Don't these images from HomeDesigning of an expanded man cave look just like a Tim Burton-directed Picture of Dorian Gray? (Are you reading, Tim? You should do that!)
If you're not familiar with the book, it is a bizarre parable of art about some dandy aesthetes in Victorian London who convince the stunning, and youthful, Dorian Gray to become so obsessed with his own image that he sells his soul for a gorgeous portrait of himself. Lol.
I always think of Oscar Wilde around St. Patrick's Day. Not because he was Irish (he was), but because sometimes you see some sloppy, unattractive, anti-dandy sporting one of these:
So ironic! So Oscar Wilde! The green carnation was the symbol of the dandy that Oscar Wilde and his crew would wear on their lapels.
My favorite story about Oscar Wilde is not the depressing end of his life in which he was jailed for sodomy and indecency, exiled to France, and eventually died at only 46, destitute and alone, as it is often told.
My favorite part of his life is the time he spent touring the US. Wilde's trip started as a lecture series scheduled to last four months, to coincide with the American premiere of the Gilbert and Sullivan show, Patience, which satirized effeminate men. It was meant to introduce America to the prototype in question, in the flesh, at a time when effeminacy was sorely lacking in the serious states.
Leadville, Colorado in 1904
Due to the popular success of Oscar Wilde's lecture series, his tour was extended to last a year and resulted in a hilarious essay documenting his uproarious travels. His tour took him around the wild west, where he not only amused but genuinely charmed his audiences. In Leadville, Colorado he saw what he said in the essay was (I'm paraphrasing) the greatest piece of art criticism he had ever come across. It was a sign on the piano in an old time saloon that read:
"Interestingly, the first Twilight book makes allusions to Wuthering Heights, via the star-crossed lovers connection. But they have a lot else in common, namely the stamp of an adolescent love. Like the perpetually angry Kristin Stewart in the Twilight movies, Cathy is pretty unredeemably unlikeable. But she has the love of two admirers to her name, and so, in some audiences' eyes, she is enviable and de-facto redeemed. We of the jaded book club set were all rolling our eyes a little bit with a montage of images swimming in our brains"
-Acton, Livre Life
"But no one has done more for Team Emily than Bella of the Twilight franchise. Her favorite novel is Wuthering Heights (she first reads it as a school assignment, and in the third book, Eclipse, she and Edward trade Cathy and Heathcliff quotes about, of course, undying love). When HarperCollins released a paperback of the book in the U.K. "endorsed" by Bella and Edward, sales quadrupled. “Wuthering Heights has always appealed more to teenagers,” says Cristina Lara, curator of the Bronte Blog, an exhaustive and very serious-minded compendium of all things Brontë. (Lara and her co-curator, Manuel Del Estal, decline to choose between the two books.) “It’s a rite-of-passage kind of novel.”
-Jenni Yarbroff of Book Beast discussing Wuthering Heights vs. Jane Eyre.
Most interesting from this passage is that Yarbroff raises a great point about changing perspective. Often the protagonists you empathize with as a teenager are very different from the protagonists you empathize with as an adult. My mother's book club, after re-reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, said that many of them had identified with Anna as a college student. At that point in their life, they could forgive Tolstoy's heroine for her impetuous, passionate nature, her apathy towards Alexei, her love for Vronsky. But as adults, they came to think of Anna as that character who heads towards the garage in a horror movie, wearing a mini skirt, and looking for one last can of beer. Okay, fine. So those weren't their exact words. But you get the idea. It's hard to watch Anna make a mess of her life for Vronsky, who aside from being handsome and exciting isn't, let's be honest, much else.
Are there any characters that have caused you to do a 180?
We read Wuthering Heights recently. But it's definitely making me want to re-read Jane Eyre before I drag my boyfriend to see the movie.
The other evening my little sister Kira and I went to a cocktail party at MOMA for a new Andy Warhol installation. Attendees were invited to slip into a video booth and take their own Factory-esque Screen Tests. Almost all of the ST's were artsy types and in on the joke; they barely moved a muscle under the eyes of the video camera, which made their images legit, but honestly not all that interesting.
Their screen tests were then projected onto a big wall opposite for all the party goers to admire (read: judge). After a few minutes, we got bored and wandered upstairs to the permanent exhibits. Kira pointed out this hilarious caption on a Matisse painting:
"Matisse described the abstract zone at the right of this composition as containing "a person who has a palette in his hand and who is observing." Most likely it is the artist himself. The Surrealist poet Andre Breton said the painting, "I believe Matisse's genius is here...nowhere has Matisse put so much of himself as in this picture."*
Goldfish and Palette, Paris
Late November 1914-1915, oil on canvas
*Whichever museum intern is writing these things has absolutely got to step up his/her game. I mean, really.
Actually, I've been thinking a lot about authorial representation reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. When a writer puts his or herself into a thought, it always makes the text burn particularly bright. Thus far, the strongest parts of Mrs. Dalloway have been these strikingly personal moments that feel as if they've been extracted from Mrs. Woolf's quotidien rituals. Here Peter Walsh talking about Clarissa (Mrs. Dalloway):
"There was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didnt mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination." P78, Mrs. Dalloway.
The idea that you were 'frittering away time' discussing high minded ideals or pop-culture trivialities must have weighed heavily on the Bloomsbury Group, because here's EM Forster talking about the very same thing in the context of Helen and Margaret Schlegl, who I think must have been modeled on Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, no?
"But London thwarted her; in its atmosphere she could not concentrate. London only stimulates, it cannot sustain; and Margaret, hurrying over its surface for a house wihtout knowing what sort of a house she wanted, was paying for many a thrilling sensation in the past. She could not break loose from culture, and her time was wasted by concerts which it would be a sin to miss, and invitations which it would never do to refuse. At last she grew desperate; she resolved that she would go nowhere and be at home to no one until she found a house, and broke the resolution in half an hour." P157, Howards End.
Equally wonderful and poignant is the description of Septimus's depression. Virginia Woolf suffered a nervous breakdown when she was just 13 after her mother died; she had another much worse attack after her father died, and there after lived in fear of having a repeat episode. There's evidence that right before she killed herself by walking into the Ose river in 1941 she had felt another attack coming on. Weirdly, Woolf is at her funniest here, describing the quack pyschologist that Septimus's clueless wife Rezia hires.
"Human nature, in short, was on him-the repulsive brute, with the blood red nostrils. Holmes was on him. Dr. Holmes came quite regularly every day. Once you stumble, Septimus wrote on the back of a postcard, human nature is on you. Holmes is on you. Their only chance was to escape, without letting Holmes know; to Italy-anywhere, anywhere, away from from Dr. Holmes.
But Rezia could not understand him. Dr. Holmes was such a kind man. He was so interested in Septimus. He only wanted to help them, he said. He had four little children and he had asked her to tea, she told Septimus. So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? " p92.
Remind you of another famous author who writes about suicide in a true and funny voice? Click here for the link.
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
Marginalia has been in the news of late. Recently, GalleyCat published a post on the release of Other People's Books, a collection of essays on marginalia, compiled by the Caxton Club that's to be release this spring. The Morgan Library is winding down a stunning exhibit that puts the research material and early drafts of Mark Twain on display. And the Ransom Center devotes a good portion of their archives to contemporary authors libraries. They have 300 volumes from David Foster Wallace's archives alone. It's a fascinating collection of 'handwritten comments, lists of words he found interesting, doodles, smiley faces, and underlining." It was far and away the most exciting part of our visit there.
Above are a few of the volumes from the DFW library at the Ransom Center. Annotating books is such a personal process (it's one of the reasons I'm not such a fan of lending or borrowing reads); it was thrilling getting to see the notations taken by a truly great fiction writer. And also to see them in the greater context as part of the author's creative process.
Annotated Copy of Underworld by Don DeLillo: "David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo corresponded frequently about their writing and their struggles when they were both working on complex and lenghty novels. DeLillo's Underworld (1997) and Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). They also shared pre-published drafts of the novels with each other. Displayed here is one fo the three bound voumes of Wallace's heavily annotated copy of Don DeLillo's draft of Underworld.
"David Foster Wallace's library includes a number of books he used for research related to his writings. He read this text while preparing for his posthumously published novel, The Pale King (April 2011), which centers on characters who work at the IRS."
I normally underline and take notes as I read. But I liked DFW's use of an index. It's nice to have a master list at the beginning to organize themes/motifs. My, inspired, copy of our book club read, Howard's End, is below.
At the top are words I had to look up as I read
Adumbrated-To Conceal
Lucent- To produce a faint image of
Super Annuate- Retire someone with a pension
(Obviously, not something DFW would have had use for being essentially, as far as I can tell, a human dictionary)
The T's next to the page numbers are all those capital t truths that I mentioned in our earlier post. Tiny daily observations that make Howard's End, despite an overwraught plot, so great. My boyfriend was telling me that the very same eye for detail is often credited to Nicholson Baker. Baker in his books has been known to leave plot out all together, opting to relay the super-mundane in a super-mundane format, as in A Box of Matches, which follows one man's thought process as he throws matches into a dying fire. I'd love to have seen EM Forster try something as daring.
"All I write is, to me, sentimental. A book which doesn't leave people either happier or better than it found them, which doesn't add some permanent treasure to the world, isn't worth doing." -EM Forster, 1879-1970
I finished Howard's End last night. Honestly, the plot pyrotechnics in the latter half of the book didn't touch me quite as much as the simple truths and observations that, though less grand, putter innocuously through the novel's quieter moments; it's the stuff between action sequences that resonated with me. The structure is making me wonder about what I'll think of On Beauty, the Zadie Smith novel that pays homage to Howard's End by borrowing the EM Forster story line. Acton's read it and I've promised to bring the book as secondary reading to our book club later this month.
Here's EM Forster describing the awkwardness that guests can feel:
"Poor Mrs. Charles sat between her silent companions, terrified at the course of events, and a little bored... Crumbling her toast, too nervous to ask for the butter, she remained almost motionless, thankful only for this, her father in law was having his breakfast upstairs."p 95
Here's EM Forster on a chance encounter with acquaintances:
"With a good dinner inside him and an amiable but academic woman on either flank, he felt that his hands were on all the ropes of life, and that what he did not know could not be worth knowing."p137
On feeling like you've fallen off the proper track:
"Miss Wilcox had changed perceptibly since her engagement. Her voice was gruffer, her manner more downright, and she was inclined to patronize the more foolish virgin. Margaret was silly enough to be pained at this. Depressed at her isolation, she saw not only houses and furniture, but the vessel of life itseld slipping past her, with people like Evie and Mr. Cahill on board."
On annoying couples:
"Mr Cahill insisted on sirloin, but admitted that he had made a mistake later on. He and Evie soon fell into a conversation of the "No, I didn't; yes you did" type-conversation which, though fascinating to those who are engaged in it, neither desires nor deserves the attention of others." p159
"One of the most interesting components of an archive is correspondence. Many archives are filled with letters. Norman Mailer's papers, for example, include thousands of letters that document more than 60 years of his life. Mailer kept both incoming letters and copies of his outgoing correspondence with family, friends, fellow writers, business associates, politicians, activists, and fans, among others. Other archives, like the papers of David Foster Wallace, include very little correspondence.
Correspondence can help illuminate the creative process behind the work of a writer or artist while also providing a glimpse into the personal thoughts and the day-to-day activities that fill a life. Such information can help one better understand a writer or artist, and thus correspondence is often of great interest to biographers and scholars. Many writers are talented correspondents who have mastered letter wrtiging as an art. The letters of James Salter, for example, are often as lyrical and perfectly crafted as his novels." -Ransom Center
Here's a letter from Don DeLillo to publisher Bob Mills. DeLillo at this point has only had short stories published and he's asking Mills to take a look at some of his pieces. In his letter he states he's working on a 'longer book', which we're assuming in this instance is Americana published in 1971.
In the following letter, DeLillo writes to Norman Mailer about The Time Of Our Time, a book with a similarly sweeping scope. DeLillo tells Mailer that the "inexhaustible subject, America, throbs through much of the book, through nearly all of it. What ready explanation for the broad dimensions of the book. If contemporary Americans are the only novelists to believe in the big book, still, it's only because this culture dares and tempts and troubles us into matching the powerful spin-out size of the forces around us."
If you're not familiar with the book, it is a bizarre parable of art about some dandy aesthetes in Victorian London who convince the stunning, and youthful, Dorian Gray to become so obsessed with his own image that he sells his soul for a gorgeous portrait of himself. Lol. 
