Gold

[malsperanza]

Had an excuse to play hookey and spend a couple of hours this afternoon at the Byzantine art exhibition at the Met. Incredible show; will need a couple more visits to assimilate all that strangeness and beauty. All that harsh faith.

All that gold.

For now, alls I'm gonna say is, Boris and Gleb: OTP! They so wanted to be holding hands. No picture of them on the museum's website, alas; you'll just have to go see the show, and find them standing in their gilded panel (o sages standing in God's holy fire/as in the gold mosaic of a wall), looking valiant, with their hands not quite touching.

Also Sts. Sergius and Bacchus: definitely OTP.

Mmm. Medieval Russian warrior saints.


Annals of Spring

Walking across Central Park afterward, I saw:

1) First robin

2) Pair of grackles grackling

3) Shadblow and redbud in bloom

4) Man playing Bach flute under the Greywacke Arch, which has excellent acoustics for baroque flute. You could hardly hear the mistakes for all the pretty echoes, which lent each note a golden, ringing sweetness. The echoes under the Greywacke Arch make one's footsteps sound like those of a spy meeting a contact in a bad movie: tap. taptap. tap. In fact, I think about 30 movies have filmed spy-meets here. The Bach soundtrack gave it a nice sophisticated touch, as in a bad European spy movie. So I handed off my intel to the agent by tossing fitty cent into the flutist's instrument case, and passed on looking as casual as possible.

5) On the Great Lawn the Squirrel Brigade was out in force, including:

-Red squirrel (quite rare these days)
-Pair of fat grey squirrels fighting over a bagel
-Another grey squirrel, demonstrating excellent posture by sitting very upright, like Maggie Smith doing Lady Bracknell

So, the poet is right, and there is more than one kind of gold. The gold of Byzantium endures untarnished, though Byzantium is dust. And as for the silver-gilt haze of trees in new leaf? Well.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~Robert Frost

I also saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodil fluttering and dancing in the breeze, and I'd like to say that they outdid the sparkling waves in glee, but they were in buckets in front of a florist's shop and looked perfectly sedate.

Still, oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, I expect they will flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.

...Especially as a vacant mood seems to be my natural state.

Good old Wordsworth. Can't hold a candle to Frost most days, but he's a dear.


All in all, four kinds of gold in one day isn't bad.

Yes, I am rich.

Comments

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I like the Frost poem. Also, entry, very pretty, and nicely structured. *approves*

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Sauntering randomly along, and I see you have changed your userinfo to my favorite passage in Heart of Darkness. Mmm, Roman references. I read that book first after a spate of Henry Jamesitude, and was all, 'Mmm, majestic phrasing and description' with relief. :)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

A favorite of mine too. I love all of Conrad and especially H of D.

Though when it comes to majestic phrasing, you can't really top James.

I change the user info once a month, when I remember.

[chresimos.livejournal.com]

Heh, I had a feeling you would say that. Perhaps syntactically straightforward majestic phrasing?

Out of random curiosity, who do you think is the most difficult author (in terms of style, not concept) of fiction prose? (Because nonfiction analysis of work is always more difficult to comprehend than the actual book!) Henry James, obviously, is mine. Mostly I'm okay otherwise, although there's always a random sentence every once in a while in Jane Austen that gets too long and forces me to reread.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Out of random curiosity, who do you think is the most difficult author (in terms of style, not concept) of fiction prose?

Kind of a subjective question. I'm inclined to mention first all the experimentalists--Cortazar, Gombrowicz, Proust, Pynchon, Joyce. Does anyone actually read Finnegans Wake straight through? Georges Perec wrote a novel without the letter "e." William Gaddis. like Pynchon, is a hard read but gives a big payoff.

Or Nabokov, who writes clear prose but can be formally challenging--as in Pale Fire, which is a novel made partly of bad poems and partly of obscure footnotes, with a sort of memoir and some fake academic literary analysis thrown in in bits. Great book, but a bit of a slog in places. For sheer density, nothing can top Moby Dick.

All the 18th c novelists have moments in which their English is alien to ours and can be tough to parse--Fielding, Sterne, even Austen, though I find her prose mostly crystalline and lapidary.

James is just a bit of a gasbag at times. The inverted clauses serve to hold the reader at a deliberate emotional remove. I often find that tiresome, though not in the short stories and not in Portrait of a Lady, my favorite James novel.

But Conrad (like your buddy Keats) comes straight out of Shakespeare, both as to style and as to theme. And is consequently elegant even when faintly incomprehensible.

Favorite prose stylist: Sir Thomas Browne.

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

I'd have to second your opinion on experimental turn of the century and on authors. I would probably add Faulkner to that crowd though. He was clearly fascinated with Joyce's experiments and sought to create his own language to convey his thoughts to readers. Nabokov, too, formalism, fabrege writing (I know, cliche association), can keep many readers at a distance. Pale Fire is one of my favourite books. Perhaps Ada, though, is his most difficult book to read both for its length and its demands on a reader. I wonder if you think some of Don Delillo's stuff, like the Names or Underworld, would qualify as stylistically challenging? Also I know many people who found 100 Years of Solitude to be a difficult read, but that mainly seems related to many characters sharing the same or similar names.

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

Oops, and I forgot Art and Lies by Jeanette Winterson and Maybe the Art Lover by Caroline Maso. The former for its language and opaque, though often startlingly brilliant imagery and the latter for its rampant experimenting with form (which I personally enjoyed, but there's barely an accountign, right?)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Faulkner for sure; a favorite author, but damn hard to get through. The pure difficulty of the prose, the hard work one has to read it, *are* the reason why the payoff on the last page (in the last paragraph, in the last sentence) is always so stupendous, and so complete. Favorite example is Absalom, Absalom God, I should read that book again...

I have mixed feelings about Nabokov. I've never read Ada, and never really wanted to try, because though I admire Lolita, and enjoy Pale Fire very much, I am also irritated by them. Not because of the pyrotechnic prose style, but the... I dunno, something smug, something rather too pleased with itself.

DeLillo: I love Libra--brilliant book, beautifully written, with flashes of what I might call difficult prose (impressionistic internal monologues etc.) and nails the American psyche. I didn't love White Noise or Ratner's Star, but those older books are almost by a different author, one still attracted to scifi. Underworld: The prose itself is pretty smooth sailing, no? Not particularly difficult. I thought the opening section, the baseball game, was spectacular, but since then I've been stuck on about p. 350 and getting nowhere. Not sure why. I haven't fallen in love with the characters yet. It's back on the pile at the moment.

100 Years of Solitude is a book that I found wonderful in long stretches and unbearably tedious in others. But the magical realist style does notstrike me as in itself difficult or impenetrable. In fact, the attraction of Garcia Marquez, Calvino, Isabelle Allende is that they are quite accessible at the level of words-on-the-page. As for characters with similar names... *points to War & Peace, where everyone has 3 names*

Jeanette Winterson has done some nice work in the experimental style, yes. I don't know Caroline Maso; what can you tell me about her? But oh, thinking about it, there are plenty of others--Cortazar, Cervantes, or--naming two of my favorites here--Tristram Shandy and The Saragossa Manuscript. Or Christine Brooke-Rose. Who could resist books titled Amalgamemnon, Textermination, and Verbivore? The intellectual masochist's answer to Jasper fforde (and at the end of the day, not a whole lot better).