I heard a great discussion on the BBC last night about an exhibit going on at the Tate in London called “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting.”

The exhibit is a review of Oriental-ist art, not Oriental art, a crucial different. These aren’t paintings from the East or Near East, they are paintings of the East by British artists–most from the height of British colonialism. As such they owe much more to British visions of the exotic Orient than to any reality of Iran in the 1890s. As such, they’re heavy on luxurious fabrics, ornate archicture, and exotic women. Take this supposedly Near Eastern beauty:

Yeah. Right. I’m sure that’s what it was like in a Persian harem. Utterly convincing. No, this is a vision of an Oriential harem, a fantasy of British men of hordes of willing women lounging about in silks vying for the attention of their powerful man. I think the clothing is particularly interesting. This is from 1892, and you can’t imagine catching a proper British lady wandering about in bare feet. Shocking! You can see her ankles! And look at her torso. The point isn’t that she’s particularly bosomy, but that she’s so loosely clothed. No corset! What freedom! What decadence!

Of course, what makes it all the more ridiculous, as the critic on the BBC pointed out last night, is that while harems actually existed, no British man ever saw one. That’s the whole point of a harem: they’re isolated. No outside men allowed. So while other paintings in the exhibit of mosques or markets might be based on some reality, the harem paintings are utterly imaginary. (Here’s a link to the BBC discussion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/saturdayreview.shtml)

The first critic to really examine these Western notions of the exotic East was the Palestinian American cultural critic Edward Said (pronounded “Sigh-EED”). His landmark book Orientalism of 1978 described a persistent set of false assumptions about Islamic peoples and their culture, one that was simulataneously romantic and degrading. While the Middle East was exotic, beautiful, luxurious and a source of desire, it was also corrupt and morally debased. This attitude served colonial notions by encouraging visits (come see the naughy harem girls!) but also countenancing European rule (man, they really need some British discipline!)

Said’s book had huge influence on art and literary criticism and cultural studies. It is considering one of the founding works of postcolonial theory, a critical approach to works (books, paintings, films, etc.) either created by colonized peoples or about colonized places.

But what all this got me thinking about is one of my favorite children’s book authors: C.S. Lewis.

Don’t see the connection? Well, you’re thinking of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe–nothing Orientalist there. But did you ever read one of the later books in the series, The Horse and His Boy?

It was not one of my favorite, nor, really, anyone’s, I think. The story takes place in Narnia during the same time period as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or sort of–the four Pevensie children are the kings and queens of Narnia, but this is years after the whole encounter with the White Witch that set off the series. This is later, when they are young men and women.

What’s interesting is that the bulk of the book isn’t set in Narnia but in the neighboring country Calormen. Calormen is, essentially, a fantasy of Persia. The people there have dark skin and eyes; they wear long robes, shoes with the toes curling up at the end, and turbans on their heads. They don’t carry straight swords like the Narnians but curving scimitars. Unlike the friendly and democratic Narnians, they have an elaborate hierarchy and keep slaves. People are always quoting the cliched and elaborately phrased sentiments of poets. When I read this as a child, of course, all this washed over me. The whole Calormene section reminded me of bits of The Arabian Nights, but I didn’t think much about it. It was obvious that the honorable Narnias, who walked around on their own feet instead of being carried on effeminate litters, were superior to the nefarious Calormenes; the Calormen king actually sends his son to his probable death without the least concern.

Reading it as an adult, I’m, frankly, appalled. I also don’t mean to say that the book is all bad, although it’s certainly not one of the strongest in the series. But the racism is dreadful! There’s only one really positive Calormene character, the girl Aravis, and she hightails it out of the country as soon as she can. Things only get worse in future books–in The Last Battle, Calormenes bring about the Apolypse by promoting a false god, an Anti-Aslan equivalent to the Antichrist, while their own god Tash is revealed to be a demon.

Lewis was writing in 1954, and I suspect he would have been absolutely baffled had he been accused of racism. He might have cited The Arabian Nights; certainly he was only speaking from the depths of his own culture. The most relevant question in my mind is, how will I deal with the Calormen section when my son reads The Horse and His Boy? I think the only appropriate action is to discuss Lewis’ cultural bias honestly and openly.

That’s what books like Orientalism do: they force you engage with texts that you otherwise would have let slide. The Horse and His Boy is no Little Black Sambo, but it does reflect ugly attitudes about race and culture.

. . . . .

I did some mucking about with the blog this morning, changing some colors and putting in a new graphic. I liked my looking-up-woman that I had before, but the combination of her and the red type make the whole thing look much more serious than I had in mind. The happy walking book is much more friendly and lighthearted, and we’re nothing if not lighthearted around here. I think the book also serves as a better companion to the flying pig on my general homepage, although both the book and the woman were by the same artist. I also changed my tagline–”the silly side of serious culture” is much more what I’m going for.

Now I just need to figure out how to adjust some fonts–that sans serif for the heading is just too intense. Cascading Style Sheets simply aren’t my thing–I can muddle through making changes, but there’s a lot of muttering and restoring of old versions. Anyhoo, let me know what you think and if you have any comments.

Posted: June 8th, 2008 under Literature, Art.
Comments: none

Today at church someone was trying to define the word “ardent,” and the entire row at front of me in Sunday School turned around and stared at me. Obviously, my penchant for (a) knowing lots of random stuff and (b) spouting it off is well known. “I’m not a walking dictionary!” I protested, but Doug W. said, “Oh, come on. Why do you think we keep you around?”

I was able to produce a reasonable definition of ardent, even under such pressure, and just to take revenge on Doug I subjected him to an anecdote related to ardentness. Now I share it with you.

First:

ar·dent [ahr-dnt]

–adjective

[Origin: 1325–75; < L ?rdent- (s. of ?rdéns, prp. of ?rdére to burn), equiv. to ?rd- burn + -ent- -ent; r. ME ardant < MF]

Then, a famous and ghastly incident came to be known as the “Bal des Ardents.” In 1393, Charles VI, King of France, was recovering from a period of insanity that kicked off in a moment of psychosis in which he single-handedly slaughtered some six of his own knights. With rest and care, the young (25-year-old) monarch recovered, but his court was instructed to keep him merry–no heavy matters of business were to bother him.

So in the spirit of lighthearted fun, the king and five other lords decided to dress up as “wild men” to entertain themselves and the court. As memorably recounted by historian Barbara Tuchman in her book A Distant Mirror, they dressed in suits of linen that they then covered with a mix of pitch and frazzled hemp “so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” They ran into the room dancing around, howling like wolves, and making obscene gestures. (So much for the dignity of the monarchy.) The men were disguised, and part of the game was for the ladies of the court to guess the identity of the savages. Much merriment ensued.

Until, that is, the king’s brother the Duc d’Orleans entered the room–carrying a lit torch. All torches had been forbidden from the room in rare moment of sense, but the Duc apparently didn’t get the memo. He held up a torch to better see one of the masqueraders, a spark fell fell, and suddenly flames erupted on the bodies of the dancers.

The queen immediately fainted in horror. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the king, has the presense of mind to throw her skirt over him to protect him from the flames. One other of the savages managed to leap into a large barrel full of water and survive. The other four died, one on the spot, the other three after days of agony.

What started as the Dance of the Savages became the Bal des Ardents–the dance of the burning ones. Tuchman uses it to illustrate the suicidal folly of the aristocracy in the 14th century. This was the generation that survived the first devastation of the Black Death in Europe; in the aftermath, all of society seemed a little insane. The king’s madness was only the most well-recognized.

And this is exactly why you guys keep me around!

Posted: June 1st, 2008 under History.
Comments: none

Let us not dwell on the failings of the past. It’s been FOREVER since I posted, but I intend to blog without guilt. I’m here now, right?

I will blame my absence in part on my old laptop. It developed this incredibly irritating problem where the AC adapter cord wouldn’t stay plugged in. Since the battery had about 45 minutes of useful life in it, this was a big problem. To work I had to jam the cable in and shove something against it, like my purse or the arm of the sofa. The portability of my supposedly portable computer was kaput. Apparently, some very, very tiny but incredibly vital connection between the power supply and the motherboard had broken, and the only solution was a new motherboard that cost nearly $500. I only paid $550 for the thing two years ago, and it was used. So the old laptop is sitting partially disassembled on top of the dining room bookcase (my husband thought maybe he could fix it himself. Er, not so much) and I’m typing on my new-to-me laptop, freshly shipped from eBay.

Ah, eBay. Where would we be without you?

The whole thing got me thinking about how writers through history have sought the capability to write on the road. Even the venerable Homer probably got tired of working at home and took his scrolls down to the local retsina shop for the afternoon once in a while. Personally, I do well in my home office for months at a time, and then I’ll hit a wall and my productivity plummets. The best solution is for me to hit the road.

(Where do I go? Well, it used to be my beloved Four Star Coffee Bar on West 7th Street. Ah, the Four Star. They had simply marvelous pizza, nice big tables, and I never worried about leaving my computer to go to the bathroom. I wrote half my book there. But the Four Star shut down last year. I’ve been camping out at a Starbucks, but I want to explore more options.)

So what was the writer of the previous era to do when the scriptorium lost its appeal?

The ancient Egyptians seemed to make do with a simple lapdesk. Clean, functional, gets the job done. What it lacks in style it makes up in efficiency. Of course, the cross-legged position can get old, but essentially I’m working right now in the same position.

The ancient Greeks moved to chairs and changed their writing technology. This scribe is seen learning how to write on a wax tablet supported on his knees. Anyone who’s taken notes in college knows the problems this poor guys is having. Your lap slopes downward, so you’re writing at an odd angle. Our scribe is supporting his tablet underneath with his hand, but that’s going to get uncomfortable soon. Cramp city.

I couldn’t find any pictures of Medieval lap desks online. Most Medieval depictions of people writing show either saints or monks writing on inclined desks. Most writing was limited to monasteries, and writing supplies were hugely expensive. So maybe the Medieval period had no need for portable writing technology.

Ah, but the Renaissance changed all that. I found two examples from this period. The first is a travelling writing desk that belonged to Henry VIII of England. How’d you like to pay bills on that beauty? This is a view of the case opened up; the little drawers and cubbies were to hold pens, inkwells, material for making ink, paper, seals, etc. The top folded down and provided the surface on which to write. Luscious.

Another example from roughly the same era is from another culture, the Ottomans. This elegant painting of a scribe of the royal court was done by Giovanni Bellini, who had been sent to the Ottoman Empire when his city Venice negotiated peace with the nation. Bellini is clearly influenced by the Islamic art he saw on display in this illustration of a scribe. We’re back to writing propped on the knees, that all-time favorite.

In Western Europe, writing desks like Henry VIII’s remained popular for centuries, reaching the height of their use in the 18th and 19th centuries. I found descriptions of writing desks belonging to Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Pope, Admiral Nelson, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens.

But  then in the late 1800s came the typewriter. Now we have a new problem. Typing has such obvious advantages for clarity and speed, but the first typewriters were too heavy and awkward–not to mention expensive–to be portable. The first truly portable machines were introduced in the early 1900s, with the Royal Company achieving great success starting in the 20s with its portables, which were marketed not to businesses but to consumers and came in a number of attractive colors.

I happen to own a portable typewriter from the 1940s, a Royal Quiet De Luxe. Here’s a photo I found online of a model like mine–I picked this picture because it shows not only the typewriter but also the case. The case, to me, is the coolest part: the typewriter can be locked into the base of the case, while the entire lid flips up to allow you to work. There’s even a nifty little metal bracket where you could stick a handwritten draft to type from. The ultimate in portable convenience!

(Incidentally, my six-year-old son loves our typewriter. It sits out in our dining room on a desk, and he’s always asking me to put paper in it so he can type. I bet he’s one of the few kindergarteners in North America with typewriter experience.)

It occurred to me that in this discussion of portable writing technology I shouldn’t forget the direct forebearers of my very own new laptop: the earliest “portable” computers. Behold, my children, the very first portable computing machine, the Osborne:

Yes, my children, it possessed a full five-inch screen. At $1795 retail, it did not, in fact, have a hard drive; programs were run off of floppy drives, which were really floppy and maxed 182K per diskette. As for RAM, you got a screaming 65K. But, it was really, truly portable, designed to fit in airline overhead compartments. The keyboard folded up and locked into place, and the whole thing could then be schlepped about with its handle. And it weighed only 23.5 pounds!

So portable is relative term.

I have great fondness for the Osborne–it was the first computer I ever worked on. And yes, I have just dated myself–but to my credit I was only about 12. My parents bought the machine used from a friend and I wrote my first short stories and poems on its teeny screen using WordStar (still my mother’s all-time favorite word processing program.)

Nevertheless, I never would have plopped the Osborne on my lap as I lounged on the sofa. As I recall, our Osborne ceased its roaming life the moment it landed on the upstairs desk.  Today I’m also as mobile as that Egyptian scribe–although he never needed to find a wifi hotspot. Or risked spilling his grande soy chai all over his keyboard.

But then, he didn’t have eBay.

Posted: May 30th, 2008 under History, Personal musings, Literature.
Comments: 2

Another post from mentalfloss.com–geesh, I’m not really keeping with my own blog, am I?

Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is like sustaining a concussion: it’s going to hurt, you won’t always understand what’s going on, you may hallucinate or lose consciousness, and it’s best if you lie down for a bit. The poem is basically an extended exploration of man’s angst—except in this case, the man is T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets and most erudite men of the 20th century.

Should you come away from The Waste Land with an aching noggin, take heart: a prominent literary critic once said that the poem couldn’t be “read,” only “reread”—in other words, only on repeated readings does the poem start to make sense. Should that prove too daunting, at your next cocktail party why not distract your friends by passing along these nuggets about the origins and ideas behind The Waste Land.

1. Show off. Eliot had a top-notch education—he attended prestigious boarding schools, got his B.A. at Harvard, studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and would have gotten a Ph.D. from Harvard had he bothered to defend his thesis. He learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Sanskrit, and the ancient Indian language Pali; he studied French Symbolist poetry, Buddhist philosophy, Renaissance theater, and epiphenomenalism (whatever that is).

The problem? Eliot couldn’t resist flaunting all this knowledge. As a result, The Waste Land is a minefield of footnotes. Before you even get to the first line, you’ve got an allusion to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a quote in Greek, and another quote from Dante’s Purgatory in Italian. Later you find whole passages in German, French, Italian, and Sanskrit. The take-away message? Never play Trivial Pursuit with T.S. Eliot.

2. Nix the Dickens. Eliot’s close friend Ezra Pound is famous in literary circles for his extensive revisions of the manuscript of The Waste Land. One of his changes? To cross out the original title, “He do the Policemen in Different Voices.”

Huh?

It’s just Eliot slipping in another obscure allusion, this time to Charles Dickens’ last novel Our Mutual Friend. The quote comes from the character Mrs. Betty Higden, referring to the talents of an orphan named Sloppy:

‘I aint, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’

In other words, Sloppy changes his voice when he reads the newspaper, “doing different voices” for different characters. Eliot is here pointing to his own practice of writing different “voices” of a wide range of characters in The Waste Land. Clever—but a bit of stretch. Pound knew what he was doing.

3. The vivacious Viv. Most of the “characters” in The Waste Land are figments of Eliot’s imagination—except for one: his wife, Vivien. Eliot met Vivien Haigh-Wood in Cambridge in 1914 and married her three months later. Haigh-Wood was a socialite flapper working as a governess; Eliot was a 26-year-old over-educated self-confessed virgin. The couple quickly discovered they were sexually incompatible, so Haigh-Wood (known as Viv) consoled herself by having an affair with Eliot’s mentor, philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Eliot learned later that Viv’s family had attempted to forestall the marriage because of Viv’s history of mental instability. He struggled to endure Viv’s screaming outbursts, anorexia, constipation, neuralgia, and “catarrh of the intestines” (whatever that might be). Eliot describes her hysterical speech in The Waste Land:

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
‘I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
‘With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
‘What shall we ever do?’

Not surprisingly, the relationship didn’t last. Eliot headed to the U.S. in 1928 on a lecture tour: while out of the country, he had his attorney send Viv a letter announcing their separation. On his return to England, he went into hiding to escape her. An increasingly unstable Viv started hanging around outside the doors of Faber & Faber where Eliot worked; the famous poet had to escape out the back door. After alienating friends and family and joining the British Union of Fascists, Viv’s brother Maurice had her committed to an insane asylum, where she died in 1947.

Feminist biographers have attempted to restore Viv’s reputation—certainly, anyone would find marriage with the fastidious Eliot difficult. (He found the very thought of menstruation repulsive and thought shaving in front of his wife was too intimate.) In any case, we can thank Viv for putting a great poet through great anguish—out of which came great poetry.

4. Don’t explain. Eliot was adamant in his refusal to help eager readers interpret his poems. Of The Waste Land, he said, “I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying.”

5. The Groucho Connection. Remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Chris Farley where he would interview famous celebrities simply by describing parts they had played and quoting from their movies—to their great unease? Now substitute T.S. Eliot for Farley and Groucho Marx for the succession of celebrities.

Rather surprisingly, the Nobel Laureate adored Marx movies, and in 1964 Eliot achieved one of his life goals by having the great comedian and his wife to dinner. A somewhat intimidated Groucho boned up on Eliot’s poetry and reread King Lear just in case, but all Eliot wanted to do was quote Groucho’s old lines. Eliot refused to talk about his poetry, or Lear for that matter, and before long the Marxes were making their excuses and heading for the door.

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Literature, Poetry.
Comments: none

For some bizarre reason, previous blog posts have spontaneous erupted in a strange case of “” with the symbol popping up at random spots. I can’t explain this in the least. I will go through and clean it up as well as do a search and find out if this is some kind of virus (by a symbol-obsessed prankster?), but in the meanwhile, my, er, Âpologies.

Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

I’m excited to post this–I’ve been working with the guys over at mentalfloss.com on becoming a regular contributor to their blog. The first post went up yesterday, and with their permission I’m re-running it here.

If you’re not checking out mentalfloss.com, you should do so–just yesterday I learned 10 other notable things that happened on May 5!

I’m working on another Dilettante-exclusive (ha!) post, and I know it’s been forever–but at least now it’s clear I’ve been working on something, not just lying about eating bon bons and watching Oprah.

As a play, Macbeth’s got it all: spooky witches, murderous noblemen, dying kings, persistent ghosts, and a portable forest. But there’s more to Shakespeare’s famous drama than all the surface theatrics. The story behind Macbeth is as fascinating as the play itself.

1. A Scottish play. When he wrote his drama around 1606, Shakespeare was capitalizing on a new fascination with Scotland as England welcomed its new king James I of England–aka James VI of Scotland. The Virgin Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603; she was succeeded by James, the son of Elizabeth’s second cousin Mary Queen of Scots. Insular Englishmen had a generally poor opinion of their northern neighbors–substitute “Scotsman” for “Redneck” in those “You Know You’re a Redneck” jokes and you get the idea. When James took the throne and brought with him a bevy of Scottish courtiers, the English needed to bone up on their Scottish history–and stop the jokes fast.

2. Ripped from the headlines. Just like Law & Order, Shakespeare wasn’t above borrowing from current events. Except he had to do it very carefully. The heavily censored Elizabethan theater banned the portrayal of reigning monarchs. In 1604, Shakespeare’s troop, the King’s Men, had tried to get around this ban with a play called The Tragedy of Gowrie, which depicted the attempted assassination of King James by the Scottish nobleman the Earl of Gowrie in 1600. Gowrie had invited James to his castle and then tried to kill him, an action not only treasonous but also in violation of the rules of hospitality; it was later asserted Gowrie had engaged in witchcraft. But The Tragedy of Gowrie hit too close to home and was quickly banned by the court. The manuscript has been lost, and we don’t even know who wrote it. However, a year or so later, Shakesepeare created Macbeth. In the plot, a courtier involved in witchcraft invites a king to his castle and then kills him. Just like Law & Order gets out of legal trouble by changing the names and circumstances of its “ripped from the headlines” plots, Shakespeare avoided scandal by setting the events of his play in the distant past.

3. A little eye of newt. James I had some peculiar interests, including a bizarre obsession with witchcraft. He participated in the questioning of accused witches and wrote a learned treatise called Daemonologie in 1597 in which he asserted the true aim of witches is to overthrow the king of the realm. So the inclusion of the Three Witches in Macbeth is more than a literary device: it’s a way of capturing the attention of the most important member of Shakespeare’s audience, the king.

4. Flattery will get you everywhere. Another way to capture the king’s interest was to butter him up. James believed he was descended from the Scottish nobleman Banquo. Historical records potray Banquo as one of the murderous Macbeth’s chief allies, but Shakespeare makes him the most honorable of men who refuses to help Macbeth kill the king . Shakespeare also portrays the royal succession from Banquo as unbroken and whole, “power without end” down to the present day and James. James certainly found this gratifying—who doesn’t want to be told their ancestors were great guys?—and the English people liked hearing it, too. The waning years of Elizabeth’s rule, when the succession was up in the air, were enormously worrying. James brought with him two sons and a fertile wife, reassuring the English there would be no messy power struggle or civil war.

5. Equivocation with get you nowhere. Reassurance about the stability of James’ rule was particularly welcome in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. A group of Catholics, then a repressed minority, planted gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament in London with the intention of setting it off on November 5, 1605 at the formal State Opening with the King, his family, and most of the nobility of the realm in attendance. The plot was discovered and the conspirators seized, among them a Jesuit priest named Henry Garnet. Garnet had in fact opposed the plot, but that didn’t stop authorities from torturing and then executing him.

What the English hated the most about Garnet was his promotion of the “doctrine of mental equivocation.” Equivocation was a way to deceive someone in order to protect yourself or others without telling an out-and-out lie, which was a mortal sin. Under this doctrine, if the police asked, “Have you taken Mass?” a Catholic might answer, “No,” and then add in his or her own mind, “not since last night.” If asked, “Are you a priest?” a Catholic priest could reply, “No,” and think to himself, “I’m not a priest of Apollo.”

English Protestants—lawyers in particular—found this outrageous. And so when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, he included a dig at the king’s enemies. In a short comic bit, Macbeth’s porter imagines he is the gatekeeper in hell coming to greet new arrivals. “Here’s an equivocator,” he says of an imaginary sinner, “who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.”

6. “The Scottish Play.” Macbeth is famously believed by actors to be “cursed.” Saying the name of the play and of its two title characters is taboo within the theater, resulting in the euphemism “the Scottish play.” Why would this particular play be cursed and not other Shakespearean dramas? Some say it’s because the Bard stole actual spells from a coven of witches. Others say a real dagger was substituted for a fake dagger in the first performance, resulting in a death. Whatever the origins of the curse, should you accidentally utter the fateful word you have a few options to redeem yourself: either utter Hamlet’s line “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” or leave the room, spin around three times while swearing, spit over your left shoulder, and the knock on the door and wait for an answer before entering.

Posted: May 6th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: none

Yet more evidence that Quirk intends to publish my book–a cover!

One thing those not involved in book-writing might not realize is that authors have absolutely no say (or at least very, very little say) on the cover of their book. The title is even out of their hands. So it’s really fun to see the cover and really like it. I wasn’t particularly worried–the covers of all the other Secret Lives books have been great–but still, it’s my book cover, and it’s pretty darn cool. In fact, I love it!

Posted: April 7th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists.
Comments: 2

I’m late to the party on this one, since the JMW Turner exhibit has been at the Dallas Museum of Art since February, but I’m a Fort Worther, and going to Dallas is a major event, like making a trip to the moon. When I was a kid, I swear, before you went to Dallas you told the neighbors. Trips to Colorado required less preparation and prompted less hoopla. Now my husband actually works in Dallas, so the trip shouldn’t be so momentous, but I work in my breakfast nook. A trip outside the Loop is a lot for me.

Nevertheless, I had a meeting in Dallas on Friday afternoon, and I snagged enough time for quick trip through the DMA. If you haven’t gone, you should go–or if you’re in New York, check it out at the Met from June through Sept.

The show is arranged chronologically, and I think most U.S. audiences will prefer the later to the earlier work. Turner started out as a rather typical–if quite talented–landscape artist, although his mastery of the depiction of light was always brilliant. But the later work, when he got all “impressionistic,”* is what I found the most striking. His contemporaries did not agree, finding the later works muddled, confusing, and incomplete.

In any case, here are a few points inspired by Turner and one of the paintings on display at the DMA, “The Battle of Trafalgar.” (A good link–it allows you to zoom in on the painting, the only way to get a sense of it online.)

1. “The Battle of Trafalgar” was Turner’s only royal commission, one that celebrated the 18th anniversary of the great battle in which the British hero Horatio Nelson defeated the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte. Turner deftly combines multiple events on multiple scales. Nelson’s flagship takes center stage, flanked by both British and French ships. Other ships loom in the background, while in the foreground sailors cling to a lifeboat.

It’s an awesome accomplishment. The painting is enormous–not only the largest canvas on display in the exhibit but also the largest Turner ever attempted. The scale has dramatic effect–you feel as if the ships are looming over you. You also tend to identify with the poor souls clinging to a lifeboat in the foreground. The DMA audio guide pointed out that in the bottom left corner is some floating wreckage of masts and rigging. Perhaps, the audio guide suggested, Turner intended you the observer to feel as if you were yourself in the water, and that floating wreckage is your only hope for survival.

2. Admiral Nelson met his death at Trafalgar, the victim of a musket shot. It’s possible that Nelson would never had been at Trafalgar had he not gotten embroiled with one of the most beautiful women of his generation, Emma Hamilton. Nelson began a highly public affair with Hamilton in Naples in 1797, despite the fact both were married. Widespread knowledge of the affair was one of the factors that prompted the Royal Navy to return Nelson to active service.

Even before she met Nelson, Emma Hart (born Amy Lyon) had made a name for herself as a great beauty. The daughter of a blacksmith, she eventually became a part-time prostitute and strip-tease artist. She caught the attention of famous artists including George Romney and Joshua Reynolds, who committed her to canvases such as the one here. She got involved at age 15 with Charles Francis Greville, second son of the Earl of Warwick. Greville eventually passed Emma along to his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to Naples. Hamilton became smitten with Emma and, to the shock of his peers, married her in 1791. However, in 1793, she met Nelson in Naples and the two began their affair. Sir William seemed to have no problem sharing his wife with England’s naval hero, and the two all lived together quite happily, first in a Naples palazzo and then in a small town outside of London. English newspapers were fascinated by the menage a trois and reported breathlessly on Emma’s taste in clothing, hairstyles, hair decoration, and even dinner party menus. The government was horrified by the public shenanigans of their war hero and returned him to active duty to stop the newspaper stories and get Nelson away from Emma.

The story doesn’t end happily. After Nelson’s death, the government refused to honor his wish to provide for Emma and their daughter. Eventually Emma ended up in debtor’s prison, became an alcoholic, and died of liver failure in 1815.

3. Turner’s royal commission came from King George IV, one of England’s less impressive monarchs. George was vain, selfish, and, apparently, addicted to laudanum. He was the bane of English politicians forced to work with him, a source of endless frustration for his wife (from whom he separated after only a few weeks of married life), and the torment of his well-born mistresses. George enjoyed making up glamourous stories about his life, and as he aged he started to believe them. He was convinced, for example, that he had actually fought at another decisive victory of the Napoleonic Wars, the Battle of Waterloo. The king would sit with the Duke of Wellington, who had actually fought and won that battle, and recount his derring-do on the field. “I was there, wasn’t I, Arthur?” the king would say, to which the duke would reply, “I have frequently heard Your Highness say so.”

4. Turner’s contemporary Jane Austen was no stranger to British naval life, since two of her brothers were naval officers. It’s no surprise, then, that the navy plays a role in several of her books, most prominently Persuasion (incomplete at her death in 1817), in which several major characters, including our heroine’s true love Captain Wentworth, are in the navy.

One wonders then, what Austen’s brothers would have made of the painting “Battle of Trafalgar.” In one scene in Persuasion, Austen has Admiral Croft laugh at a painting of a ship because it is so unrealistic:

Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat! Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think thaty anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that. And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset at any moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built! . . . I would not venture over a horsepond in it.

5. It seems that some of those at the English court who first saw “The Battle of Trafalgar” agreed with Admiral Croft. The first display for the painting prompted immediate criticism. Turner spent several days reworking the painting to address issues about the depiction of details such as rigging, but the critic’s real beef was with his whole approach. Nelson had collapsed several events that took place over a few days into one scene. For example, the flagship Victory displays Nelson’s message to the fleet from about noon on the first day, “England expects every man to do his duty,” while at the same time the Achille is shown under fire (an event that occurred in the late afternoon of the first day) and the Redoubtable is shown sinking (the second day.)

Naval officers and the literal-minded found the painting both bewildering and offensive. Before long, the painting became an embarassment, and in 1829, the king gave the painting away to Greenwich Hospital, primarily to get it out of St. James Palace. Today the painting is the property of the National Maritime Museum, although, of course, you can now see it now in Dallas. If you get a chance, you should do so–see if you agree with modern audiences who find the painting amazing or the critics of the 1930s who found it preposterous.

* It’s important to know that the Impressionists came after Turner and were inspired by him rather than the other way around.

Posted: April 6th, 2008 under History, 5 things about, Literature, Art.
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Today is the birthday of the Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen is that most unusual of writers, a writer of fairy tales. Most fairy tales don’t have authors–they are folklore, rooted deep in the past and carrying with them memories of the Middle Ages in their terrifying forests and hungry wolves. Andersen invented his fairy tales from scratch, yet they have such a ring of authenticity and wonder that children love them. And so in Andersen’s honor, here are five things you might not have known about the author.

1. I had a book of Andersen’s fairy tales as a child, which I loved. I remember lying in the backseat of my parent’s car on the seemingly endless drive from Texas to Colorado for summer vacation reading “The Little Mermaid.” It was my favorite of his stories, but . . . er, it’s much darker than Disney would leave you to believe. Read the original and you realize that the Little Mermaid, who is not, in fact, named Ariel, wants not only the love of the prince but also a human soul. When she becomes human, she gives up not only her voice but also with every step she feels as if she is walking on knives. At the end, the prince marries not Ariel but another princess. Ariel resolves to murder him, an act that would return her to her mermaid state, but instead she commits suicide by throwing herself into the sea. At the last minute, she is swept up as a spirit, with the other spirits telling her if she does good deeds she can earn a soul and go to heaven.

And sing with me now, Under the Sea! Under the Sea!

Not so chipper, eh? It’s a really, truly, odd story–particularly the end. Things have gone from bad to worse until the point when the mermaid becomes a spirit. Then there’s the weird, tacked-on moral:

“After three hundred years, thus shall we float into the kingdom of heaven,” said she [one of the spirits]. “And we may even get there sooner,” whispered one of her companions. “Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!”

Um, OK.

It’s hard to understand what was so transfixing about this story to me–or to Disney–but I found the entire text online, and I see again the appeal. The beginning of the story, when the Little Mermaid is a child, is delightful.

She [the Little Mermaid] was a strange child, quiet and thoughtful; and while her sisters would be delighted with the wonderful things which they obtained from the wrecks of vessels, she cared for nothing but her pretty red flowers, like the sun, excepting a beautiful marble statue. It was the representation of a handsome boy, carved out of pure white stone, which had fallen to the bottom of the sea from a wreck. She planted by the statue a rose-colored weeping willow. It grew splendidly, and very soon hung its fresh branches over the statue, almost down to the blue sands. The shadow had a violet tint, and waved to and fro like the branches; it seemed as if the crown of the tree and the root were at play, and trying to kiss each other.

Andersen was a Victorian writing for children, and I guess he felt a moral was necessary. What a pity he hadn’t left the mermaid under the sea, since, after all, “Darling it’s better / Down where it’s wetter / Take it from me.”

2. Other have been equally smitted by The Little Mermaid. In 1909, Carl Jacobsen of Copenhagen commissioned a statue of the little figure by Edvard Eriksen; it sits to this day on a rock in the Copenhagen harbor at Langelinie. The statue is quite small–just over a yard high–but for some reason it has become a focal point of vandalism and protests. In 1964, her head was cut off by political activists; the original head was never recovered and the current head is a reproduction. In 1984, one arm was sawn off but later recovered. In 1990, another attempt was made to cut off her head; it failed, but a third attempt, in 1998, succeeded, although this time the head was found. Several times the statue has been covered with paint, it has been repeatedly dressed (once in a burka, once in a Muslim head scarf), and in 2003 the poor mermaid was blasted off her rock with dynamite.

3. Andersen wrote that endlessly popular children’s story “The Ugly Duckling,” and he was a bit of an odd duck himself. In 1857, he visited England for a proposed two-week stay with the famous author–his hero–Charles Dickens. Despite the frustration of his host and endless blatant hints, Andersen hung around for six interminable weeks. It didn’t help that Dickens was in the middle of divorcing his wife. Soon after, Dickens published David Copperfield, apparently modeling the obsequious figure Uriah Heep on his unwelcome house guest. The oblivious Andersen considered the trip a great success never understood why Dickens stopped answering his letters.

4. You won’t find the visit with Dickens in the 1952 musical “Hans Christian Andersen,” which purports to be about the writer’s life. In fact, it is completely fictionalized and romanticized–all the better for its star Danny Kaye. At the time, the movie was a big hit and was nominated for six Academy Awards. Now, it has that creaky 50s-costume-musical feel. Nevertheless, some of the songs are lovely, and Danny Kaye was undoubtedly brilliant. Check out this clip, of the song “Thumbelina”–which was, in fact, got the Oscar nomination for “Best Song.” I have no idea why Andersen is in prison, or why small, adorable children spent their time playing outside said prison, but it makes for a sweet song.

5.  One of Andersen’s most lovely fairy tales is “The Nightingale,” a story about a beautiful nightingale whose song revives a Chinese Emperor. The story is believed to be an homage to “the Swedish Nightingale,” the opera singer Jenny Lind. Andersen fell deeply in love with Lind, but the feelings weren’t mutual. Lind is little remembered now, but in her day she was the most famous singer in the world, beloved of Queen Victoria and promoted around the U.S. by P.T. Barnum. She seems to have been irresistable–as well as Andersen, she was wooed by Felix Mendelssohn and Frederic Chopin.

So huge a success was Lind’s tour of the U.S. in 1850 that numerous products were named after the singer, including a mining town in California and an island in Canada. Curiously, the product that has really hung on to the Lind name is the Jenny Lind crib, essentially any crib with vertical bars on all sides. Lind supposedly slept in a bed with turned spindles, and someone seized on the name to promote their own product. You can find Jenny Lind cribs in every Babies R Us in the land–and in my very own attic, my son’s old crib.

Finally . . . OK, I couldn’t resist:

Posted: April 2nd, 2008 under 5 things about, Literature, Movies, Art.
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A fun thing came in the mail last weekend: a copy of the journal New Hibernia Review complete with my article “Violence and Silence in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Mycenae Lookout.’”

Now, I write for magazines. I get contributors copies in the mail all the time. Usually they go into a pile, and then later in the box labelled “Clips.” The mental_floss issues make it to the coffee table, but others I barely glance at, just checking to make sure my name is spelled correctly.

This? This is different. First, I didn’t get paid for it. Second, it’s the last item of my grad school to-do list, now crossed off.

The article was my thesis work, and I finished working on it in 2002. I submitted it to the New Hibernia in 2003, and it has taken five years (five years!) to get it published. Thanks goodness I wasn’t waiting around for a job or tenure all this time.

The poor editor didn’t quite know what to make of me. Everyone else in the journal is either a student or, more likely, faculty at a university somewhere, and here I am all on my lonesome in Texas. So I’m identified as an “independent scholar.” Makes me sound like a real nut job, doesn’t it? Like someone who works at Starbucks or as a UPS delivery guy during the day but develops ground-breaking robots at night in his garage and holds a grudge against the academy.

Wasn’t the Unibomber sort of an independent scholar? Yikes.

In any case, it was lovely to see it, and I need to email my old supervising professor, remind him of who I was, and announce I finally made it into print . . . this kind of print.

I’m very fond of the article, though. It’s about a poem of the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney called “Mycenae Lookout,” which retells the events from Aeschylus’ Oresteia. (The poem is under copyright, so even though you can find the text online, I’m not going to post a link. You can find it easily in any library and many large bookstores.)

So in celebration of my long-delayed success, a few points:

1. The correct pronunciation: SHAY-mus HEE-nee.  It’s confusing, since the “ea” is pronounced differently in the first and last names of the poor man’s name. I called him “SHAY-mus HAY-nee” for half a semester until kindly corrected. I felt like a doofus.

2. Heaney was born in Northern Ireland in April 1939. He’s lucky he didn’t come into the world a few years earlier or his name would have been (officially, at least) James. One of the lovely little tricks of English colonial rule was that Irish names were Anglicized on birth certificates, so Seamus would be James, Sean would be John, and so forth.

3. I have had two points of personal contact with the illustrious Laureate. The first when I wrote him a letter while working on my thesis. I was discussing certain points of the poem with my professor, specifically did Heaney read Greek, and he said, “Well, why don’t you ask him?” It had never occurred to me to do such a thing. Write an author? Ask about their work? In Ireland? The attitude of my professor was why the heck not–if the author is alive, take advantage of it. One gets so used to dead authors–long dead, in many cases–that the thought of actually inquiring of them simply hadn’t crossed my mind. Later I shared an office with two Elizabethan scholars who were green with jealously. There’s no sending Ben Jonson a letter and asking him what he had in mind.

I wrote my letter, sent it off, and prepared to never hear back–but I did, some months later. Heaney wrote me an incredibly gracious letter, which I treasure.

4. My second contact was at a reading Heaney gave in North Carolina my last semester. The reading was held at a small college, the name of which I don’t remember, in Western NC, south of Asheville. It was about a four hour drive, but my professor had two tickets, one of which entitled him to a seat up front and an invitation to a private reception afterwards, so I had to go.

Unfortunately, I had a cold. Not a bad cold, but a niggling, sniffling, coughing kind of cold. I had stocked up on Kleenex, but I did not adequately bring in mints. Just as the introduction ended and Heaney stepped up to the microphone, I felt a tickle in my throat. As he accepted the applause, I felt it grow. I tried to hide tiny little cough under the cover of the clapping, but it didn’t clear the tickle. Then everyone was sitting down.

The poem stood at the podium, faced his audience, and began reciting the first poem from his very first book, “Digging.” The entire auditorium was rapt and silent. I could feel this horrible, hacking cough building and I did all I could to repress it. I clamped my mouth shut, held my breath, and wheezed slightly. God, it seemed like a short poem on the page, but reading it out loud took forever. Tears began to run down my face as I stifled this horrendous cough. I noticed my professor glance over at me with some concern–probably surprised that I was so moved by what is by any account an excellent poem, but not a weepy one.

Finally the poem ended, and I used the following applause to cover a massive coughing fit. Now my professor was looking at me as if wondering where I had come down with tuberculosis and why he had positioned me next to the aisle instead of himself, so he couldn’t flee from my probably drug-resistant sputum.

The reading went on–it was marvelous–and afterward I got to greet the great man himself. I wiped my hands frantically on a clean Kleenex, but there was no time to wash them. Oh, for a bottle of Purel!

I ended the evening by becoming utterly and completely lost leaving the college and driving for hours in entirely the wrong direction before sorting myself out and making it to Charlotte, where we were staying with a friend. I don’t know if I ever explained to my professor my suddenly tearfulness during “Digging.” To this day, whenever I read the poem I get a little scratch in my throat.

Furthermore, I now take this moment to say: Mr. Heaney, Mr. Laureate, SHAY-mus, Sir, if you came down with a terrible cold after speaking in North Carolina in the autumn of 2002, I most humbly apologize. I love your poetry. Thanks for the letter. And, er, write on!

Posted: March 27th, 2008 under Poetry.
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