Preference for Fictional Fiction

In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don't have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana's death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana's mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It's a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella's plot was imagined and the film's was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It's handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.

I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth's reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?

Suffering for Art

Artists get credit for suffering for art, but what about the viewers?


I sat watching a play, in the leftmost corner of the gallery where a chilly draft plagued me, for over 2 hours. It wasn't torture to be cold, and an angle that wouldn't suffice for TV watching or Internet surfing was somehow worthwhile for the stage. At the end of the play, like a bunch of trained monkeys, everyone watching hit their hands together to make a slapping sound. Why do we clap? How is it more civilized than howls or stomping? It signifies our enjoyment, but what is this quality of aesthetic enjoyment--this dreamy break from reality that takes on the guise of reality? Why is a simulacrum of reality more pleasurable to watch than the thing itself?

Aesthetic expereince, whether it's a play or a painting, is a combination of cultural expectations and an innate human need to image. While we may frame our experiences with a stage or strips of wood to set something off as art, art moves us in a very innate way. So then we express our reaction by hitting our palms together...?

We are a strange animal.

Fashion Saves Economy

Christian Dior, couture 2009. Similar to images in recent posts, this dress is not recession-friendly.

This is a classic example of a patently untrue headline written to get attention, and lure the reader into the rest of the article. Fashion, despite the importance it gives itself, not to mention our necessity for clothes, could not save the economy alone, and the tents going up in Bryant Park and across the city for New York Fashion Week are certainly not going to do so. But don't tell that to the designers or newspapers.

Reading fashion week coverage, the recession is on everyone's (including Diane Von Furstenberg's) lips. While saying times are tough, designers are also saying that they are necessary to a vibrant economy, that they create jobs, that it is always important for a woman to look and feel beautiful. Sorry designers, this may be a recession without breadlines, but that doesn't mean people are buying couture.

Von Furstenberg's vision of recession

The thing is, I believe them on a certain level. A recession influences style, both larger trends and what an individual can afford to wear, but it also doesn't take away a person's interest in looking good. The need for beauty hasn't dimished.

From the other side of the tracks, art has been claiming style as it's own as a result of the recession. The confluence of fine art and fashion, much like art and advertising, is not new. But only recently have I heard someone say that,

“I think I represent the future of contemporary art and the synthesis of so many worlds that include contemporary art, like fashion. We can try taking it into the wider reaches of our culture in general, making it more accessible"

as the young Nicola Vassell does in a recent New York Times article. I have mixed feelings about the synthesis of fashion and fine art. Fine art has never been married to practical concerns of life and daily wear and tear, and a beautiful dress has never moved me like a beautiful painting.

Marc Jacob's recession chic

On the other hand, the intersection of life and art is fascinating, and fashion is an excellent example of that. The New York shows have a lot to deliver if they plan on saving the economy, beautifying women, and retaining the art to their fashion on a budget. For coverage of the shows, click here and the excellent commentary of Suzy Menkes click here. Let me know what you think about fashion as art.

Little Grey Cells Tackle Agatha's Christies Perennial Popularity

Agatha Christie's murder mysteries is to crime what Romeo and Juliet is to lovers; her thrillers inspires admiration from criminals themselves. My ignorant companion of last night made some distinctly unappreciative sounds when he discovered what my 'big find' at the library yesterday was. Harrumph! was my returning noise, and so we watched The Blue Train, A&E version of the novel starring David Suchet. Soon he was chuckling at the detective Poirot's vanity over his waxed moustache and throwing out (entirely wrong) guesses as to whodunit. The perennial popularity of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time at over 2 billion books, stem from the 'order and method' she uses to construct her thrillers, the same 'order and method of the little grey cells' with which Poirot solves his cases.

Order and Method
Agatha Christie's work is brilliant because its purely driven by plot. A whodunit is a suspenseful process of revealing facts, and with Poirot's 'order and method' arranging them into a solution. The order and method of my little grey cells, as opposed to Poirot's, are perhaps not so strong. In Christie's work, nothing in the plot is superfluous to arriving at this denouement. Characters gradually expose themselves in connection to it, people knew each other through it, and closed situations such as the snowed-in manor house or blue train have the advantage of keeping the suspect pool focused but large.

This is not to say I disparage her characters because they are by-products of plot. She sketches individuality in a few quick strokes. Overall, her books capture post-WWII British society with the wounds of the past and the changing mores of the Jazz Age. But her characters are plausible without the reader being tempted into their interior lives. They are shallow books of circumstance and mere fun, but mere fun is a great thing and Christie writes them to perfection.

Christie quite rightly tends to keep the viewpoint to a limited 3rd person, so that we see what Poirot sees, but not what he thinks. This engages the reader to sleuth out the mystery too. The few novels that she has done from the point of view of a character has its pitfalls, as the reader automatically side with the protagonist. It feels like a gyp when something happens that the narrator leaves out.

Of course she's popular: her whodunits perfect their type, and her detectives are delicious, whether it be the wax-moustached Belgian Hercule Poirot or the old village gossip Miss Marple.

But who is this woman?
The Queen of Crime was in many senses a steadfast, disciplined writer who produced mystery upon mystery rather than illegal activities. She remains something of an enigma herself. While the later part of her life found her happily married to an archaeologist- not Mr. Christie- and going on digs between buying new houses, there was a most curious case (more here) in her youth. The only odd incident in an interesting, but ordinary life.

She disappeared in 1926. Classically enough, without a trace. The police were at their wits end for 11 days. Then one day a reporter is in a hotel lobby in the country. He notices something odd about the woman sitting on the chair. "Mrs. Christie?" he asks. Mrs. Christie blinks, and says "Oh yes. I have no idea how I got here." To the end of her life she claimed amnesia.

Jealousy Strikes Over Writer's Rooms

A creative space, exactly as you like it, and a routine, undisturbed, can make a day or, in the case of some people, a work of art. Balancing work and writing is something I've thought about lately, but more than that I'm curious about other people. How do they write best? So to fill that curiosity, we have creatives spaces and routines...(ahh, the wonders of the internet.)

Rooms:

The Guardian has a great page dedicated to writer's rooms...literally a series of photographic "portraits" of the rooms the writers work in by Eamonn McCabe. Coincidentally, McCabe has an exhibit that just opened that runs through January 17 at Madison Contemporary Art if you are in London.

They're gorgeous and interesting shots that give you an intimate look of the creative spaces of various authors. They tend to have a desk and a computer...but other than that, these spaces are as varied as can be. Some are bare spaces with merely a desk, but most tend toward a messy, comfortably chaotic appeal. I wish they would do a series of artist's studios next.

These are clearly all successful, middle-aged writers because they have rooms they can devote to writing. I live in New York city, and have a compact desk in my bedroom that I can devote to writing. There is just room for it between the door and the bed. It's usually crowded with papers that I once meant to look at. The chair hurts my shoulders after a while. A certain someone likes to sit at it with his computer. And so, my workspace has become wherever there is a computer. A helpful versatility, no doubt, but I envy the luxury of a room of one's own and the flourish of a quill pen, like in Jane Austen's room, right.

Routine:

It isn't mere space I pine for, but the lives that could be led in them. Similar to these room portraits, blog Daily Routines gives a brief summary of how artists, writers, and other 'interesting people' organize their day in all its intimate detail. The writer Murakami runs marathons to get into a zenlike state, much like his dreamy novels. Kafka's is bizzare. Truman Capote is a "horizontal" author.

My routine involves a lot of 'sometimes'. I go to an office sometime. Sometimes I have been up writing or reading for an hour. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I'll polish something up during the day, sometimes I'll write at night. Today, I'll cook up a nice breakfast and lay in bed typing while trying to plan the most productive possible day.

I'm still settling into a quasi-writing life, but I have dreams of what it would be like. They run along the lines Oscar Wilde's perscriptum of life as art. In which case, I have a lot of work to do. Christmas angels and huge koi decals are competing for decorative space to ill effect in this writer's rooms. Yet based on the differences I found in rooms and routines, I'd have to say to each his own.

Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf: French Icons with Panache

Beware the women of Paris. They will chew you like a baguette, and down you with a sip of wine.




Formed by a hard childhood in poverty and wartime France, these two self-made women Coco Chanel, legendary house founder of Chanel, and Edith Piaf, "the little songbird" (at 4 feet 10 inches) exercised a severe dedication to their arts that led to international success and renown. Despite personal problems and society's moral approbation, the designer and the singer fashioned themselves into the top people in their profession, in a style that was wholly their own.

I watched La Vie En Rose last night, a 2007 movie telling the tempestuous life of French singer Edith Piaf starring the excellent Marion Cotillard. The movie switches poetically between scenes of her childhood and her early death from liver cancer at 48 years of age, and I recommend seeing it. Born in 1915 to a mother who sang on the streets and later deserted her and a circus performer father who left her in a brothel where prostitutes cared for her until he took her to sing on the streets at 14, Edith had small prospects and no education. A club owner recognized the talent in the starving street urchin at age 20, and her fortunes begin to change. Along with success came tragic love affairs and morphine and alcohol addiction. The movie paints her as the 'artiste' throwing temper tantrums, and she retains a coarseness throughout her life. Edith was not always a pleasant person, but then neither was Coco when something blocked her shrewd plans (albeit Coco exhibited great self-control).

Perhaps this temperamental street brat doesn't seem similar to Coco Chanel, educated in a convent and now the epitome of elegance? Yet the two aren't linked merely by coming into the height of their power around the WWII, worldwide success and a close identification with that French je ne sais quoi.

As women, they overcame the social stigma of their origins, had affairs with rich and successful men and were left brokenhearted, and surpassed who they were as individuals by creating something bigger than themselves, seen today in their fascinating legends. In an age where women weren't praised for grit or business acumen or unfailing dedication to art over home and family, these were women to be reckoned with. They weathered changing fortune not with happiness so much as triumph.

WWII found Paris overrun with Nazis. Coco had closed her shops in 1939 and took up residence in the Hôtel Ritz Paris, where she stayed through the Nazi occupation of Paris. During that time she was criticized for having an affair with a German officer/Nazi spy who arranged for her to remain in the hotel. The French despised her after that liaison. What did she do? Come out with a collection after the war the was a sensational hit in America.

Edith was a frequent performer at German Forces social gatherings in occupied France, and many people considered her a traitor. Following the war she claimed to have been working for the French resistance, but then she, and Coco, often lied about themselves. Despite the negative stigma, she remained a national and international favorite.

Small women of bad family and little education, they became enigmatic French icons. They became such with panache. It makes me want to stroll the banks of the Seine in Chanel humming Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and nursing heartbreak with cigarettes and wine.

Greater women in Kate Christensen’s The Great Man

Terrible title, but I picked it up because there was a paint brush on the cover. I didn't know about Kate Christensen's other novels or that this one had won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Instead of the light trash I imagined, I'm in the midst of the lives of some intriguing women as they sort themselves out as the great (dead) man's biographers stir up their static lives. On knowing this, the title becomes amusing, especially because the book is about the not-so-great, great man's many women.

The dead artist, Oscar Feldman, binds his wife Abigail, his sister Maxine, and his mistress Teddy together, and not always in ways they enjoy. These very different and complex women are complex and passionate. Oh, they happen to be old. That's by no means a focus of the story, but I find it interesting to see old women as active characters. The fact the Oscar was a selfish womanizer who got everything he wanted makes their stories a bit more poignant.


The male biographers who come to interview these women think of Oscar as a great painter, a great man. As the women see it, Oscar was a good painter rather than a great man, and a closely guarded secret bears them out. The Great Man theory, according to Wikipedia, is a theory that aims to explain history by the impact of "Great men", or heroes; that is, highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence and wisdom or Machiavellianism, used power in a way that had a decisive historical impact. Examples would be Stalin or Napoleon, my image left, or Oscar Feldman. Except the novel snips away at the Great Man theory with curt comment after snide remark. A purely feminist approach to this novel would be limiting, but it is satisfying to see the women come into their own in the wake of Oscar's death. It certainly beats cats and knitting.

Christensen captures the competitiveness of the art world and its strikingly different personalities with tongue-in-cheek humor. The character Maxine provides a stringent perspective on all art (besides her own), like

the dinner party where she criticizes the artist across the table and her dealer in a sweep of faux pauxs. Oscar's paintings get ripped apart women by women to the starry-eyed biographers dismay. A question of authenticity arises about some important paintings, and the art world buzz is so strong the book hums a bit in the reader's hands.

Vibrant women and art transforms this book on the great man into a delightful dialogue that would be a home Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Chicago, who created the art installtion of a triangular table with 39 places for iconic women, stated that its purpose was to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record." Appropriately enough, The Great Man is the story of women writing themselves into history.

I'm 2/3rds of the way through, which is the perfect time to review a book: I can't give away the ending, but I know quite well what I think. The characters are delightful, and the plot well-constructed. I got more swept up in it than I expected, despite having reservations about the writing itself. Obviously it's well-written enough to convey characters that are sweeping me along, yet the language itself is predictable and non-distinct. Don't let my nit-picks or this sketchy plot outline dissuade you though; Christensen is onto something quite delightful.

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.

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.

Paul McCarntey and Nicolas Sarkozy star in Art Gone Asunder

Two fabulous headlines for your Wednesday morning: Paul McCartney left his head on a train and Sarkozy is 'needled' by voodoo doll.

Ahhhh...Wednesday morning news...

Paul McCartney’s Head?

Yes, it's true. McCartney's head has been lost, rather, the ape-like wax representation of it. Professional transporter/grand bobby Joby Carter was taking it to an auction in Berkshire, England, where it was estimated to fetch up to 10,000 pounds. Then Carter, similar to Mrs. Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, left the baby, ahem, the head. The BBC reports: "The head was left in a bag under a seat on a train from London at Maidenhead station in Berkshire on Thursday. The service would have terminated at Reading."

I suspect McCartney paid him so that nobody would ever connect him with that terrible head again. And speaking of unwanted likenesses, Sarkozy's in a bit of a stitch across the channel. Oh the power of the public image! Oh life as art! Oh unwanted portraiture! Oh the horror!

Nicolas Sarkozy is not amused.
As one can tell from the image of the French President, left, Sarkozy is not amused to have been transformed into a voodoo doll. BBC reports that "Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company if it does not withdraw from shops a 'voodoo doll' in his image." It even comes with pins! According to BBC, "The publisher said Mr Sarkozy's reaction was 'totally disproportionate' and has so far refused to pull the doll from shops." Vive la revolution!

Ah, life and art don't really change, do they? As I wrote in an earlier post, a voodoo doll bears a remarkable similarity to a medieval portrait, and here we see the voodoo doll as portrait. In the Medieval ages after a regime change, the new rulers would scratch out the eyes in portraits of previous rulers.

So what conclusions can be drawn from this morning's news? If you are a public figure, people will do terrible things to your likeness, in which case you must either steal or sue the maker. Then after passing your hands three times over the false image, you must suck the tiny bit of your soul that is trapped in it out. (I recommend the breath they teach in Lamaze class.) Then you must burn the false, soul-sucking idol. Add its charred remains to the images you create of your enemies for a little extra oomph.

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.