flemmings | (no subject)

Been a while since we've had an unbroken string of +30C/ 90F weeks. Even 2018, which I recall as unendingly hot, only did it for a week at a time. The consolation is that this is a dry heat, so somehow I'm quite comfortable just with fans and the window AC only at night. And for future reference, the unseasonably cold spring that led me to keep the windows in the side rooms closed, even in June, proves that the house stays cooler than if I open them in seasonable weather and close them in hot, because the heat never has a chance to get into the house. Mind, if we start having 35C/90F days, that might change.

One of my chronic 'get it off the shelf' books is Walter Pater's The Renaissance, and the reason why I can't read it is because Pater's prose makes me think I don't understand English. Here, for example, is him talking about sculpture:

"Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which he belongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and this system of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome the special limitation of sculpture—a limitation resulting from the material and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and which consists in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sided presentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motion can relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality of expression pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each great system of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising, spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The use of colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, by borrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects by strictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent of colour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the too fixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form—this is the problem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in three different ways.

Allgemeinheit— breadth, generality, universality— is the word chosen by Winckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to express that law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and his pupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in the individual, to abstract and express only what is structural and permanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him, all the accidents, the feelings, and actions of the special moment, all that (because in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt to look like a frozen thing if one arrests it."

Somehow I never had these problems with sculpture. "...the hard presentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality of nature itself"? It is? It does? Guy, what are you talking about? I only keep on with this because somewhere in Pater there's supposed to be all this gay subtext. But I probably won't be able to recognize it when it peers through the dense thicket of Pater's prose.

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Man, I tried to read Pater so many times because Wilde loved him, and I just gave up repeatedly. Sometimes Victorian era English seems like another language.

Glad it's not just me. Some writers just are Like That- Henry James, Virginia Woolf- but it's disconcerting to find this obscurity in a nonfiction writer of the era. I mean, yeah, 20th century philosophers are pretty impenetrable, but that's philosophy. But *art history*??

I had to read his essay on the Mona Lisa at least three times (for art history, VicLit, and I think something about the Decadents) and hand to God every time I did, it became less comprehensible. Immortal diver vampire what?

I think readers then were used to a certain kind of....archness? floridity? verbal contortions like gymnastics? that modern readers are just so unused to. Carlyle was like that (also had to read him for VicLit) but a little more penetrable. I think the closest the Yanks ever get is Henry James, altho you find it swooping back in David Foster Wallace a bit, maybe also Melville....and MILTON is like that. For Milton you need a hunting dog, a dowsing rod and an Ouija board.

(obvs Milton is not a Yank, he just popped into my brain as someone who REALLY writes like that)

Edited 2020-07-06 02:24 (UTC)

Yes to the floridity (Matthew Arnold, ugh.) It's just that the potboiler Victorians didn't write like that: Dickens is prolix but perfectly comprehensible. James- later James- OTOH is just totally obscure to me and always has been. The revelation was that he made much more sense when dramatised, when you could see facial expressions and hear tones of voice. But otherwise: brick wall.

Forty years ago I could read Milton no problem, but forty years ago I could read Shakespeare no problem either, and now I suddenly can't understand him. I dare not revisit Milton, though I remember thinking him really neat at the time.

Shakespeare is MUCH easier for me to understand in performance, yeah. Altho I grew up reading one of those one-volume collections with the tiny print in two columns on each page and the names abbrv. lk. ths. so it was really hard to figure out what the fuck was going on anyway.

Hmm I don't think Milton's sonnets are like that either! They're much easier to understand. Maybe the compression of the form forced him into intelligibility?

The gayness is more apparent in The Imaginary Portraits- which, being fictional or semi-fictional- are also perhaps more easily digestible.

That said, I think Pater's essay on Leonardo is sublime...

The Pater is impenetrable but at least here makes up for it by being delightfully wrong--Greek sculptors in fact went all out with the "unskillful contrivance" of color.

Of which I've never heard. Maybe I'll look them up. Unless I die of a surfeit of Pater.

It'd be umm interesting prose if it weren't about the Mona Lisa. Because what I see is just a guy, guy-like, projecting fantasies onto a perfectly ordinary human woman.

My very thought.

I see your double-page tiny fonts and raise you- onionskin.

My high school texts were much more readable. Individual volumes for each play, plus thank god notes.

I have a sneaking suspicion Milton was trying to be, unconsciously of course, not so much Homer or Vergil as Shakespeare, so of course the language got away from him. Hell, it got away from Shakespeare too, so why not?

ONIONSKIN

Man, I remember typing on onionskin, altho not how.

Yes, but...

Pater was a gay guy.

And Leonardo was another gay guy.

There's something more going on here than the common or garden male gaze...

And the Mona Lisa is a strange painting. Just look at that mountainous landscape behind her.

Carbon paper between the real paper and the onionskin copy?

Yeah, I know. But being gay doesn't inoculate you against commonplace modes of thinking. If straight guys view women as Other, betcha gay guys will too.

Mountains, yeah. I think Leo just liked rocks?

Mona Lisa started off as the portrait of an ordinary woman, but it was the one painting Leonardo never got rid of- and kept working at- obsessively. I think he came to see it as a spiritual self-portrait- or something of the sort.