the thing about Proust

is that sometimes he's writing about French social manners which i have limited patience for and then he brings out the most incisive, unique, beautiful sentiment you've ever read

some bits living in my head from Combray I and the beginning of Combray II:
- the bit about how in bed at night space melts away completely
- the whole extended bit where he talks about his horror at his parents realizing he was going to be a sad, weird child forever
- the madeleine bit of course, though more specifically, the visual way he describes memory as a theater set that is suddenly connected to its surroundings
- the description of his aunt's tea where he talks about how, since it's not a factory-made blend, all the individual leaves create this pile-up of detail and desiccated life

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randomly found a first edition of Between the Acts at work today which is really cool, got to go on a side quest to repair it and by side quest i mean i decided to do that instead of doing my actual job

i love mentally ill women

therapist: evil Clarice Lispector isn't real, she can't hurt you
Unica Zurn: check out my novella it's called The Trumpets of Jericho and you'll have normal feelings about it

like a lot of mentally ill women writers, especially of the surrealist and post-surrealist milieu, there's a degree to which Zurn's history of Brain Stuff outweighs in public consciousness her actual work. Even when people talk about The Man of Jasmine, for instance, they tend to focus much more on its autobiographical nature than its literary qualities. i'll write a different post about that, but the point right now is just that if you like the sparking animistic stream-of-consciousness explosions of someone like Lispector and are interested in what a more nightmarish, almost horror-tinged writer might do in that dimension, Zurn is a great person to take a look at.

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wakefield press is so cool btw i want to own everything they've published