Why do you say that Paeter? I underwood what he meant. Does that mean that I don't understand what amateur means?

Oh dear Truffles, my little diddly-plomp, what would Mr Swan say?

I really don't know who Mr Swan is. Perhaps you'd care to enlighten, or are you going to continue with oblique half-comments?

You don't think he's referencing Proust do you?

I had to bloody look that up. And, if you're right, he should be ashamed of himself for Swan/Swann

Who, Proust or PB?

PB. Proust has nothing to worry about...mainly because death bequeaths that right.

Then there's "my little diddly-plomp".

Again, Proust at his finest.

See, this is why I can't read Proust.

Still, I'm relieved to learn Mister PB was merely a plagiarist, and not the author of the odious phrase.

I tried reading Swann's Way and got half way through, about to that point where there's a single sentence that covers something like one and half pages. I have trouble remembering what I was just talking about 2 minutes ago, dealing with a sentence like that and keeping track of the gist was nigh on impossible.

Most of 'em don't become it so much as begin it.

Well begun is half-done.

You really don't know? Oh lord don't give me that! The answer hides within.

You're supposed to be bright; does it feel hard in getting what I'm saying?

Maybe you need go under hypnosis, or perhaps we'll, um, have to... ask Chrisss?

I doubt it; I don't think he'd heard of the bugger before your post.

Wow...

Two tapestries of high warp represented the coronation of Esther (in which tradition would have it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of the kings of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been); their colours had melted into one another, so as to add expression, relief, light to the pictures. A touch of red over the lips of Esther had strayed beyond their outline; the yellow on her dress was spread with such unctuous plumpness as to have acquired a kind of solidity, and stood boldly out from the receding atmosphere; while the green of the trees, which was still bright in Silk and wool among the lower parts of the panel, but had quite 'gone' at the top, separated in a paler scheme, above the dark trunks, the yellowing upper branches, tanned and half-obliterated by the sharp though sidelong rays of an invisible sun. All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people's supernatural passage—all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space—the name of the fourth being Time—which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way."

Three sentences!

And that's just plucked from a place I had happened to scroll to, just sampling the text without having been looking for an example of what can only be an instruction to the reader that the author wants to be thwacked around the head.

His prolixity knows no bounds.

I've no idea if Proust was a Van Gogh type character, ignored during his lifetime, or if he was famous and celebrated while he lived. I suspect if it was the latter he may well have been assasinated by his proofreader.

Ahhh, I understand now. You realise that you'd fucked up criticising Smiffy and simply can't admit it. So you're obfuscating.

If what you're saying was worthy you'd make it clear enough for the proles to understand. So it's obviously not.

(And, yes, I'd heard of Proust before, just never read any of it)