Ravels in Review: It's Summer!

I'm thrilled to be writing this when it's actually hot and sunny outside. Summer had to come eventually, I suppose, and it's basically August. So let's see:

• The BBC updated Byron's image with a music video, to odd effect, but I appreciate the effort.

• Then I read the collected poems of E.E. Cummings in one sitting, but figured I'd spare you and hunt up the one I really liked.

• I saw In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA. More intellectually apppealing than visually, and I might just be more visual.

• I found out a bit about rust used in art, specifically rust paints. (Thanks all!)

• For something absolutely delightful and cheering on your Friday, check out this artist dress code.

• Artists do not own Mickey Mouse, and more illegal art due to copyright.

Also, I'm trying out the twitter thing. If you're on there, come find me at linnea_west. Have a great weekend!

k

Annoying Annotations of a Besotted Byronite

My recent homage to 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' Lord Byron made clear that not only was Byron idolized as a celebrity in his time, but that I adore him myself, making him a patron saint of this blog for example. I was inspired to write that post partly by the old biography of him I found at the library. Well, this staid biography by Longford contains a discovery of a most upsetting nature! Of a nature so vile, I have been tempted to put the book down unfinished.

Some creature, of repellent handwriting and distinct ammorality, has annotated this book! Scrawled in No.2 pencil all over its margins!

"Lord Byron then went to Venice..." becomes annotated by some childish scribble such as "As he should! Pisa was far too provincial for him" (the excess of exclamation points is distinctly annoying.) This person, no doubt some susceptible very young or very old female, defends Byron against any negative charges brought against him by his peers, defends his incestuous love for his sister, defends his leaving his sick 4-year-old daughter in a nunnery to die of typhoid fever, and calls Shelley a 'tiresome bore'! She quite obviously shows her jealously of his many mistresses, and roots for Byron to leave them all and break their hearts. She keeps saying things like, "But Byron was never a class-traitor or atheist, thank god!" Yes, thank god he was a selfish, incestuous poet who was 'revolutionary' but title-proud...?

So look you, o noble notater, come forward. I challenge you to a duel. Something must be done to stop your forever marking up books to turn dialogues into trialogues, and if death is the answer, so be it. I demand the satisfaction.

And you readers, if you happen to come across a female of inexplicable and strong feelings towards the sundry elements of Lord Byron's life who is an amoral, elitist with strongly round handwriting, probably defensive of some petty title she inherited, and likely a dumpy figure and big red nose, please tell her my challenge.

Self Inconization: Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde

Before MTV and Hollywood, there were superstars, rebel bad boys who captured the world's attention. Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde created themselves as symbols for their generations with no help from the Internet, TV, or movies. They self-consciously created themselves before more familiar figures like Andy Warhol were born.

Wilde is a patron saint of this blog not simply because he was an clever writer and interesting literary critic. He created a view of aesthetics that determined his life down to the boutonniere, and he did it so brilliantly that turn-of-the-century Britain and Europe watched, scandalized and delighted. His society plays inverted social mores, but so cleverly it was hard to realize it had happened. And they lionized him, this pudgy aesthete from Ireland, of all barbaric lands. Love, that Achilles heel of us all, is what brought his ascendancy to a crashing halt, when his lover Bosie got him involved in an infamous trial of homo sexuality, which did not go well, leading to his ruin, imprisonment and penniless death in exile on the continent. But prior to this low, Wilde achieved heights of fame that were improbable considering his origins, and lived out his convictions regarding art and life that were 'moral' in the highest degree. He champions artifice in The Decay of Lying, saying "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life" and in he indeed wrote what he became to the public, as his plays were used as evidence against in his trial. He considers "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art."


Paradoxically my other patron saint, Byron, held quite the opposite view. (Now--I know what you are thinking: these two dandies on the British 19th c. scene were both sensational and scandalous public figures and writers who, despite all their endeavors, dies rather unheroically in exile and out of favor. Their ascents to greatness were similarly unpredictable from their humble origins, and displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and ambition. And yes, of course, that even as they wrote within the Romantic and Decadent movements, scholars now consider their work to make stylistic leaps that distinguish them from those circles. One might also say they had extreme temperaments and the ability to behave with extreme selfishness. These bad boys were the ultimate rebels for their times.) Byron, living 80 years before Wilde, thought writing was secondary to living, "The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain." Life was a much higher thing, and "scribbling," as he called his work was merely a side item to living.

Art into life, or life into art: it amounts to the same thing. Wilde struggled for impersonal objectivity, and does not mention himself. However, he lived his life as art, so that in his writing he, rather than any imaginary characters, is what the reader sees. Byron said that "To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all." By the time he wrote his masterpiece Don Juan, he had taken life--his life as narrator--and injected it into his poem at every possible opportunity. The almost megalomaniac way the put themselves consistently in their audience's face is how they achieved super stardom.

The confluence of life and art brings the reader back to the same thing: the author. The author always dominates the work, and his legacy haunts his every word, as each of them very carefully like to manipulate. It is a fascinating thing to watch. A parallel to such success would be Warhol, another self-made icon.

The desire for life to be art: Oscar Wilde and myself

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Oscar Wilde

I sat in my kitchen this morning, attempting to write a novel. Wearing my sick boyfriend's overcoat and trying not to wake him, I was typing in the dark with cereal as my roommate and then his girlfriend came up from the basement wrapped in a blanket and a pashmina respectively. Allow me to state this is not the hip, drugged out bohemian love shack it may seem, although why my roommates slept in the living room with no clothes I'm happy not to know. I'm just relieved that the third roommate was not here. It left me wishing that life was different, was more like art.

To elevate the mundane and the ugly into something beautiful and irreducible is a creative act extraordinaire. To do so with one's life, the prime material of all art, requires genius and unflagging commitment. I'm not sure that I have enough of either either. But I admire Oscar Wilde's philosophy, and his statement that he has "put all my genius into life" rings true when one studies his life. Literature became his words, visual art his clothes and house, just as his plays were mirrors of his mind. In many ways, he, and Byron, have become patron saints of mine, for their lives as well as their works. Dandies and writers and lovers, they were controversial touchstones for the societies of their time.

My boyfriend has woken up and I can now crawl back in bed to type (if I can over the YouTube videos and complaining he produces). Wilde never had to deal with this. Actually Bosie was rather a no-good handful. But if only life could imitate art, or art I like more

A selection of Wildean-isms to inspire one on a Sunday morning:

• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

• Life is too much important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.

• It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.

• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

• Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

• It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

• I can believe anything as long as it is incredible.

• I often take exercise. Why only yesterday I had breakfast in bed.

• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Note: In his honor, I have made him a patron saint of this blog, in whose hallowed cyber halls his fellow worthies shall begin to join him.