Wilde

Among my hebdomadal drafts I just found one which was actually supposed to get published last monday. But here it is:

Our little sexuality work group will organise friday's seminar, and again my research has acquainted me with some interesting - or rather funny this time - bits of history.

Oscar Wilde's trial transcripts generally are a delight to read. But they are rather lengthy, so I'll give you a fragment.

Wilde gets cross-examined on an attempt at blackmail:

"Wilde: I felt that this was the man who wanted money from me. I said, "I suppose you have come about my beautiful letter to Lord Alfred Douglas. If you had not been so foolish as to send a copy of it to Mr. Beerbohm Tree, I would gladly have paid you a very large sum of money for the letter, as I consider it to be a work of art." He said, "A very curious construction can be put on that letter." I said in reply, "Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes." He said, "A man offered me £6o for it." I said to him, "If you take my advice you will go to that man and sell my letter to him for £6o. I myself have never received so large a sum for any prose work of that length; but I am glad to find that there is some one in England who considers a letter of mine worth £6o."' He was somewhat taken aback by my manner, perhaps, and said, "The man is out of town." I replied, "He is sure to come back," and I advised him to get the £6o."

Later on in one of the trials:

"Edward Carson [Lord Queensberry's attorney]: You stated that your age was thirty-nine. I think you are over forty. You were born on 16th October, 1854?
Oscar Wilde: I have no wish to pose as being young. I am thirty-nine or forty. You have my certificate and that settles the matter.
C: But being born in 1854 makes you more than forty?
W: Ah! Very well"

"Ow..."

Here I am, a little curled-up sparrow with tea and clementines; I woke up wih a fever, an aching throat and a head like a pounding bowling ball which only wish when I stand up is to give in to gravity.

I had a hell of a week, in all the positive senses of the expression, and this is the well-deserved outcome. I am afraid I won't be worth much today as a library-visiting, essay-writing person. Maybe I better assume the role of a bed-lying, snivelling, moaning person. However, that would never do, because I am already bored by the thought: in spite of a deranged body, my spirits are excellent.

Yesterday was the last day of school. The last seminar. The last presentation. And the last day on campus for moist of the students here. This meant:

I got up and finished the preperations for the seminar about the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials which our sexuality study group was leading. On the way I found a hilarious account of a fashionable fin-de-siècle gathering by the Pythons (it might help to know that prince Albert Victor of Wales was engaged in a huge male brother scandal; Shaw and Wilde, the playwrights, had their own sexual idiosyncracies; about painter Whistler I just read that he "was one of those artists whose legend as wit, dandy, and esthetic kamikaze - for what was his libel suit against John Ruskin but a suicide mission, compelled by his own pose of 'Southern honor'? - continued after his death and became a barrier to proper appraisal of his work"). I suppose two years of UCU-drilling is bearing fruit, as I was the only one who wasn't nervous to lead the seminar and, again, the only one who didn't read from notes and, again, the only one standing up. It all went relatively smoothly and our audience, in as far as present on this last day, responded, so we were satisfied.

Afterwards I ran to Prince of Wales Road corner to meet A. who had invited me to go and watch Factotum, the new Bukowski adaptation. We had a very nice Subway sandwich in the pitch dark of Bartholomew cemetery and when it turned out the Picturehouse had stopped playing Factotum thursday already, we decided to have a go for Narnia: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Jaja. There was quite a lot to criticise about the movie, but we still enjoyed it. However, brainless enjoyment of Disney movies isn't in it anymore for us literature students: binary oppositions, cultural hegemony and stereotypical representation where-ever we turn... On the positive side: it makes the most boring books and films interesting. But to reassure you: Narnia wasn't boring at all. Still, we agreed that it's slightly dated: features that may have been acceptable in the forties would, we felt, have to be adapted in a new film such as this is.

I got back my sleeping-bag which A. had used on a trip to London for a Franz Ferdinand concert, and which I am gonna need next week on another trip to the capital (Ha!) :-)

Our last stop was Mowbray Avenue, where at number 15 we found a lovely metropolitan birthday- and goodbye-party of a bunch of English Germanophiles, German Hispanicophiles and generally Franco- and Vindobona-philes (that last one's Vienna. I was happy to find a place to look up such things). And they had lebkuchen! Oho, the joy!

After coming home this morning (and still not being able to sleep because of my kind wall-bashing flatmates); after reading and writing my head/ass off for a week; after an alternation of too much food and wine with days of buttered toast and tea; after a week of six hours of rest a day: you might agree that my body deserves to be ill now.

But don't worry: I will be up and running again by the time you need me to!

In the meantime, bbc radio treats us to a review of a 1944 A Christmas Carol radio play. Isn't it a marvellous country?

Also, I have completed Christmas decoration in my room on wednesday: I 'found' some evergreen branches along the campus borders, and together with my ruby balls (see entry last week) and a Christmas cd (Oh dear, I hear you saying: but really, Aretha Franklin and Cyndi Lauper don't do a bad job) it makes a lovely sight and smell and sound. By the way, the leaves are finally falling from the trees in serious numbers.

All in all, one might even get a holiday-kind-of-feeling.