Keeping warm

Tree at S. 4th St and Driggs, Williamsburg

Snow alert: Man down

Corner of N. 10th St. and Driggs, Williamsburg

Brian Bedford's The Importance of Being Earnest at the Roundabout

Another day, another drenching of wet snow to struggle through, adding the misery of a full body contact subway commute with people whose horrible taste in music pounds through their earbuds. Anyhow, as I intended to write, last night I went to see one of my favorite plays of all time, the one I write my university thesis on, have seen on stage four times, and viewed every movie version of, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde directed by Brian Bedford.

It de-ceded expectations. Perhaps because I was bringing so much to it, I lost a naive enjoyment of it. Surely a joke is bound to lose some of its funniness when I already know the punch line. Yet I also think I have some distinct opinions about how to deliver the mannered and difficult lines (with preferably less camp) and really about how to do the whole play.

Two perfect things: the set and Brian Bedford (also the director) in his role as Lady Bracknell. He was perfect, and every line of his was a joy to hear. The campy Algernon, and over-modulated voices of the Gwendolyn and Cecily, and character roles the servants took on, and the histronics of Miss Prism--somehow none of them hit the right note of artificiality. They were all too excitable about it, not nearly languid enough. Dr. Chausable and Jack were actually rather good. They ham up the obvious theatrically of the piece rather than treating it with the upmost seriousness.

While it didn't live up to my expectations, Wilde's brilliance is unsquashable and it is a serviceable rendition. True to Wilde, "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily." The New York Times reports this morning that the critically acclaimed show's run is being extended.

Apropos my discussion yesterday against the glorification of Nature in Schiller, this quote of Wilde's seemed deliciously suited:

"I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone." - Lady Bracknell, Act 1

Against Nature

Dream of Arcadia (1838), Thomas Cole 

1. Schiller: The ancient Greeks, by living close to Nature, were naive geniuses who lived better lives than we do and created better works of art because of their ability to maintain a natural state of honesty, simplicity, and virtue that innately worked within the forms of nature.
2. Schiller: Modern society has advanced beyond Nature, and in becoming disillusioned with the society he entered when he left childhood, longs to return to the childlike, naive, and natural state that is so much better than civilization. 
3. Me: Ancient Greeks painted their pristine temples all sorts of gaudy, rather Victorian colors, a illustrative difference between the traditional ideal of the pure Greeks and the reality, which I imagine was both more colorful and Hobbesian (nasty, brutish, and short). 

Landscape with Aeneas at Delos (1672), Claude Lorraine

We have the luxury of admiring the natural now that we are not forced to survive in it, just as Schiller has the luxury of idealizing it in this essay. Did the ancient Greeks idealize a nomadic, hunting and gathering past as more virtuous? Is the whole history of civilization really one of degeneration? I don't think so. This is only the beginning of Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature, that I started reading after this discussion, and his basis for the two types of poets, so I'd have to say so far I'm not buying it.

Et in Arcadia Ego (1637), Nicolas Poussin

Can a novelist write [well] philosophically?

"Can a novelist write philosophically?" begins the essay The Philosophical Novel in the NY Times Book Section last week. It's an old question. The conflict is the long-held (hello, Plato) notion that philosophy is a dry, precise search for truth, heedless of aesthetics while novels tell stories to create illusions and explore imprecise, untrue things. It goes on to discuss philosophers who wrote well like novelists (Nietzche) and novelists who write like philosophers (David Foster Wallace), and whether either of the disciplines suffered for the mixture.

The questions are not unlike the series of lectures bound up in The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010) by Orham Pamuk. Pamuk's love of reading and the craft of writing is a great read, all spun around the famous concept of Schilller: naïve writers write “spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words” while the sentimental writer is “thoughtful” and “troubled” and “exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the method and techniques he uses, the artifice involved in his endeavor.”  The sentimental poet can be called philosophical. Pamuk himself writes--and reads-- both naivelly and sentimentally at times. As a reader, he claims we all juggle the same differing mindsets, between the suspension of disbelief and the analytic understanding of what we are reading.

 Friedrich Schiller's On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795) is a paper on poetic (more generally artistic) theory, in which he as the reflective sentimalisch writer rather envies Goethe, a naive writer who never doubts whether the words that stream out of him are accurate and true. Schiller's influential oppositional and psychological views have been very influential on later art history criticism and psychoanalysis. Within this dialogue is also the opposition of the Classical and the Romantic

While I imagine the Romantic poet as driven to pour out his heart unselfconsciously, ala Keats, and Wordsworth, Schiller himself felt the opposite. Classical poets like the Greeks were naive writers for whom there was no struggle to reach a natural state. Romantic writers suffered the anguish of trying to recapture their lost ideals, and doubt as to whether their words actually did. So inspired by all these connections, I'm trying to recapture the lost ideal that is my ability to focus on philosophy, and actually site down and read beyond the introduction of On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature. Surely these oppositional groups are more nuanced than they seem, and hopefully a novelist can find the teetering, tottering edge between the philosophical and the story, the naive and the sentimental.

4 Thursday Tidbits

Short weeks don't always go quickly enough. Happy almost Friday!

• On creating the feeling you want the reader to feel via Maud Newton

Not always so easy or pleasant if it means feeling what you are writing

• Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths via But Does it Float

Really striking, lovely images in RED

• The Great Escape via Economy Custard

Always delightful.

• Me, Myself and Why via FT.com

Cindy Sherman interview

I love Dick: Epistolary Roman-a-clef, con cojones

"Chris Kraus is a writer, filmmaker, and professor of film at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her books include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, and Torpor."

That is what Wikipedia tells us. However, I made the mistake of thinking she was just a writer of a fictional novel, I love Dick*, an double entendre for whatever reason I didn't pick up on until I got home and my boyfriend commented it would be interesting to read on the subway. (That alone should have disqualified me from reading this.) 


As Wikipedia explains better than I can, I Love Dick is: 

"...an epistolary novel. The text, a series of love letters to an elusive addressee, is anchored firmly in a tradition that can be traced back through Derrida's La Carte Postale, the letters of Madame de Sévigné (and their immense influence on Marcel Proust), Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the letters of Héloise and Abelard, as well as art concret and the confrontational performance art of the 1970s. Its implicit conceit is the connection between the novel (in French, le roman) and romance: I Love Dick manages to be both a sincere lover's cry and a feminist manifesto... I Love Dick's narrator invents a genre she names, variously, "The Dumb Cunt's Tale", "lonely girl phenomenology", and "performative philosophy", treating, among many other subjects, the paintings of R.B. Kitaj, the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet, the activism of Jennifer Harbury, and Felix Guattari's Chaosophy while deconstructing the institution of marriage and the life of the mind."

I don't know about all those fnacy-shmancy conceits, etc, but it gives you a good idea of what swirling experience it was, all in the guise of simple narrative love letters. I do know I put it down going: "What the hell was that?" And really, it is a pleasure to be shaken up a bit and have a book take you to a completely unexpected place. Most interesting was the non-fictional nature of it, even while there is a strong performative aspect. The realness of the exposure in these letters is a pleasure beyond voyeurism, as the writer/artist is capable of bringing a wealth of experience and thoughts to a extreme situation (falling passionately in love with a man who is not your husband and beginning an affair with the lukewarm new man). It's a bit like if Sophie Calle actually had something interesting to say. Oh the cojones.




*I am slightly afraid to see what this does to my incoming search traffic.

Re-presenting Nancy Spero's Notes in Time Online

Nancy Spero's Notes in Time, made up of 24 horizontal panels about 9 feet long, can be hard to display, but the internet stepped in with a valiant stab. Triple Canopy, a pretty cool organization worth bookmarking, recently published the artist's 1975 landmark work as a continuous online scroll, eliminating the 90 degree angles of most rooms and enhancing the architectural frieze-like feel of this Grecian-inspired piece.

Enjoy it here. You can just keep scrolling indefinitely, viewing Spero's fragmented notes, drawings, and prints concerned with women's place in history

The Screwtape Letters' “soft, gentle path to Hell”

I saw an adaption of The Screwtape Letters at the Westside Theater the other night, in one of last performances before it hit the road (check out the site to see if its coming near you). The Screwtape Letters is a satirical novel by C. S. Lewis first published in February 1942 and the play, set in a stylish office in hell, follows the clever scheming of Satan's chief psychiatrist, Screwtape, as he hungrily entices a human 'patient' toward damnation (human souls being hell's primary source of food). Evil, the banality of evil, and specifically the insidious ways it works into individual's lives is told here through a demon's point of view. It is damn funny, because psychologically is is dead on and startlingly true even today, even from a non-Christian perspective.


As I learned in discussion after the performance, Lewis wrote this story about a senior demon, Screwtape, teaching his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, how to secure the damnation of a British man after hearing a translation of one of Hitler's speeches on the BBC radio. Hitler's silver tongue, as he exhorted the English to believe that he only wanted to work together to lead a great cultural world upheaval, struck him as being the purest evil. 


Lewis dedicated the work to his friend and fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien, who had warned that delving too deeply into the craft of evil would have consequences. Lewis later wrote:


"Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment . . . though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded.”


However the play is much more lively and interesting than that, and I imagine a much better theatrical experience that reading the meditative letters might give one to expect.

Parade of the Bearded Man, or my walk to dinner Friday night took an unexpected turn

First they popped across my view on the Bowery. I heard the Mariachi's cheerful music before I saw the parade leader, neon blue coyote shining from his large paper-mache head.

Then I saw his followers, sporting real and fake beards, carrying  white banners behind him, all bearing the sign of the bearded man. I walked with them up Bowery, east on Houston, and then a bit down Eldridge Street where they began to crowd into a gallery.

Thanks to the wonder that is the internet, I have since learned that the gallery was DCKT Contemporary, the artist was Irvin Morazan, and that is was actually a coyote procession. I stand corrected.

The exhibition itself is called "Temple of the Bearded Man." I can't speak for the rest of it, but the parade was good fun, even though I don't know what happened with the whip cream at the end. A birthday dinner called.