Earlier this week – Buddy Ebsen passed away…Most obits cited his acting career on The Beverly Hillbillies — but I think more attention should have been paid to his role as Barnaby Jones…I only wish it still came on at 3 in the morning here in the ATL…I had a much more poignant tribute ready to go – but lost it when a PDF file locked up my computer. NPR had a nice piece on it as I was driving home after ten hours at the “office”…Since that time I have been incredibly busy – and unable to blog at all…
There are a few points of light that have begun shining this week…Bush is under fire for using the Niger forgeries in his state of the union address…
Cheney’s underhandedness in the energy task force meetings can now be exposed thanks to a 2-1 victory in the Appeals court.
And a beautiful woman emailed me some glossy glam shots…
Unfortunately — the rest of the week hasn’t had very many high points…the problem is like that of those cartoons where people tread around and around in circles burrowing into the earth over and over until they’re suddenly six feet under their own path…
I’m still trying to finish up Hardy’s Tess D’Urbervilles – 100 pages to go — and the next time I get the opportunity to sit down and read – it’ll be to the back cover. I’ve talked about my reading habits before — and how one of my favorite pursuits is to unearth references to other works within the novel themselves…The obsession began with my favorite novel — Melville’s Billy Budd, and continues…
Hardy’s references aren’t nearly as numerous — but they point to several intriguing pursuits…
Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown shall be pain.
Searching led me to someone’s site who has a very different perception of the work. They made it quite easy to discover where the quote was coming from – “Atalanta in Calydon”, a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne — who was quite the interesting individual:
His mania for masochism, particularly flagellation, probably began at Eton and was encouraged by his later friendships with Richard Monckton Milnes (one of Tennyson’s fellow Apostles), who introduced him to the works of the Marquis de Sade, and Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and adventurer. Some gamey stories survive from the year or so that he spent living at 16 Cheyne Walk with Rossetti: according to one, Rossetti once had to tell him to keep down the noise–he and a boyfriend had been sliding naked down the bannisters and disturbing Rossetti’s painting. In another, Rossetti gave to Adah Menken, the American circus rider, to introduce Swinburne to heterosexual love. She returned it because, she said, “I can’t make him understand that biting’s no use.” He took a sardonic delight in what the critic and biographer, Cecil Lang, calls “Algernonic exaggeration”: When people began to talk scathingly about his homosexuality and other sexual proclivities, he circulated a story that he had engaged in pederasty and bestiality with a monkey–and then ate it. How many of the stories were true and how many inventive fiction is still unclear. Oscar Wilde, thoroughly capable of inventing his own interesting fictions, called him “a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.”
Rossetti was, of course, the most infamous of the PRB, or Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood…which I studied whilst still a student.
Apparently Hardy enjoyed Swinburne’s work – making a reference to
“Fragoletta” as well:
“The maiden’s mouth is cold…Fold over simple fold Binding her head.”
The PDF file that locked up my computer and lost this original entry was an online study of Robert Browning’s work “Pippa’s Song”:
THE year ‘s at the spring,