Vicissitudes of a Night Owl on a Tuesday

'Tis the day before St. Patrick's, and ever since I woke up at two-ish it has not been precisely springlike, but the cloud ceiling and light quantity are discernibly higher than they were a month or so ago. Last night I stayed up until around 6:15, then shivered miserably to sleep because the featherbed blanket had unfolded itself and I didn't want to bother doubling it up again so that its virtue of insulation would take effect. ("'Tis the voice of the sluggard," etc.) What was really irritating was when the feet tingled and itched as they warmed up again.

During the night itself I had amused myself among other things with updating Firefox to the 3.6 version, then troubleshooting for what must have been a good hour as YouTube's videos refused to load. After downloading and re-downloading Adobe Flash Player 10, restarting Firefox and the entire computer, etc., it turns out that I just had to click on the dormant Shockwave Flash in the list of plug-ins.

In the future there might be a music blog post, but in the interim I'll just say that I've been concentrating on violin music and that yesterday I went on a cello spree, and what especially leapt out at me were Yehudi Menuhin's recording of Bach's Concerto in E major, David Oistrakh's of the Concerto in a minor, Jacques Thibaud's and Jacqueline du Pré's of Maria Theresa von Paradis's (or von Weber's or whoever's) siciliana, and Jacques Thibaud's of Tomaso Antonio Vitali's famous chaconne. Besides I am fond of Pau Casals's versions of Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei and Camille Saint-Saëns's Swan, and also bookmarked the first Bach cello suite (Mvt. 1-3), even though we do have CDs of them and I played them often whilst doing homework or slacking off during the first year of university.

Besides I've been on an art spree. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website has an art history timeline, named after one Heilbrunn, which provides thumbnails and actually useful informational blurbs of a large selection of the museum's holdings. They are classified by region, time period, etc., and what I just do is to click on a certain time period and go through all of them. During the night I went through the 20th and 21st century stuff, which was especially interesting to me because it feels peculiar to see what someone has decided are the important products of the times I've lived through.

The black-and-white photography sticks in my then befogged mind best, especially because I like what I've seen of Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. I was pleased when I recognized a photo of a cowboy leaning against a wastebasket on a New York street and smoking a cigarette in tight jeans, plaid shirt, belt, and a Stetson, because that one came up in a nytimes.com slideshow about an exhibition of Robert Franks's oeuvre.

Then there was fashion from the Costume Institute. I don't like flapper fashion very much, though as an aesthetic I can appreciate it as well as any other, because I like couture that celebrates curves, etc., rather than obscures them and because its limpishness is annoying. So Paul Poiret, whether his fashion is technically flapper or not, was not my cup of tea; neither was most of Coco Chanel's stuff, to which I perhaps shockingly prefer what Chanel turns out under Karl Lagerfeld in the present. On the other hand I thought that the Christian Dior frocks destroy the argument that fuller figures were in vogue in the day of Marilyn Monroe, etc., because the cuts and sizes suggest corsets and diets and a slender Grace Kelly rather than steak and muscles and a subtly plump woman. But maybe the patrons really wanted something that tiny-waisted, or people were thinner back then in general.

I kind of liked the Balenciaga and Madeleine Vionnet, and with the Givenchy it was difficult to imagine Audrey Hepburn out of the dresses. Speaking of which I think the adulation accorded to that actress on the grounds of her style is irritating. When people like Victoria Beckham tamely imitate it I'm disgruntled. Frankly I would not weep if I never heard of Breakfast at Tiffany's or saw the dumb cigarette-in-holder/pearls/sunshades photo again. And the "little black dress" is an obnoxious cliché; to quote and paraphrase Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, if the construction of that phrase could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. The reason I like Audrey Hepburn is admittedly because she is beautiful but also because of her grace and interesting life and, above all, sensibility.

After that I went through the 1400-1600 A.D. period and was surprised to find that I didn't like the offerings from that time very much. Then I roamed through Wikimedia Commons in search of an illustration for an incipient Lighthouse blog post on Jane Austen's Persuasion. One problem is that I have an ideal portrait of Anne Elliot before my mind's eye, with gentle and intelligent eyes in a slender oval face, but I can't think of an actress or lady in a painting/lithograph/whatever who embodies that. Besides portraits of the time are often commissioned, and then they're of apparently self-important or blowzy or self-dramatizing (two words: Emma Hamilton, against whom I've had one of my one-sided feuds for years) women who are utterly unsuited. But I did come across portraits of well-known figures like the actor David Garrick, whom I've often heard about but never expected to see almost made alive again in a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds(?), and then hit the motherlode and was forced to reevaluate my stance on Caspar David Friedrich when I stumbled on the category of "Romantic paintings."

But what I'm mainly looking for is an illustration for a blog post about John Keats's "Pot of Basil," which I've been wrestling with for weeks and probably needs to be written afresh. Two or three Pre-Raphaelites had a field day with the poem, but I am not especially fond of the Pre-Raphaelites, since I think that their hyperstylized, immaturely moody saccharineness shows a weakspined unwillingness to cross lances with reality much like that of science fiction writers who, rather than sensibly learn to get along with other people as they grow older, prefer to premise their books on the nearly summary extinction of humanity.

Anyway, having been a total snob and trodden on many a foot, I'll just mention that J. presided over a batch of homemade marshmallows again, and we've eaten lots of them on their own and as a creamy melting mass on a cup of hot chocolate. J. uses beetroot syrup (Zuckerrübensirup) instead of corn syrup, so the marshmallows have a faint brown tinge and a nice distinctive flavour. Another option is to toast the marshmallows at our coal stoves, which works quite well as long as the coals are burning red and cleanly and not passively emitting gasolinish fumes.