Beethoven did an Overture, Guerlain a scent

     not bad 

     for a lad

     who couldn't

     come out

I remember, some dozen years ago,

being astounded when Guerlain an-

nounced the men's fragrance with

this portrait. Instantly, the im-

age struck me as spot-on; but why,

even from the land of Grétry, did

a scent emerge to commemorate this

personality? Rather than quibble,

Guerlain did a very Coriolanic 

thing - they simply renamed their

product, soul of a hero.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus

op. cit.

Unbecoming Coriolanus

The title is not as redundant

as it sounds. The blogger on

his birthday has already here

asserted the prerogative to

claim the great gift of his

readers' indulgence - this is

of course the driving clamour

of Shakespeare's hero. Now

that we're being given a new

Coriolanus for the screen, 

it will be timely to recall

our acquaintance with him;

and to note the distinction 

between an unbecoming man, 

and unbecoming him.

I will go to Mr Fiennes' movie and pay attention to it. I'm taking it for granted that we all know this is intriguingly a political play, a considerable discourse on alternative theories of governing, which were of great interest to the Renaissance and which have certainly never been settled. But this is William Shakespeare, and the play occupies the political sphere with that almost indifferent (although famously cautious and astute) and versatile genius with which, we know, he could have set it in a vineyard or a dough-nut shop, and have come up with the same issues to illuminate his real subject. We don't forget Mozart, whose prettiest music involves a pair of phony Turks, an old roué, and an animal-magnetist maid.

Coriolanus boasts some 27 wounds, which puts him in the casting call for a Mel Gibson biopic; and given the grosses our Roman thrillers entail, it will probably be enough for Mr Fiennes to show them. But this hero is no Philoctetes, no Amfortas. His real wounds are not visible, and they stretch all hope to regard as curable.

Moreover, you and I know, this is not a writer who will ask a man his occupation, to discern his character; and you and I greet that intelligence as a breath of fresh air - if not as air, itself - in our specialist times, with all their naïve and tiresomely vain claims to exculpations of expertise. We will be curious to discover if Fiennes' Coriolanus is a man necessarily involved in politics, or one of the stock deformities that we mistakenly attribute to that calling, itself, only to call it a day. But we have known pâtisseurs who were Coriolanus. And who hasn't, in the stale doughnut?

Coriolanus is a stale man, and has cultivated himself to be so. We think of this as unbecoming, who invoke the features of Mr Young to suggest an unfitness for the law. But there you have it; his distinct unbecomingness is derived not from ordinary vanity, but from disdain of intimacy. He is famous (to hear him say it) for great, single-handed conquests, and he is grudgingly feared, because he has capabilities that he uses for himself. Yet he is maladroit in what drives him and proficient in militant offense; and this is not conquest as he conceives of it.

This is far from being one of Mr Shakespeare's more appealing plays. Brilliant people have found its language, gorgeous, and disliked it (Auden); others have found its language, base, and adored it (Eliot). These are not polarities, however, so much as they are arguments over a tragedy of original impression, not derived from Greece and not derived from the play's literary sources, but from themes so indebted to the Sonnets, that they furnish one of its most certain keys. Coriolanus is hideous and draws fear and pity from a truly Shakespearean crisis. If this movie fails to break the heart, either we don't know how to look at movies anymore, or a tale too often dismissed with contempt will have been deferred again, unforgivably. And that is exactly what Coriolanus did to himself.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus

after 1605, before 1610

Philip Brockbank, editor

The Arden Edition of

  the Works of William Shakespeare

op. cit.

"I don't get angry, Mr Gittes. My lawyer .. does. "

  Even if you'd rather steer clear

  of Mrs Hollis Mulwray, on advice

  of counsel, Evelyn cabriolets

  about LA with her own in tow,

  with a satchelful of subpoenas.

  This is not that gentleman, but

  our shirtlifter for a cause, in

  an uncharacteristic glower; and

  I don't know why, but he seems

  not to have mastered her tech-

  niques for facial serenity. In

  another 400 years, timed to co-

  incide with Charley Kane's be-

  ing wiped out (at the rate his

  newspapers are losing money) he

  will probably acquire a telling 

  wrinkle. We should then be sad.

  The law was plainly not for him.

                

                            Funny, how that works.

                            Time of life, that sort

                            of thing.

                    

Robert Towne, screenplay

Chinatown

Paramount, 1974©

Jeremy Young

What is keeping

It is rare when I find a portrait

of anyone which suits me, as op-

posed to a blogger's requisites.

This approximate contemporary of

Laurent probably floated up from

the well of Flickr™ into one or

another of those strata where I

search for characterisation of a

phrase in this pursuit. And now

it comes to the page to address 

a timely purpose.

Novembr' au revoir.

I heard from a literature student

that he had never read any gay fic-

tion. He is of a generation - the

one we indelicately call, the pres-

ent one - which will never discover

gay fiction as mine did, and by

whose experience whatever is writ-

ten today will be shaped materially.

A number of us, one could almost go

so far as to say, discovered fiction

through gay fiction. That is, we dis-

covered the close reading of imagin-

ative texts through the application,

at an early age, of incentives which

the present generation finds being

met in non-literary terms, all about

it. We didn't know anything, at 11,

19, 27. Surely, there was Classicism.

But that was not about us, we knew.

Harmful as my ignorance was, I still

value the surprises it sequestered.

Somehow, in the same correspondence,

the subject of one's first kiss was

raised. This is why that portrait is

valid to me in ways which nothing I

have read - from Melville to Cunning-

ham - has captured; and this, I know,

is a test that many people apply to

red mug, blue linen. I am grateful.

The single most formative experience

in my college life was not that first

kiss, which did happen there, between

terms. It was another, which happened

the previous Spring. A professor of

history called my bluff on reading the

founding masterpiece of biographical

psychology, in his course in the High

Renaissance, furiously chewing me out

for negligence with - it rings in my

ears to this day - a labour of love.

I was earning grades with him in the

revoltingly prosperous range which is

enough for a Princetonian to acquit

himself without breaking a real sweat.

For my final paper, I raked my way

through his own benchmark work on Ital-

ian rhetoricians; turning, in effect,

straight upon him. His comment was, 

"you have a fine sensitivity to texts."

This was my introduction to the kiss,

which is to say, the thing of oneself.

We do some rough and tumble here with-

out much citing of its predicate, and

I owe this youth an answer for his in-

terest. This portrait shows an exer-

cise of consciousness by someone made 

intimate to us by the act. We have a 

nature which assimilates an articula-

tion of caring as a caring for us.

We know this is the basis of a can-

ard, rooted in unease, that we are 

sensitive. It is, rather, that we 

are aware we have a bond with that 

being, which none of us needs to 

hear explained. We know we can watch 

the day go down; and we know what is

when we do. Many people do. We are 

the ones who are fond of each other 

for it.

What is gay fiction?

  

Herman Melville

Moby-Dick

op. cit.

Michael Cunningham

Flesh and Blood

  pp. 130-131 et passim

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995©

Erik Erikson

Young Man Luther

  A Study in Psychoanalysis

  and History

Norton, 1958©

Jerrold E. Seigel

Rhetoric and Philosophy

  in Renaissance Humanism:

  From Petrarch to Valla

Princeton University Press, 1968©

Mr Wittgenstein and his sister's ceiling

Have you never wondered, how it should be, that the same people who might berate Ludwig Wittgenstein for prodigal waste in the reconstruction of his sister's ceiling - it having been laid some few centimeters too low to permit that agreable perception of proportion which is essential to the humane occupancy of space, to say nothing of its sharing - mightn't think twice of concentrating the attention of an entire nanosecond on the inevitably mobile and  entirely conditional disposition of their own waistband?

I know the page is bound to suffer some rebuke for raising a question of human happiness in terms of structure, without so much as a sop to decoration, but not every posting can include a Rothko, unless that nice lady in Upperville should care to blog her acquisition of eleven Rothko canvases one morning, on the fly of a carefree walk in town. (Yes, but those were the days when painters would deliver). And who does not remember, as Clemenceau had said, the good Lord had no more than ten?

But our sage was plainly on to something, hounded for not lower-ing the floor as he might have done, at such vastly less expense. You know you are not just neurotic when you decline to step down, to appreciate your environment. As élitists are so quick to remind us, there's nothing defensible in being practical, if pleasure isn't possible; and the élite, need I say, are limited enough in that prospect, without enduring compressions of their domicile. We can't really leave our leaders of perception and opinion, to say nothing of our arbiters of exper-ience, to the mercies of a clement day for their delight.

But to take our truffles bending low is not so much a concession to constraint as a credit to a chef whose eggy gigli's timely toss is all it takes to turn attention's head. Not to commit a waste (a laundress' wrath being harsher than frugality's reproach), we draw nigh to the plate of gracious service.

In the Rothko Chapel without a press pass

One shouldn't let intellectuals play

with matches

Because Gentlemen when left to itself

The mental world Gennntlemen

Isn't at all brilliant

And as soon as it's alone

Works arbitrarily

Erecting for itself

Out of self-styled generosity in honor of

building-workers

an auto-monument

Let's repeat it Gennnntlemen

When left to itself

The mental world

Lies

Monumentally.

Jacques Prévert

Paroles

  One Shouldn't

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 

  translation

op. cit.

Mark Rothko

  Painting no. 8

circa 1970

iii  Hedi Slimane, photo, rev.

Yes, you may be a dog

  Yes, you are a slightly shedding 

  fellow, but you are not my guest, 

  you are my friend.

ii, iii  another country

Glare of Monday

Too brutal to

portray, atop

the page, the

glare can not

altogether be

deflected.

Richard Serra, litho

oncle pierre