(no subject)

Looks like it's finally turning spring... Temperatures are rising, the last snow melted in the yard today, the Schneeglöckchen are out.

Had to drive out & check on the horse because Ch. is sick (again), feeling extremely irritated, but it turned out rather nice, I even got to ride; followed by family lunch, exasperating as usual, no surprises there.

.:.:.:.

Otherwise, continuing to read Th. Mann's diaries & enjoying it...

It must be about ten years ago now, I borrowed from the British Council library a volume of Virginia Woolf's diaries (or letters, can't quite remember which), and was suddenly struck with an acute sense of guilt at the voyeurism of reading something that was never meant for me to read. I vowed (sort of) never to do it again and one way or another actually kept the promise, though that might have been at least partly due to the fact that no author since sufficiently tempted me to want a direct glimpse into his/her life.

For whatever reason, reading Mann's diaries doesn't feel like such a breach of privacy. Either my attitude has changed, or the style and brevity make the reader feel less like a voyeur (was he aware that they might/would be published after his death? did he care?), or again, because his novels are in many ways much more intimate than the accounts of daily comings and goings, dinner parties, letters or problems with household staff.

What I found interesting in reading about the process of creation of 'Doktor Faustus' is how the relationship between Adrian and Rudi was consciously made more vague, all (comparatively) explicit mention of homosexuality erased. (Möglichkeit des geheimnisvollen Verschleierns [10.9.46], Knappe Kondensierung, Disretisierung der Äußerungen über Adrian-Rudi [21.12.46])

Geheimnisvolles Verschleiern, indeed. Across the cultural and linguistic barrier of fifty years and dealing with a character so emotionally distant as Adrian, who barely even has friends, for the greatest part of the novel (until Adrian's ... daß ich [...] lieben dürfte in Fleisch und Blut, was nicht weiblich war... ) I never was altogether sure how this was meant to be read, as friendship tinged with mostly sublimated sexual elements or outright sexual attraction/seduction. Maybe it doesn't matter at all and it's a misguided tendency of this day and age wanting to compartmentalise everything and slap a label on it, but it's interesting that where in the manuscript 'love' and 'sensuality' are presented as an unity there is only 'love' in the novel.

I think the cut makes sense, though - the reasons aren't given in the diary (and may be artistic, first and foremost) but the manuscript-text in question reads very much like a justification and I could see how he might have wanted to avoid the impression that there was a need for justification, especially with a first person narrator. Adrian's sense of guilt and subconscious destruction of the one person he dared love are ambivalent enough. (Just a thought, though, I may be wrong. Probably am.)


The way Mann tends to treat (read: kill off) his gay characters always bring to mind what his contemporary, E.M.Forster, another of my favourite authors, though dating back to an earlier period of my life, wrote in respect to his (unpublished until after his death) novel Maurice:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it 'To a Happier Year' and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote - which by the way has had an unexpected result: it has made the book more difficult to publish. (...) If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors. But the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime.

It's maybe not the best novel ever, but I think one can't but admire the attitude, especially in the light of the fact that his love for personal honesty ultimately ruined his career as a writer. ("I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or published more, but sex has prevented the latter")

(no subject)

... vaguely continuing from last post; also relating to something soavezefiretto wrote some time ago about art and it being a necessary part of our lives, which I wanted to reply to, but never actually got around to ...

I discussed this with M. once, at work, and she wouldn't see my point, but I think most art - great art, groundbreaking art - comes from a place of inner conflict, often pain: most artists' biographies are not exactly those of happy people. Depending on my mood this has, at times, made me feel almost like a voyeur, or maybe a kind of vampire - even if the book/work of art is important to oneself, if one does connect to it, even if the artist wanted (needed) to share his/her feelings, there is a (probably totally irrational) element of almost-guilt, feeding on someone's pain, being entertained by it... there's a nin bootleg that makes me uneasy every time I listen to it, but it's even more complicated when the pain isn't so obvious in the art. I browsed through Marc Almond's autobiography recently, because during my late teens/early twenties I was quite a fan and was almost appalled at having liked the music never knowing where it came from.

Art... either creating it or looking at it is, I think, a way of trying to figure ourselves out, to better understand ourselves. Plato was deeply suspicious of most art, but he himself started out as a poet.

"We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out."

Religion is irrelevant as a sponsor or inspiration for art today at least in the western world, and state art has mostly disappeared just as we've ceased to define ourselves mainly by our place in society; any too close connection between art and politics is regarded as suspicious. Art today is ideally highly individualistic...

... if we all were truly happy and balanced, if we understood ourselves (not that this is going to happen any time soon, but merely for the sake of the argument) would art render itself useless and eventually disappear?


( quoted from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra... )

... he, of course, takes the pessimistic view.

(no subject)

It probably won't make me buy their products, mostly because I'm really too lazy to switch brands, but you've got to love, or at least appreciate dove's new advertising campaign... (*sigh* well, except for the part where they tell you that you've got to buy their products to be beautiful... )

I guess it would be too much to hope that this might be the beginning of the end of those unrealistic and mostly unattainable female bodies in advertising.