Oscar Wilde on American Women

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Irish Writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Reading an 1893 play by Oscar Wilde entitled A Woman of No Importance, I ran across some of the author’s famous wit at the expense of American womanhood:

Lady Caroline. These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the Paradise of women.

Lord Illingworth. It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.

Lady Caroline. Who are Miss Worsley’s parents?

Lord Illingworth. American women are wonderfully clever in concealing their parents.

Lady Hunstanton. My dear Lord Illingworth, what do you mean? Miss Worsley, Caroline, is an orphan. Her father was a very wealthy millionaire, or philanthropist, or both, I believe, who entertained my son quite hospitably, when he visited Boston. I don’t know how he made his money originally.

Kelvil. I fancy in American dry goods.

Lady Hunstanton. What are American dry goods?

Lord Illingworth, American novels.

Lady Hunstanton. How very singular! . . . Well, from whatever source her large fortune came, I have a great esteem for Miss Worsley. She dresses exceedingly well. All Americans do dress well. They get their clothes in Paris.

Mrs Allonby. They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.

Lady Hunstanton. Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?

Lord Illingworth. Oh, they go to America.

“There Is No Path”

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This is a re-post from February 2, 2013.

Poetry can twist you around sometimes even if you just read a little sample of it. The following lines by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939) were in the introduction to a book on Buddhism by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Wanderer, the road is your
footsteps, nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
you lay down a path in walking.

In walking, you lay down a path
and when turning around
you see the road you’ll
never step on again.
Wanderer, path there is none,
only tracks on the ocean foam.

Is this the entire poem? I don’t know. It could be a fragment, but if it is, it is remarkably self-contained.

In the meantime, I will continue along the path that is no path, that is being wiped out by the ocean foam even as I make tracks—toward what end? At least the water feels cool to my bare feet.

“Hope Is a Bad Thing”

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This is the second part of my Henry Miller post. It is a quote from “Peace! It’s Wonderful!”—the first essay in the author’s collection, The Cosmological Eye. It sounds very Buddhist or Taoist.

Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun has ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within. I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Before this inward change came about I used to think that we were living in extraordinarily different times. Like most men I thought that our time was the worst possible time. And no doubt it is—for those, I mean, who still say “our time.” As for myself, I’ve thrown away the calendar by which one reckons the lean and the fat years. For me it is all gravy, one continuous, marvellous stream of time without beginning or end. Yes, the times are bad, permanently bad—unless one becomes immune, becomes God.

A Mere Jonah

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American Writer Henry Miller (1891-1980)

George Orwell got it right when, in 1940, he wrote an essay entitled “Inside the Whale.” About the rising American writer Henry Miller, all of whose books except one (The Cosmological Eye, which I am reading now) were banned in the United States and England, Orwell wrote:

Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

Ever since I read his so-called “dirty” books in my youth—including Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn—I have loved Henry Miller’s work. He is a uniquely American writer, who could have appeared nowhere but in the United States, especially in Brooklyn, where he was born. He could be incredibly profound, as when he slams James Joyce in one of his early works:

Joyce is the lost soul of this soulless world; his interest is not in life, in men and deeds, not in history, not in God, but in the dead dust of books. He is the high priest of the lifeless literature of to-day. He writes a hieratic script which not even his admirers and disciples can decipher. He is burying himself under an obelisk for whose script there will be no key.

But then he could lapse into a goofiness all his own. Writing about film as art, he says, “It does not require millions to produce an artistic film; in fact, it is almost axiomatic that the more money a film costs the worse it is apt to be.” Then in a separate piece, a writes a film treatment with production costs that would exceed the gross Earth product (GEP?) in “Scenario.”

This is the first of two posts based on my reading of The Cosmological Eye (1939). The follow-up will appear tomorrow, God willing.

“Reading Books”

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Ancient Chinese Scroll

This is a delightful poem from Liu Tsung-yuan (AD 773-819) who was exiled by the Emperor to Yungchou in the 9th century for espousing unpopular opinions. Though it is more than 1,100 years old, it could have been written yesterday—especially in today’s political environment.

Reading Books

Living in obscurity I’ve given up current affairs
I bow my head in silence and reflect on the sage kings
the highs and lows of the ancient past
the ups and downs of countless paths
I laugh to myself when I’m pleased
when I’m sad I simply sigh
I take my books from their cases
I go through from front to back
despite the affliction of tropical diseases
I feel different than in the past
while reading I suddenly understand
when I’m done my mind is a blank
who can I talk with at night
if not these texts on bamboo and silk
I lie down when I get tired
after a good sleep I feel refreshed
I yawn and stretch my limbs
I read out loud to my heart’s content
I enjoy doing what suits me
not to please learned men
I shut up when I’ve said what I want
free of restraints I relax
the clever consider me stupid
the wise think I’m a fool
but reading as managed to make me happy
what good is working till you drop
cherish this body of yours
don’t use it to chase after fame

The translation is by Red Pine. The book is Written in Exile: The Poetry of Liu Tsung-Yuan, published by the Copper Canyon Press.

Gothick

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An Engraving of a Scene from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

Not too many years ago, I would have laughed to scorn the works of Mrs Ann Radcliffe and indeed the whole 18th century gothic novel. Since then, I have undergone a change of heart: I no longer eschew melodrama. Instead, I recognize that there are degrees of quality in the works ascribed to it and that it is a legitimate genre. To date, I have read four of Mrs Radcliffe’s five novels, having only The Sicilian Romance (1790) and a number of shorter works to read. I have just finished her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and found myself loving it.

Originally, I thought of the 18th century gothic novel as a failed attempt to create a horror novel. But then, in the closing paragraphs of Athlin and Dunbayne, its author explains what she is trying to do:

Virtue may for a time be pursued by misfortune,—and justice be obscured by the transient triumphs of vice,—but the power whose peculiar attributes they are, clears away the clouds of error, and even in this world reveals his THRONE OF JUSTICE.

In other words, unless there are numerous dank abbeys and castles in her work, there is no hint of the supernatural. She comes close to it in her most famous work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but is too devout an Anglican to fall prey to such dubious flimflammery. (That didn’t stop Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) from going whole hog, but then he was undoubtedly less devout, being a wicked Whig politician, and earl, and man about town.

The edition of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne which I read was published by Oxford University Press and contained a superb introduction by Alison Milbank on the subject of Mrs Radcliffe and the gothic novel. That didn’t prevent OUP from butchering her last name (by making it Millbank). Sic transit gloria mundi.

Physical Therapy

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Working Those Shoulder Muscles

For six weeks now, I have been in physical therapy—two sessions per week—to work on the muscles sidelined by my broken collarbone in June. I have clearly made strides. Only two problems remain:

  • I have difficulties reaching across my body with my right arm to my left armpit.
  • My shirt is never tucked into my pants, as my right arm can’t do the tucking in on the right side.

One negative aftereffect is that the many exercises I perform have resulted in a low level of pain as my muscles attempt to adjust.

I can see myself doing some exercises even when Medicare stops paying for my therapy. I might even buy a pulley like the one above, although I will by no means look so cute as the young woman in the above photo.

Will I ever be 100% back to normal? Perhaps, but I rather think that some problems will remain. In the past, I broke my right and left shoulders. To this day, these two fractures affect my ability to raise my arms high, should I ever want to do so. Perhaps I will always wear my shirts on the outside of my pants. Perhaps my left armpit will always be slightly stinkier than my right armpit.

Life goes on.

Ultimately Unknowable

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Ukrainian/Brazilian/Jewish Author Clarice Lispector

As much as I like her work, I think that Clarice Lispector is ultimately unknowable. Then why do I like her? Is it that I like living in her somewhat troubled (but ultimately sane) mind for several hundred pages? Her main character in <b>The Chandelier</b>, Virginia, is undistinguished. But she draws me in and makes me care for her. Her strange family, especially her brother Daniel and sister Esmeralda, her on-again off-again boyfriend Vincente—don’t really exist as persons outside Virginia’s field of vision, but Virginia, on the other hand, exists in spades.

At one point near the end of the novel, Lispector writes:

She’d always observed in old people something that couldn’t be summed up, that wasn’t exactly lack of desire, or satisfaction, or experience, ah, never experience—something that only the imponderable living of all the incomprehensible instants of sleep and wakefulness seemed to grant. So strange and imperceptible were the power and fecundity of the rhythm. Nothing would seem to escape the the continuous sequence, the intimate spherical movement, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. Anyway everything was the way it was, she thought almost brightly, almost cheerful—and that was meaning her deepest sensation f existence as if things were made of the impossibility of not being what they were.

As I read the book, I felt mesmerized, inhabiting for a short while the brain of a likeable woman, of no particular intellectual attainment, but of an honesty that never fails.

Deer, Wildcats, Tigers & Bears

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One of China’s greatest writers of prose and poetry was Liu Tsung-yuan. Here is Red Pine’s translation of one of Liu’s tales:

Deer are afraid of wildcats, wildcats are afraid of tigers, and tigers are afraid of bears. Covered with long shaggy hair and able to stand upright, bears possess exceptional strength and are capable of killing people. In the south of Ch’u there once was a hunter who could make all kinds of animal calls with his flute. One day he took his bow and arrows and his firepot into the mountains, and he made a call to attract deer. He waited, and when a deer appeared, he started a fire, then he shot the deer. But when a wildcat heard the deer call, it came too. The hunter was terrified and pretended to be a tiger to frighten it. But when the wildcat ran off, a tiger appeared. The man was even more terrified and pretended to be a bear. The tiger disappeared. But a bear heard the call and came looking for a mate. When it saw the man, it grabbed him and tore him apart and ate him. It turns out that those who rely on external aids instead of developing what they have within themselves invariably end up as bear food.

Prove That You’re You!

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To Prove I’m Legit I Don’t Wear Hoodies

The ultimate fly in the ointment of technology is the prevalence of hackers. In a way, it’s the ultimate challenge for the technically gifted, especially if there’s a chip on their shoulders. All they have to do is create a false identity and run with it. After all, does there exist a piece of software that can’t be hacked?

Today I received an e-mail from one of my medication suppliers. It was encrypted in such a way that I could not make head nor tail of what it was trying to say. I telephoned the corporation that sent me the e-mail and discovered they were just trying to tell me they were trying to contact my physician.

Did that message require special security? Would the hacker have made off with any personal information for which the corporation would be liable?

The answer to both questions is NO. Apparently, some low-level techie fell in love with an obscure bit of security software and decided to use it for everything.

In the beginning, computers were so much fun. Then all the twisted baddies began to emerge, and companies went overboard on forcing users to prove that they are themselves. Passwords had to be incredibly long and complicated, incorporating upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. One had to use a password manager—and they, too, became too complicated to use.

On my desktop, I maintain a passworded Excel file for 146 programs and websites. Am I protected? Not really, because I’m not that fanatical about updating it every time I’m asked to provide a user id and password. I can understand the jokes about users whose password is “Password” or “12345.” Users are just not able to keep up.

In the end, who suffers? Everybody.