Ok so this post marks my triumphant return to the blogosphere. thank god.

recent obsessions: since my last post i have finished reading The Search for Gainsborough, loving every second -- and also finished Orlando, loving nearly every second. Now i'm on to my old friend Aubrey Beardsley, rereading two books of note about his life -- one is the Sturgis biography (which I read in 2004) and the astonishing volume entitled The Eighteen-Nineties by Holbrook Jackson.

The volume is invaluable for many reasons -- not the least of which is his cunning critique of the artistic culture of the time, one that was less about works themselves and seemingly for the first time about a culture surrounding the arts. He writes of the interdependence and almost competition between the greatest thinkers of late-Victoriana: Wilde, Beerbohm, James, Beardsley, Ross, Downson, Gray, etc. All of the men that I wish I had been able to know. The NY Times wrote of it's first publishing in 1914: "Mr Holbrook Jackson is the first -- and will probably be the last -- to give the world a sane, thoughtful readable treatise on the productions of those strange young men who delighted to apply themselves and all their works the lamentable term fin de siecle."

(read the original review as a pdf here)

Of course I'm fascinated by the drama behind the publishing of the Yellow Book and the Savoy -- publications that were both headed by Beardsley and struck down by the scandal Wilde's arrest. Some of the most beautiful illustrations ever made were printed on those pages -- sort of a New Yorker for bohemian Englishmen and intellectuals. Also sort of a rally in favor of the dandy -- an invention that would not only revolutionize man's relationship to appearances, but forever change the world of sexuality and gender politics. Wilde -- though obviously one of a kind -- was never alone in his flamboyance and aestheticism, but simply became exemplary of the supposed perversion of dandyism.

I've started working on my next project -- working title Aubrey -- about the life of the artist. Still in the research stage right now.

Again for the NY Times:

"The chief excuse for the aestheticism of the nineties is that is was a reaction against the then cut-and-dried materialism which then filled the minds of the British public; it was a protest against rationalism. The poets and artists were no satisfied with the gospel according to Darwin and Huxley. They wanted something else, and they did not know what that something else was. They made strange, foolish ventures before they found out. Some of them never found out. But Aubrey Beardsley did and so did John Gray...and so, at last, did Oscar Wilde. And Francis Thompson knew, all the while."