Saturday, February 16, 2013
Oscar Wilde's Wife
Most people don't even realize he had one. But he did.
From a story in the Weekly Standard...
It is surprising that no biography of Constance appeared before 1983—although, oddly enough, that year brought forth two differently documented and often conflicting works. Surprising because Constance was a pathbreaker in many ways, not least in marrying Oscar. Franny Moyle, having written on the loves and aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelites, now turns her attention to the Aesthetic movement, of which Oscar Wilde was the most notorious popularizer.
She begins with a dramatic mise en scène, the evening on which Constance learns that Oscar will press the fatal charge of libel against the Marquess of Queensberry. At that very moment he was at the height of his renown, with two plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, showing in the West End. What follows concerns how things reached this point and the aftermath.
Interestingly, it is the story of a marriage. According to Moyle, Constance was prepared “to partner the high priest of Aestheticism in awakening a wide public to just how far art might be extended in life.” She was well educated for a woman of her class, and she seemed to share Oscar’s gift for languages. From childhood she was already familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and, later, with the writings of John Ruskin. Her dresses, reflecting the clothes made fashionable by the Aesthetic movement, created sensations: At gallery openings, “Mr. and Mrs. Wilde were offering Lillie Langtry some serious competition as the main interest for celebrity spotters.” Constance, with her interest in textiles, was probably also responsible for the avant-garde interior design of their residence in Chelsea, which was (per the Aesthetic credo) “aesthetic, practical, and healthy.”
She-Hulk - the Novel?
SHE-HULK LIKE COMIC. SHE-HULK PREFER LONG-FORM FICTION.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Stand aside, Bridget Jones. Becky Bloomwood, your shopaholic tendencies in Sophie Kinsella's novels have no currency here. There's a new chick-lit heroine in town, and she goes by the name of She-Hulk.
Comics publisher Marvel is teaming up with Hyperion Books to target women readers, with two new novels out this summer both featuring "strong, smart heroines seeking happiness and love while battling cosmic evil": She-Hulk, the female cousin of the Incredible Hulk, and Rogue, one of the female mutants from X-Men. This is the first time the publisher has taken its female superheroes out of the world of comics and into the world of long-form fiction.
"Marvel has had tremendous success with recent hit movies, and we think it's a great time to explore what happens to superheroines when they are dropped into traditional women's novels," said Hyperion's editor-in-chief Elisabeth Dyssegaard.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Does African-American Literature Exist?
That's the question recently posed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
From the piece...
I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further, it has already come to an end. And the latter is a fact we should neither regret nor lament.
African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely, the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow. Punctuated by state constitutional amendments that disfranchised black Americans throughout much of the South, legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 with the infamous "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and stumbling into decline in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Jim Crow and the fight against it gave rise to—and shaped—African-American literary practice as we have come to know it. Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature as an object of study, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature.
World's Largest Collection of Authors on Vinyl Up for Sale
The National Post has a story about a man obsessed with collecting authors on records.
From the piece...
In some ways, it began with Dylan Thomas. In 1952, two young New Yorkers, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney, heard him read at the 92nd Street Y. They were so impressed by the Welsh poet that they invited him to record his work the following day. Thomas only had enough material to fill one side of the record, so someone rushed out to get a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, which had printed one of his stories. “And that’s the only reason we have ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ recorded,” says Gatenby. That was the first release by Caedmon Records and Dylan Thomas Reading, Volume 1 might be the first audiobook.
Gatenby’s collection is exhaustive, containing almost every major writer and literary figure of the 20th century: T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Ayn Rand, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Vladimir Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, James Joyce, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, E.M. Forster, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Dorothy Parker, Albert Camus, Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood. Gatenby owns Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five; Tennessee Williams reading from The Glass Menagerie, with a cover by Andy Warhol; Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activity and Maya Angelou billed as “Miss Calypso.” Many have never been opened, most are in mint condition. “They didn’t get played over like The Beatles,” says Gatenby.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Love, in Amish Country
The Paris Review discusses, yes, Amish romance novels.
From the piece...
The only items there truly unfamiliar to me were two wire racks full of paperbacks, their covers each backlit with the golden glow of God’s everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet. I spun through the racks, elated, repulsed. Could there be anything better, or worse, than Amish romance novels?
“Oh yes, people love them,” my uncle said. “They’re very popular.”
I picked the only one I could have possibly purchased, titled Rachel’s Secret, and left with this as the one keepsake from my conflicted return to Amish country. Fitting.
The Love Letters...of LBJ?
Indeed.
From an AP story...
Unlike brief and instantaneous Twitter or Facebook posts or cryptic phone texts, the letters — most multiple pages — reflect a time when the handwritten note was the chief form of communication.
"Dearly Beloved," Taylor begins one, before reconsidering her salutation. "This sounds like a sermon — it isn't."
He signs them, "Lyndon," or "Lyndon Baines." She signs, "Bird." One closes, "Do you still love me? Devotedly, Bird."
Her stationery carries that name, given to her by a caretaker nurse who described her as "pretty as a lady bird." Her handwriting is very neat in thin black script.
His, also in script with thick dark black ink, is on letterhead from Washington's Dodge Hotel, where he lived while working as an aide to U.S. Rep. Richard Kleberg of Texas. Other letters are on Kleberg's office stationery, sent simply to "Miss Bird Taylor, Karnack, Texas," where her home didn't have a telephone. The envelope carries 6 cents postage, but some he sent by air mail or special delivery.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
In Cold Blood - It's Got Some, Well, Problems
Truman Capote's classic recently tarnished with newly emerged files.
From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...
But new evidence undermines Mr. Capote's claim that his best seller was an "immaculately factual" recounting of the bloody slaughter of the Clutter family in their Kansas farmhouse. It also calls into question the image of Mr. Dewey as the brilliant, haunted hero.
A long-forgotten cache of Kansas Bureau of Investigation documents from the investigation into the deaths suggests that the events described in two crucial chapters of the 1966 book differ significantly from what actually happened. Separately, a contract reviewed and authenticated by The Wall Street Journal shows that Mr. Capote in 1965 required Columbia Pictures to offer Mr. Dewey's wife a job as a consultant to the film version of his book for a fee far greater than the U.S. median family income that year.
In researching "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter—her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI's case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers. Mr. Dewey even helped Mr. Capote, a New Yorker with no home in Kansas, obtain a Kansas driver's license.
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