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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
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7:01 pm - Jewelled Snot
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leopold_paula_b
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Gustave Moreau took it up with morbidity and conscious artificiality — painting in a style that Paul Gauguin called "jewelled snot".
This is from Guy Davenport's essay "The Head as Fate". Can anyone help me find the original French quote?
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, April 26th, 2008
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5:55 pm
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phantastes
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So, growing up an anglophone an American with a northern-European based education, I know next to nothing about the literature of the Iberian peninsula. I could count the number of Spanish writers I know even by name on one hand, and until about weeks ago I don't think I could've named a single Portugese one. For those as ignorant as I, though, I should mention that at least one, Fernando Pessoa, is well worth getting more familiar with. He's supposedly the greatest Portugese poet of the past century, and one of those obscure but great and newly-rediscovered heroes of modernism that seem to be a dime a dozen these days, most famous for writing poetry under a number of different alter egos or "heteronyms", all with their own distinct personalities, philosophies, biographies, and poetic styles (though this concept doesn't strike me as quite so revolutionary or postmodern as it's purported to be)- you can find a fairly decent and informative article about him (written, somewhat amusingly, by a "founding member of Blondie and contributor to Fortean Times") here. I don't feel terribly qualified to comment on his poetry, which I've only skimmed in briefly in translation sitting in a chain bookstore (hardly ideal circumstances), but I can say that, at least from the evidence of the first 20 pages, "The Book of Disquiet" (a collection of self-consciously fragmentary, pensee-style set of journal entries claiming to be the "factless autobiography" of one "Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon") is one of the more tremble-provoking, consoling, and heartbreakingly lovely things that I've read in quite some time, and one that I suspect might appeal to quite a few readers of this community. So, if you come upon a copy, I most highly recommend you take a look.
If I might be permitted to quote a few passages from the beginning, not the prettiest but among the more easily excerptable:
"And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life, Could it think, the heart would stop beating...
We're well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There's no sunset so lovely that it couldn't be lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they're finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day...
I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing--for myself along--wispy songs that I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain the on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."
current music: The Secret History- "Our Lady of Pompeii"
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 11th, 2008
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11:29 pm - Ernest Dowson
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| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
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1:31 pm
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phantastes
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As I recently saw on the "Strange Tears" community, it seems that Dedalus books (the most prolific publisher I know of for comparatively obscure European decadent literature) has lost its funding (from the British arts council), and is in danger of going under. They've a petition at their website for the signing, should anyone care to (my apologies to everyone whose going to see this twice, but I thought it would likely be of some interest to the members of this community as well, and I thought their petition could probably use as many signatures as possible).
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 4th, 2008
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6:44 pm - Previous post (for Kira)
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malkhos
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In case it escaped the moderator's attention, the preceeding post (which seems to have replies disabled) is spam.
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, February 1st, 2008
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11:22 pm - A Propos of Vienna and Decadence
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phantastes
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This song by Leonard Cohen, loosely translated from a poem by Lorca, has always entertained me a great deal. (I wish I could provide a link to the actual song, which is every bit as delightfully overwrought and melodramatic as the words, but for now the words will have to do):
Now in Vienna there are ten pretty women.
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There's a tree where the doves go to die.
There's a piece that was torn from the morning,
and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.
I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.
In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love's never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
in a cry filled with footsteps and sand --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
with its very own breath
of brandy and death,
dragging its tail in the sea.
There's a concert hall in Vienna
where your mouth had a thousand reviews.
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking,
they've been sentenced to death by the blues.
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
with a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz, it's been dying for years.
There's an attic where children are playing,
where I've got to lie down with you soon,
in a dream of Hungarian lanterns,
in the mist of some sweet afternoon.
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow,
all your sheep and your lilies of snow --
Ay, ay ay ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"
And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist --
O my love, O my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it's yours now. It's all that there is.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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1:53 am - Reconstruction of the Amber Room
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vonjunzt
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I'm sure our friend Des Essenties would heartily applaud the reconstruction of the Amber Room in St. Petersburg. Imagine, a room constructed entirely out of amber! Unfortunately, I can't seem to determine what material was used for the reconstruction -- I somehow doubt it's real amber, though I could be mistaken.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
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8:41 pm - seeking a few more friends
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ohmypersephone
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For your viewing pleasure, Schiele. Any other particular devotees of Expressionism and/or Vienna here?
(Hello, I'm Isabella, expatriate, sometime decadent, and soon-to-be theology student, seeking like-minded individuals/journals to read and by whom to be read...)
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(19 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, January 25th, 2008
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9:20 pm - Publius Vergilius Maro
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phantastes
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I'm no particular fan of the so-called "Golden Age" of Latin literature, and I'd be the first to agree that all the scorn heaped upon, say, Horace and Cicero is richly deserved (though there's something to be said for Catullus and what little of Ennius survives), but I do think that our friend Des Esseintes was perhaps a bit unnecessarily hard on the poor "Swan of Mantua". Admittedly, my Latin is nowhere near good enough to tell whether his hexameters indeed ring false, or to judge to what extent the prosody is padded, barren, and pedantic, and the Aeniad, at least in translation, is indeed unbearably pompous and deathly dull. The Georgics, however, are a delight from start to finish, at least to a reader raised on the pastoral/romantic tradition of English poetry- charming and vivid, with a wonderful eye for detail and the kind of solemn, almost liturgical reverence for the cycles of, well, for lack of a better word, that I suspect would have delighted Huysmans had he found it in a medieval Book of Hours or the miniatures in the margins of an illuminated manuscript. The Eclogues are rather more of a mixed bag, sometimes fresh and springlike, sometimes tiresome, insipid, and full of conventions that seem stale even to a reader who's never encountered them before, often within the same poem. There are enough charming passages to make their perusal worthwhile, though, and every so often you'll stumble upon something genuinely marvelous and strange, as I did when trying a translation of the eighth one, describing a magic rite meant to bring a the shepherd's man back from the big bad city:
( The text in the original Latin, should you care to tackle it )
( and a kind of awful translation by some fellow named J.B. Greenough, sadly the only one that seems to be readily available on the internet, as I'm to lazy to retype my own painfully literal prose version )
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(20 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
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11:26 pm
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| Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
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11:05 am - In Memoriam Ingmar Bergman
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| Sunday, June 24th, 2007
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10:30 pm - And now, Happy Feast of Saint John the Baptist!
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| Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
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7:10 pm - Happy Birthday, Egon Schiele
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| Saturday, June 9th, 2007
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4:05 pm - New article about Edgar Allan Poe
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| Thursday, May 31st, 2007
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12:22 am - New Group
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| Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
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10:45 pm - Essays on Dolls - Heinrich von Kleist, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke (1994)
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mo_no_chrome
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This slim volume, in Penguin's Syrens series, collects three essays: von Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre (1810), Baudelaire's The Philosophy of Toys (1853), and Rilke's Dolls: On the wax dolls of Lotte Pritzel (1913/14). It's a remarkable collection, demonstrating the casual yet weighty essay style which in our age has become the realm of the polemicist alone.
von Kleist's conversational, but dense, essay, concerns a master dancer's discussion of marionettes, dolls which are attached to those who manipulate them only by one string placed at the centre of gravity. The joy of these dolls, says the dancer, is that they are unselfconscious, free from affectation, and weightless. Grace (and here we see a confluence of divine grace, and gracefulness), argues Kleist, exists in opposition to thought. In the human form, it can only be reconciled in the inanimate (the soulless), or the divine (the infinite soul).
Baudelaire takes us from a childhood experience in a rich woman's fantasyland of toys, to a discussion of the way in which playing with toys is the first expression of abstraction and imagination (though Baudelaire excludes from this those children who 'merely' recreate adult situations - and here there is a certain misogyny in evidence in his scorn for female children playing at childish women - and also excludes 'men-children' who collect, rather than play with, their toys - a problematic argument, to my mind, since this might be read as a symptom either of anxiety or of possessiveness, but not, certainly, as a lack of creativity). But the ultimate desire of a child is to see the soul of a toy, and for this reason, at some time or another, the child breaks the toy. Just as playing marks the beginning of abstraction and imagination, so the failure to find the soul gives the first sensation of stupor and melancholy. And so, we might conclude, imagination and creativity are inextricably linked with disappointment and melancholy...
Rilke takes us to darker places yet. He begins with an examination of the dolls, made for artistic exhibition to adults, of Lotte Pritzel - these, according to Idris Parry, the editor and translator, were elongated, emaciated figures dressed in weird gauzy costumes suggestive of dance, decadence, and a Beardsley-esque atmosphere of eroticism and melancholy.
This is Rilke's introduction to his argument on the way in which dolls, in contrast to other everyday objects which gain by their integration into human life, are 'gruesome foreign bodies' on which our affection is entirely squandered, dense repositories of forgetfulness, so devoid of imagination that, at an age in which it was impossible to truly interact with other humans but only to lose ourselves in them, they can be used to establish distance between the self and the external world, as they become repositories for split or opposing parts of that self as it expands. But we rage at these creatures, because they do not need us, and we have wasted our affection on them (and the doll's lack of response gives us the lovely thought that silence confers considerable importance in a world where both destiny and God 'have become famous mainly by not speaking to us'). The doll helps the child become used to things; but it also inspires the first bitterness of wasted tenderness. Of all toys, the doll is soulless, or rather the self is uncertain whether the doll's soul resides in the self or in the doll; dolls have a quality of not being present. They are thus kept in existence only by a monumental mental effort combining anxiety and magnanimity, but we can never entirely detach ourselves from this experience of the uncertainty of the other, our desire to create them, our rage at the fact that they will never return what we gave in the spirit of expectations with which we gave it. And these adult dolls of Pritzel's? They are are dolls who have 'entered into all the unrealities of their own lives', have become an unnerving symbol only of the permanent sensuality of the doll, 'into which nothing flows and from which nothing escapes'.
These reflections on creation in our own image essentially concern the constructed nature of the self and the sensual, the physical, the material and its relation to the soul or the spirit. They inform our understanding not only of their subject but of works from Coppelia to Hans Bellmer's Doll, and the perennial fear of dolls and mannequins expressed in films from House of Wax to Child's Play. It's no coincidence that that most of the earliest examples of works of creativity are human forms, or that man made god make man in his own image...
x-posted to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) strange_tears, talkbooks
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 24th, 2007
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5:56 pm
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phantastes
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Those who are inclined to agree with the Proverb of Hell that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, or even those who share Des Esseintes' healthy distaste for golden-age latin literature might be pleased to learn, if they do not know it already, that Horace's "golden mean" is, in the original, "auras mediocritas."
current mood:  amused
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 5th, 2007
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11:58 pm - The abject, sensual and transgressive in Plath, Rimbaud and Verlaine.
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mo_no_chrome
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A wonderful passage from Sylvia Plath's Journals - both incisively written, weirdly lyrical and beautifully transgressive - which Plath wrote when she was still an undergraduate(!). I found the piece in Janet Malcolm's excellent The Silent Woman: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
I thought this piece fitted our ethos inasmuch as it involves the forbidden sensuality of transgression; and because, although Plath's pleasures are solitary, rather than focusing on an external amatory object, I'd still see this work as having a great deal in common with a positive sensual exploration of the abject like Rimbaud and Verlaine's ( Sonnet du Trou du Cul ).
Personally, though not a big Dylan fan I like his cynical nod to the (warning: massive understatement ahead) 'troubled' couple in You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go). But, to turn to Plath:
As for minute joys: as I was saying: do you realize the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose? I always have, ever since I was a child. There are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucus in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the soft, resilient, elastic greenish-yellow smallish blobs of mucus, roll them round and jellylike between thumb and forefinger, and spread them on the under-surface of a desk or chair where they will harden into organic crusts. How many desks and chairs have I thus secretively befouled since childhood? Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with the mucus: in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes. God, what a sexual satisfaction! It is absorbing to look with new sudden eyes on the old worn habits: to see a sudden luxurious and pestilential "snot-green sea," and shiver with the shock of recognition.
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curious
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