_The Good Place_

The 80s

I was born in the 80s, and, I mean, early in the 80s, so you might think I would be used to 80s aesthetics.  Nevertheless, I just really don't like them.  I mean, after having watched the Blade Runner sequel, I remarked to multiple people that my main memory of watching the original is just how off-putting I found the actresses' haircuts.

I was just reminded of this again by watching a whole bunch of Bowie videos and performances spanning decades.  I don't always find the aesthetics of Bowie's appearances in the 70s attractive (not a mullet fan), but they are consistently appealingly bizarre.  Conversely, while in the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s Bowie's aesthetics were more normal, they were consistently pretty attractive.  However, the aesthetics of Bowie's 80s appearances were a thoroughly unappealing mix of conventional and unattractive.  Sigh.  The only partial exception is Bowie in the Screaming Lord Byron role in the "Blue Jean" video, but:

1. this is presumably meant as a parody of Bowie's own 70s personae.
2. it is literally a Byron reference.
3. although presumably unintentionally, it reminds me strongly of Torquil.

Certainly I don't find anything else about the aesthetics of the video particularly appealing.

Sometime this year I am intending to watch the "Love Cats" video again, and hopefully that will remind me that there are at least some 80s aesthetics out there that I quite like!

Reading _Alice_'s Footnotes

Maybe it's just me, but I find this a hilarious footnote in the heavily annotated edition of Alice's Adventures  in Wonderland that I'm now reading: "The Liddell children had a particularly distinguished drawing-master at this time, John Ruskin. . . ."  What an incredibly bizarre way to describe Ruskin, "a particularly distinguished drawing-master?"  Seriously?  Later on, the footnote says, "He taught Alice drawing in the deanery, lending her paintings of Turner to copy. . .," and I found that hilarious too, but that really is probably just me.  The thing is, most of my exposure to Ruskin was in my summer course back in high school on Victorian literature, where our big joke was that Ruskin suffered from profound lust for Turner because he just would not shut up in any of his work about how great Turner was. . . I suppose by this principle I myself suffer with profound lust for Byron, Shelley, Henry James, DWJ, Jenna Moran, Bowie and Kevin Barnes?

I also seriously had no idea that the Liddell in Alice Liddell was the same as the Liddell in Liddell-Scott.

Obviously, these are the kinds of things I am going to blog about.

Neck and Neck and Not so Neck

Apparently I have seven posts tagged Byron and seven overlapping but not identical posts tagged Shelley. And three tagged Keats. Sorry, Keats! You're beating Blake and Wordsworth! And really beating Coleridge (unsurprisingly - I genuinely don't have much to say about Coleridge, even if I like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel").

Well, eight and eight and four, now.

You know, I meant for this to be a very short post, but. . . the person directly responsible for the publication of both "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" was Byron? And the motivation for the whole writing competition thing was Byron's recitation of "Christabel"? I swear to God that I wrote those two as the Coleridge poems I really like before learning any of this.

Deeply Satisfying

So, what's going on in my reading life is, ignoring the lengthy hiatus I took to play Final Fantasy II in sync with my brother and the lengthy hiatus I took to read plenty of YA novels and all of Sarah Rees Brennan's fanfiction, I'm reading in essentially random order through the books that a friend of mine who moved to a different continent allowed me to take. You may recall that these books included The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Maurice. These were then followed by Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow and, now, Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. So that's five books. Much to my surprise and pleasure, three out of those five have included Byron mentions! Ironically, considering the subject matter, Maurice is one of the ones that doesn't; more logically, neither does The Serpent and the Rainbow. Oh, yay Byron! 60% of all novels should mention you!

Three Things About _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_

1) My brother had read the chapter "One Shall Destroy the Other" in a class and described it to me, but despite this advance preview it turned out to be quite dull. That having been said, it was a huge relief to me to see Byron towards the end. I don't know why I find it so endlessly pleasing that Byron was such a celebrity in the 19th century. It's not even like I'm so into celebrity culture in the modern world - I would hardly claim to be uninterested in it, but still, there's plenty of people out there who are far more interested than I. But whenever I see some completely random reference to Byron in a seemingly unrelated text by an American or a French person, I find it deeply satisfying. Ah, Byron.

2) Relatedly, later on in the book, a character mentions a "text of Charlemagne, Stryga vel masca (Witch or vampire)." Interested as I am in the history of the Western vampire, this definitely got my attention. Was there actually a Latin word for "vampire"? Was Charlemagne actually writing about vampires? It's a little unclear, but I think I've reassured myself that this wasn't quite what was going on. It's hard to find material about this particular text that isn't directly related to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but this 1820 French text (the link goes to the Google translation) mentions it - Google translates "stryge" as vampire. However, looking on Wiktionary, while masca clearly means "witch," the meaning of stryge is less clear. It comes from the Vulgar Latin "striga," which does have "vampire" as one meaning, but seems to refer ambiguously to witches as well. The Romanian strigoi are clearly vampires, but it's alright because they are the old-fashioned disgusting Germanic type of vampire, not the sexy Byronic type. The Italian strega are of course witches, just like in the Tomie DePaola books. So even if Charlemagne was writing about vampires, I think it's okay and does not dethrone Byron, and he may have just been writing about witches and ghosts anyway.

3) This passage:

"The archdeacon heard him not. 'Oh! fool!' continued he, without taking his eyes off the window. 'And even couldst thou have broken through that formidable web, with thy frail wings, thoughtest thou to have attained the light? Alas! that glass beyond - that transparent obstacle - that wall of crystal harder than brass, which separates all philosophy from the truth - how couldst thou have passed beyond it? Oh! vanity of science! how many sages have come fluttering from afar, to dash their heads against it! How many systems come buzzing to rush pell-mell against this eternal window!'"

At first glance, it looks interesting, because it's talking about people trying to achieve transcendence and inevitably failing. But I think the focal point is in the wrong place for me to empathize. The issue here is that ultimate truth is unattainable. Which, okay, it's true, but is that really so much of a concern for anyone? The scientists I know personally are pragmatists who believe in the scientific method and are happy to admit that all of their theories are models of reality which always can be further refined - while of course their goal is to find more accurate models, I think they appreciate the fact that all they're doing is modelling reality because the gap between model and reality means that there will always be more science to do. As for me, a friend (a musician) recently asked me what truth meant in my discipline, and I pointed out that, while other students of literature would obviously disagree, for me, truth was simply not the significant issue. Literature and literary studies are not trying to find what's true - we're trying to construct our own system, obviously fed by the truth of this world but not beholden to it - and, in fact, surely the attraction for those of us who are attracted to this mode of thought is the fact that it's not beholden to truth. The problem with our system is not that it's untrue - in fact, that's the benefit of the system. The problem with the system is that it's unstable, tends to regress to the abyss. Ultimately, Dom Claude's concern seems to be a medieval one - it's always a bit surprising to me when people today obsess too much about the unattainability of truth, since I tend to feel that we have solutions for that that pretty much work for us!

Do I Have Time for This? No, I Do Not Have Time for This!

One beneficial side effect of my current utter, complete, mind-blowing, devastating obsession with "Station to Station" (Devastating? Part of the problem with being obsessed with a song about the experience of cocaine addiction is that the obsession kind of recapitulates the experience of cocaine addiction) is that I have discovered that this is finally available online. I have been looking for that forever because it is, very predictably, probably up there on my list with Byron as one of the best things that has ever happened in the real reality. It's kind of hilarious to watch, really, because. . . well, first of all, Jagger sounds like me while I'm teaching ("Are you going to be quiet and listen to me now? This is really important, so you really should be quiet!" That is totally what I'd say if I were to suddenly start reading from Adonais in class.), but, secondly, he says something like, "I'm sure this reflects the way we're all feeling about Brian," and I'm like, "No, most people do not react to celebrity death with Neoplatonism, do they? I mean, the mere existence of Adonais certainly suggests that some people do, but. . . that's not the normal response, is it?"

If you are wondering about the connection with "Station to Station," can I just point you to this poem? It's by Aleister Crowley! And it's called "In the Woods with Shelley!" Lines totally include the phrases: "Spurning the stain of all grief here" and "Loose but your soul - shall its wings find the white way so appalling!"

EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS ABOUT SHELLEY!

Giles Goat Boy!

Oh! Giles Goat Boy is totally another example of wonderful OTT narrative! I mean, this is the novel that I like to summarize by explaining that it's about a young American man who decides that he is going to finally achieve the goal of so many philosophers and spiritual leaders and start a new religion that can bring salvation to, at the very least, all of America, if not the entire world. Except that America is a college, the world is a university, and salvation involves passing your exams and graduating. Then my ideal interlocutor asks me if I mean that literally or figuratively, and I get to respond, "Both!" Plus there is the beat poetry version of Oedipus Rex.

Of course, the problem here is that Giles Goat Boy qualifies as exactly the right sort of OTT in my mind, but, unlike Angel Sanctuary or Gardens of the Moon, it is quite obviously intended by its author as a joke. OTOH, "Rautavaara's Case", for which the brief summary is "Jesus eats people" and which is clearly not meant as a joke, is not OTT at all, much as I adore it. I think the difference is that the basic premise of "Rautavaara's Case" is less "Jesus eats people" and more "Wouldn't it in fact be rather odd if Jesus ate people?" In other words, the oddness of the premise is intrinsic to the story; the story's plot and themes are entirely dependent on the fact that it's a really odd premise. Though PKD might well have written the story because he thought the idea of Jesus eating people was really cool, he goes to a lot of trouble to justify it in the story itself, and to explain why Jesus eating people is not only fascinating as a ridiculous idea but also genuinely fascinating on a theological level. On the other hand, though Giles Goat Boy is clearly a joke, it's told with a completely straight face - there's no attempt made to justify why the world should be a university, America a college, or salvation passing one's exams and graduating. This is just taken as a given, just as Yuki Kaori clearly thinks giant flying aborted angelic fetuses with lots of eyeballs that possess their twin brothers and try to rape people don't particularly need any justification, or Steven Erikson apparently believes that good houses versus evil trees are totally par for the course. So Giles Goat Boy may be a joke, but this is extrinsic to the story - although there is no way to miss the fact that it's a joke, the narrative does not depend on explaining or justifying the joke. The depth of the worldbuilding, I think, is what makes me feel inclined to take it very seriously despite being such a ridiculous joke. In a way, it reminds me of Gulliver's Travels - which, again, is obviously satire, but I tend to have the feeling that while Swift was writing it he sometimes just got so caught up in the worldbuilding that he forgot to focus on satire ;-). In fact, if it weren't for the fact that I've known the basic premise of Gulliver's Travels for as long as I remember, such that I'm entirely inured to it, maybe that would count.

Actually, you know what probably does count? Manfred! And that's even relevant to the original instigator of this whole train of thought, given that I strongly suspect Yuki Kaori of having an interest in Byron. I mean, her two most famous manga are both full of incest and homoeroticism, one of the bizarre brother/sister pairs in Angel Sanctuary involves a sister named Astarte who winds up dying before her brother, and her other famous manga (which I admittedly haven't read) takes place in 19th century Britain (or. . . umm. . . perhaps I should say Yuki Kaori's version of 19th century Britain)and has a hero named Cain who is only interested in heterosexual relationships with girls to whom he's related and is himself the product of incest between a woman named Augusta and her brother. So yeah.

Solidifying an Awesome Insight

This isn't really a new thought, but it is a kind of awesome one in its awesomeness:

I am Shelley - Headfinger is Keats.

I was going to say, "Just read Alastor and Endymion," but there are two problems, namely: is it really fair to ask people to read Endymion, and, there is so much else to read that you could just about read everything, actually. Still, Alastor v. Endymion is the fundamental contrast I am going for here.

The reason why it's awesome, obviously, is that someone is going to write in the comments to my previous post some kind of rebuttal to my explanation of The Fabric of Reality's argument against solipsism, and that person will be Byron. Then we shall see some painted veils called life torn aside, and some loathsome masks are going to damn well fall, I say, fall! Oh, yeah.

Augustine St. Clare

As I have commented in the past, even in a novel written today, I think it's usually pretty easy to get a sense of which characters the narrative is favoring and which it is disfavoring. If the book ends with character X generally happy and character Y generally unhappy, depending on whether the tone at that point seems positive or negative, you can probably decide which character the implied reader is supposed to be rooting for. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it can still usually be done.

But in the classic 19th-century novel, with its omniscient narrator, it's even easier to get such a sense, because the narrator will come right out and tell you, "Yay wonderful, amazing Character X of Love!" or "Boo horrible, awful Character Y of Hatred!" This is taken to its logical extreme in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, wherein the narrator reveals to us whether each character who dies is going to Heaven or Hell. At this point, while you can certainly read the book against the grain as described in my above post, you certainly can't deny that the text pretty well sets out for you a defined attitude on each character.

What I find amusing is the contrast between the very. . . Protestant attitude of the narrator and my own. Most of the good characters are pretty good throughout, and, believing in Christ, as they do, they shape their actions and behavior based on their sense of what Christ would want. And then there's Augustine St. Clare. Augustine St. Clare was clearly written to be an attractive, Byronic figure (he's explicitly compared to Byron in chapter 28), and he is attractive. He's also, as you might expect of a Byronic character, not an especially good person - as he himself would, as you might expect of a Byronic character, be the first to admit. He has a very high moral standard, but fails to even begin to live up to it in any way. He hates slavery more than many of the other white characters in the book, including some who don't own any slaves, and is extremely articulate on the topic, but he gets so much benefit out of his own slave-owning habits that he doesn't even free his own slaves, let alone work for abolition in any way.

Eventually, St. Clare realizes that maybe he ought to act on his beliefs (he also starts trying to believe in God, which, for Harriet Beecher Stowe, is more or less synonymous). Before he can do anything to help anyone at all, except for Topsy, he gets killed off. Presumably, Beecher Stowe does this in order to end her novel with the portrayal of the awful and not-in-any-way-attractive Simon Legree and to give Uncle Tom the opportunity for his Christ-like martyrdom. But the funny thing about the way that it functions in the novel is that it also gives St. Clare the chance to go to Heaven, because he's started trying to redeem himself and now believes in God, despite the fact that he really never did anything good to anyone and, through his inaction up until the last couple of days of his life, did a lot of harm. Nonetheless, the chapter wherein he dies is called "Reunion," because he gets to go to Heaven and be with his beloved mother and daughter again.

Thing is, I really like St. Clare. I reread Uncle Tom's Cabin this past week largely in order to read about him. I find the book enjoyable and engaging during the section set in his home and kind of boring in the parts before and after. St. Clare is great. But I have the sense that the narrator, and quite possibly Harriet Beecher Stowe as well, like him even more than I do. I mean, it's one thing to be very fond of a character who's clearly not the most wonderful of people. It's another thing entirely to be so fond of him that you give him the chance to redeem himself without in any way making it necessary for him ever to change his behavior. So. . . well. . . it amuses me.

All the Poets Are Ded

I like Keats. Heck, I've written two relatively decent and (if I do say so myself) insightful papers about Keats, which is more than I can say for Byron and much more than I can say for Shelley (in fact, I feel I wouldn't even know where to begin with this last).

The trouble with Keats is Keats as a person, which. . . well, I've read multiple writers talking about how, of the younger Romantics, Keats is the only one you'd actually want to know, because Keats was genuinely nice, sweet, and good. Which on a certain level is presumably true. And reading Keats' biography, or his letters, is not boring - and not just because he had interesting things to say about literature and wrote some amazing poems - since he was both a legitimately nice person and a brilliant genius in his field (and, for that matter, relatively disadvantaged), his death is quite depressing and tragic. But poets, like pop stars and politicans, don't really count as real people. And my tastes in real people probably don't run to the norm, anyway.

Shelley (as a person, as described in Richard Holmes's book) actually reminds me more of many of my friends than Keats. Probably this is a class thing, at least to some degree, but it remains true. Shelley writing that atheist pamphlet but getting kicked out of school for refusing to answer questions rather than making the "strong case" that his intellectual inquiry was, in fact, not criminal, Shelley deciding that it would be a great idea for his best friend/boyfriend to sleep with his wife, going away in order to facilitate this, and then completely abandoning the friend when he suggests it to her and she gets offended. . . these may not be paradigms of positive behavior, but they seem awfully reminiscent to me of the kind of things that happened to my friends, at least when they were young. And Shelley was, if not the same kind of intellectual as my friends, certainly a very intellectual person. . . part of the reason why I have such a hard time thinking about how to write about his poetry is because of the philosophical complexity of it. Shelley certainly had his flaws, and he obviously wasn't a nice person like Keats (hell, he apparently was, completely obliviously, not very nice to Keats himself), but I would have liked to have been friends with him, had that been possible. He would certainly have been a very interesting friend (although some evidence suggests that a friendship between us would have been difficult. Then again, this goes for Keats, in a perhaps even more off-putting way, as well.).

As for Byron as a person. . . ummm. . . he sort of wasn't. I realize that the blame for this lies somewhat on his own head, but obviously not entirely. The problem with Byron is that every aspect of his personality, including his own resistance to his celebrity, his desires to divorce himself from the characters in his poems, and even the admitted great differences between, Don Juan and, say, Manfred, has informed later writers and creators so much that it really is fundamentally impossible for me to think of him as anything other than a fictional character. Are there lots of real people like Byron? Clearly, no. Are there lots of fictional people like him. Oh my God yes. Thus, the concept of considering Byron as a potential friend seems ludicrous - it would really be like considering Cain or Manfred as a potential friend.

Everybody knows the story behind the creation of Frankenstein, but I found the story behind Polidori's Vampyre to be really. . . entertaining. So Byron begins a story and then never finishes it. Polidori, who apparently served as Byron's personal doctor largely out of a desire to give a kickstart to his career (and who was uncle to the Rosettis? Man, you think of Goblin Market as setting up a completely different tradition of speculative fiction), uses the story as inspiration for his own novel. This ends up being a story about a guy who pals around with a British nobleman who spends vast quantities of time seducing women on trips throughout Europe and eventually seduces the guy's sister. The nobleman, who is of course a really evil vampire, is named after a character in an earlier novel who is a transparent portrait of Byron. When the novel was published, somehow the magazine decided to claim that it was by Byron, thus infuriating both Byron and Polidori, who by this time really disliked each other. And apparently, all Internet sources agree that Polidori was the first to really write about the vampire as an aristocrat, thus more or less setting the tone for the entire genre as it developed throughout the next couple of centuries. I find this story genuinely hilarious. But it really does demonstrate why Byron basically only counts as a fictional character. The fact of his existence seems more or less irrelevant ;-).