Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Goethe – The Man and His Character
(Joseph McCabe) (1912) In the years before Kaiser Wilhelm turned the English off anything German, this stodgy but comprehensive life is a good introduction to the Teutonic Shakespeare. From 28 August 1749 through Faust Part I, numerous flings with strait-laced ladies (all lovers of literature), festschrifts in Weimar, an Italian pilgrimage, the search for a Germany, mateship with Schiller, the French Revolution and Faust II, to the last cry for “More light!”, the story carries you along and hopefully leads you to the work. And what work! He is the post-classical bridge to the new literature and he remains a Giant,…
Continue Reading →The Stones of Venice
(John Ruskin) (3 volumes, 1851-3) Ruskin, high priest of fine art and architecture, wrote these 3 volumes based on a deep well of learning and meticulous research, including a Pevsner-like mountain of sketches and using the new technique of daguerreotype, a revolution in architectural appreciation and review. It will be read from cover to cover now only by art historicists, not architects, for on aesthetics Ruskin (like Carlyle) is a man out of time: “art is valuable or otherwise , only as it expresses the personality, activity, and living perception of a good and great human soul; …it may express and…
Continue Reading →Vale Mr Walsh
The Varnished Culture has a modest yet passionate interest in Australian Rules Football; thus we comment on the dreadful passing of Phil Walsh, Senior Coach of the Adelaide Crows. He called himself a ‘Bogan from [the southern Victorian region of] Hamilton’, yet cited (superbly) Van Gogh as an exemplar of the frustrating chase to achieve perfection, suggesting that he had soared beyond the mundane to reach the varnished culture. Our condolences to Mrs Walsh.
Continue Reading →Amalfi Coast
Painting by Edmund Berninger, 1929
(May 2013) We started the day well, with a very fast and comfy train, replete with champagne, from Rome to Naples. But then we were emptied at Naples station where an old gent showed us to a shop, where a young fellow, probably the grandson, sold us tickets on a local caboose to Sorrento. P spent the trip standing at 10 degrees off perpendicular, and L was groped. In Tasso’s town, we caught a hotel jalopy that took us up a 60 degree slope on a nerve-twanging single road to the Art Hotel Gran Paradiso, a chichi, vaguely Bohemian pile…
Continue Reading →Israfel
Daguerreotype copy by Oscar Halling, c. 1860s
(Hervey Allen) (1926) The big Pennsylvanian author of the romantic hit Anthony Adverse (apparently the favourite novel of Tony Curtis) obviously admired the lush and gothic, and his long, detailed, overwritten biography of Poe is great fun in a crusty, hoary, adamantine way. Poe’s life was such as to invite that treatment. His work might best be called ‘patchy’, and his life a tribulation. Harold Bloom, who famously detested Poe’s writing, said “Only outrageous overplaying works with Poe…but [he], as I have glumly acknowledged, is inescapable. To dream everyone’s nightmare has to be genius, which cannot be denied Poe.”* He did…
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