Lately I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s Rembrance of Things Past (aka. A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time), which I supposed would be quite an undertaking, but am actually finding quite readable. I get the impression, and had the impression myself, that Remembrance of Things Past, like The Odyssey, is another of those classic novels that scares people away because they think it’s too difficult to read. Admittedly the sentences are often quite long, as is commonly the style with Victorian novels, but I think the main reason people are put off reading the novel is its length: I thought Ulysses was long at over nine-hundred pages, but the complete Remembrance of Things Past is about three-thousand pages long (which is practically inconceivable to me, whose longest work currently stands at about 120 pages). Daunting, certainly, but not so much when you consider it is split into seven volumes.

(more…)

American Beauty is, as you might expect from the title, a beautiful film, full of beautiful imagery, the most prominent of which is the image of a paper bag blowing around in the wind. That this should be the most memorable of the film’s images is unsurprising, as it was just such a discarded bag blowing around the plaza of the World Trade Center that was that inspired writer Alan Ball to create the script for the film. (more…)