barnes on bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, or the literary holiday honoring the June 16th, 1904 novelscape of James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses and its main character Leopold Bloom.  June 16th, 1904 was also the day of Joyce's first significant romantic encounter with Nora Barnacle, who would eventually become his lover, muse, mother of his children and wife -- all pretty much in that order.

Author Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) did some interesting and adventurous interview work -- aside from writing her own fiction -- in the earlier decades of her career, and many of these interviews featured illustrations by Barnes as well.  This portrait of James Joyce is a wonderful example of her artistic talent and accompanied Barnes' Vanity Fair interview of Joyce from 1922. 


(image from wikimedia commons)

festive fezziwigs

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.

In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them.

When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, 'Well done,' and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a brand-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish....

(A Christmas Carol, Mr. Dickens)

art and the house of mirth

More Suite101 blog reposting....

I’ve always loved the chapter from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, where ladies of New York society take part in an evening of "living pictures" or tableaux vivants. For the entertainment of their guests, and for the presumed showcasing of themselves, the costumed women pose within sets designed to resemble classic paintings. These illusions depend "not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination."

By this point in the novel, we’ve become familiar with the female characters and to link some of them with art is aesthetically fun — and a nice fictional device by Edith Wharton. We know about the translucent-skinned "frailer Dutch type" of old New York money, perfect for bringing a van Dyck to life. We also know about the resourceful and resilient Carry Fisher, who despite being a divorcee when divorce was still questioned has managed to keep herself within society circles. With her earthy dark looks she becomes one of Goya’s women for the night, from the "exaggerated glow of her eyes" to the "provocation of her frankly-painted smile."

Then there’s Lily Bart, The House of Mirth’s heroine — beautiful, capricious, determined to find a rich husband yet not quite calculating and manipulative enough to pull that feat off. Lily chooses Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Lloyd as her tableau, knowing that its simpler lines and similarity to her own loveliness will be a show-stopper. Which it is, and Lily is a true vision — with some of the men of course wondering privately about whether she’s got any underwear on beneath those "pale draperies" that outline "dryad-like curves."

The tableaux evening is a high point in Lily’s otherwise troubled quest to become one of New York's truly powerful society women — and to no doubt eventually have her own beautiful, slightly haughty portrait painted by John Singer Sargent.

Pictured: La Maja Vestida (Francisco de Goya, ca. 1800) & Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd (Sir Joshua Reynolds, ca. 1775) -- click on each painting to get a closer look

unconsciously brilliant

"The unconscious should not be thought of as a limbo where vague, cloudy, and amorphous notions swim hastily about. There is every reason to believe, on the contrary, that it is the great home of form; that it is quicker to see types, patterns, purposes, than our intellect can ever be...[I]f you are to write well, you must come to terms with the enormous and powerful part of your nature which lies behind the threshold of immediate knowledge."

Words: Becoming a Writer -- Dorothea Brande, 1934
Image: Dream Vision -- Albrecht Dürer, 1525 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

that lunatic impressionist gang

(More Suite101 blog reposts....)

The French Impressionists initially had to organize their own exhibits because the official Paris Salon wouldn’t consistently accept their works. When those indie shows were reviewed by certain art critics of the day, the feedback could be downright nasty. While some admired their new perspective, others sniped how:

“Here five or six lunatics deranged by ambition -- one of them a woman -- have put together an exhibition…They take canvas, paint and brushes, splash on a few daubs of color here and there at random, then sign the result. The inmates of the Ville-Evrard Asylum behave in much the same way…Try telling M Pissarro that trees are not purple, or the sky the colour of butter…Try to explain to M Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a rotting mass of flesh, with violet-toned green spots all over it...There is also, as in all famous gangs, a woman. Her name is Berthe Morisot, and she is a curiosity. She manages to convey a certain degree of feminine grace in spite of her outbursts of delirium.”

That was critic Albert Wolff behind that 1876 rampage, and as a result of it, Berthe Morisot‘s husband Eugene (also painter Edouard Manet‘s brother) challenged Wolff to a duel, though I don’t think any swords were ever drawn or pistols fired. Clearly, Mr. Wolff would be horrified by the crowds who still flock to museums to view French Impressionist paintings, and by all the Monet tote bags and Degas and Renoir calendars for sale in the gift shops.

Wolff’s tirade is included in Sue Roe’s very interesting and smoothly flowing The Private Lives of The Impressionists (HarperCollins). The book gives factual and biographical information, but it also heightens the personalities and friendships of the artists so that it reads more like a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

(Pictured: Buttery sky by Camille Pissarro -- Apple Pickers at Eragny, 1888 -- Dallas Museum of Art)

cleaning hydrotherapy

Whenever it gets this hot I wish I could reenact that scene from Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover, wherein the mother goes on a water-wash cleaning binge in their house in 1929 French colonial Vietnam. Duras writes how the house was raised above the Mekong, so it "can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen...[we] splash each other, then wash the floor with yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot...[the] whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight...."

Pictured: Waterfall, Blue Brook -- John Henry Twachtman, ca. 1895 (Cincinnati Art Museum)

stuart's seven stairs

Stuart Brent, one of Chicago's great booksellers, died at age 98 this week. His first shop opened in 1946 and was a frequent hangout for the then up and coming Nelson Algren, who had just finished a collection of short stories known as The Neon Wilderness. Algren's biographer Bettina Drew describes Brent's Seven Stairs at that time as "a tiny literary bookstore on the Near North Side with a woodstove, a barrel of apples, a hanging salami and a knowledgeable owner...."

Brent soon became an Algren fan and hosted "Neon Wilderness parties" when the book was finally published. Beyond his relationship with Nelson, Brent was friends with many other Chicago writers and even the proud recipient of an oak desk given to him by The Front Page author Ben Hecht. An item in Chicago Breaking News also notes how Brent would sometimes "rise from behind a pile of invoices on the table to offer browsers a bit of advice -- or criticism. Sometimes he'd take a book from a customer's hands, quickly substituting one he thought better."

He closed things down because the world of book sales and publication had changed and Michigan Avenue turned too sleek and upscale. He lamented that the Garrett Popcorn shop had outlived his small book oasis, but that kernel-popping place has seen the closing of many other stores, and in its own way Garrett is one of the few Mag Mile locales that attracts all kinds of people who share a democratic love of their rich gooey caramel or super-cheesy mix.

Brent's 1962 autobiography was titled Seven Stairs: An Adventure of the Heart and details how his shop and career came more from a love of reading and writers than any desire to make money. Brent noted that "I have never had what the public wanted to read, and I lost out because of it," but without doubt Brent's loss was Chicago's literary gain.

the random page

Facade.com is a website that offers free on-line Tarot card readings from a variety of decks, along with rune readings, I Ching and other features. One of those other interesting features is their Stichomancy option, which spotlights an old form of divination wherein a person flips open to a random page of a book and tries to gain insight from wherever he or she happens to turn to. There are categories like Biblical, classical or historical texts, along with passages from mysteries, plays or poems – or you can just allow a computer-generated extra-random choice.

A random whirl of the pages today brought up this excerpt from Honore de Balzac's Juana:

Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The profile of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing which he, an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen.

I don't know that this particularly divined anything in my life but the story sounds intriguing, what with the jaded libertine and all. It also brought to mind the featured 1855 painting Portrait of a Spanish Lady by Gustave Courbet, who was something of a libertine himself.

the bridge

"Over the great bridge...with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world." (The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Image: The Bridge: Nocturne -- Julian Alden Weir, 1910 (Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden)