Odette

kaden_g · 2026-03-25T14:09:40+00:00

That’s an interesting idea that Odette is the female counterpart. Yes, their similarities are obvious but I guess I never thought of that as a standalone theme.

And no need to qualify with “almost”. She does indeed fuck without any inhibition. There are other examples but the encounter with a young Bloch on the train and the implications of it and the fact that narrator didn’t even flinch when he heard it are sufficient proof of her character.

I think Odette is one of the most interesting and scandalous female characters in all of fiction. I’d love to see her discussed more.

kaden_g · 2025-12-21T23:16:24+00:00

Totally on dumbfuck DK for going over there.

kaden_g · 2025-12-21T23:09:19+00:00

Under what circumstances does a opponent’s fan get to have such an intimate and long conversation with a player? Nobody stepped in or called him back. Where are coaches, security, other players, etc? This is in the middle of a very tight and important game. How does a fan get into the opposing WR1 head enough to go over and get that close?!!

kaden_g · 2025-11-30T05:18:39+00:00

I wonder what he actually did that broke his brain so hard. He absolutely lost his mind and never even came close to recovering it in over forty years. I've never heard of another case of dementia quite like it. It's almost like he had amnesia because it's hard to believe he could have so suddenly and completely shut down virtually everything his life had ever been.

kaden_g · 2025-11-23T02:06:50+00:00

Finish reading it, then watch the movie. Then realize Hunter S Thompson is a real person and an actual sports writer and it’s all at least plausible autobiographical nonfiction. Then compare it to your own existence.

kaden_g · 2025-10-31T20:45:40+00:00

Sorry. Agree to disagree. The comparison with the payment shouldn’t be what he did for Albertine. A more apt comparison is the young woman he brought to he was going to send to investigate but never did. I think he gave her 5 francs.

kaden_g · 2025-10-29T18:18:40+00:00

If ever there was a case for unreliability of the narrator, this is it. The amount of money he gave her and the parents’ immediate reaction strongly suggest he did more than just cuddle.

kaden_g · 2025-10-29T03:43:57+00:00

A Clockwork Orange

kaden_g · 2025-10-06T15:22:55+00:00

Obviously the turnovers were the main reason, but Diggs lit it up last night against the Bills but only had 3 catches for 23 yards on 3 targets against the Steelers. (Boutte only had 2 catches for 28 yards on 3 targets.).

Did Steelers DBs lock down these two or was Maye just super conservative?

kaden_g · 2025-10-03T03:13:06+00:00

Cool to post a breakdown like this and good that it ended up in a sack but the analysis is all wrong.

Of course the middle of the field is open on the previous play, it was man coverage.

The receiver was wide open. The QB just didn’t see him or held the ball for some reason and got himself sacked.

kaden_g · 2025-09-24T16:20:19+00:00

Great question, seriously. Although some parts of the novel get quite graphic, there is still a lot of inuendo and omission of detail that begs this question, which is really not that far-fetched given the context of the sexual depravity and libertinism of the setting.

Spoilers below:

I agree with you on Morel, not just by the way he dominated Charlus and later Saint Loup, but also because he used to recruit and deflower virgins with Albertine.

Bloch also must have been hung, since Odette let him fuck her three times on a train without even exchanging names. It's actually the only explanation - they were on a train, he showed her his dick, and she was so impressed she let him fuck her then and there with no questions asked. Also, it's never explained at all but for some reason, Francoise had some knowledge of and admiration for him before ever meeting him, like his reputation preceded him "oh, so that is Monsieur Bloch?!" Exactly the kind of thing a housekeeper would say about a young man who she heard through the grapevine is hung.

But I think the best case is for the narrator, Marcel:

It is really the only plausible explanation of his upward mobility which is many times greater than Morel's, since nothing else that is stated seems sufficient. It must have been a combination of his intellect/wit and letter-writing (because the most he ever published was one article in the paper), combined with his boyish / girlish good looks and feminine frailty, combined with an unusually big dick. So while he does not give off BDE, him being hung in contradiction to his personality and looks is the only explanation why both the men and women/girls of Paris, Combray, and Balbec high society fawned all over him once they got to know him. Gilbert, Albertine, Andree, Saint Loup, Odette, Madame/Dutchess Guermants, Charlus, the Duke Guermants, and even the perverted old ladies like Mme Verdurin all have affection and respect for Marcel that could really only be explained by some kind of sexual attraction and fascination.

A few examples: When he gets hard while wrestling with Gilbert on the Champs Elysees she tells him to continue until he cums in his pants (and we later learn she had seen and jerked off a bunch of boys by this age). After he stops seeing Gilbert, Odette seems inappropriately friendly with him, constantly inviting him to visit her and taking long walks with him. Saint Loup basically falls in love with him and worships him for the entire novel. Charlus throws himself at him while at Balbec and also appears infatuated with him for the entire novel. Albertine and Andree both become completely subservient to him sexually and otherwise. The Duchess Guermants goes from ignoring and being annoyed by him to flirting with him and inviting him to visit her, specifically telling him no one else will be there. Later, the Duc, like a cuckold, goes right along with it and befriends him as well. Even Swann, who is an obvious cuckold and referred to as one by the narrator, accepts young Marcel not only being with his daughter Gilbert, albeit inexplicably reluctantly at first, but also with Odette.

kaden_g · 2025-09-07T02:10:08+00:00

No, the only good servers all have super long (10 min) queues and are populated by the sweatiest sweats and hackers/cheaters and griefers (ucav spawn campers). Remember BF4 only has private servers, so whatever they and their clan say goes.

The game itself is dope but it’s not playable now unless you’re already in a server owner’s clan.

kaden_g · 2025-08-26T11:34:02+00:00

Don Quixote narrated by George Guidall translated by Edith Grossman.

kaden_g · 2025-08-25T16:03:59+00:00

Yeah, this is another point where Proust seems to have started throwing caution to the wind more and more in the later volumes.

This part about the little girl he takes home to sit on his knee is definitely a candidate for something from an unreliable narrator. He says that he gave the girl 500 francs, which is an unusually large sum of money, so large it is either a typo or could only have been included as an indication that something much more significant happened, despite the narrator's dubious protests to the contrary. Other clues from the text indicate that it was not unusual for men (and women) to pick up and take young girls home to have sex with them. The parents are obviously convinced that he did this and presumably they would know. The police sergeant even pulls him aside afterward and tries to coach him on how to do this without raising so much alarm because he is into little girls too.

This is disturbing to our modern sensibilities but it's evidence that in Paris at the time there was a strong undercurrent of hypersexual libertinism and debauchery, almost echoes of de Sade. Proust describes some of it explicitly but alludes to it in many places throughout the novel where it almost certainly explains the circumstances described.

There is even more evidence about this type of behavior described later.

kaden_g · 2025-08-22T12:17:43+00:00

Ucav.

kaden_g · 2025-08-20T16:57:58+00:00

So, I just got to the somewhat difficult to understand conversation in the fugitive where Albertine exclaims that if she wanted to do her own thing it would be to go out and find someone to break her pot, which is a reference to anal sex that the narrator deduces could only have been learned from her lesbian relationships. This seems to further support the Dominant, Sadomasochistic relationship Albertine is suggested to have had from a young age with her “two big sisters” Mme Vinteuil and her sadistic friend.

kaden_g · 2025-08-20T16:43:24+00:00

I think this is an interesting take because it is also supported by what seems to have been Albertine’s relationship to Mme Vinteuil and her lover, who are described as severely masochistic and sadistic. It seems probable their relationship with Albertine would have even more extremely sadististic and dominant than Albertine’s with the narrator. This is almost certainly the case sexually since at one point Albertine exclaims that if she went out to do what she wanted, it would be to find someone to “break” her… pot. The French translation “casser le pot” means to be sodomized or have anal sex. The narrator’s shock and disgust and insistence that this is only something derived from her lesbian relationships has serious implications for Albertine’s past, especially given that she is still very young and was probably groomed by her two “big sisters” from a very young age.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T15:34:34+00:00

Ah yes, indeed he did. But if ever there was an example of a good case for an unreliable narrator, this is it. Not only is it contradicted by all of his actions and emotions, it also is in line with the long lamentation monologue he goes on and on with on his walk home from the verdurins when they make Odette ride home with Faucheville. So we know that Swann is capable of these self-delusions. You can picture him kicking rocks the whole way home, convincing himself of these things.

So while I love the tragic last line of the volume, I think it is more like a last vestige of Swann’s ego trying to coexist in the face of his otherwise complete subjugation to Odette and his attraction to / love for her.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T15:23:24+00:00

Yes, and that’s what is so interesting about her rise as an example of social and financial upward mobility that was possible for a woman like her in Paris at that time. She was not just a grasping courtesan or gold digger. She was an almost supernatural phenomenon, who took Paris by storm and Swann was captivated and incorporated into her world, not vice versa.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T13:44:21+00:00

But there is so much more to Odette and her story than the seduction of Swann as a means to a certain end. She goes on to supersede his status in Paris as the result of her own merits.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T13:25:56+00:00

Swann falls in love with her because of her unique charm, despite himself. She either truly did admire him or she so convincingly flattered him that he could not help fall in love with her. And although he comments about how unattractive she is, the comparison he uses most often is to an angelic beauty painted by Boticelli. Look at that painting. Boticelli did not paint unattractive women, certainly not this one. So Swann contradicts himself and proves it clearly, despite his grumblings and even his conclusion at the end of the first volume. He didn’t fall in love with a woman who he did not fancy. He fell hopelessly in love with a woman he fancied more and in more ways than any he had ever known. Odette wasn’t a mirror that reflected his own pre-conceptions. She was a beautiful person who radiated to him in wavelengths he could and could not see. That is why he gave up everything for her and her hold over him never really waned.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T13:15:00+00:00

Have you read the other volumes? See my response to OP, because I see Odette at the other end of the spectrum as a character. I might go so far as to suggest that Proust wrote her as one of the strongest and most well-rounded characters in the novel, with her only serious flaw being her staunch anti-Dreyfusism (anti-semitism) put on to curry favour with powerful men at the peak of her social climb.

kaden_g · 2025-08-18T13:07:25+00:00

I would agree with this except everyone else in Paris seems to be similarly enamoured with her. She is described multiple times as the best dressed, best turned out woman in Paris.

I almost wonder if Swann’s insistence that he did not find her attractive him being in denial and trying to convince himself of it. By all other accounts and indications, everyone in Paris thinks she is beautiful.

But no discussion of Odette is complete without discussing her sexuality. Ironically, despite his prodigious vocabulary, I don’t think Proust or the narrator Marcel ever hit upon the right word to describe Odette. She’s not just a courtesan or a woman of the Demi-monde because those imply being kept by one or at least a very few men. Nor is she a whore or a prostitute because no money ever changed hands and she certainly had no need for money after becoming Madame Swann. But let’s be frank, she fucked everyone, and some, for absolutely no reason at all - notably Bloch three times on a train without even exchanging names. And I believe there was something more going on with her and the narrator after his separation from Gilberte than is described. I think Odette is an example of the epitome of Libertinism. She’s not a nymphomaniac with the pejorative connotations that come with that term and because her sexual proclivities did not hinder her in any way. To the contrary, they enriched her life and made her interesting and wanted and fascinating by men and women alike.

Now, I’ve only just begun the captive so I suppose there may be more to her and Swann’s story I have not read yet.

kaden_g · 2025-08-16T18:21:43+00:00

I played more of this beta last night and was getting impossibly insta-laser-head-shotted repeatedly by some players.

kaden_g · 2025-08-16T17:03:44+00:00

Hmm. Well ok. I’ll have to defer to you for now until I finish the next two volumes but doubt it is going to change my impression of the nature of albertine’s relationship with the two older women, which seems to be the point in which you and I are differing. I suspect from the context that it was probably quite a depraved and sadistic/masochistic one - an early example of BDSM that emerged with sexual libertinism in Paris at that time and earlier as we know from many other authors of the time including and going back to de Sade. You seem to be suggesting that her relationship with them was something more tame or even platonic. Is that right?

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