Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel
"Let's see what he makes of this brief..."
(by John Louis Di Gaetani) (1978) When P brought this obscure little tome at the Paradise Bookshop, L asked, not unreasonably, “What has Wagner to do with the modern British novel?” Oh ye of little faith and so many brains! Well, let’s see…. In this book, Dr Di Gaetani mounts the case that the operatic works of Wagner, and in particular the poetry and prose in his librettos, had a vital galvanising effect on five major British novelists maturing (if not all necessarily in their prime) during the Edwardian Age: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. P read this…
Continue Reading →Winningness
It's About the Journey (from "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?")
Marcus Aurelius said “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”* Such a relief, then, to see that the Australian television industry is free from all malice, as they join hands and combine to serve us a homogenous array of competition drama. These are not reality shows, but rather a kind of existential reality where you idolise the biggest master who’s talent rules and mark their dance card with an X. These realities simulate contests but actually are, like life, far more varied, subtle, oblique, unfair and satisfying than any staged match, and describe life in their arbitrary and pre-ordained outcomes, which are classified and ritualised according to…
Continue Reading →The Entertainer
(Dir. Tony Richardson) (1960) This is probably John Osborne’s best play and he scripted the film that centres on Archie Rice and the closing days of his “Act” at one of merry England’s many depressing beach-side town-lets, whilst the Empire slides into the Suez Canal. There is a potent whiff of death hovering about the whole diseased enterprise – when you see the various scenes of music hall depravity, dreadful old routines and songs in the local pub, or the gorgeously hideous Lovely Girls Contest, poolside and prurient, you can picture a young David Lynch, wide-eyed and with a beatific grin, imagining future scenes…
Continue Reading →Alexandros of Antioch
Louvre photo of Venus by Chosovi
The Venus from Melos, gesturing toward Cupid, shows the apotheosis of the ideal sculptural style under the stewardship of Hellenistic Greece, as produced by the superb Alexandros, who with a handful of colleagues cruelly leave the ruins of their works, deistic and profane (e.g. Nike of Samothrace, the Apollo Belvedere, the head of Alexander, the Altar of Zeus, the Laocoon) to shame and humiliate the abject poverty and sloppiness of all efforts in the plastic arts in the 22 hundred years since. We are near the ninth circle of hell in respect of the plastic arts today. Exhibit A: the work of Jeffrey…
Continue Reading →Tender is the Night
"Hello, Mad Anthony Wayne" - William Adolphe Bouguereau, "The Wave" (1896)
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald) (1934) Scott and Zelda, Dick and Nicole – these tempestuous marriages merge in Fitzgerald’s most substantial novel, a complete rendering and realisation of the beautiful people of the cote d’azur between the wars. The author referred to the book as “a confession of faith” in a secular sense and there is a touch of Keats in his portrait of the ambitious Dr Diver and his doomed, chivalrous defiance of the rule against falling in love with your patient. Sheilah Graham justly described Tender as “sheer poetry all through, though the story is not so tightly knit as Gatsby.”*…
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