Jokes by Proust

There are a lot of Proust blogs out there! And their names range from the boring (proustreading.blogspot.com) to the poetic (involuntarymemory.blogspot.com) to the...uh, seductive (proustwhore.blogspot.com). Suffice it to say, my perusal of alternate Proustian options on the Internets only served to solidify my commitment to Marcel: Le Blog.

But I did come across two gems that I wanted to share...

1. One blogger posted what she calls a "joke by Proust:"

...For the folding seats on its shore and the forms of the monsters in the stalls were mirrored in those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence, as happens with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered analogous to our own, we should think ourselves insane to address a smile or a glance: namely, minerals and people to whome we have not been introduced.

She labeled this post "Jokes By Proust: One," suggesting that she would continue to post jokes in subsequent postings. Alas, she dropped the project. I motion for us to continue it.

2. Proust Discovers Livejournal

see http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/5/21kumar.html

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Oh, and also - Hannah, you can skip this part - a brief introduction, since I've never met most of you:

I'm Ali. I live on a boat in Seattle. I work most of the time for an ex-Moonie who hired me to help him write his memoir, and occasionally for the Cascade Bicycle Club, and on weekends at a farmer's market selling various and sundry tomatoes. I went to Middlebury with Hannah's friend Maren, which is how I know Hannah, although I could probably have known her before that, since we recently discovered we grew up a block away from each other in NYC. My In Search of Lost Time was a bit of an impulse buy; I finished Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, was so floored that I didn't know what to do with myself, wound up on Amazon...and three days later, a very large box arrived.

Anyway, thanks for having me in your Proust group (Proup?).