Month: May 2013

Making the rounds in literary circles this week is the 19th-century relic Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book, which features passages on how to treat female writers with civility:

If you chance to find an authoress occupied with her needle, express no astonishment, and refrain from exclaiming, “What! can you sew?” or, “I never supposed a literary lady could even hem a handkerchief!” This is false, and if expressed in words, an insulting idea. A large number of literary females are excellent needle-women, and good housewives; and there is no reason why they should not be.

If, when admitted into her study, you should find her writing-table in what appears to you like great confusion, recollect that there is really no wit in a remark too common on such occasions,–“Why, you look quite literry,”–a poor play on the words literary and litter. In all probability, she knows precisely where to lay her hand upon every paper on the table: having in reality placed them exactly to suit her convenience.

If you find your literary friend in déshabille, and she apologizes for it –(she had best not apologize)– tell her not that “authoresses are privileged persons, and are never expected to pay any attention to dress.”  Now, literary slatterns are not more frequent than slatterns who are not literary. It is true that women of enlarged minds, and really good taste, do not think it necessary to follow closely all the changes and follies of fashion, and to wear things that are inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unbecoming, merely because milliners, dress-makers, &c. have pronounced them “the last new style.”

(Image: Reading, by Teodor Axentowicz, 1899, via Wikimedia Commons. Hat tip: Sadie Stein)

Olivia Rosane reviews the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a popular web series adaptation of Pride and Prejudice:

Watching a story that has survived two centuries play out over new media is an assurance that something of our humanity remains constant between the world of quills and parchment and the world of styluses and screens. We will still judge each other based on first impressions. We will still have embarrassing families. A combination of money and reserve will make you seem like a huge jerk to everyone who doesn’t know you well. But more than that, watching a serialized adaptation of a story we all know takes the edge off our suspense. No matter how disturbing some developments may be, (Spoiler alert: in this version, in stead of running off with Lydia under the false pretense of an elopement, Wickham plans to publish a sex tape of Lydia online without her consent) we know the end is happy. We keep watching not to know what will happen, but how it will.

She adds:

Jane Austen’s internet success isn’t so surprising. She is, after all, one of those few authors who live on as both a pop-cultural phenomenon and a dissertation topic. In fact, given her talent for snarky dialogue, Austen and the internet seem like a perfect match. For what do we use social media, after all, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

Previous Dish on Jane Austen here.

In 1985, the Public Library of Nijmegen, Netherlands pulled from its shelves Charles Bukowski’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, calling the book “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).” Bukowski reacted in a letter to journalist Hans van den Broek:

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists, I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

(Video: Tom Waits reads Bukowski)

The great German artist Albrecht Dürer inured himself to the melancholy of his time by embracing religion:

Like so many of his contemporaries, Dürer was haunted by death and guilt and the fear of damnation. He had good reason to be. Death was everywhere. Dürer had seventeen siblings, and only two made it to adulthood. Both his trips across the Alps to Italy—in 1494 and 1505–1507—were partly inspired by the desire to flee outbreaks of the plague in his home town, Nuremberg. “Anyone who is among us today,” Dürer wrote in one poem, “may be buried tomorrow.” This was not a poetic conceit. It was the brutal truth. …

To overcome the inborn tendency to evil, Dürer appears to have believed there were three things you could do, if you received the grace to do them. One was to mortify the flesh. It may sound morbid to us, but mortification was a common part of religious practice then. It is even recommended in the third of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses: “penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.”

We do not know for a fact that Dürer also practiced this discipline, but his sense of its attractions is evident in his art. … If the artist did not actually practice self-flagellation, he surely understood why someone would and sympathized with the impulse.

The second was to throw yourself onto the mercy of God. His writings are full of sayings such as “Always seek grace, as if you might die any moment” and “No help could have reached us save through the incarnation of the son of God.”

The third was to work without ceasing. Never stop. … Work was a form of prayer and art was a form of praise. Dürer wrote, “[Painting] is useful because God is thereby honored.” But if you ever stopped, you would lose your way and fall into error, like the idle genius in Melencolia I. To quote [Martin Luther’s spiritual advisor Johann von] Staupitz once more, “The first sign of true faith is the battle against the demons.”

(Image: St. Jerome in His Study, Albrecht Dürer, 1514, via Wikimedia Commons)