saw little girls dressed in perfect miyake pleats and orgami headresses
doing crane like motions
and i was at peace with quebec
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Friday, June 20, 2014
The weight of the world, it seemed, rested on the bachelor's shoulders. And the4 conflicts and stresses registered in certain bachelor texts rerive from the peculari situiion of bachelor identiy in the antebellum phase of its emergence. The bachelor occupies an ambigious position within the mid-Victorian system of sex, gender and body ideologies. Not yet the subject of etiquette books such as the complete bachelor (1896, no longer an adresse of younge men's guides of the thirties and forties (in which the owrd "bachelor" can barely be mnetioned, nowhere to be found in the treatises on domestic life and martial sexuality, the bachelor's sociosexual identity is undefined and unrelgulated. Located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshokld between domestication and transgression, the bachelor is a liminal concept in atebellum culture, and a strantional s tate within proper masculine devolpment...
Fireside Chasity, The Erotics of Sentimental Bahelorhood in the 1850s, Vincent J Bertolini, from Sentimental Men 29.
Fireside Chasity, The Erotics of Sentimental Bahelorhood in the 1850s, Vincent J Bertolini, from Sentimental Men 29.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Pater envisions his critical activity under a public gaze, and thereby structures his aesthet- icism through the social forms and psychology that it ostensibly re- pudiates, those of Victorian gentility.
"The world," Newman writes, mistrusts innocence as "craft" because "sobriety, self-restraint, control of word and feeling have about them an air of being artificial, because they are not natural; and of being artful, because artificial." Thus self- restraint, he continues, "is the first thing which makes holy persons seem wanting in openness and manliness.
Georg Simmel points out in "The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies," That which we can see through plainly to its last ground, shows us therewith the limit of its attraction. . If the utmost attractiveness of another person is to be preserved for us, it must be presented to us in part in the form of vagueness or impenetrability. This is the only substitute which the great majority of people can offer for that attractive value which the small minority possess through the inexhaustibility of their inner life and growth
The trope of arcane wisdom thus invites thefin-de- siecle celebration of art as a dangerous influence, as in the trope of "the fatal book." And Pater's rhetoric clearly suggests a calculated affiliation of his aestheticism with homoerotic subcultures that still remain shadowy in recent social and literary histories of Victorian England.3"
But it is important to note that the rhetoric of secrecy is not inevitably the expressive veil of a specifically homoerotic desire. Indeed, to draw this inference would seem to reproduce the very practice that Newman analyzes in his sermon on "Innocence and Wisdom": "the world," disturbed by the secrecy of those who withdraw from its scrutiny, interprets the transgression as a mode of gender deviance. One facet of the burden of Victorian manliness is a deep mistrust of (which is of course inseparable from a fascination with) secrecy:
ritualized devotion as a means of giving shape and solemnity to a life of aesthetic experience -of realizing aestheticism as what Foucault has called a technology of the self.?5
Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism
Author(s): James Eli AdamsSource: ELH, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 441-466Published
"The world," Newman writes, mistrusts innocence as "craft" because "sobriety, self-restraint, control of word and feeling have about them an air of being artificial, because they are not natural; and of being artful, because artificial." Thus self- restraint, he continues, "is the first thing which makes holy persons seem wanting in openness and manliness.
Georg Simmel points out in "The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies," That which we can see through plainly to its last ground, shows us therewith the limit of its attraction. . If the utmost attractiveness of another person is to be preserved for us, it must be presented to us in part in the form of vagueness or impenetrability. This is the only substitute which the great majority of people can offer for that attractive value which the small minority possess through the inexhaustibility of their inner life and growth
The trope of arcane wisdom thus invites thefin-de- siecle celebration of art as a dangerous influence, as in the trope of "the fatal book." And Pater's rhetoric clearly suggests a calculated affiliation of his aestheticism with homoerotic subcultures that still remain shadowy in recent social and literary histories of Victorian England.3"
But it is important to note that the rhetoric of secrecy is not inevitably the expressive veil of a specifically homoerotic desire. Indeed, to draw this inference would seem to reproduce the very practice that Newman analyzes in his sermon on "Innocence and Wisdom": "the world," disturbed by the secrecy of those who withdraw from its scrutiny, interprets the transgression as a mode of gender deviance. One facet of the burden of Victorian manliness is a deep mistrust of (which is of course inseparable from a fascination with) secrecy:
ritualized devotion as a means of giving shape and solemnity to a life of aesthetic experience -of realizing aestheticism as what Foucault has called a technology of the self.?5
Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism
Author(s): James Eli AdamsSource: ELH, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 441-466Published
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