine asleep. 25. By falling asleep she becomes a plant. He says 26 plants do not actually sleep, nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia. 27 A sometimes in her sleep, Albertine throws off her kimono and lies naked. 27 B sometimes. Then Marcel possesses her 27 C. Albertine appears not to wake up 28. Marcel appears to think he is the master of such moments. 29. Perhaps he is at this point. Parenthetically, if we had time, several observations could be made about the similarity between Albertine and Ophelia Hamlets. Ophelia, starting from the sexual life of plants which Proust and Shakespeare equally enjoy using as a language of female desire. Albertine like Ophelia embodies for her lover, blooming girlhood and also castration, casualty threat and pure obstacle.

Speaker 5 (44:06):

Albertine like Ophelia is condemned for a voracious sexual appetite whose expression is denied her. Ophelia takes sexual appetite into the river and drowns it amid water. Plants albertine distorts hers into the false consciousness of a sleep plant. In both scenarios, the man appears to be in control of the script, yet he gets himself tangled up in the wiles of the woman on the other hand, who is bluffing, whom is hard to say. 30 Albertine laugh has the color and smell of a geranium 31. Marcel gives albertine the idea that he intends to marry her, but he does not. She bores him. 32. Albertan's eyes are blue and saucy. Her hair is like crinkly black Violets. 33. Albert's behavior in Marcel's household is that of a domestic animal which enters any door. It finds open or comes to lie beside its master on his bed making a place for itself.

Speaker 5 (45:21):

Marcel has to train Albertine not to come into his room until he rings for her 34. Marcel gradually manages to separate Albertine from all her friends whom he regards as evil influences 35. Marcel never says the word lesbian to Albertine. He says the kind of woman I object to, 36 Albertine denies she knows any such women. Marcel assumes she is lying 37 at first. Albertine has no individuality at all. Indeed. Marcel cannot distinguish her from her girlfriends or remember their names or decide which of them to pursue. They form a freeze in his mind, pushing their bicycles across the beach with the blue waves breaking behind them. 38. This pictorial multiplicity of albertine evolves gradually into a plastic and moral multiplicity. Albertine is not a solid object. She is unknowable when he brings his face close to hers to kiss. She is 10 different albertine in succession.

Speaker 5 (46:46):

39 1 night Albertine goes dancing with a girlfriend at the casino 40. When questioned about this, she lies 41. Albertine is not a natural liar. 42 Albertine lies so much and so badly that Marcel is drawn into the game. He lies too. 43 Marcel's, jealousy, impotence, and desire are all exasperated to their highest pitch by the game. 44. Who is bluffing, whom is hard to say? See above on Hamlet 45 Near the end of volume five, Albertine finally runs away, vanishing into the night and leaving the window open. Marcel fusses and fumes and writes her a letter in which he claims he had just decided to buy her a yacht and a Rolls-Royce when she disappeared. Now he will have to cancel these orders. The yacht had a price tag of 27,000 francs, about $75,000 and was to be engraved at the PR with her favorite stanza of a poem by Mallarme.

Speaker 5 (48:08):

46. Albert's death in a writing accident on page 642 of volume five does not emancipate Marcel from jealousy. It removes only one of the innumerable albertine he would have to forget. The jealous lover cannot rest until he is able to touch all the points in space and time ever occupied by the beloved. 47. There is no right or wrong in Proust says Samuel Beckett and I believe it. The bluffing, however remains a gray area. 48. Let's return to the transposition theory. 49. On May 30th, 1914, French newspapers reported that Alfred AGAs Delli, a student aviator, fell from his machine into the Mediterranean sea near on Teeb and was drowned. AGAs Delli you recall, was the chauffeur whom prust in letters to friends admitted that he not only loved but adored. Proust had bought Alfred his airplane, which cost 27,000, francs, about $75,000 and had had it engraved on the fuselage with a stanza of mallarme.

Speaker 5 (49:37):

Proust also paid for Alfred's flying lessons and registered him at the flying school under the name Marcel Swan. The flying school was in Monaco in order to spy on Alfred. While he was there, Proust sent another favorite man servant whose name was Albert 50. Compare and contrast, Albertan's sudden fictional death by runaway horse with Alfred Ellis. Sudden real life death by runaway plane poignantly both unfortunate beloveds managed to speak to his or her lover from the wild blue yonder. A agostinelli before setting out for his final flight had written a long letter which Proust was heartbroken to receive the day after the plane crash. When transposed to the novel, this exit scene becomes one of the weirdest in fiction. 51, several weeks after accepting the news that Albertine has been thrown from her horse and killed, Marcel receives a telegram. You think me dead, but I'm alive and long to see you affectionately Albertine.

Speaker 5 (50:59):

Marcel agonizes for days about this telegram and debates with himself whether he should resume relations with Albertine or not. Only to realize that the signature on the telegram has been misread by the telegraph operator. It is not a telegram from Albertine Atal, but from another long lost girlfriend whose name Bert shares its central letters with Albert's name. 52. One only loves that which one does not entirely possess, says Marcel. 53. There are four ways Albertine is able to avoid becoming entirely possessed by sleeping, by lying, by being a lesbian and by being dead. 54, only the first three of these can she bluff.

Speaker 5 (51:59):

55. Proust was still correcting a type script of Rizzo on his deathbed November, 1922. He was fine tuning the character of Albertine and working into her speech. Certain phrases from Alfred Augustin, Ellie's. Final letter 56. Isn't it always a tricky thing, the question whether to read an author's work in light of his life or not? 57. Granted the transposition theory is a graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism. In the case of Proust, it is also irresistible. Here is one final spark to be struck from rubbing Alfred against Albertine as it were. Let's consider the stanza of poetry that Proust had inscribed on the fuselage of Alfred's plane. The same verse that Marcel promises to engrave on the prowl of Albertan's yacht from her favorite poem. He says, it is four verses of malar may about a swan that finds itself frozen into the ice of a lake in winter. Swans are of course migratory birds. This one, for some reason failed to fly off with its fellow swans when the time came. What a weird and lonely shadow to cast on these two love affairs. The fictional and the real. What a desperate analogy to offer of the lover's final wintry paranoia of possession, as Hamlet says, to Ophelia accurately but ruthlessly, you should not have believed me.

Speaker 5 (53:50):

58. Here is the stanza of mallarme in rudimentary English. A swan of olden times remembers that it is he the one magnificent, but without hope of setting himself free for he failed to sing of a region for living when Baron Winter burned all around him with On we 59, everything indeed is at least double Riz. Page 360 2. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (54:56):

Thank you again to our readers, Lucy and Anne, and thank you all for coming. Please do buy their books right outside. Goodnight.

Speaker 6 (55:11):

Thank you for tuning into the A W P podcast series for other podcasts. Please visit our website@www.awpwriter.org.