Tag Archives: Oscar Wilde

Jealousy Strikes Over Writer’s Rooms

Posted on by

A creative space, exactly as you like it, and a routine, undisturbed, can make a day or, in the case of some people, a work of art. Balancing work and writing is something I’ve thought about lately, but more than that I’m curious about other people. How do they write best? So to fill that curiosity, we have creatives spaces and routines…(ahh, the wonders of the internet.)

Rooms:

The Guardian has a great page dedicated to writer’s rooms…literally a series of photographic “portraits” of the rooms the writers work in by Eamonn McCabe. Coincidentally, McCabe has an exhibit that just opened that runs through January 17 at Madison Contemporary Art if you are in London.

They’re gorgeous and interesting shots that give you an intimate look of the creative spaces of various authors. They tend to have a desk and a computer…but other than that, these spaces are as varied as can be. Some are bare spaces with merely a desk, but most tend toward a messy, comfortably chaotic appeal. I wish they would do a series of artist’s studios next.

These are clearly all successful, middle-aged writers because they have rooms they can devote to writing. I live in New York city, and have a compact desk in my bedroom that I can devote to writing. There is just room for it between the door and the bed. It’s usually crowded with papers that I once meant to look at. The chair hurts my shoulders after a while. A certain someone likes to sit at it with his computer. And so, my workspace has become wherever there is a computer. A helpful versatility, no doubt, but I envy the luxury of a room of one’s own and the flourish of a quill pen, like in Jane Austen’s room, right.

Routine:

It isn’t mere space I pine for, but the lives that could be led in them. Similar to these room portraits, blog Daily Routines gives a brief summary of how artists, writers, and other ‘interesting people’ organize their day in all its intimate detail. The writer Murakami runs marathons to get into a zenlike state, much like his dreamy novels. Kafka’s is bizzare. Truman Capote is a “horizontal” author.

My routine involves a lot of ‘sometimes’. I go to an office sometime. Sometimes I have been up writing or reading for an hour. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I’ll polish something up during the day, sometimes I’ll write at night. Today, I’ll cook up a nice breakfast and lay in bed typing while trying to plan the most productive possible day.

I’m still settling into a quasi-writing life, but I have dreams of what it would be like. They run along the lines Oscar Wilde’s perscriptum of life as art. In which case, I have a lot of work to do. Christmas angels and huge koi decals are competing for decorative space to ill effect in this writer’s rooms. Yet based on the differences I found in rooms and routines, I’d have to say to each his own.

Celebrity Lives as Art: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know

Posted on by

What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little. Lord Byron

I would rather heap scorn on some actor-besotted rag like US Weekly than read it, and am not in the habit of sending fan mail in the hopes that some rock or soap star will come and deflower me. Even Andy Warhol, to my mind, get too much credit for being a star maker just because he churned out some movies in the Factory. If anything, Warhol began the decline of the celebrity, as he heaped attention on people with no talent or accomplishments. Fatuous, small-minded uninteresting little twerps fill the pages of the modern rag and reality TV show.

Perhaps you are wondering you could live up to my high standards of charm, uniqueness, intelligence, attractiveness and expertise. You are? Well then, allow me to present the man who started it all, the first man to have women throwing themselves at him sight unseen, the only to be talked about in London in 1816:

Byron, painted after his death fighting for Greek independence, crowned with laurels.

Lord Byron, famously named by a lover as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” His lyric poetry, combined with luscious dark curls, brought him fame at a young age. His sensual appeal appears in his work throughout his life; indeed, it becomes a part of it. Even after becoming too ‘bad’ for the London scene to tolerate, when his divorce from his wife brought up questions of sodomy and incest and his debts from his exorbitant drinking and gambling chased him to the continent.

Difficult in person, but in theory a dream of a man, he kept his readers, especially the female of the species, enthralled with his tales of dark heroes who were all reminiscent of him. In his rollicking epic Don Juan, in which he, as narrator, begins to write events of his own life into the poem, and between the bawdy lies and bawdier truth one is utterly charmed. He and his work are engrossing, whether your taste is for the Gothic, the lyric, or the romance, you’ll find a witty and sexy bad boy reflected within. Take a look at a biography, like the one by Elizabeth Longford that I’m reading now, and you find a string of romances and writings, and a poor biographer struggling to defend Byron from a thousand accusations, even now the individual fighting against the world.

Celebrity culture, created by Byron, who put his life into his writing, was furthered by Oscar Wilde, another British dandy at the opposite end of the 19th century, who declared his life was art. Wilde dressed and acted the part throughout, and slyly led respectable Victorians to the precipice of free-thinking anti-prudery. Outrageous and flamboyant as a drag queen in his velvets and green carnations, Wilde scandalized the public with his unique morality of aesthetics even as they laughed at themselves when he tore high society to shreds in the theatre. Tried ‘for posing as a Sodomite,’ Wilde could no longer not speak ‘the truth that dared not speak its name’ and the media frenzy was bigger than OJ Simpson and Britney Spears combined when he was sentenced to prison.

Depicting Wilde’s reception in America on his book tour. He started a sunflower craze.

Byron and Wilde, the patron saints of this blog, whose contributions to aesthetics are as notable for they way they lived as what they wrote. Interesting and with eventful, active lives, the talented and dangerous duo also happened to be damned good writers who brought glamour to the arts. Blame them for celebrity culture if you will, I just wish that there were more celebrities like them.

Self Inconization: Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde

Posted on by

Before MTV and Hollywood, there were superstars, rebel bad boys who captured the world’s attention. Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde created themselves as symbols for their generations with no help from the Internet, TV, or movies. They self-consciously created themselves before more familiar figures like Andy Warhol were born.

Wilde is a patron saint of this blog not simply because he was an clever writer and interesting literary critic. He created a view of aesthetics that determined his life down to the boutonniere, and he did it so brilliantly that turn-of-the-century Britain and Europe watched, scandalized and delighted. His society plays inverted social mores, but so cleverly it was hard to realize it had happened. And they lionized him, this pudgy aesthete from Ireland, of all barbaric lands. Love, that Achilles heel of us all, is what brought his ascendancy to a crashing halt, when his lover Bosie got him involved in an infamous trial of homo sexuality, which did not go well, leading to his ruin, imprisonment and penniless death in exile on the continent. But prior to this low, Wilde achieved heights of fame that were improbable considering his origins, and lived out his convictions regarding art and life that were ‘moral’ in the highest degree. He champions artifice in The Decay of Lying, saying “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and in he indeed wrote what he became to the public, as his plays were used as evidence against in his trial. He considers “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”


Paradoxically my other patron saint, Byron, held quite the opposite view. (Now–I know what you are thinking: these two dandies on the British 19th c. scene were both sensational and scandalous public figures and writers who, despite all their endeavors, dies rather unheroically in exile and out of favor. Their ascents to greatness were similarly unpredictable from their humble origins, and displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and ambition. And yes, of course, that even as they wrote within the Romantic and Decadent movements, scholars now consider their work to make stylistic leaps that distinguish them from those circles. One might also say they had extreme temperaments and the ability to behave with extreme selfishness. These bad boys were the ultimate rebels for their times.) Byron, living 80 years before Wilde, thought writing was secondary to living, “The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” Life was a much higher thing, and “scribbling,” as he called his work was merely a side item to living.

Art into life, or life into art: it amounts to the same thing. Wilde struggled for impersonal objectivity, and does not mention himself. However, he lived his life as art, so that in his writing he, rather than any imaginary characters, is what the reader sees. Byron said that “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.” By the time he wrote his masterpiece Don Juan, he had taken life–his life as narrator–and injected it into his poem at every possible opportunity. The almost megalomaniac way the put themselves consistently in their audience’s face is how they achieved super stardom.

The confluence of life and art brings the reader back to the same thing: the author. The author always dominates the work, and his legacy haunts his every word, as each of them very carefully like to manipulate. It is a fascinating thing to watch. A parallel to such success would be Warhol, another self-made icon.