Oscar Wilde On Marriage and Muffins

"The Importance of Being Earnest," Act 2


JACK 
I wanted to be engaged to Gwendolen, that is all. I love her.

ALGERNON
Well, I simply wanted to be engaged to Cecily. I adore her.

JACK
There is certainly no chance of your marrying Miss Cardew.

ALGERNON
I don't think there is much likelihood, Jack, of you and Miss Fairfax being united.

JACK
Well, that is no business of yours.

ALGERNON
If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. [Begins to eat muffins.] It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stock-brokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.

JACK
How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.

ALGERNON
Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

JACK
I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.

ALGERNON
When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as any one who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins. [Rising.]

JACK
[Rising.] Well, that is no reason why you should eat them all in that greedy way. [Takes muffins from ALGERNON.]

ALGERNON
[Offering tea-cake.] I wish you would have tea-cake instead. I don't like tea-cake.

JACK
Good heavens! I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden.

ALGERNON
But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins.

JACK
I said it was perfectly heartless of you, under the circumstances. That is a very different thing.

ALGERNON
That may be. But the muffins are the same. [He seizes the muffin-dish from JACK.]

JACK
Algy, I wish to goodness you would go.

Dueling Banjos

Reading Christine Stansell's American Moderns reminds me why I wanted to study early 20th century American things in the first place.  Or, to echo Jessa Crispin's recent comment about reading the book, it makes me "a little nostalgic for the era...despite not being alive for it."  I'm imagining ways to pirate Stansell's material into my own creative work, especially her ideas about an "optics of pleasure" and the emergence of the "New Woman/New Man."  Optics of pleasure.  What a juicy phrase.

The part of me training to write a dissertation, however, notices (and protests slightly at) other things.  "Hey!  Why isn't she drawing more on Ann Douglas?  Or Michael Denning?  They wrote two of the most important cultural studies books to come out on early 20C New York, artists, and radical politics in the last ten years.  But they only get brief mentions.  Must.  Investigate..."

Old habits die hard.

Instead of thinking about any of this, I'm going to go make stew.  Because I'm on break.  And I can.  Yum.

For something else delicious, you should read Crispin's great review essay on American Moderns and Sharon Zukin's Naked City over at The Smart Set.

80s Party

I've been trying to find an excuse to post this Annie Lennox video, besides the fact that it's just awesome.  Starring Hugh Laurie and John Malkovich in amazing period costume, the video showcases how bizarre and extravagant the early 90s were for pop culture.  Or just how bizarre and extravagant Annie Lennox was.

At any rate, I've slowly been catching up on episodes of House over the past few weeks, since I enjoy finding out what the crotchety medical miracle-worker will say next.  In "Known Unknown," House tags along to a medical conference just for the chance of finally making it with Cuddy.  What do you know, but there's an 80s party at the conference?  House shows up, dressed almost exactly like his fop character from "Walking on Broken Glass."  And I would show you a picture, except NBC has their fists wrapped tightly around copyright.

The only thing is, everyone on the internets seems to have missed this tongue-in-cheek throwback!  Including the L.A. Times and the House wiki.

So, I implore you, watch this Annie Lennox video.  The next time Hugh Laurie doffs a powdered wig, you'll be able to giggle a little harder.

Accidental Poems, Grumpy Librarians, and Other Observations

1.  Familiar story: writerly intention--whatever that means--thwarted by some secret brain initiative.  That first novel, your collection of poems, is really about your mother.  Or your divorce.  Or whatever.

Surprise!  So's the second one.

But I love that, too.  I love that we're thinking about other things than we claim to be, even when thinking to ourselves.  What a marvelous and human capacity.

I spent yesterday revising some recent poems and, lo!  Welcome, Accidental Hamlet Poem, welcome Accidental Daughter Poem.  I didn't expect you to show up.

In other news, hearing the cashier ring up the total of my remaining course books--$58--was not a happy accident.  This morning, the receipt clearly says $85.

2.

Dear Librarians Who Work In A Particular Public Library In A Particular Place Where I May Or May Not Actually Live At This Moment In Time,

I love you.  And I love libraries indiscriminately.  Anytime I move to a new place, the first thing I do after unpacking my boxes and buying coffee is start memorizing the library floor plan.

Do you not sense my fierce love and admiration each time I hand you my library card?  Even if you are having a bad library day, are you so immune to my charm, to my cheerful demeanor?

I don't understand you, Librarians.  I don't ask for much.  A smile.  A friendly overture.  Anything but coldness.  Anything but that.

Yours, in agony,

KE

(The RadCam in Oxford.  Not The Library In Question.  But A Favorite.)

The Specimen Box Project

I accidentally drank too much beer, and instead of acting like any other normal person--soporific, sprawled in bed--I'm most seriously awake.  And I have this idea.

For the last few months, I've been trying to write a series of "Specimen Box" poems, mostly in an effort to move beyond the interior spaces of the poems I'd been writing--my speakers were always naming things, were existing in these conditional spaces or relationships to other subjects, and these elements defined the parameters of the poem.  My aim with the "Specimen Box" series was to force myself to make my speakers look out at the world, even a very tiny portion of it, and to report back.

At the same time I began this project, Vintage issued new covers for Nabokov's work, all featuring--yes, you know it--a specimen box on the cover.  (This isn't, to be honest, prescience on my part.  I probably stole the idea from them in the first place.  In fact, I'm sure now that's what happened.)  They're beautifully designed and because I am a sucker for a cleverly designed book, I want them.  All 21 of them.  (Funny how a spin-off of Nabokov's naturalist habit inspires the collector in me, too.  Too bad books cost money and dead butterflies don't.)

Because I'm woefully under-read in terms of Nabokov and because I'm told it's good to set realistic goals, I am challenging myself to read one Nabokov novel every month until I've collected all of the nifty new issues.  I'm not reading them in any chronological order or order of importance to the literary community or whathaveyou.  I'm just picking whichever book strikes my fancy when I go to the book store.

I suppose if I were any kind of respectable writer, I'd challenge myself to write a "Specimen Box" poem after I read each novel, but I think my responses will come out in their own time.  And will, in all likelihood, have very little to do with Nabokov at all.  Or, everything to do with him.  Poems are capricious creatures.

First up:

Detectives.  Death.  Yes.

More to come on this (two-year, holy cow) adventure...

[For more on specimen boxes, or a version of them, see also this guy.  Every so often I'm reminded of him, and it's exciting all over again.  This time, someone threw out a reference in class, and I wrote down his name as one of three notes to myself.  Surprise!  You knew about him already!  (So, I'm never getting hired by an English Department.  Ha.)  Probably as close to a poem as you're going to get in a physical form, these things.]

Dispatches From The Black Sheep

1.  On break, a barista regales his friend with theories about philosophy in Ender's Game.  Passages are read aloud.

2.  Outside the large picture window, a man walks by.  He has the best mustache EVER.

3.  There is a delicious confection called a Budie Bar with perhaps five different kinds of sweetness, from coconut to M&Ms.  It's gone now.

4.  A German and an American argue politics.  The German is right about everything.

5.  In the small park across the street, a toddler makes a snow angel.  Her mother (?) leans down to show her the outline in the snow, how it makes wings, a skirt.  The little girl runs through the snow, trampling the image, laughing.

From The Mess To The Masses

1.


(They're so French I can't even stand it.)  (Also, the sound quality is unfortunately poor.)

2.

I'm reading Lilian Pizzichini's biography of Jean Rhys, The Blue Hour, and am enjoying (mostly) that Pizzichini has decided to approach biography via fiction.  The book reads like a novel, which I think is perhaps more appropriate than a cut-and-dry account of someone's life--details are always invented or reimagined, no?  What I don't like is the melodramatic overtones of Pizzichini's psychologizing of Rhys--something Maud Newton also pointed out in her review of The Blue Hour.  This tendency is especially off-putting considering that Rhys managed to render terror, grief, depression, and jealousy without ever sounding dramatic--just terrified or grieving or despondent or envious.  She was a precise, careful writer, and I wish her life was more precisely written, as glad as I am to see her written about.

3.

                                   

The Met is exhibiting this weird collage art--Victorian family photographs cut and pasted by Victorian women.  I think they're fantastic.  This one was made by Georgina Berkeley and belongs to the Musée D'Orsay.  Some more of my favorite images in the exhibit:

4.

I can't get Peter Terrin's story "The Murderer," anthologized in Best European Fiction 2010, out of my head.  After a man murders his neighbor--a spoiled "artist" who consistently blares loud music night and day--he is haunted by other real--and possibly real--murders that he previously committed.  Luckily (or unluckily), the character lives in a society whose New Measures grant each person two get-off-scot-free murders.  What follows is not so much gruesome as mesmerizing, not so much terrifying as captivating.  And that accomplishment is both terrifying and captivating.  I'm looking forward to reading much much more out of this anthology and hope that at least some of Terrin's work is translated from the Dutch...

And on that note, I'm going to go drink more tea.