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October 3, 2005
The Artist Sleepover
I would love to invite Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, Wallace Stevens and Oscar Wilde to my house for a sleepover. I rather suspect that Jane and Wallace might be disposed to decline the invitation, but I would wheedle and flatter, tell Jane how much I admire the navy and promise Wallace I'd buy all my insurance from him, until their resistence would deliquesce like a snowman and its mind of winter thrust suddenly into the orderly heat of Key West. Before my guests arrived, I would bake a batch of my special chocolate chocolate chip cookies, because those cookies always garner me praise, admiration and gratitude. I'd stock up on different flavors of Ben & Jerry's, because after all, the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. I'd buy a case of Bass Pale Ale, as well of plenty of tequila, triple sec, limes, salt and ice, because who wouldn't like to see Emily Dickinson completely shitfaced? We'd lay our sleeping bags out on the living room floor and play Truth or Dare.
Actually we'd play Truth or Truth. Like I'm going to dare Frank O'Hara to make out with Oscar Wilde? I mean, yeah, I'd love to watch that, but I'd bet my entire poetry collection it would happen on its own. I'm far more interested in what they can tell me.
I'd ask Jane about sentences. She's considered one of the greatest prose writers in the English language, but in her work, metaphors are as scarce as racy lingerie in the underwear draw of a middle-aged Mormon matron. Was it a choice? Did she want clean, elegant prose, free of baroque ornamentation that might distract from her withering characterizations of fools and the wisdom achieved by her heroines and their paramours? So much of her work focuses on the ways people communicate and miscommunicate; was she working to communicate as directly as possible as with her readers? Does she think that's one reason her work has aged so well?
I'd give Frank O'Hara the complete works of David Sedaris and beg him to read some of it aloud. I'd ask him what he thinks of Oscar's statement in The Critic as Artist that "That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul." I'd ask him what he really thinks of Andy Warhol's work. I'd invite him to lunch, hoping he'd write a poem about it later. I'd play some Madonna and convince him to dance.
As for Wallace--first of all, I'd want to know how he came up with the name Holly for his daughter, way back around 1910. (Of course I think it's a fabulous name, but there aren't many people my age or older with that name. The character who popularized the name was of course Miss Holly Golightly, but in her case, Holly was short for Holiday, and her real name was Lula May.) I'd give him Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror, then ask him to discuss "The Man on the Dump" in terms of Kristeva's notion of the abject. I'd ask him how we recognize and reckon with the mess. If you're Eve in the garden and you can't tell the garden has become a junk heap, then what's going on?
I'd ask Emily about friendship and death. I'd ask about mastering homemaking skills, since when she was 25, she "won second prize in the bread division at the local cattle show." I'd ask about dwelling in possibility. I'd ask if she ever had her astrological charts done. (Emily, Jane and I are all Sagittariuses--Jane and I share the same birthday.) I'd ask about her refusal to be baptized into the religion of her family and if she was ever afraid of God. I'd ask her about this poem, one of my favorites in the whole word:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the meanings are--
None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air--
When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--
I'd ask about internal difference. Her answer would probably make me as earnest and overblown as a Tony Kushner character, so to lighten the mood I'd show her my meticulously ordered closets: one for shirts and blouses, one for skirts and dresses, another for trousers and miscellaneous items, and of course my coat closet (I just bought the coolest lightweight sky blue quilted walking coat), and ask if she wanted to try on any of my clothes.
And Oscar? First of all I'd ask him if his last words were really, "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." I'd ask if he still loves Bosie. I'd ask if he has truly forgiven Bosie. I'd ask him about Constance, where his wife fits into the memory of his life. I'd tell him that in the first year of my PhD program, I wrote a paper about him that was returned with the comment that it was "wonderfully well written and enormously entertaining. It feels like it could be published in Vogue, say, beginning as it does with ‘boredom' and ending with a rowdy affirmation" and a grade of A-. (Anyone else who's done work toward a PhD ever have a professor tell you your critical work could appear in Vogue?) I would read him this paragraph from another paper I wrote about him:
For Eliot, who got away with his dictum that "good poets steal; bad poets borrow" partly because Wilde had already announced, "Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man," his proximity to Wilde (and perhaps his homophobia) was too great: he is Wilde's hypocrite lecteur but the familial slot Eliot occupies is not frere but fils. Eliot as Oedipus is aware of Wilde as Laios, and is very uncomfortable with his brilliant, tragic, homosexual, disgraced and already dead father. He could not allow himself to acknowledge or appreciate Wilde, not only when borrowing from and expanding on, but also when reacting against and attempting to refute, Wilde's work. He is anxious to see completed the erasure of Wilde begun after Wilde's fall from grace.
I'd get him to agree with me that Eliot is thoroughly overrated and The Waste Land really kind of sucks. I'd ask him about this passage from de Profundis:
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought--the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled at the end of each week--so they always try to get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that conception of life; as soon as we have to pay for an emotion we shall know its quality and be the better for such knowledge.
Then I'd cry and cry and tell him that I have always loved him.
I'd haul out my copies of their work--especially the ones I read and cherished like love letters as an undergrad, the filemot pages now brittle and loose in their cheap bindings--and beg them for autographs. I'd give every last one of them the address for this blog and ask them please to comment. I'd stare out the window at the darkness beyond my neighbors' houses and think about nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Then I'd shout, "Who wants more margaritas?"
p.s. Saviour, you are absolutely invited this time.
Posted by holly at October 3, 2005 6:17 AM
WHAT!??!?!?
YOU HAD A SLEEPOVER AND DIDN'T INVITE ME!
(mumbles under breath)
Well, fine! I'm having a sleepover on Friday with Courtney Love, Whitney Houston, Winona Ryder and Kate Moss. And YOU can't come!
I know, I know. They are not dead, but their careers are... so there!
Tongue-firmly-in-cheek,
SO
What a great post! I can see why you liked it so much the first time around. I like the idea of Saviour's sleepover too.