Favorite Women of Art #10: Amour--Maurice Denis (1899)

This is almost "modern", but it speaks to me. I think it is the combination of the hair (I love it), and the slender, delicate, childlike figure, which do remind me of (grown) women I have actually seen, though the type is rare, as well the slumbery blueness and stars. It also reminds me--is really of a piece with--the famous and, to me, haunting musical compositions of Debussy and Satie that date from the same period and of which, though I make no profession to being a musical man, I am extremely fond. The direction in which certain aspects of the arts appeared to be moving at this time, needless to say, from my present vantage point, appeals to me greatly, and it is not clear to me why, among several competing paths, this particular one seems to have been so thoroughly snuffed out. Its worldview is still something that informs, and I think necessarily and fortuitously so, my dealings and engagements with the various great matter outside my own skull, though doubtless hampered by the twin curses of sensitivity and a sentimental rather than intellectual nature.

As my knowledge of this picture is courtesy of a little book of poems and artworks called "Art & Love" published by the Metropolitan Museum that I picked up somewhere in the course of my wanderings (I think I may gotten it in Brattleboro. I find I am often inexplicably inspired to buy things in Brattleboro that I would not think of buying anywhere else), I have always associated it with New York and the romantic notions I used to carry of that city, but really the associations could be of any ideally exciting cultural place full of beautiful and intelligent and, yes, sensitive young people like one's self, or rather one's ideal would-be, or would-have-been self. This is all very melancholy and self-pitying, and perhaps is an argument against the artwork by the more hardheaded and warlike among us, but the fact is that the picture does induce a sensation in me of great loneliness and sadness, albeit a very pleasing and beautiful and whimsical loneliness and sadness, to which I am admittedly too susceptible. Nonetheless I cannot leave it off the list.

I recently watched a film with my wife called "The Music Teacher" ("Le Maitre de Musique" for those who require original titles whenever possible). It is a Belgian movie about opera singers set around 1900. The "pitch" as given on the box of the film itself is "Amadeus meets Rocky". To give a quick review, the plot, writing and characters are pretty weak, and the governing POV of what it means/takes to be a great artist or to associate with the same, is Gallic to the core, or at least that which seems to have held sway in the official intellectual and high-middlebrow circles which have dominated the French cultural atmosphere for most of the last century, which I generally think is crap. On the pro side however, there are many beautifully filmed scenes and wonderful, even rather merry-sounding songs from the opera repertoire with which I was not previously familiar (if I can figure out what they were, I might list them here in a later post). The point of this digression, however, is that at one point in the film, late the night before the big singing competition that provides the `Rocky` element of the story, the 18-year old ingenue enters unnoticed and unchaperoned the room of her fellow pupil and budding star (who was discovered while picking pockets at a train station) to complete the last necessities of her artistic training, as the French mind would have it, in a horizontal position. (Some back story is necessary here: she had previously fallen in love with the old master, which everyone, including the master himself, had deemed beforehand to be necessary to her singing education. The master however being practically on his deathbed, was not up to the requirements this entailed on him, which occasioned the necessity for his finding the pickpocketing protege.) While I was enraptured by the glories of the classical artistic life, the inimintably sensible Mrs. S said `Pause the tape right there!` (Yes I still watch tapes. My children have broken both of the DVD players I have owned within a month.) She pointed out that modern movies cannot seem to help themselves in making well-bred and upper class young women from remote time periods as devoted to the practice of free love as modern shopgirls on package vacations to Ibiza, citing `Titanic` and a recent adaptation of `Mansfield Park` (in which some incest that is probably only even suggested in the book by the luridness of the modern imagination is presented in fully consummated glory by the edgy modern director) as other examples of the type, though she expected better from the French-speaking world (Why?). Her point was that if women, especially wealthy women, even intelligent and strong ones, had had such freedoms, even in matters of speech, let alone sensual ones, and such human regard as are depicted in these modern movies, the feminist movement would have been considerably less fervent, and perhaps would not have occurred at all. All the while I was thinking naturally of my current infantile romanticizing of the conceptions of feminine beauty which persisted in this time that was in fact highly unenlightened and chauvinistic, and wondering, as I often do in the face of my wife`s mature observations on all matters, first, `why am I so infantilized?` and second, `It is really because I did not spend enough time in my childhood handling and using firearms and engaging in brutal physical contest with other boys (for noble and educational purposes), as so many conservative thinkers seem to attribute the current crisis in American manhood to?`

Just last week it was snowing, but today it was 85 and the girls, as the song goes, were out dressed in their summer clothes. 2 pictures left.

Favorite Women of Art #9--Panel from the Times of Day--Alphonse Mucha (1897) You cannot go too far wrong with Mucha, since all he painted were attractive young women in elegant and flattering poses. I chose the one above for my series because Mrs Bourgeois Surrender bought a print of it when we lived in the Czech Republic (Mucha was Czech and is still much celebrated in that country) and it hung in our bathroom and later my office for many years. Then one day it was gone, shunted off to the attic, for Mrs S had decided that it was the sort of picture a young person would have on her wall, not a 30-year old mother, in which judgement, as she is in all matters of taste, she was exactly right.

But to get back to the subject of the younger and more immature art audience, women of a certain type--a certain type that I like--love Mucha in the same way that they love Klimt and that they love Jules and Jim. He sees them just as, apparently, they want to see themselves, and do see themselves when they are doing something exhilirating or hanging out and holding their own with exhilirating people (i.e., cool men). They like that. His taste admittedly was excellent, though as the remaining pictures I have chosen will demonstrate, this was an age generally that understood what constituted feminine beauty, as well as what adorned most becomingly and upliftingly.

Since Mucha painted so many lovely women, there is no reason not to put another one of his pictures on here. This one is entitled Fruit. I like her lots.

Favorite Women of Art #8: The Toilet of Esther--Theodore Chasseriau (1842)

I feel that I have begun to go off the rails a little in my series, which after all was supposed to be fun, not a demonstration of my psychological estrangement from normal human society. I thought about taking a break from the series and writing a few nontaxing posts about watching music videos from the 80s on Youtube. For example, I had forgotten that Swing out Sister had a second song ("Twilight World") released in the US. Seeing it again made me rather melancholy. Here were people who clearly thought themselves, circa 1988, to be very clever, fashionable, creative, progessive, international--in a word nearly at the extremity of the cutting edge of world civilization itself. Moreover, they had broken through and made some figure in the great world; the possibility, even the probability, that they were in some way important could not but have flitted across their consciousnesses a few times. And then of course, as quickly as they came, they dropped off the face of the earth again, immediately becoming a relic of those very last dregs of the 80s, of the Cold War era, a time that in media and technology and politics and economics at least often feels no less remote than that of the big bands. I had utterly forgotten about them. I remember their song coming on my car radio back when it was new and feeling that it was a harbinger of some excitement coming to happen in my life, I suspect because I was alone, temporarily freed from the dreariness of family life. I was on I-84 somewhere in eastern Connecticut, probably on my way to have lunch at McDonald's and then right through New York City without stopping and on to my mother's in Philadelphia to watch television and evoke pity or scorn from all the regular hard-working people and wander fruitlessly around the neighborhood in search of...? This is what else I have looking at to carry me back to that time:

"Domino Dancing"--The Pet Shop Boys
"Joe le Taxi"-- Vanessa Paradis--terrible video and she is about 13, but it was a big hit when I was first in Paris, and everybody like me always thinks Paris is perfect the way it was when they were first there, and is never quite so wonderful ever after.

"Basketball"-Kurtis Blow

Morrissey--`Suedehead` and `Everyday is Like Sunday`--the essence of Morrissey on video

"Here`s Where the Story Ends"--The Sundays. Harriet Wheeler of course was my dream north-of-England dark rainy evening at the pub date circa 1990.

"Just a Friend"--Biz Markie. Don`t ask. Some things, like my fascination with this song and this performer, defy explanation.

"Wonderwall"--Oasis. I know this is years later, but it was the raging hit the 1st time I was in London, and I didnt make it to London until I was in my mid-20s.

Esther, as she is presented either in the Bible or in this painting, is not a woman of the type with whom I historically have had any success, even so far as getting her to say hello (if she were forced to do so) without a clenched jaw and hostility in her eyes, but this is nothing if not an aspirational web site, and neither artists nor writers seem to able to take her up as a subject without convincing the audience that she is hot-t-t-t-t-t-t-t. Esther was the sexiest female character in the Bible by far. I wish there was a better way I could say it without sullying one of the greatest productions of the human race, but having once read the whole thing straight through there is really no getting around it when you hit that story; it is what is most memorable when you read it. (I always considered Leah to be the second sexiest, by the way; the text insisting that she was inferior to Rachel in every way and was unloved, her story has always interested me, as she was still frequently entered into and impregnated, probably with a certain amount of relish despite not being the dreamgirl or the mother of a race of heroes. There is a lesson in that somewhere.) I dont have a very vivid idea of what Esther might have looked or been like (and her beauty is important, or at least might have been, if the literature is to be believed, to the course of human history.) The intellect suggests that to become the favorite of the King of Persia, a line of men renowned for their sensual appetites even among other Asiatic despots, she must have been a tall, poised, raven haired girl with the body of a college swimmer, though I tend to imagine her as one of the rather small but energetic, motormouthed (and pretty) Jewish girls I knew and loved, deservedly unrequited as it turned out, in my youth. But of course for us gentiles and non-Greeks all these characters and events of antiquity are just symbols that we use, that we only can really use, for our own purposes however petty or great, are they not. The modernists probably set Western art down that same path. We have been knocked loose from the moorings of the past as far as their being to us what they say or suggest they are or are supposed to be. What, after all, are Esther or Theodore Chasseriau to me? I am not of their race nor kind.

Favorite Women of Art #7: Portrait of a Woman Holding a Fan--Goya (1807) I really love her.

If I had lived in this age and been of a rank anywhere comparable to this woman (and the skills of manhood commensurate with that rank) and she had come into my acquaintance, I can't imagine anything that could have prevented me from making some attempt on her virtue. If she were already married? Inconvenient, but then what were all those hours with the fencing master in boyhood spent for, after all? This is not mere ego-gratification or animal lust(though naturally it partakes heavily of both those qualities, as it must), this is Western European post-classical romantic idealized heterosexual love that pierces me through the breast. But why? Because she is half my own self, you fool, and while she may not need me as a lover (it does not follow that I am so fully half her own self--the math is complicated, but necessary to understand), she does need me in some capacity to achieve her own completion.

Favorite Women of Art #6: Marriage-a-la-Mode II-Hogarth (1743)

Between the mid-Elizabethan period, starting with Spenser, and about 1750, when the custom of the Grand Tour had become solidly entrenched and Brittania's rule of the waves and relentless plying of the same helped make the wonders of foreign lands more widely known in that nation, England's poets and prose authors celebrated the whey-faced ladies of that country as the most beautiful in all creation with an enthusiasm that their descendents would, even if they felt the urge to do so, be embarrassed to aver. The Spectator plays up this angle for all it's worth, especially contrasting the artless and natural virtues and delights of the English roses with the vainglorious, conniving decadence of their counterparts in France. Likewise the Cavalier poets and others of that period such as Waller felt no compulsion to seek for ladies to honor in verse among ancient Greeks or medieval princesses, highborn Persians run away to the west in search of the true faith or Venetian chambermaids, when the daughters of Albion themselves were so near to hand. Shakespeare himself, though one of the most universal men ever to walk the face of the earth, was also a English patriot, and not above extolling the merits of the local womanhood in his all-conquering art. Now the economists will easily demonstrate that life in general at this period in England, compared to today, was cruel, painful, smelly and miserable, and no doubt most of us would have to confess them right, though the gaiety of the literature of those woeful bygone ages hints that at least pockets of consolation existed in the human mind and spirit that even we seem to be numb to in our own, whether willfully or not. In this nations are akin to schools, religions, occupations, arts, and sciences, in that a great deal of their strength, especially during the period of their ascension to that strength, is drawn from the general level of esteem with which the various members of the group, particularly the most prominent ones, regard their fellows, which promotes among other things, an atmosphere of high spirit and a sense of community. Thinking highly, or being able to think highly, of the attractiveness and general desirability (as well as ability, personality, intelligence, etc) of the women (or men) of the group of which one is a member or leader is a very high indicator of the health and future prospects of an institution or society. Obviously societies and institutions, being human constructs, mature or outgrow their youthful and perhaps ideal forms, a certain cosmopolitanism is forced upon them as a matter of circumstance, and for a time, sometimes a long one, they appear stronger, wiser, more dynamic than that which the small(er) original in-group inhabited. Eventually however the collective vital spirit is drained any beyond denial and the last remnants of the idea collapse, and no one plausibly identifies himself as a Roman anymore, though this was at one day the most consciously alive and active group of humans on the planet. But I go on too long.

Though I have no doubt the English ladies were as gorgeous at this time as the poets say they were, the nations painters did not really do their part in preserving the glory that was Sacharissa and her sisters. I have not found any pictures that really excite me drawn from this group of women. I chose this one because I have always liked the idea of the bawdy, lolling. gin-guzzling Englishwoman, who kind of went underground during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but slowly began coming back in the 20s and has apparently overrun the womanhood of that great nation again, and Hogarth`s sleepy sensualist is a relatively cute example of the type (the type unfortunately is often not really very cute). Though they are strangely deficient in drawing people in general (though I would not include Hogarth in that censure) compared to certain other nations, I have always been a fan of the British landscape and sea painters, who do present a very distinct idea of how to look at and think of these things which I think we may take for granted because it so culturally near to us. Unlike bad things which we take for granted, and which may be called prejudices, I think these ideas tend to be quite beautiful and positively influence our thought, make us fuller men and women, especially if we are conscious of what we are doing.

I apologize for the sloppiness of the thought and writing here, but I wanted to post today as I probably won`t be back to a computer for 2 days. Why the rush? Nobodys reading the posts anyway, you say? Well, I have six more paintings to do and I want to move on.

Favorite Women of Art #5: Girl Eating Oysters--Jan Steen (c.1659)

After the maelstrom of emotion that the last painting aroused in me, I am going to try to return to a state of greater equanimity with the technical virtuoso and craftsman of minute detail Jan Steen and his devilish young bourgeoise. It might be objected that this girl is not close to stunning enough a beauty for such a list as this purports to be, but she serves a distinct purpose, representing a type that is a little more mildly haunting than that evoked by Velasquez's Venus, but haunting nontheless. The oyster girl recalls to me all the Michelles and Kims and Melissas and Jennys that crowded the high schools in the days when I was attending them, and manned the kitchens and counters of pizzerias and sub shops, the supermarket cash registers and movie theater ticket booths in their off-hours. This work bit is important, because while actually getting any action at school or school-sponsored functions was so unusual as to be almost bad form, things happened at work, or just after it, with such girls, or least such was the constant report, not merely in the school cafeteria, far from the scenes of the alleged licentiousness, but in the bowels of the restaurants or stockrooms themselves. Every time one went into the broom closet where the assistant manager and the loudmouthed waitress and the wiseacre busboy and the mopey but big-breasted busgirl had casually taken down each other's pants for the sport of it, it was impossible not to wonder, will this be the time I get lucky with perky, apple-cheeked Kristin from the Catholic girls school, whom I seem to encounter there on a more frequent basis than random probability would suggest? And then one day of course you show up in a completely dreamy sort of mood, at relative peace with the ridiculous fate that seems to have been meted out to you, and find out she has either gotten it on with the wiseacre busboy right under your nose, or has quit, to be heard from nevermore. Call it a cliche if you will, but when a certain story is the dominant narrative of life for close to half of a given population, as it is in the modern United States, especially where an extreme deprivation of sensual experience in the lustiest years of ones youth is concerned, and the right of performance/publication is practically unhindered, nothing will be able to stop the tale from being repeated many, many times.

Jan Steen is, as I have hinted at before, known for his technical virtuosity. In the original of this picture the details of the oysters, the bread, the dishes, etc, are widely remarked upon, along with the myriad symbols advertising our girl`s *availability* (the dark object behind her against the wall is apparently a bed, in addition to the other clues). I do not have anything else of pertinence to say about him.

That the oyster girl is well within my range of acceptable attractiveness for an assignation, without so much as a second`s hesitation, I think there can be little doubt. I used to affect to myself that I followed a *Helen Keller rule*, on the rationale that as it can be presumed Helen Keller had little idea how attractive or hideous she was compared to other women, if you were actually uglier than she was, that could not be good, and I should be aiming higher, and every real man has to draw the line somewhere anyway, right? Of course:

Helen managed to look kind of cute in a unconsciously dour, quietly frustrated sort of way. In my most desperate hours to have found the likes of her in my arms would have been practically a cause for ecstasy. I come from a very low and a very foul country of the spirit, which paintings and literature and history and all things high merely reinforce in some manner.

I am up off my sickbed finishing this commentary, having had a nasty stomach virus whose effects have made my body, especially my throat, feel as vile to me as my intellect and character ever do upon critical examination. I may return there for a day or two before proceeding with this assignment.

Favorite Women of Art #4: The Rokeby Venus--Velasquez (1648)

This one is perhaps obvious, but is there a finer picture of a woman ever painted? Even Henry James found it impressive (although he and I have in common that we have both gazed upon the original of this painting, when he saw it it was still hanging in the Rokeby castle, where he was a personal guest of the owner). Velasquez is another of those creative masters people like me whose intellectual faculties are easily wearied are attracted to like cats to boiled lobster, who produced superficially easy and perfect works that one cannot imagine having ever possessed any possibility of completion other than as they are. In the modern world the main drawbacks of this kind of perfectly executed presentation in art, music, writing, filmmaking, etc. where it occasionally manifests itself on general subjects is that it threatens to allow people who are not particularly clever or interesting to feel happy or otherwise good about themselves as participants in a more exalted life such as is offered by the artwork, which does not quite do. As it is impossible to keep such art as is naturally pleasing to masses of ordinary people a secret in today`s world, the connoisseur classes have had to invent and to keep inventing new notions of beauty and achievement in every artistic field to keep them esoteric; in which, as they have always been able to do whenever pressed by the mob below, they have evidently succeeded to the satisfaction of most of the sprightliest minds of the age who care about such things.

During the long period from the time I was 16 or17 until I finally matriculated at a college I could somewhat handle when I was 20, I had a lot of wild ideas about what was going to await me when I got there. One of them was that I was going to have sex with a lot of bohemian girls who looked like the Venus in the picture above (I had absolutely no concept of morality or self-control as something that might be desirable where this area was regarded at the time, but that is a subject for another post). For any readers I might have who have had hundreds or even thousands of sex partners, when I say a lot I mean a lot for me. I thought it not unreasonable that over the course of four years I might get to have 20-25 different girls, seeing as other people had so many more, and when in the privacy of my own thoughts or my room I seemed to myself to be just as good as most of them were. Indeed, if at one of these times before I went when I was making these calculations somebody had told me that I was never going to be particularly cool and that I was not going to have anywhere near even 10 girls once I got there I probably would not have bothered going. I`m not kidding either. Now this doesn`t mean I`m not glad I went anyway now, all in all, but I`m trying to demonstrate that it is only such crazy delusions--and I really do have them still--that enable me to get out of bed and carry on and progress at all in life. Even in the midst of realizing some colossal overestimation of my abilities and consequent social disaster, whatever possibility looms next--a new school year, going to Europe or moving to some new city, going to the writing conference--before I go I am absolutely convinced that this time I will finally be ready, my preparations of reading and thinking and writing will finally enable me to combat successfully with other capable men and women. I will be at long last be among the smartest, the coolest, the most accomplished in my chosen field, the most engaging conversationalist, the wittiest with the ladies, etc, etc, in the whole place; and inevitably within the first half-hour of the new setting it is clear that none of this is the case at all, that I am completely overmatched and out of my proper element (God knows what that might be though) compared to just about everyone else, and that if I do talk to anybody who is not also a complete freak they are going to think I am a disturbed misfit and run away from me. And then, when the ordeal of the failure is over, some new possibility for the future arises immediately in my mind. In the first half of my life I was sustained by the idea that someday I really would find myself in a place and position where I would be cool, and where it would be worth being cool; I have finally within the last year I think come to terms with the fact that I am never going to have the social life I want to have, that I am never going to have really high level conversations replete with palpable intellectual or sexual tension with other human beings. Now, and really for the last ten years the main sustaining delusion is that I really am and someday really will be for real a real author of real bound books. The jaded experts assure all failures and wannabes that the accomplishment of their wishes will neither make them happy nor change their perception in the eyes of the world, for unless you do something legitimately magnificent, the world does not care. I am not such a trivial being as to seek happiness, or imagine it is the object of life. My work is important, however, including this blog, even if there is no one capable of liking it that is currently alive, otherwise I could hardly bother doing it, as I hardly bother doing anything else. It seems to me somehow that it has to be made...what else is there?

Favorite Ladies of Art #3: The Procuress--Gerrit von Honthorst (1625)

This reproduction doesn't do justice to what a cutie pie this naughty creature is (I am speaking of the one on the right of course). In my rapid descent into becoming a middle-aged fogey and killjoy I had some misgivings about honoring the depiction of an apparently eager and fun-loving prostititute in my catalogue, but as in the complete innocence of my youth I had a terrific crush on her and everything that she promised, and as any painting this old that induces a crush in a modern person has to be included in a list like this, my scruples are thus pretty easily overcome.
I know nothing about this artist except that he is obviously influenced by Caravaggio and the rage for chiaroscuro (I am not going to look up the spelling; let it serve as a test of how much of a poser I am) and scenes of the dangerous and sordid life that were made popular by that master.

This is one of I believe only two pictures featuring superabundant cleavage on the list in case you were worried I was descending down a one-note path.

This girl facially resembles some girls I went to high school with and whom I cannot really imagine being older than 20, so supergirly were they in appearance and disposition. They constitute in some sense the backbone of the nation, though, albeit a little more shakily than their type was formerly wont. They are the most officious mothers and loyal (if given to frequent complaining) wives remaining among the populous. They willingly take on prodigious amounts of debt to maintain the appearances of middle-class prosperity that are probably beyond their means, as they and their husbands tend to be drawn from the tactile rather than the cerebral segments of the population, and however hard-working or skilled they may be, and however good a living they earn, their potential streams of income tend to be limited; and of course if the modern world and the future are about anything it is about having continually multiplying streams and sources of income flowing into one's coffers. But I have gotten way off the subject now.

Favorite Women of Art #2: La Donna Velata-Raphael (1516)

This painting I have actually seen in person and I was struck by it at the time as, unlike most of the other paintings in the gallery, depicting a human figure that might, however remotely, be knowable to the likes of me. This is no doubt an incorrect and wholly inadvertent conjecture; Raphael's figures having the air, especially to those of us in latter ages, of being flesh and blood human beings in the same way as ourselves, more than those of his contemporaries, and indeed more than perhaps any other painter in history. This is the most immediately distinctive characteristic of his pictures, and is quite wonderful for people who desperately want to feel some connection with the European tradition and the higher points of its history but are usually too completely intellectually overmastered by such specimens as they encounter to consider they have achieved this. I have always thought him one of those figures whose talent/genius is such that his work, once executed, appears to be so obviously what was called for, so obviously true, as to puzzle one that it is so rare, and so unique even among the rarities. He shows men things that they know and have always known, how they would see and think about them if their minds were not so encumbered by crudity and stupidity and conceit. Is it not wonderful how little art manages to attain this clarity, or even strives to?

I suppose one cannot quite imagine taking this particular Donna Velata to McDonalds (on the first date anyway) but certainly I can see her in a kind of scoop-necked black blouse at some cafe connected to an art museum (say the one at the Isabella Stuart Gardner) surrounded by a lot of potted palm plants and Germans declaiming in irritatingly flawless English about the inferiority of the coffee and the comparative weaknesses of the economics faculties at the Universities of Michigan and Cal-Berkeley. So she is not really knowable to me, though I come within a table or two of her on this singular occasion before I have to descend once again from the empyrean of the beautiful, educated, globalized set to my more humble regular life.

Favorite Women of Art #1 Melun Diptych (1454)--Jean Fouquet
I have taken some grief in the past over my fascination with this painting. When I showed a plate of it to Mrs Bourgeois Surrender once she immediately got to the heart of the matter. "You like that girl, eh?" she asked, a little doubtfully, not particularly impressed with the subject. "She has a very, er, natural-looking body." But it is really a very remarkable picture, I pointed out, I have never seen anything remotely like it in its time period, and as to the lady, well...I've never seen anyone remotely like her either, yet...she is rather attractive...she seems as if she really could have existed...This greeted with a half-bemused, half-exasperated look and a pat on the head as if sense and insight were not to be expected in conversation with me.

Most critics comment on the improbable spacing of the lady's breasts and excessively melanin-challenged skin. I have not come across any who have anything to say about her hair.

As this is ostensibly supposed to be a representation of the Virgin, it could be argued that there was a failure of execution in the artist's purpose; for this lady makes one think of Mary mother of Jesus about as much as Kenny G does of Ivan the Terrible. One story has it that the lady is really Agnes Sorel, whom we recently encountered in the Joan of Arc stories, the reputed most beautiful woman in France and mistress of Charles VII. I would be satisfied with that.

Jean Fouquet seems to be the largely consensus choice for the greatest French artist of the 15th century. I don't know how much of an intellectual he was, but he certainly had a brilliant talent for painting, as well as a sensibility for the way painted objects might look that was well in advance of his contemporaries. The allure of his Marie/Agnes to me I think is the combination of the truly gorgeous and ostentatious clothing, including the crown, setting off the pleasing form, or importantly the idea of a pleasing female form that is insisted upon strongly here. The vivid colors of the cherubs that dominate the background contribute to this effect too; but none of it works if the temper and poise and suggested nature of the quaverings of the various parts of the lady's person are not right, and these are all right in this picture.

The Game of Art: APPENDIX: Homage to Favorite Painted Ladies

That the dictum that beauty is truth and truth beauty applies more forcefully in art than in life, one need seek no further demonstration than that it is not absolutely necessary to have a beautiful human being or setting or scene to make a beautiful artwork, but a great artist who is able to penetrate in some way to the truth of his subject. I find the girl in the Chapeau de Paille beautiful or desirable because the artist has seen and given her qualities, has maximized her humanity in a sense, beyond herself, and often beyond the self of the person viewing the picture as well. If one has some affinity with an artist it is not impossible that one will see in actual life what the artist sees and is able to capture. With most artists however, and Rubens is such a one for me, there is no deep affinity of mind, personality, sentiment, etc; thus the beautiful women of his paintings must remain for me exclusively works of art, without any corresponding existence in actual life.

When one does encounter an artist with whom one has more affinity, however, this enables him, among other things, to fall into love primarily with the subject of the painting, and not the painter. This is a noble goal, not merely in art but in literature and music as well, where the cult of the master artist as often as not forms a barrier between the receptive human brain and the work that in a truly perfectly realized and executed production should, in the immediate moment at the very least, be forgotten. I wanted to conclude my little series of art ravings with a commemoration of some such pictures as had this effect on me, in which are depicted such women as made me wish I had known their like in life--yes, indeed, been such a commanding lover as they and all beautiful women doubtless require--at the first encounter, rather than moving immediately from the subject of the picture to the comtemplation of the artist's genius. Not that the contemplation of genius is not a worthwhile and ultimately more important pursuit, but I think ideally, as I have indicated in other essays on poetry and the like, that the awareness of it should quietly complement rather than overhwelm the experience of the actual work.

Some brief notes before I move on to the pictures: I am far from being widely learned in art history, and thus my selections are drawn from a very small pool of paintings that I have once seen either in museums or books and happened to remember. Having culled ten pictures out of my memory as having made an impact on my sensibilities when I first saw them, I have doubtless forgotten a few, and am ignorant of many more images that I would find far superior if I knew about them. I may add supplementsin the future if I come across any new pictures of the type.

My intention is to display the pictures in chronological order. It may be objected of some of the earlier ones, that they depict very high aristocratic ladies with whom I must have nothing in common to discuss or otherwise connect in an intimate manner; however, I counter that in the pre-democratic, pre-bourgeois era, sophistication was only relative to classes of people--rustics, artisans--who were completely uneducated, and therefore likely had intellectual and sensual predilections more similar to that of modern bourgeois than those that later sophisticates developed. All the women in these paintings look to me like people I might have thought about approaching at a college dance, which means their sophistication must be within parameters that I can relate to.

I confess that the working title while I mused on this series was "Come, Come Ye Babes of Art", but I really didn't want it to be, so I didn't use it. It just insinuated itself in my brain and I could not banish it for several weeks.

Assessment of the Current State of this Blog

It is about eight months now since I began publishing this paper. There is as yet no evidence that it has attracted a single reader. The primary goal of this undertaking, to afford me the opportunity to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I was not left hopelessly far behind every capable person in the world in every area of human life that was of value to me, has not been attained. The quality and polish of the writing, which was to be the signature attraction of the blog, have been disappointments. Much of this no doubt is due to the hurriedness and half-attentive process of composition that circumstances tend to impose; however these are the conditions under which everyone operates today; and as with all developments in history, some minds thrive beyond the wildest imaginings of their owners` childhoods under the novel conditions, while others prove completely unable to adapt. Obviously the greatest question facing me over the next decade is how to give my children at least some hope of moving among the agile ones, the ones among whose language and thought all action, all vital life outside our charming but unfortunately isolated household, is led. Of course these vital, world-shaping people know their share of confusion, failure, shame, heartbreak, and all the rest, as these are the experiences that primarily constitute human life at all its levels, but there is still a quality of scale, and of the consolations and compensating activities at the disposal of the better-ordered mind and spirit that makes life worth the trouble, perhaps, I begin to worry, more worth it, than for those minds and spirits that are not so happily developed.

I do hold out hope, however, that these awful ideas, which have only taken possession of my brain because I cannot seem to overcome/disprove them through my own agency, will eventually dissipate. Anthony Powell, whom I have been referring to a great deal lately, wrote of one of his characters (the one the reader can assume is based on himself) that he had never felt so old as when he was in his mid-30s (and he lived to be 95). I suspect this is because at this age one is conscious that there is still a rather long time to have to continue existing set before one while the prospects for one's further improvement or any excitement comparable at least to the possibilities that were conceivable in youth appear increasingly hopeless. At the same time I am reminded also of the ravings of the hapless uncle Carlchen character in the movie Fanny and Alexander. This fellow looks to be in his mid to late 40s, is constantly in debt, though what for is not exactly apparent, the implication being that his income is insufficient with little hope of ever increasing. Among his better lines (in subtitles of course) are "When does a man become second-rate?" and "Why am I such a coward?" Part of the astuteness of this movie is that this speech takes place during the part of the film that will later be looked back on as the happy (or at least a happier) period. There is a lesson I suppose in both of these examples. In Powell the best and liveliest parts of the book, which are set over a fifty year period, are those that take place in this period where we are to suppose the narrator frequently discouraged and on his most uncertain footing. My theory would be that desperation, or some approximation of its sense, plays a part in this, which is of course observable in innumerable other stories as well.

I often wonder that I did not end up like one of those Japanese people one reads about in the papers who never talk to anyone, never leave their bedrooms in daylight, for whole decades, slipping out only in the dead of night to procure food from vending machines (of course the vending machines in Japan are of reputedly of a much superior quality to anything we know here, and you can get beer at them as well). I have been trying in my blog to keep the extreme pessimism, to which I am unfortunately prone, to a minimum. Like everyone else nowadays, I am really a great pragmatist, a man of respectable, rational sense. There is too much information, too much research in human biology, too many breakthroughs in the study of economics, and so on and so on, for anyone of modest sense and awareness to be ignorant of what he is and what he can reasonably expect to be able to do, or even more chillingly, what his children are likely to be and be able to do. Such at least seems to be the consensus and the primary obsession of the age's philosophers, whose tone becomes all the time increasingly impatient with anyone below international-class levels of talent and intelligence; especially such of those in the middling range who instinctly and ignorantly try to resist these salient truths, though it is actually impossible to do so. The demand for talent is so great now, the supply of it so scarce and precious, the search for it on a worldwide scale unprecedented except by comparison to that of minerals in previous ages, that it is become inconceivable that anybody of real worth should go unidentified deep into his life. This is one of the existential truths of any time, I suppose, but ours especially, given the present organization of society and and its peculiar social conditions. This at bottom is of course what this blog is really about; it is also, however, the work of an individual who has had several opportunities to be evaluated for any sign of serious ability by people at fairly high levels of intellect and achievement, and has in every instance failed to make any necessary impression to progress. Thus the blog, as well as the biography and education and activities of its author, are not de facto self-justifying, and indeed in recent years all have been increasingly called to account, both on a personal level and as a general sense of dissatisfaction that has infiltrated the zeitgeist. Thus the deep, dark purpose of the blog, perhaps a hopeless one, has been a stab at justifying my very existence, including the three sons I have propagated, of whose place in anything resembling an identifiable human community or even a normal Western-model economic hierarchy I have no sense whatsoever. I have not yet accomplished this to my satisfaction, to say the least.

I have lamented before the amount of time it takes me to write these entries; though I only post on average once a week I work on this probably five days in the week for an hour or more at a time per day. I cannot work near fast enough. As of now I have at least my next 14 posts planned out all in order, with notes scribbled on various workpads setting out images, ideas I dread forgetting, strategies for ordering paragraphs--but like having a list of hundreds of books before one and being bogged down in a very slow and very long one, you cannot proceed as quickly as you wish if you are going to do it at all well, at least if you are me.

I am literally falling asleep at the computer so I am just going to post and be done with it.

The Game of Art--Part 6


By the time I have arrived at the high moderns my connection, both emotional and cognitive, to museum art, is already grown feeble. After them it evaporates entirely. Abstract expressionism, Postmodernism, Pop Art, whatever came after those things (I have a hard time even reading about anything that has happened since about 1970, so impossible is it to find a neutral or at least reasonably phlegmatic account about what is supposed to have actually happened and why it is important) have no resonance with me. Whatever particular delights or aspirations motivate its admirers to seek it out and try to lay claim to an identity with this work remain beyond my ability even to experience them, cold and inscrutable and indifferent as most of the world and most of life becomes.

Though we have reached the end of the game for me both chronologically and with regard to the height of the social levels I can glimpse, at the end I do not remain confused and despondent among the teasing Picasso and his uptight sensualist-wannabe fans, but decamp back a few centuries in time to a moderately high ground, 2/5ths of the distance from the center to the remote edge of the landscape, an excellent position from which to view nearly all the other hills populated by Westerners anyway, from the Sumerians to the last of the pre-1945 modern Europeans. My hill is fairly sparsely populated, mostly men in proper dinner dress with a scattering of good-looking but forbidding women, all in appearance rich, capable, expensively and carefully educated, possessed of frigid taste, stridently conservative in politics and social behavioral ethics, nastily disdainful of almost everything that does not approach the (not very) various personal standards they have set for themselves. Though they are formally polite enough to me I do not enter into serious conversations with any of them but observe them from a distance. I listen in on them because they speak more often about the things I am interested in than any of the other groups, though they are rarely able to get through a whole relation of anything without encountering a particularly unsavory specimen of their ideological enemies, who must be intellectually skinned and flayed and rendered wholly impotent before they can return to the story of the expatriate poets of 1950s Alexandria or Henry Green's half-decades lost to drink or whatever had been engaging my attention. The totemic painters of this my hill, approved heartily by all my fellows, are Poussin and Tiepolo. I had never heard of either of these artists, and probably would not to this day consider them any more special than dozens of others of their stature at the just sub-Rembrandt/Leonardo/VanGogh level of fame, until I was confonted by each's having a substantial part to play in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (painting by Poussin which inspired the title, above). It is not that I consider Powell or the supremely self-satisfied men and women on my hill paragons of taste, but it is clear that they have had such an education as both makes them capable of having it, and of having a fairly indomitable confidence in such opinions as they do form.

These painters have achieved a most comfortable and, to the confirmed bourgeois, enviable position in the art-stature game by the mores of early 21-century technocentric culture, though they are never set in the very highest niches of the pantheon; they are nonetheless largely unassailable by any force that the most rigorous current criticism seems to have at its disposal. Their technical proficiency is exemplary; their taste in and execution of their subject matter is uniformly of a high and thoroughly intellectually considered nature; in them, man is a more dignified creature in his degradation than moderns are generally able to conceive him in his triumphs. Their works appear, albeit by my very limited anecdotal evidence, to be relatively rare; Poussin's scattered a painting or two at a time around many minor and major museums, though with a decent concentration in London; Tiepolo having the bonus advantage (for snob value) that many of his finest works are on the not easily transportable ceilings of Venetian palaces, many of which remain in private hands and therefore inaccessible to the general public. Indeed I do not know that I have ever seen any of Tiepolo's work--certainly not since I became conscious of who he was, and the fresco of Candaules and Gyges that Powell writes about at such length I have not even been able to find any other reference to in my researches, though I find it strange that if he does refer to an actual work that there should be any difficulty in finding out basic factual information about it. In the Game of Art that I have been writing about however this (very intimate familiarity with and understanding of a painter's work) is often not so important of course, if a certain artist, or certain works or types of works fill an obvious symbolic need in the persona that the player wants to adopt to attract the potentially superior admirers/friends/contacts he seeks by engaging in it. Certainly there are other artists who occupy a similar position with me, especially some of the hyperbolical French romantics, David and Delacroix and the like, many English painters such as Constable and Hogarth, and all manner of academic painting, which I think it is not so hard to find charming if one can find television commercials charming, which doubtless in certain conditions most people probably do in spite of themselves. All these however are vulnerable to attacks in various major points of intellectual or even artistic weakness or failure, where the other two seem on stronger ground, only lacking that highest sublimity which is so rare that very few are in a position to attack it without making themselves more ridiculous than it is possible for their intended target to be. This kind of solidity of mind and competence has always fascinated me because it is the very remotest state to my current existence--sometimes more remote than genius I think.

Thus ends the game of art.

Jeanne d'Arc Part 3--EXCURSION: Joan of Arc's France

Below: the house known as Joan of Arc's birthplace, Domremy, Lorraine

The life and travels of Joan proceeded in such a neat and convenient order--she never re-traced a step or returned to a place she had once left--that following in her footsteps makes an ideal itinerary for a French vacation, and the air of venerable pilgrimage implicit in it might even be the sort of unifying theme or purpose, consecrated by long historical distance and high associations, that the discouraged or angst-ridden tourist can grasp onto to justify himself in being there; if nothing else it might fill his heart with more hope at the outset.
Joan never made it to Paris, but since anyone coming from the Anglosphere will most likely arrive there first, or will have to pass through it to get to Lorraine, one might as well stop there for 3 or 4 days before setting out for the provinces. For this trip I would recommend a restful or at least a not high-intensity 4 days of modern culture and consumption in the capital, since it is important to try to get into the mindframe of the Middle Ages, which I have been promoting in several places as probably the most proper way intellectually to approach this area of the world, including Paris itself. One could visit the Musee de Moyen Ages, I suppose, which some intelligent people have said is good, and of course Notre Dame. I am aware that it is somewhat trendy to eschew the great masses and hucksters at this church altogether and brave the more decorous and tasteful ones at Sainte Chappelle, which is not as universally known. By all means go to the second of course. Many people not ordinarily given to deep spiritual experiences claim to have them there, and this is a vital requirement to getting anything out of our tour. Notre Dame however is, and as long as it stands, always will be the heart of the city, its most important structure, the one constant that links, however tenuously, the medieval city--and in the 1200s and 1300s, Paris was by far the largest city in Europe, and probably the world, and more utterly dominant and essential in European learning and culture than it was even in the grand siecle--to the present. The building has been the greatest and most renowned landmark in the greatest or second-greatest city of European civilization for over 800 years, a tourist attraction for 500, and it still exists; all of which carries much weight with me. And I am telling you, when I get in there, jostled and tossed hither and fro as one of the post-Christian equivalents of the animals who used to graze among the ruins of Greece and Rome during the dark ages, I love my fellows. I do not mean a mushy, weepy personal love of a bunch of random and ill-dressed nonentities, but a properly manly and aristocratic vision of human possibility in which one is oneself an actor. Such is the power of my method.
Other possibilities for medieval activities in the Ile-de-France include a jaunt up to St Denis to see the basilica where the tombs (emptied during the Revolution) of most the French kings are. This is also where Pierre Abelard lived out his days after the legendary events he became entangled in during his prime. Of course the Latin Quarter/Sorbonne has come down in history as the center of the vital life of the city in that period, though I must confess I am not familiar enough with this neighborhood to say how much, if any, of the spirit of the time survives there.
By now the pilgrim must be ready to set out on his journey. The birthplace of Joan of Arc is at Domremy (now Domremy-la-Pucelle), and like Shakespeare, the house in which she is believed to have been born still stands, though it has undergone many alterations in the intervening 595 years. The church that she would have gone to likewise apparently still stands in some form, though it too has undergone many renovations, to the extent that entire parts of it have been destroyed or reconfigurated. Bourgeois Surrender does not believe in rushing through any town of any historical significance in an hour if he can help it, so you are going to have to hang around all day and wander about a little on foot and absorb some impressions of the country.
Next we have to journey back quite a ways across the country and through the English lines, as it were, to get to Chinon, where the future Charles VII was idling with ladies and defeatist church magnates when Joan got to him. This is in the Loire Valley, so we will substitute the many wine and gourmet food tourists we run the risk of encountering for the English as our designated enemies. The chateau is largely a ruin now (note: I have not been there, or to most of the places I'm writing about). In the throne room only the fireplace remains. To be sure the exhibits feature much Joan material (4 rooms worth) and there was a claim for some time that her ashes had not been dumped into the Seine but were miraculously saved and brought to the Chinon castle, though recent testing has determined the said ashes to belong to a cat (trying to tell which story to my wife, who is one of the least credulous people currently living, she immediately swarmed over me with "how do they know it's a cat? You can't identify anything from a pile of ashes" I don't know. If scientists say they can do it, what choice have I but to believe them?) Chinon looks to be a somewhat popular tourist stop, so perhaps if one stays overnight and has a personality and some nerve there is a possibility for romantic shenanigans. This last is completely speculation however.

From Chinon it is necessary to proceed up to Orleans, where of course Joan raised the seige of that city and achieved her most glorious victory on the battlefield. Orleans calls itself the capital of the Loire Valley--I would have thought it was Tours, but that shows you how well I know anything. It has a cathedral, as well a reconstruction of the house where Joan stayed during the battle, and looks well worth visiting, as old, mid-sized cities without any particular compelling sites often are in Europe (see below). From Orleans one then must venture back toward Joan's home territory, to Reims in Champagne, which of course has the ancient and important cathedral which was the coronation site of the French monarchy through the middle ages up to the revolution. Besides several churches, Reims also has a number of champagne cellars. Something about this sounds not as bad as going to wine tastings at Chateaux and vineyards, presumably because I imagine the cellar as a dark, dank place and I can't imagine you sniff champagne and swirl it around and take a wee dram and spit it out and all that pussy stuff. That isn't how the Russians do it, and they drink a lot of champagne. I still probably would avoid the manufacturer though. Maybe there is a quasi-rowdy (by French standards of rowdiness)champagne bar somewhere in town.

The glory being short-lived however, Joan was captured and taken to Rouen, where she met her end. I have actually been to Rouen, and it was one of the better times I have had visiting any place (though I did not pay much attention to the Joan sites). It is one of those mid-sized, old, historic and reasonably-preserved European cities that have managed to escape excessive popularity. Mantua in Italy, and Chichester and Lichfield in England are others that come immediately to mind. Their centers are all attractive, and they all retain some atmosphere of the pre-EU, pre-globalization character of their respectives regions and nations. You do not have to worry about being taken in by the uncool hotels, bars and restaurants that rip off stupid American tourists and divert them from the real fun, because there are not enough such visitors in these towns to warrant such business coming into existence. In Rouen English is--or I should say was, for it is some time since I was there--spoken less frequently than it was in Paris in 1990 (which was considerably less than it was there just 10 years later). I can barely communicate in the French language myself, though I read it passably; but I find generally in most European countries that the atmosphere is more interesting and less strained, certainly less artificial, for a foreigner, when the traditional/local language is the dominant one in the scene. This is not to dismiss the great multinational spectacles, and no doubt rich cultural exchanges common in the great city squares and train stations and downtown cafes and bars of Europe's grand cities, which so excites those who already live confidently with one or both feet in the hyper-globalized future. I have a weakness for poignancy, however, a decidedly unaristocratic/unelite sentiment; and places that can evoke an air both of having a "high" past and of being always a little stuck there, and not really very much of the present, are very poignant. Likewise highly intelligent or pretty people can be poignant, can be downright luminous in such a setting. The great cities seem to be evolving to a point where only the wretched and the innately inferior can have poignancy, though if that is a state wholly incompatible with meaningful high culture then perhaps this can be a positive change. I don't know.
The Joan sites in Rouen--the tower where she was imprisoned, the supposedly tacky museum, the modern church built on the spot where she was burnt--are generally shunned by the touring establishment. But I'm going to go to them if I ever get back to Rouen, and I am going to enjoy them. Her ashes, as noted earlier, were supposed thrown into the river Seine nearby.
This was quite a lame post. I apologize to my audience. I think I won't do any more 'excursions' for the time being. I will publish it because I want to get in the habit of posting copy, and because having the mind of a democratic man, I believe that there will probably be people out there who will be amused even by this, and I neither desire nor feel the responsibility of the aristocratic intellectual to keep such low entertainments from them.

Notes on My Trip to Florida

So as I intimated in my last posting, I was recently away for ten days, about a week of which were passed in Sarasota, Florida. This is the second year in a row that I have partaken in this New England ritual of taking a winter vacation in the Sunshine State, though prior to that I had certainly not thought of myself as the Floridagoing type. I have not yet been corraled into going to Disney World, my children being still small and unaware of its existence; but can anyone doubt that I will be there someday soon, happily relieving myself of fistfuls of cash and failing to feel properly the visceral recoil any serious-minded adult must experience when confronted with such a place? I didnt think so. This however is a matter for another time.

My image of Florida, which I had only been to once, when I was eleven, a time of my of life of which I remember virtually nothing, was that whatever might be said of it, it did not appear to exist for the likes of me, nor I for it. Intimidation, in my teens and twenties at least, I must confess was a factor: I was not affluent, nor did I have any particularly rabid ambition to appear so; I did not have an appropriate physique for hanging around attractive people my own age in the sort of attire customarily worn at beaches, yachts or trendy nightclubs in that region, which I imagined to be the only places in Florida that existed for socializing with young people; besides that I did not have any of the aforementioned suitable attire and my general appearance tends to wilt in heat and humid conditions anyway; having seen too many episodes of COPS set in Miami and Jacksonville I feared I was in no state to survive a likely encounter with one of Floridas innumerable well-built, often shirtless or tank-top sporting criminals (I am uncomfortable with displays of toned flesh generally, as one scarcely ever sees such a thing in New England. Such scary people as do exist in Boston are at least always dressed and are wearing parkas half the year, which makes them much less forbidding to cope with). This was combined with a general apprehension of the hostility I supposed from listening to too much right-wing radio anybody who enjoyed hanging out in France and Vermont could expect to meet with in that faraway and very mysterious region known as The South. This last of course seems absurd on reflection, but it is true that when we first got down past Richmond on the first trip, I felt very strange until we stopped somewhere and everything went off pretty much as normal. Still though, I was more comfortable and felt more attuned to people and the psychological environment when I was in Poland, than when I was in South Carolina. The real South psyches me out. I dont get it.

Sarasota, as anybody who has been there knows, is not the real South, and in my unscientific opinion, once you hit Gainesville going the western route or St Augustine on the eastern, the northerner is actually back in a somewhat recognizable milieu, indeed among many exiles from his own country, albeit with palm trees, a much greater community commitment to football, and at least in the wealthier areas along the coast, a much healthier-looking population. Sarasota and the keys that accompany it constitute one of those areas where not much nature apart from the actual ocean has been preserved quite as one might expect to find it. Insects, for example, appear to have been eradicated from large areas, including the--I dont know what to call it, development, I guess--where we stayed (we were lodging with some older relatives). The average age of people on the beaches is about 74, which greatly relieves the pressure on ones physical vanity. It is also a wealthy town, though one thing I have observed over the years is that if you are actually poor but vacation in the same place as upper middle class people the tendency is for most of them, even if they still consider you to be not so wonderful as themselves, to assume you are wealthier or more substantial than you really are, which of course causes to quiver a little the same ego I have just been relaxing on the point of physical beauty. There are about a thousand restaurants and bars there, not that I went to any (the children you know), so I cant gauge how much fun they would be, or different from the same type of place anywhere else in America. There are actually some decent tourist sites around Sarasota itself, which for somebody like me who can tolerate about a day and a half of beach time, is a happy circumstance. The Ringling estate (see top picture, which I fear I have stolen illegally from some professional), formerly owned by the circus mogul, is rather an extravaganza: with the outrageous mansion, which resembles a circus version of an Italian palazzo (I nonetheless like it), beautifully set with a great 1920s Gatsbyesque terrace right on the water; some circus displays and artifacts which can at instants offer one distraction from complete existential despair; and a very good art museum--really--from Ringling`s personal collection, of which I was only able to see about 40%, though I did at least get to see the Poussin, which was the closest feeling to a triumph I experienced the entire trip. The Spanish Point estate and grounds, quite extensive, was another good site for people like me who feel like they ought to spend time outdoors if they go somewhere warm, but like their nature subdued by the landscapers and engineer`s art. St Petersburg, about 40 miles away, is supposed to have 2 or 3 good art/culture museums too, though I didnt make it there. One of them is a Dali museum, which is not the sort of thing I would go out of my way to see, but would go to if I were in town for a week with nothing else to do, which is a state I am never in at this point of my life, but...
So Florida is starting to grow on me a little. I still would not want to live there, but if I had a lot of vacation time I could tolerate going for a week or two most years. Most of what there is to do there are not the sorts of things that I generally like doing, or seem not to be done at least in a way that I would like; but while this attitude might be tolerable in a Parisian philosopher, in me it only confirms my longstanding reputation as an incurable stick-in-the-mud. In other words it is not getting me anywhere.

It is moderately exciting to be in vacationland Florida during spring training (the Reds are the team in Sarasota nowadays) since this is about as aged a tradition as Florida has. I haven't been to any playing sites, but it is amusing to be around them, you know, and know that Yogi Berra and Bob Feller are somewhere in the neighborhood, and I also can better appreciate any stories I come across where somebody is feigning injury to skip out on the bus trip to Ft Myers and go on a bender (of course no one does this anymore).

In keeping with the ethos stated in an earlier chapter, we drove down. According to this guy, such adventures for people at my level of society will soon be distant memories, and I can expect within a few years to be toiling in a field within walking distance of my house (assuming I have one) alongside my fellow members of a revived native peasantry. As I dislike it when people go on a vacation and tell you all about the restaurants and hotels they stayed at, however great or awful they were, I dont want to go too much into that, but the state of things along I-95 between basically D.C. and Florida is pretty grim in that regard. I put a picture of the Waffle House up here because there about five hundred of them on the way south, and I had never heard of the place in my life before these trips. I have a high tolerance for inferior chain food compared to the sort of people who ought to be my friends but are not for such reasons as this, but this place, and its doppelganger in crimes against cookery, the truly execrable Huddle House, were too abysmal and depressing even for me to endure. Imagine Denny's at 2am on Saturday night, but half the size, and the chairs and counters smaller/lower and more cramped as well (and of course you are not drunk either). Our New England chains (Friendly's, Papa Gino's, D'Angelo's Subs, etc) are almost elegant and relaxing in comparison. Though I enjoyed the idea of driving through these faraway states, I still felt slightly cheered when we got back to Washington, and then we had dinner in Annapolis (where we went to college) and then we went on to Philadelphia where my family lives and has lived for a very long time, and returning to these scenes of youth and--I won't lie--more sophisticated areas cheered me of course even more, for I had been a little melancholy just before we got back to that familiar region.

I have lamented about the decline of the affordable but not completely gross and dispiriting American hotel elsewhere in these pages, which decline is of course felt most drearily along the far-flung outposts of our highway exits. Some have tried to persuade me that it was always thus, that the rathole motel is embedded in American lore and so forth, but I am talking about something else. Something else that still exists in Canada, by the way, that is a place where you pay $50-$70 for a room, no fripperies but reasonably comfortable and not brutal aesthetically, a la the Motel 6 model, which appears to operate under a policy that people who don't want or can't afford a $150+ room deserve to be spiritually punished for it; where the coffee and muffins probably lack dynamic flavor but someone has at least bothered to check that the milk isn't rancid or the donuts stale before setting them out; where the sheets have been competently laundered and the blood entirely mopped up from the bathroom floor. Now in the current economic and cultural climate, I know that I run the danger of implicating myself as impoverished or beyond the pale of respectable society merely by indicating knowledge of such places, letting alone confessing to having stayed at them. I have to plead nolo contendere. I do not think it is seemly for the likes of me to have to spend hundreds of dollars a night on unnecessary luxuries to be assured of avoiding squalor; though to be honest, if Mrs Bourgeois Surrender, who is a frugal Yankee of the old type, were not even more adamant on this point, I would assuredly be doing just that (So you see I could never have married anybody from Texas).

It seems pointless not to comment on what everyone must observe, that a great many, if not almost all, of these ramshackle hotels in the boonies are managed/owned (I'm not sure how it works) by persons who appear to be of a Subcontinental origin, most of whom exude a singularly indifferent attitude towards most of the traditional and noble functions of hostelry apart from collecting the fees. Not that this isn't all innkeepers' favorite part of the profession, or that native hotel employees are noted for their enthusiasm; but the these are usually not displayed quite so baldly, without even feigning to care about anything else, and especially by the proprietors. I know these motels are just roadside pit stops. There are however a lot of bad elements/vibes/what have you coming together in this trend that bother me a lot. The main thing being that, in large swathes of the country, these are not lowlife places you can just avoid and easily look elsewhere, but are the dominant accommodation. Therefore they set a standard of attitude and effort and attention to aesthetics for most travelling life in this country that I would prefer the nation to find wholly unacceptable. The Indian model of business/professionalism, as well as its attitudes towards services, seems to be ideologically an even more ruthless and extreme, status-obsessed version of the American one, which is the last thing this country needs at the present time. I did notice somewhere on the way down a hotel rather brazenly advertising itself as `American owned and operated` which I assume addresses a more widespread sense of discontent with the current state of affairs in this area. These are such touchy issues of course, when you feel compelled to criticize some identifiable group of people, something or other about whom just annoys you tremendously. These hotels are awful, though. In the old world you can get away sometimes with a nasty bathroom and sheets because you have other compensations; you are overlooking an ancient street, the food is good, the bar is lively, the other guests are attractive people of some parts and learning, and most importantly probably, you are in no way at home. But obviously I am beating this to death.

I had been getting excited because every time I checked by profile my visitor total was going up...by 1. I finally realized that the only person visiting it was me.

Joan of Arc Part 2

Now I will write my impressions of the four Joan of Arc plays I have recently read. Although I am not connecting on a very immediate level with the whole Joan of Arc legend, and do not have anything to say about it that promises to contribute to the vast existing body of knowledge on the subject, there is always a fascination and thrill, you must understand, for people like me in declaiming on such classical stories as have continuous and widespread popularity among people with pretensions. When I was looking for these pictures, there were tens of thousands of images of the Maid to choose from: statues, movie stills, handkerchiefs, salt shakers, posters, medals. And yet in all my life I have never talked to anyone about this subject, or encountered one Joan enthusiast to my knowledge.

Anouilh--L Alouette (The Lark) 1952

(Note: the apostrophe on my home keyboard all of a sudden does not work. This is the one of course for quotation marks also)

I can only consider that I have half-read this, as I read the American adaptation by Lillian Hellman, which struck me as, at the very least, not getting the authorial voice of a midcentury French playwright and penseur accurately enough. Five years ago I would have made a day of going down to Cambridge, having lunch at John Harvard's ale house or one of those places that serious intellectuals and cool people never set foot in, buying a few liter-bottles of imported mitteleuropeen beer at the gourmet market and picking up a copy of the original. Now however I dashed into a second-hand store on the way to Brattleboro (I do like Brattleboro though. If it were a woman I would both desire to dance with it and feel that it was attainable to me to do so) for New Year s Eve dinner, wife and babies sitting in the still running car, grabbed the questionable adaptation and endured a witty observation from the bearded fellow at the cash register that I must have known what I was looking for. So you see how tenuously I am clinging to maintain the forms even of a provincial pseudo-intellectual.

Of the four plays delineated here, The Lark has the virtues of appearing to correlate most with the actual events of history, or such of them as seem verifiable, as well as being more about the actual figure of Joan (Arc?) herself in a more signifigant proportion than the other plays. Her trial forms the structure of the play, the great events of her career being recalled in flashbacks. The tone of the action and dialogue, while somber, is rendered rather gently overall despite the threatening and grisly circumstances; I wish I could trust my adaptress more, however. I did like that rather than ending with Joan reduced to a pile of cinders on the stage, in the translated version at least, there is a flashback to the hour of her greatest triumph, the coronation of the Dauphin at Reims. In this American version the play comes off as, if not affirmative, at least offering hope that life contains nobility, or the possibility of it, after all, which strikes me as an unusual and rather too neat position for a French artwork of that era. It is the sort of thing that would probably cause me satisfaction and comfort if I were to see it as a playgoer, and any theater that enables the likes of me to be comfortable...well, you know what must be said about that. If I ever make it back to a big city, I will have to keep my eyes peeled for a copy of the original. I know I can order it off the Internet, but...it isn t urgent.

Schiller--Die Jungfrau von Orleans-1801

Though Schiller is, as far as I can tell, still regarded in the German speaking world as one of their very greatest authors--as high as number 2 in some polls--he is hardly read at all, and even that I suspect in a very desultory manner, in the Anglosphere. His power, or perhaps it is his Romanticism (the Germans going to much further artistic extremes in this movement than the English generally did) do not register strongly in English to my mind. Five to ten years ago again I probably would have tried to at least struggle through the original to try to get some feel of the poetry; especially as I love plays written in verse, which is a method I think is ripe for a revival, and which frankly I am surprised has lain dormant so long. It gives a dignity and a grandeur, and, if done at all skillfully, a pleasure, to one's story that is much harder gained by plainer dialogue.

To give an idea of how big Schiller is in Germany, there are I believe 7 or 8 museums dedicated to him, mainly in houses where he lived, which incidentally would not constitute a bad basic tour of that important and to my thinking still largely mysterious nation: 2 in Marbach-am-Neckar, where he was born, 1 (plus his grave) in Weimar, one in Jena, one in Leipzig, 1 in Dresden, one in a town called Bauerbach. Here is the Schiller-National Museum in Marbach. This is not just a Schiller museum, but an archive of German literature generally (I think; I cannot find any substantial information in English on this institution), but still, it is named after him, it is in his hometown, there is at least one large statue of him on the grounds. The edifice is certainly most impressive. In Portland (Maine), where I went to high school, there is a very dignified late Victorian statue of Longfellow presiding over one of the major intersections downtown. This might be the only real monumental-type public statue of a poet, I mean where he is elevated and large and dressed extravangantly and is sitting in an expensive chair and so forth, that I am aware of in the United States. I cannot think of any others at the moment. I am not going to argue that there ought to be more. Such things are as they are. Our American poets perhaps do not strike us as grand or good enough to be statue-worthy, but then again good monumental statuary has the effect of making people and events more likable. On the other hand, how many Schiller museums will Germany be supporting and how many Schiller monuments maintaining in a hundred years? It is hard to imagine as many as it does now.

But to address the play: the liberties and Romanticism--Joan's falling desperately in love with one of the English leaders, her dying in battle instead of the stake--as are noted in every modern critique of this play, become too much by the end to hold the reader's confidence. The first half, before one is certain where things are leading, is engaging enough. I like the extended emphasis on the heroine's family and village life, and the nature of the setting in which she receives her visions, which was passed over more quickly or disposed with altogether by the other authors. I think a more sober or tempered Romantic treatment would work well on this story. Although Joan is more brilliant than everyone she encounters, she is not an intellectual, nor learned, nor anguished, nor emotional, nor in way real way intimately accessible in point of her actual character. She has always been understood as a symbol of a number of desirable and usually impossible human qualities, which is the essence I suppose of true Romantic art, as well as religious iconography, which ought to be taken into consideration in any treatment of this subject. The play is not rated highly among Schiller's works, and I did not get much more out of it than what I have related, so I will let it go and move on to the next.

Brecht--Die Heilige Johanna der Schlacthofe (St Joan of the Stockyards)--1929

For those not familiar with this play, it is actually set in the meatpacking district and stock exchange of contemporary Chicago, and deals rather obliquely at best with the Joan legend. The Joan character actually resembles Major Barbara more than the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of her proselytizing the wretched and the unemployed in exchange for a cup of soup are almost as if lifted from that other play, which, however, had the advantage over this one of being much funnier and having some cleverer ideas and twists of the plot. The various, neverending business scheming and manipulation of prices made my eyes glaze over pretty quickly, and reminded me of why the calls one increasingly hears from conservative and high-testosterone American critics for a new race of manly novelists to address the world of high-powered, ultra-competitive business rather than their own sensitive feelings and petty grievances is likely to go unheeded. The day to day action and conversation of the respectable business world, as well as its etiquette, its publications and the apparent inner lives of its protagonists are not simply uninteresting; most of this is deadly and inhuman, and as if willfully so. The realm of art has apparently not yet found the form or the attitude--or the necessity--to raise its players and issues to the level of high culture, such as great minds recognize when confronted with it. This is not something I am just throwing out. I have worried about this for many years, given the centrality and ascendance of business values in our society as well as the widespread sense that modern American would-be writers have holed themselves up in their bedrooms, terrified of and overwhelmed by the very vitality of their nation. Now I don't think it is wholly true that authors have ignored business altogether, though I concede the entrepreneur or corporate ladder climber is rarely depicted as a hero deeply admired by the author. And secondly, I have to say that the more time I spend as an adult around corporate and other self-consciously professional-type people, the Kafkaesque or absurdist approach to understanding the ethos of this world seems the most plausible option, which is I suppose what our author (Mr Brecht) is saying at some level too, though I wouldn't really know from reading him. I would be curious to see one of his plays performed sometime, in Germany (I have realized that I can best endure live drama, as well as opera, in the country and language of origin, in a setting that I can imagine to resemble that in which the play was originally performed; thus I enjoy the faux-Globe that was put up in London and the Statny opera-house in Prague [formerly in Austria, remember!], however inferior the experts assure me their actors and singers are, as if I could tell anyway). I am positive I would glean more of what I am supposed to be gleaning from that than from further reading in translations of this author. I am not of the school, as should be discerned by now, that lower and even minute levels of understanding, in inferior minds, of great works of art, are utterly worthless, least of all to the mind concerned, as some apparently hold.

Brecht still has his fans. Someone should get hold of her and have her write a guest piece about why she likes Brecht. I am old and conventional and not especially good-looking, so it's unlikely she would respond to me. (If my link doesn't work, which it probably won't, go to the meet-me page on Hotornot.com and search for women with the keywords "Bertolt Brecht". There is only one).

Shaw--St. Joan-1924

This was the most enjoyable to read of the four, probably because it was the only one originally written in English. I thought the preface a very good piece of writing, both as an overview of Joan s career and for the many ideas about the type and quality of mind she possessed that duller or inattentive writers either missed entirely or grasped at inexactly or without succintness. George Bernard Shaw always had very distinct, pet ideas about the world, such as that well over 99% of the human population in any age and level of society were incontestable morons whose thoughts or troubles were of no real significance, and he could not resist topical jokes at the expense, as he imagined, of the lesser end of his audience (one of the English adjuncts at Joan s trial for example argues as proof of her heresy that she claims her saints spoke to her in French and not English). Pound, comparing his writings about his native Ireland to Joyce, thought it necessary to call him a ninth-rate coward. This type of declamation is a characteristic of a certain brand of hot and quick mind that I have always been envious of; for my own part I can only say that Shaw's work has not, compared to the other, the sensibility of the totality of a human being, or an atmosphere, of, shall I just say it, the spiritual influences at work in human society and culture. How far that is a matter of courage I do not pretend to know, but it probably has more to do with it than it seems at first appearance, or that most people--most bourgeois, certainly--would want to admit.

I would write more, but it has already taken me fifteen days to write this bloody report, and I can't even remember the damn play anymore. Granted, I was away for ten of those days, but come on. My life is slipping away while I try to write one coherent idea about what I am supposed to make of Joan of Arc. And I'm not done with her yet either! I am going to give this up and start on something else. This will all eventually lead somewhere if there is enough accumulated mass in it, that I believe.

Joan of Arc Part 1

Joan of Arc is one of the favorite female subjects in all Western art, particularly in the theater and its offspring the cinema, where Cleopatra has been about her only consistent competitor over the last 500 years. An Internet search turns up a great number of people living in places like Sacramento and New Zealand who identify fiercely with the story of this maid, who indeed devote a good portion of their life's energies to taking inspiration from her, studying her legend, collecting pictures of her, dressing like her at festivals, perhaps eating Joan of Arc brand brie, and the like. Morrissey even claims an affinity. She is, or has been at one time or another, claimed as a heroine by individuals desiring to represent Roman Catholics, anti-Roman Catholics, homosexuals, French nationalists, Romantics, anti-authoritarians, feminists and loyalists to the house of Valois, as well as innumerable artists and authors.

"Et Jehanne, la bonne lorraine/Qu'englois brulerent a Rouen..."

To the early 21st century mind--mine anyway--the obvious question that presents itself, there being no easy economic explanation for the most spectacular elements of the story, is 'What really happened?' or perhaps a little less prosaically 'What should I believe?' or 'What is important within that portion that I should believe?' It also occurs to me to ask, 'If I were myself to write a play or make a film or paint a picture about these events, what form would it take and what would I emphasize?' though I don't have any immediate sense of that inquiry's illuminating anything.

The story is evocative and spectacular from almost every angle. A teenage heroine...an endless war that has resulted in the occupation of the heroine's country by a foreign army...a dispossessed, listless prince (whose mistress, at least, is renowned as the greatest beauty of her age)...the rustic teen becomes convinced she must seek the prince, procure a horse and a suit of armor and lead an army to raise the seige of Orleans...she persuades every male authority she encounters, including the Dauphin and the Archbishop of Reims, to acquiesce to her plans...she wins the intial battle...the Dauphin is crowned in the ancient ritual and hallowed cathedral of his forbears...the heroine is given up to the enemy, tried for heresy and witchcraft, acquits herself with brilliant and rational cogency before a formidable ecclesiastical court, and burned at the stake at the age of 19. This is a biblical-caliber career, partaking variously of qualities found in the lives of Jesus, Socrates, and Julius Caesar, often at the same time. It certainly makes the exploits of such modern icons of youth as James Dean and Jim Morrison look rather pitiful. It is generally acknowledged now that Joan was not by current international standards at all physically attractive apart from having remarkable eyes, the remarkableness of which appear to have been more otherworldly and mystical than sexy in nature. As well, despite the rampant speculation about her sex life during certain periods of historical inquiry, the present among them, there seems to be little concrete evidence that she was not as disinterested in the acts of bodily love, or even as virginal, as the traditional legend makes her out to be. Accepting even this has been a stumbling block to many, however.

Since the mindset of the Middle Ages began to erode from the active consciousnesses of thinking people, artists have sensed that the story of Joan possessed in it something central to the spirit of European civilization while being at the same time increasingly difficult to comprehend as "true" in any modern, scientific understanding of the idea of truth. The Joan character as remembered is among the foremost figures of history in three areas thought by the general public as well as by some serious minds, to be contradictory: war, religion, and rational elocution with regard to each. She is indeed such a singular figure in each of these areas, and her actions and movements within and between them so seamless and inexplicably and seemingly almost effortlessly correct, as to strongly suggest genius-like qualities, the possibility of which, if it frightens the mass of men and their leaders and causes them to seek the death or destruction of the possessor, also excites in them an irresistible fascination, such that the murder of such figures usually produces a sense of deep regret right away, though the sort of charismatic genius of great military and religious leaders is always meteoric in nature and never able to be recalled or captured perfectly.

I must admit, I have at this point in my life lost any sense, which I do think I possessed at one time, of what medieval Western European man understood, or experienced, by the invocation of the idea of God and saints and angels--the Church triumphant--quite distinct from the Church militant which one knew matter-of-factly as the primary institution of society, which makes it quite difficult to write anything pertinent about this story, or the age in which it took place, though even Shakespeare, as Shaw observed in his preface about Joan, could not shed himself of the mindset of a Renaissance English Protestant in this instance either. This is partly why I set myself these exercises however, tedious though my audience, if I ever acquire one, may find them. It is very rare for me to be able to read any book or episode of history long accorded veneration or importance and pronounce it rubbish on the spot, in the manner of Nietzsche or Ezra Pound, yet I want to be honest about what really appeals to me in it. Superior qualities and abilities--daring, vigorous energy, a clarity of intelligence and will that extends to and uplifts others outside one's self--the very definition of heroism--always appeals to sentient humans; but here it is combined with the very strong and almost necessary insistence that these abilities were only exercised under the submission to and direction of a superhuman agent, God or his saints in this instance. This is obviously a deeply appealing and reassuring idea to most people even today, that the great events and conditions of their lives are not being directed by ruthless egomaniacs answerable to nothing but the gratification of their own wills and intellects, but by some greater force--even if a dark force, I think--before whom all men, the powerful and the crushed in spirit alike, are the same, and who can therefore at any time be raised or inspired with abilities or motivations that had previously been inaccessible to them. This is also a purpose and effect of the highest classical art, music and literature of course, which is doubtless why for the likes of me they have come to be as a kind of substitute for religion. In this way I can reconcile Joan of Arc too as having existence both as legend and reason suggest her to to me. The legend, especially over time, always becomes more important than the literal truth, indeed becomes the de facto truth; at least, as far as art and history go, the real truth is never more than partially successful in destroying the legend, if the legend is important enough.