Archives for January 2008

“Old age equalizes–we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.”
Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

• Jorge Luis Borges foretold the Internet.
• The marvelous James Hynes on what to read after Season 5 of The Wire. Nice to see some love for Denise Mina’s great Paddy Meehan books. (Via Pinky’s Paperhaus.)
• The Surreal Life: A fur lifejacket, “not intended for wear, but it would function perfectly in any capsize or other drowning emergency.” So, stylish and practical. (Via Lux Lotus.)

Rats and consternation. Somehow, sometime, someway, M.S. Smith’s new incarnation of his nonpareil culture blog, Where the Stress Falls, fell off our blogroll. We don’t know how this happened–its predecessor site, CultureSpace, had been a longtime favorite here and in fact made an appearance as a Top Five–but we’re happy to restore it now, and to give special mention to Smith’s recently posted essays on his favorite movies and music of 2007.
And it’s with keen regret that we note the tentative retirement of another blogroll mainstay and another Top Fiver, James Tata, whose blog chronicling his cultural and literary enthusiasms has long been a reliable pleasure. He says:

I’m tired of having opinions about everything I read and watch and listen to. I think I’d like to be an open aperture for a while, just taking it all in.

Here’s to a rejuvenating break from opinion-having, and here’s hoping for a mere hiatus.

The stars are

Although I do not sing

About them–

The sky and the trees

Are indifferent

To whom they please

The rose is unmoved

By my nose

And the garland in your hair

Although your eyes be lakes, dies

Why sigh for a star

Better bay at the moon

Better bay at the moon

Oh moon, moon, moon

Samuel Menashe, “The Stars Are”

Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” is a Bluebeard tale in which the young narrator, a penniless pianist (“a virgin of the arpeggios”), becomes the bride of the richest man in France. He whisks her off to a remote seaside castle bristling with treasures: A Bechstein in the music room, cabinets of Limoges and Sèvres, a library lined with “calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco.” From all this we’re to conclude that this Bluebeard is a connoisseur and collector of many fine things, including wives. For these hapless young ladies, their husband’s art collection must serve as a first warning sign, including, amid the Fragonards, Watteaus and Pouissins, an ominous trio of Symbolist paintings: A Moreau entitled Sacrificial Victim, an Ensor called The Foolish Virgins, and a late Gauguin called Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go, which depicts “a tranced brown girl in the deserted house.”*
Rereading “The Bloody Chamber” this weekend I grew interested in the bride’s trousseau, especially a Poiret dress that she wears twice in the story — once to the opera, when she is taken to Tristan during the courtship, and a second time when she loses her virginity at the castle by the sea. The dress is described as “a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts,” although later it’s a “chaste little Poiret shift.” So: It’s sensually provoking to wear, yet virginal to look at. Both times M. Bluebeard requests that his child-bride wear the dress with a choker of crimson rubies around her throat, an aristocratic fashion rooted in guillotine humor. (Later, he will try to lop off her head. Ladies, I implore you, inspect those gifts of jewels for all possible meaning and significance before accepting!)
Interestingly, decapitation also pops up in an anecdote connected to Poiret’s own life. As Hamish Bowles recounts in Vogue, the Parisian designer’s early clients were put off by the “brazen modernity of his designs, such as a Confucius coat innovatively cut like a kimono. ‘What a horror,’ Poiret recalled the formidable Russian Princess Bariatinsky exclaiming when he presented her with it. ‘When there are low fellows who run after our sledges and annoy us, we have their heads cut off, and we put them in sacks just like that.'”
Other gratifying Poiret links:
• A gallery of images from the Met’s 2007 “Poiret: King of Fashion” exhibit.
• A slideshow paying tribute to Poiret’s freeing influence on women’s fashion (illuminating to tie this to the dress’s stimulating qualities in the Carter story).
• A lengthy but fascinating article by Whitney Chadwick that highlights Poiret’s costume design.
• Poiret paper dolls!
* I can’t find images of these paintings online or indeed any mention of them independent of discussions of “The Bloody Chamber,” so I leave it to ALN readers to tell me if Carter made them up.
The Poiret dress shown here is a 1913 “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées” evening gown made of ivory silk damask with an overskirt of ivory silk tulle. Credit: Photograph Studio, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Old age is a shipwreck.”

Charles de Gaulle, The Call to Honor

I looked in the bathroom mirror when I got up on Saturday morning in Smalltown, U.S.A., and saw dark circles around both of my eyes. That was when I knew I was starting to feel the strain of two weeks’ worth of caregiving. Seventeen hours and two flights later, I was lugging my suitcases up the stairs of my Upper West Side apartment house, and an hour after that I was out cold.
The good news is that my mother’s orthopedist and physical therapist have given her excellent reviews. She’s healing nicely, has recovered her balance, and graduated last week from her walker to a cane. While she’s not quite out of the woods yet, her recovery has been much faster than anyone expected. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I am.
Needless to say, I haven’t been sleeping very well lately, and I returned to New York to find the usual mountain of snail mail awaiting me. Fortunately I have only one deadline to hit this week, but I’m several days behind schedule on The Letter and my Louis Armstrong biography, I need to plan a playgoing trip to California, and starting on Tuesday I’ll be seeing six shows in six nights. For all these reasons and plenty more, I don’t plan to do any more blogging this week except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings. OGIC and CAAF will pick up the slack. If I break my word, give me hell.
See you next Monday.
P.S. No, I haven’t been answering my mail–but I will. Eventually.