Regards! from regards, marcel
And bienvenue! (If you're into that.)
Bonjour! salut! et cetera!
I’m thrilled you’re here! For the next two years, I’m reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu so you don’t have to. (Kidding!—please read it with me! If you’d like!) We’ll be jumping into the waters properly on the 12th, but today, I thought I might tell you a bit about me, something of the origins of this project, my sense of the writing landscape, and where (I think, I hope, I wonder) we’ll be going.
Why Proust? Why now?
There are two guiding impetuses (impetii?) behind regards, marcel:
ONE, I want to read the whole of À la recherche—or La Recherche, as wikipedia tells me the French abbreviate it—before I’m a heap of ash in an urn on some undusted mantle. In a graduate seminar many years ago now, our department’s leading Modernist tossed his immaculately disheveled scarf over his shoulder and said something I barely remember and am probably distorting entirely—something, I think it was, like, by the time you start really reading Proust, you’re already halfway up the queue towards death. (I should say he wasn’t British, but he did delight in using words like ‘queue.’) I didn’t know what it meant then and don’t feel confident I do now, but his diffuse foreboding has followed me these many years, even as, in the back of my mind, I knew our cohort had confirmed the scholar’s coffee mug was never without a nip of something in it that wasn’t exactly coffee.
I can swallow or vomit the fact of it, but I’m not getting younger. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that the world teeters over an increasingly precarious and unknowable cliff-edge. Experience seems to be speeding up; the bad news arrives all the time, and there’s so much of it. I think many of us have begun to recoil from the droning horizon of our days, have come to see life, not without reason, through an ambient haze of cynicism, or despair. What I would like is a possibility of slowing down. I’d like to luxuriate in something wondrous, to nestle inside a literary experience that lasts for more than an overnight, a retweet, a petty line of gossip, another byline to toss into the ‘about me’ section of my silly little email to another editor who’s swamped with another three dozen of the same dull byline-filled emails.
Probably what I seek is some Herculean deferral of death, or to make sense of what I want to have done with this one wild and precious life while I have it. Perhaps the coded message in my professor’s proclamation was that to read Proust is to exist somehow more expansively, to be inside a life that is, as it were, rather more examined. (Funny enough we read Joyce rather than Proust in his seminar but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.) I’m not oblivious. I know death looms larger this last little while. COVID, for one thing, and in my particular corporeal world, three upcoming major surgeries inside a year, my gray hairs proliferating, the slim possibility of my becoming a mother thinning to the width of a piano wire. In any case if what is going on is a postponement—what better postponements than these to embroil within Proust’s 4000 page epic of memory, art, desire, and time’s passing?
I know—even among the most mouth-breathing of bookish types—I am also not alone in wishing I knew Proust better. (I should confess I read the first two volumes a thousand years ago, but that’s ok—bartending’s destroyed my long-term memory. I’m as green to all of this as anyone can be.) And so what I fancy more than going it alone is an idea of inviting others into the project, making it a sort of promiscuous book club—one that won’t dissovlve because of internecine drama, or the forgetting of a bar meeting, a monthly zoom call. People are welcome to (and inevitably will) come and go as life demands, but unlike a more ceremonial book club, I’d like to think that here there is no shadow of guilt to be hung over our ineluctable faultlines. (Whether it is right I assume the role of your Proust-goddess is unclear, but it’s the solution I’ve got for the time being.)
TWO, I long for a safe(r) harbor for my writing, a place where I am able consistently to write for an audience and to do so by my own authority.
2022 was, until its close, a pretty good year for me. I wrote on Annie Ernaux and Fanny Howe for The Baffler, Chantal Johnson for Vulture, Joanna Walsh for LARB, Shirley Hazzard for Vogue, Lucy Ives and Yuko Tsushima for Bookforum, Ottessa Moshfegh for Observer, not to mention a brief, flirty polemic on feminism and the figure of the reactionary for The Drift. I painfully formulated a proposal for my second book and, in November, sold it to Pantheon. I was bartending less and making money writing more.
2022 was also, crucially, a sea legs year—I was compelled to become reacquainted with a mode of thinking I’d exiled myself from for nearly a decade (since fleeing grad school—and fleeing the spoilage of my writing process brought on by the knuckle-snapping ruler of the academic apparatus)—but began to feel, finally, I was on a steadying wavelength, committing my self to the guiding passions of my life.
By end of year, however, heaven came crashing. Books budgets were slashed (often under the guise of “content recalibration”), magazines closed (we love you Astra and Bookforum!), many of my editors had left, or else been shuffled off to other positions. (I’d like to note, as I write this, that Vox employees have just suffered a devastating round of layoffs. Buzzfeed has just announced A.I. generated content—another axe hovering above the neck.) Don’t mistake me. I hope to continue freelancing in (some of) these spaces. There is nonetheless a sense of despondency nagging at me on the future of books coverage. Revenues at bookstores have been up the last three years, but the money being disseminated for this kind of coverage in media is vanishing. (And the money that has been there, as many editors and critics will freely admit, is hardly enough to scrape by on in the first place.)
I don’t want to not be able to do this sort of thinking through the world, this kind of writing, this creative (and loving) labor because the landscape has shrunk, or because I’m not tenured at an Ivy or a critic with 20 years of bylines behind me, or because I’m too fucking tired from bar work to be charming at every literary soirée. People are welcome to be smug about the state of contemporary criticism if they wish (and far be it for me to deny there’s plenty there that should be held to account), but the work of it matters to me. And I want the matter of my life to coalesce around expansiveness, pleasure, and rigor—not to just be one more dull exercise in precarity.
But Jamie! you said you’d never do a newsletter!
And this isn’t the first time I’ve disappointed my adoring fans. It’s true—for years I insisted I wouldn’t take on one more part-time job, juggle another massive literary project, add additional weight to my already over-stuffed (in the good way!) day-to-day.
But I don’t want to bartend for the rest of my fucking life. Frankly I don’t want to be in a bartending situation for even one minute. The last decade I’ve spent in the New York nightlife industry has wrecked my body—I have the joint health of an 80 year old—not to mention obliterated my social + emotional energies. (One day I dream of again recognizing faces rather than only drink orders and the last names of bar tabs. One day I dream of again finding myself invigorated by the pulse of a crowd, rather than going feral, reverting to work brain, clamming up because every party now feels to me mainly like a job.)
In a sidewise fashion the pandemic forced my working hand. Losing four bar jobs overnight meant I had to scramble, and fast, to figure out how to cobble rent together. Part of this meant making the decision to professionalize my creative labor, something I had (and have) deep reluctancies about. But as Anne Sexton once said in a line she improvised during a live reading of her poem “The Operation”: goddammit, the bills must be paid1 :(
I sold my first book in 2020, I began freelancing, I’d make an odd $50 or $100 from readings now and then. A handful of times I was invited to guest lecture in college classes, where I felt woefully out of my depth but honored, nevertheless, just to be nominated. When nightlife reopened it seemed to me impossible to return to six nights a week behind a bar. I suspect it would kill me now. (Probably it was killing me before; it’s just I wasn’t able to stand still long enough to see it straight.)
In an ideal world I’d spend the next year or so making the transition to writing full-time, but this shift is—for those of us who are not the beneficiaries of inherited wealth—hardly a straightforward path. (Must I say this? Maybe so. It feels as though there’s never been less money for the arts but more of it circulating among a select coterie of its practitioners. Art imitating late-stage capitalist life, I guess...)
At any rate my sensibility was, by hook or by necessary crook, transformed. And with what looks a lot like (or at least a step toward) the incremental disintegration of books coverage in media, it feels more urgent than ever that I take greater responsibility in the stewardship of my work. I want to ensure I regularly reach an audience—it keeps me honest, and is another calibration of my practice (I hope) toward stability, self-guidance, and the kind of intellectual restlessness and autonomy that energizes me.
If I’m anxious about the newsletter format, that anxiety is, in the main, a fear of not being edited. All writers are made better by good editors, and working with such rigorous, thoughtful, and kind ones has inestimably widened my field of vision. But perhaps this will also be a process of learning to better trust myself as a writer, and to trust that my readers know who I am and what I do—to know that there are people who look to my work specifically for its willingness to be a bit messy, its shamelessness in registers of vulnerability, its often annoyingly digressive curiosity.
It doesn’t hurt that I’ll have a little more breathing room here to take relish in the peculiarities of my style, and further roam around in the (as I believe Joanna Biggs has called it) “cryptoautobiographical” possibilities of criticism.
Let’s talk shop.
If you’re reading along, we’re working through a volume ~ every 4 months—somewhere in the ballpark of 90 pages every other week. We’re all busy; what I intend is that this be manageable within all of our increasingly hectic lives! Later today I’ll be sending out a reading schedule for the first volume, Swann’s Way. Here’s the edition I’m using. I’ll be sticking with the Moncrieff (et al) translation + the Modern Library Classics editions throughout, partly because my boyfriend bought me the set for our anniversary last year and partly because it seems like the simplest way to standardize things.
If you aren’t reading along (and you don’t have to!), you aren’t, therefore, banished from my garden of earthly delights, from (what I hope are) the pleasures and ranging connectivities of this project. Think of regards, marcel as a lovechild of the blog and the book club, where the book club is one you’re only accountable to if you wish to be.
While the project is, in its way, “about” reading Proust, the texture of the dispatches will be experiential. regards, marcel is my Julie & Julia, my My Life in Middlemarch, my All the Lives We Ever Lived, my A Horse at Night. Its orientations and affinities are memoirist; reading is the project’s territory, not because the Proust “assignments” make the project comprehensible but because I’m the sort of woman who makes sense of my world through books.
Proust is our lighthouse beacon. All the rest is the sea.
What should we expect?
Every other weekend I’ll send a brief dispatch. Possibly I’ll reckon with a scene from the reading, or amble through a flight of fancy set off by a single line. Some letters will be researched—looking to the criticism, correspondence, histories + biographies—or even the broader Proust industrial complex (I’m coming for you Alain de Botton!).
Others will be purely personal, intimate, concerned with a feeling, or culled from the long walks I take every day with my dog (Olive, a superstar to many of you already, I’d wager). Or perhaps a meditation on bartending and its unsettling interrelational dynamics, a consideration of something else I’m reading, how it echoes inside the Proust. I also yearn for a place to write about things I don’t get commissioned to write on (visual art, movies, music, the kinds of books that don’t get coverage in major pubs).
Mainly regards, marcel is a meditation on the reading life through the prism of Proust, an act of group reading—which is to say an act of communion, and a way of sending my regards, from one little world to (hopefully!) many others.
What if we pay?
I mean first off I’d love it. Let’s get this girl out of the bar industry and into the writing desk, where she belongs!
Additionally, for paid subscribers, bonus longform essays will go out every other month, with additional monthly audio content and—once I’ve ironed a few details out—regular visits from guest writers.
But which Proust???
In case you missed the mention above—I’ll be using the Moncrieff (et al) translation found in the Modern Library Classics editions. You can find the first volume, Swann's way, here. For our next meeting, we’ll be reading up to about page 80, closing with the paragraph ending “‘Go and look after your lunch.’” À bientôt!
regards, jamie
You really should listen to this! Anne’s voice is just incredible…