The Useless Critic 2.0

Do you know what I really don’t care about right now? These people. I didn’t write this last week because these people are just— I really hate them. This is basically everything that happens between pages 250 and 300: even though Swann finds the Verdurins positively “magnanimous,” neither of them actually like him and encourage Odette to spend her time with Forcheville. Odette is very stupid. She thinks of a house with wood paneling as being medieval. She doesn’t really understand anything. Forcheville is characterized as having an intellect which is superior to other minds because of its skepticism— he’s in league with medicine-denying doctors and school teachers “who do not believe in Latin compositions.” The Verdurins stop inviting Swann, so he quickly casts them as “the lowest thing on the social ladder,” as “Dante’s last circle.” He concludes with affirming “no doubt [that] venerable text refers to the Verdurins!” and assumes Odette is giving handjobs (cattleyas) to everyone in Fr...

Cattleyas! Odette had a habit of wearing them when first becoming acquainted with Swann, although Proust never mentions anything further about them; this freedom of interpretation is having me feel lost, contextually. Not a single word regarding colour, petals, which particular sub-species that particular evening’s cattelya belongs to which would then inevitably segue into several pages of tangential reverie which could have contained a flourish regarding the orchidaceae family as a whole and how this is directly related to the frescoes painted within a certain chapel, of which he has a certain fondness. Anyway, cattleyas are regarded as the orchids most evocative of love because, as many flower websites are tactfully insinuating and, as I just updated the cattleya wikipedia entry to note, they look like vaginas even though I’m not really “seeing it” despite, to compare and contrast, looking-up those weird diagrams from fifth grade. Maybe this is like one of those photos of a lamp ev...