Byron Updated

The BBC tries to make Lord Byron cool in this new video, as if he needed any help. The King Blues update 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' Byron with a punk rock twist.

Change for the better? Eh...

Book Review: A Quiet Adjustment

A cursory glance at the jacket copy makes clear why I picked this book up: it's a fictional account of Lord Byron's wife, and thus Byron. Byron's work is delightful, he was a fascinating person, and I'm a tad enamoured. I love Byron no less after this imaginative and vivid account of his cruel humor and selfish megalomania, not to mention his more depraved side, but I don't recommend anybody actually read A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (Fathers and Daughters, Imposture).

Is Byron's character pure imagination on Markovits' part? Hardly. He embellishes the facts but not the characters of the ill matched pair of Annabella Millbanke and Lord Byron. Prudish, self-righteous, and dignified Anabella had no idea what she was getting into when she ended up marrying tempestuous, willful, and perverse Lord Byron. Their marriage seems like an accident on both their parts, as Annabella felt little love and Byron less. Byron's antics from shattering bottles on the ceiling during her confinement to carrying on an affair with his sister in front of her eyes are horrid. Markovits tackles Annabella's inept reaction to his behavior that put off divorce for too long, and then refused to name the most terrible ground for divorce. (What that unnamed reason was remains a mystery, rumored to be incest or sodomy.)

Would I recommend this novel to those who couldn't give 2 figs about Byron? Absolutely not; it's dull. The monotony of A Quiet Adjustment, with its accomplished character development and good sense of setting, stems from the plot and not the author. Of course, I happened to know the ending, but the more basic failure is that its plot follows that of the real Annabella's life. Life does not often form the arc of suspense and conclusion that a satisfactory plot requires.

Unless you happen to be Lord Byron, and then you continue to live, love and write the rollicking Don Juan until your death fighting for Greek Independence. Byron makes a much better story than a person, and no doubt Annabella was a better person than she makes as a story. Markovits choose an angle for his story that is more of a straight line, which is shame because as a writer he seems capable of more.

Bottom line: read Byron instead.

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.

Celebrity Lives as Art: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little. Lord Byron

I would rather heap scorn on some actor-besotted rag like US Weekly than read it, and am not in the habit of sending fan mail in the hopes that some rock or soap star will come and deflower me. Even Andy Warhol, to my mind, get too much credit for being a star maker just because he churned out some movies in the Factory. If anything, Warhol began the decline of the celebrity, as he heaped attention on people with no talent or accomplishments. Fatuous, small-minded uninteresting little twerps fill the pages of the modern rag and reality TV show.

Perhaps you are wondering you could live up to my high standards of charm, uniqueness, intelligence, attractiveness and expertise. You are? Well then, allow me to present the man who started it all, the first man to have women throwing themselves at him sight unseen, the only to be talked about in London in 1816:

Byron, painted after his death fighting for Greek independence, crowned with laurels.

Lord Byron, famously named by a lover as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." His lyric poetry, combined with luscious dark curls, brought him fame at a young age. His sensual appeal appears in his work throughout his life; indeed, it becomes a part of it. Even after becoming too 'bad' for the London scene to tolerate, when his divorce from his wife brought up questions of sodomy and incest and his debts from his exorbitant drinking and gambling chased him to the continent.

Difficult in person, but in theory a dream of a man, he kept his readers, especially the female of the species, enthralled with his tales of dark heroes who were all reminiscent of him. In his rollicking epic Don Juan, in which he, as narrator, begins to write events of his own life into the poem, and between the bawdy lies and bawdier truth one is utterly charmed. He and his work are engrossing, whether your taste is for the Gothic, the lyric, or the romance, you'll find a witty and sexy bad boy reflected within. Take a look at a biography, like the one by Elizabeth Longford that I'm reading now, and you find a string of romances and writings, and a poor biographer struggling to defend Byron from a thousand accusations, even now the individual fighting against the world.

Celebrity culture, created by Byron, who put his life into his writing, was furthered by Oscar Wilde, another British dandy at the opposite end of the 19th century, who declared his life was art. Wilde dressed and acted the part throughout, and slyly led respectable Victorians to the precipice of free-thinking anti-prudery. Outrageous and flamboyant as a drag queen in his velvets and green carnations, Wilde scandalized the public with his unique morality of aesthetics even as they laughed at themselves when he tore high society to shreds in the theatre. Tried 'for posing as a Sodomite,' Wilde could no longer not speak 'the truth that dared not speak its name' and the media frenzy was bigger than OJ Simpson and Britney Spears combined when he was sentenced to prison.

Depicting Wilde's reception in America on his book tour. He started a sunflower craze.

Byron and Wilde, the patron saints of this blog, whose contributions to aesthetics are as notable for they way they lived as what they wrote. Interesting and with eventful, active lives, the talented and dangerous duo also happened to be damned good writers who brought glamour to the arts. Blame them for celebrity culture if you will, I just wish that there were more celebrities like them.

Unfinished and Unread Books

Lately all these arts and culture posts have been artsy in a visual way. That's fine in itself, except it's a symptom of a greater malady. And no, not being sick of hearing about the presidential election. It's that I can't dig my teeth into any new book. True, I could be to blame. I did try to read up on medieval history and found my enthusiasm waned quickly. There were no pictures. But I also took out a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel, whose style is excellent and subjects are humorous and folksy. He has a great short story, Guy de Maupassant, and it inspired me to go for the whole oeuvre at once. Sigh...bad idea.

I went to the New York Public library online. It's hard to search their catalogs, and I ended up almost ordering a dozen old favorites. However, the point is that I want new contemporary fiction. After my Milan Kundera phase, I want a new pet author. And I do not want this to became a fall of Dostoevsky or a winter of Proust. Dear god, I want to get through the winter without committing suicide. Classics thought they may be, my mind doesn't seem to be up for a challenge.

So I went to Borders looking for a cure. Tragic. The books they put on those shelves did not inspire me to read, but to finish my novel in a hurry, while the general reading public has no taste. Maybe then my project would survive on the turbulent waters of publishing.

What else has fallen beside the wayside? Poetry. I love the 17th century British poets, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, and of course Lord Byron. Lately, nothing has moved me.

Any suggestions to stir me out of this apathy? Anything? I'm on the library website now...