Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Supergroups

"Marcel Proust and James Joyce, who with Kafka and Freud constitute the inescapable writers of the twentieth century, met once at a Parisian dinner party attended also by Stravinsky and Picasso, in May 1922, half a year before Proust's death, and soon after the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, Part Two and Ulysses. Joyce had read a few pages of Proust, and saw no special talent; Proust had never heard of Joyce. The aristocratic Stravinsky snubbed both, and Picasso admired the women present. Accounts of the conversation between Proust and Joyce vary: evidently Proust lamented his digestion, and Joyce his headaches. ..."  -- Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds