No end of words

By writing this for a poetry competition
about the end of days,

I’m colluding with spiritual genocide,
vicarious, of course,

all perpetrators’ hands clean of blood.

There’s nothing cheers the disaffected more

than bringing down a world that’s rejected them.

For twenty-five pounds I’d betray my species

with a spiteful sentiment classically columnized,

my disillusionment disguised as edified.....

Art and Friendship

"It is humanity that interests me" (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867) 

Thirty years before he risked his own safety and reputation in the Dreyfus case, Zola had taken up his pen in another passionate public defence, in this case of the painter Manet, whose early works were misunderstood and condemned by the art establishment for their alla prima technique and stark realism of their subject-matter, flouting the academic rules and allegorical ideals that had determined post-Revolutionary French art.

Manet's paintings were geuninely shocking to a respectable bourgeoisie unused to seeing a nude looking like a real woman just before or after having sex rather than a neo-classical goddess representing an unattainable virtue or abstract idea. For Zola, they represented a new analytical truth in art, the visual counterpart of the literary realism first introduced to the reading public in the 1830s by Balzac.

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... 

(Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). Image source: Wikipedia

As a Realist novelist and art critic, Zola dismissed preconceived and philosophically pompous ideas about absolute beauty in his sweeping rhetoric - "It is humanity that interests me" - and argued that all kinds of artistic interpretation of reality were valid, contributing to a vast and varied "epic of human creation"....

TRUTH part 2

Monet: "Water-Lily Pond," c.1915-1926.Oil on canvas, diptych in the Chichu Art Museum. Image source: Wikipedia
ART AND CONSCIENCE

"I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness" (Zola, J'accuse).

 

Glass vase "Les hommes noirs" by Émile Gallé and Victor Prouvé, engraved with monstrous mutations coming out of the darkness of human nature displayed in Paris at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. 

Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

Within two weeks of the publication of J'accuse in the newspaper L'Aurore, edited by Clemenceau ('le tigre' of French republican politics and future war leader, who was also an admirer of the Impressionists), Zola was prosecuted by the government for libel on 23 February, after a trial described at the time by the Manchester Guardian as "a mockery of justice", he was condemned to the highest penalty of a year's imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. There was a further humiliation when he was removed from the Légion d'honneur.  He avoided hearing his final sentence at a second trial in July by fleeing to England, where he stayed in exile until June 1899, returning when he saw signs that "truth was marching on" under the pressure of the Dreyfusards, with the government's collapse and the appointment of a more sympathetic president. His prime objective, the retrial of Dreyfus, was ordered at last....

Imaginary Palaces and Garden Theatres

Giuseppe Valeriani's set of designs for a stage set. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Theatres were built to look like palaces, and palaces looked like theatres....

Truth

7th February,1898: opening day of Zola's tumultuous libel trial in Paris after the publication of J'accuse....

Art and Conscience

'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867)  

Truth appears as a plastic commodity to people in power as it does to most of us in our everyday life. This is one of the reasons we need art, including fiction and history: to correct a short circuit in our moral brains. We despise liars in fiction, and we expect dramatized accounts of real life to be true. 

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). 
Image source: Wikipedia

Truth wouldn't mean so much to any of us if we hadn't been conditioned to think of it as a deity, secular and spiritual, personified as a solid figure, often paired with Justice; without it our human experience would descend to scrabbling about without a compass in primal mud. We are far more worried about whether other people are being truthful than if we are, because we are not in control; our own adjustments of the truth do not count as lies; they are corrections. We have our eye on a greater truth transcending ordinary means, whether it's saving our careers or the peace of mind of someone we love; we think a self-constructed truth, made up of our intentions and deletions, is as valid as the actual truth.  Like successful businessmen and ambitious politicians, we end up feeling that the more virtuous duty is not to be found out.

It is true that a lie can save lives. It is true that a lie can cost lives. Dr David Kelly was a casualty of "reasons of State". Hundreds of badly cared for hospital patients are casualties of institutional lies, and everywhere in government and businesses there are managements inciting or covering up lies and making scapegoats....

Winter

Through the window I see ghostly rain 
blown like a mad woman trailing veils across the lawn

under an exhausted sky;

contrary man-made wet and cold, out of rhythm,  
confuses birds and plants,  
dispirits us.
My mother’s old hibiscus plant, totem I have tended,  
is alight with amber flames for a day,
magnificat that leaves me cold.

Extract from At World's End © Pippa Rathborne 2013 written for and included in the anthology End of Days - A Collection of Poetry, to be published by Forward Poetry in April, 2013.

Guest Post: Sarah Vernon writing about Ellen Terry

Image © Sarah Vernon

Starting with an old theatrical photograph in her possession, Sarah Vernon penetrates the world of last century's professional actresses, their dedication to truthful interpretation of character and to stage-craft, and also their friendships with one another, that linked generations. Sarah has always believed in the importance of passing on the lessons of past actors and actresses' performances. This extract from her post quotes from Ellen Terry's memoirs, containing invaluable insights into playing Volumnia and deploring the non-existent or, at best, underwritten mother-daughter relationships in Shakespeare:

'"The critics who wrote their notices at the dress-rehearsal, and complained of my playing pranks with the text, were a little previous. Oh, how bad it makes one feel to find that they all think my Volumnia ‘sweet’, and I thought I was fierce, contemptuous, overbearing. Worse, I felt as if I must be appearing like a cabman rating his Drury Lane wife!” By 20 April, however, she feels she is “beginning to play Volumnia a little better.”

The actress later comments on parents in Shakespeare’s plays: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little stock he seems to take of mothers! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia, Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione, Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of fathers, but of their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess Roussillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they are poor examples, like Juliet’s mother and Mrs. Page.”

READ SARAH VERNON'S FULL POST

Reblogged from First Night Design with many thanks to Sarah Vernon

The Faery Prince and Winged Time

A Jacobean Tragedy

 Jacobean fantasy and hope for the future cut off before fruition:
Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), armoured and hatted, rides on horseback, 
with winged Time walking beside him.  Oil painting by Robert Peake the Elder, c.1606-08. Peake (born c.1551) was the prince's official painter, producing iconography in the Elizabethan tradition, at odds with the bravura realism of contemporary European baroque art, already old-fashioned in England at the time of his appointment, and soon officially superseded by Isaac Oliver (of refugee Huguenot parentage) and Dutch and Flemish-born portraitists, but providing a transitional allegorical vision of royal mystique. This image is made poignant by our knowledge that death overtook the prince in the flower of youth.  Image source: Wikipedia

On January 13th, 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman, two of the authors of Eastward Ho!, were arrested and imprisoned on charges of sedition after a performance of the play at the Blackfriars Theatre. The third playwright involved, John Marston, fled London to avoid arrest. The new King, James I, had only been in power for two years and the government was particularly sensitive to criticism of the court; it was the same year as the Gunpowder Plot. Jacobean political censorship was motivated by immediate propaganda needs, trying to second-guess the reactions of domestic factions and foreign powers, rather than by a programme of ideological oppression. The king, a published author, who regarded himself as a benevolent intellectual patriarch, believed in the power of disseminating words to convince minds, and his queen, Anne of Denmark, passionately loved theatre and performance...

Blogger's Block/Commemorative Post 2

JANUARY 13TH

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block. For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events in the hope of spinning a Universal Truth makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

Engraving by George Glover for the title-page to Robert Farley, 'Kalendarium humanae vitae, The Kalendar of Mans Life' (London, William Hope, 1638) 
 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

But take at random some news headlines for January 13th, and perhaps you will boggle that they are not from 2013. The details, the names of people and places, have changed, but not humanity, either for good or bad....

A year's blogging later, Twelfth Night or They Never Give Up

Undeterred by everything I've told them, the bear cubs are still dancing on the frozen lake, 

and the young angel is still climbing the starlit sky.

Blogger's block or Dido's Lament

The Death of Dido, marble by Claude-Augustin Cayot, 1711. Musée du Louvre. 

Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block.

For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

But, any excuse for a celebration is justified these austere January days, and who knows what happy coincidences we'll bump into if we start playing this game of almanac trivia, and see by how many Degrees of Separation we are brought back to this blog....

Power and Seduction, Marilyn and Juliette, Muse and Model, Artemis and Aphrodite...

 ....Atalanta and Daphne....a post brought on by too much Christmas Pudding and Stilton?

The Three Graces, empowered or exploited, by Canova, c.1799. Image: Web Gallery of Art
THE DANGERS AND DELIGHTS OF BEING DECORATIVE
part six of The Laurel Trophy

Immortalized as the dark-haired model in white chemise, peeping under her lashes at onlookers in Gérard's  meltingly sexy portrait, and forever associated with the sofa on which she reclines in the painting by David, in her lifetime Juliette Récamier was a discerning patron of literature and the arts. Her personal taste influenced fashion and interior design in western Europe, and she helped promote philosophical and political ideas in post-revolutionary French society. She was also famous for her virginity, that she is alleged to have given up, willingly, at the age of forty. The long wait is usually perceived as odd, a disorder, rather than a trumphant assertion of individuality through sexual discernment.  

The greatest loves of her life, consummated or not, were always worldly intellectuals, people addicted to using and defining power, whose inclusion of her in their observations gave her validation. Down this road lies the danger, fun but facile, of comparison to Marilyn Monroe and her symbiotic relationships with professional writers, teachers and analysts, all besotted with the ambivalent sweetness of her sex appeal, a vicarious affair that persists in the dozens of publications about her exploited or empowered femininity.....for more dangers, read on

Daughter of The Tragic Muse

Sarah Martha Siddons, c.1795, portrayed and betrayed by the Romantic painter, Thomas Lawrence.

Private Collection. Image source: Wikipedia

"Whenever I meet his eyes...it is like an electric shock to me"

Dutiful daughter and casualty of Romantic egotism
part of
 NEOCLASSICAL GODDESSES AND ROMANTIC HEROINES

SALLY SIDDONS

Sally (1775-1803) and her sister Maria (1779 -1798) were both in love with the gifted young portrait painter, Thomas Lawrence. He was a friend of their mother, Sarah Siddons, and the whole family had known him well for several years. In his mid-twenties, he appeared to fit the description of a romantic hero. He was graceful, dark and delicately featured, with soul-piercing eyes and a charming manner. He behaved with the destructive emotional immaturity found in many former child prodigies. 

He courted both girls in turn, initially forming an attachment to Sally, then deciding that he was in love with the younger girl, Maria, who was already showing symptoms of consumption. Months later, he confessed that it was really Sally he had loved all along, and his engagement to Maria was broken off. He seems to have been genuinely confused about his feelings - Mrs Siddons, always indulgent of him, thought he was being quixotic - but that wasn't really the point. The sisters had only a two dimensional existence for him. Their feelings were as far removed from him as those of supporting characters in a play, in which he was watching Mrs Siddons and himself in the leading parts...CONTINUED

Once and Future Heroine: SARAH LUND

detail, Hammershøi: Young Woman from Behind

She's back. Despite being profaned by the cult of her sweater, Sarah Lund has joined the pantheon of Norse gods and heroines. Indefatigable, fallible, unflinching goddess of retribution and lady of sorrows, she and Forbrydelsen (The Killing) have elevated the TV thriller genre to modern myth. At its best, in the first two series, it achieved the moral authority of classical drama, consistently superior to English-speaking imitators and Scandinavian successors. 
Never mind that the third series does not, and never could, match up, that the supporting characters are less profoundly observed and the interlocking plots more formulaic. With a sense of duty that matches Lund's, Sofie Gråbøl.....CONTINUED

Who's afraid of heroes?

A twilight world of haunted houses on blasted heaths, billowing curtains, priest holes and craggy old retainers, grown men struggling with oedipal longings and alcohol addiction, a slender plot about a list of names and a china English bulldog, an accused Great Actress, superb yet ridiculous, reciting Tennyson's rallying cries to a lost people torn between technologically advanced modernity and their sentimental loyalties to a myth of nationhood - what is this we have, yet another re-working of a Bronte novel, a missing scene from the Olympics opening ceremony, or just more teenage vampires? 

I hear a gunshot on the Scottish moors; a man and a woman get out of their car and stand in the whisky-coloured heather beside a trickling burn. Is it mother and son on holiday in the Highlands, searching for their roots? Maybe it's Richard Hannay from The Thirty Nine Steps on the run from master criminals in 1915?
No, the year is 2012, and the man is Bond, James Bond, as we have never seen him before and should never, ever, have to see again.
In a feat of heroic acting against the odds, Daniel Craig doesn't lose Bond's masculinity or credibility (or put on a funny voice like the Batman, rasping long after everyone's realized he's Bruce Wayne), 007's upper lip still twitches with humour, not emotion, thank god, but he has to fall through the treacly vortex stirred by the director and screenwriters, hooked on the currently pseudo-Freudian, psychobabbling, whinging interpretations of action heroes, like men afraid of their own shadows.

JAMES BOND TAKING HIS MOTHER ON HOLIDAY IN THE HIGHLANDS

Detail of Morning in the Highlands: The Royal Family Ascending Lochnagar, by Carl Haag. Watercolour, 1853, in The Royal Collection

THIS POST IS FEATURED ON FIRST NIGHT DESIGN TIMES ONLINE NEWSPAPER

Special Guest Post: LUCIA BY SARAH

Reblogged from Sarah Vernon's First Night Design, here is an intimate portrait of a long dead woman, one of those ancestresses too well-brought up to divulge any secrets about themselves, who are only deciphered a hundred years later through a mixture of research and intuition. Sarah's post reveals just as much about her own and her mother's imaginative writing talent as it does about her clever, amused, inscrutable-looking great-grandmother Lucia:

My Great-Grandmother Lucia by Sarah Vernon

8 August 2011

My great-grandmother, Lucia, was a gently beautiful woman.  I have late Victorian photographs to show me just how charming she was to look at and last week I created an image with her as the centrepiece.  This particular photograph (below), which admittedly stands on its own, was exquisitely hand-tinted.

Image © Sarah Vernon

Being me, however, I wanted to embellish it!  I used my own textures and backgrounds alongside one from The Graphics Fairy and one from Deviant Art.

Lucia died in 1906 when she was in her 40s. There is some mystery about how she died....
My mother used to imagine that Lucia had had a riding accident since she found the idea so romantic....Read Full Post

If Downton Abbey was McDonalds....

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" ENOUGH TO EAT - YOUR BRAINS

Poor comfort-eating recessionites, we've got to wait till Christmas for our favourite, luxuriously engineered, salt-fat-sugar fix. The invidious thing about Downton Abbey’s success isn’t its undeniable entertainment value and popularity, or that it has restored UK Entertainment’s balance of trade with America, but that such smugly gilded, spinelessly plotted, lumpily scripted bathos has won awards for excellence in drama and writing. It's another discredit to the honours and prize-giving system which needs abolishing. Preposterous, predictable, derivative, sychophantic, aristophile...

Discovery and Denial

A Mermaid by J.W.Waterhouse (1901). Royal Academy of Arts. Image source: Wikipedia

On January 8th, 1493, during his first New World voyage, Christopher Columbus, wrong again, mistook three sea cows swimming south of the Bahamas for mermaids. This had been a common delusion among sailors for centuries, whenever they saw the large grey creatures raising their amiable, long-nosed, whiskered heads above the ocean surface, and bending their fore-limbs like arms.  

Columbus was not the man to give up a preconception.The next day in his blog - sorry, log - rather than speculate that he had seen a new species, any more than he would ever admit landing on a new continent, he dissed his mermaids for being less beautiful than they were painted (no eran tan hermosas como las pintan) and for having masculine-looking faces (forma de hombre en la cara). From the distance of his ship, he was sure he had seen three butch sirens waving at him. CONTINUED

distemperature

drowning garden

video by Martin Huebscher Photography

...the moon (the governess of floods),
Pale in her anger, washes all the air

...And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1 

AFTER THE STORM (A Story)

More distemperature: SPRING, SUMMER, DENIAL

contrablog:

 

A fine dose of revenge is in every complaint. Nietzsche

WORLD'S END GARDEN

 ...I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

John Donne, A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day

Part One GARDEN
Part Two PUNISHMENT
Part Three RE-BEGOT
Part Four BOUNDARIES
Part Five SWORD
Part Six BESIEGED
Part Seven BREACHED
Part Eight GARDEN
© Pippa Rathborne 2012

 
Like all histories, this is a product of the imagination, based on real events. Every word is true, but, except for the first person singular and plural, the characters are fictional composites and any resemblance to living persons is unintended and purely coincidental.

I think that whenever one has something unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest