Pre-Raph

            On Wednesday morning I needed to find a rhyme for my translation of two lines of "Complainte du progrès" by Boris Vian. He says, "un avion pour deux / et nous serons heureux”, the first line meaning either “a plane for two” or “a plane trip for two” and the second line meaning “and we will be happy”. I settled on “a Cesna 150 / and we’ll both be happy”, since a Cesna 150 already is a two seat plane.

            I started memorizing “La cible qui bouge” (the moving target) by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s from the point of view of someone that likes to go to sordid bars and dance by herself while men are watching. The moving target is her ass as she sways her hips.

            In the early afternoon I had my first fourth year seminar and so I took a siesta in the late morning so I’d be fresh for class.

I had no trouble finding the classroom at University College since I knew that room 57 would have to be in the basement. I haven’t been in the basement there since I took second year FSL. This is the tiniest classroom I’ve ever had. It’s about the size of my living room and bedroom combined. There was just one other student when I arrived. The room was stuffy and so I opened the little windows.

            I read Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey. When Professor Hao Li got there at 14:00 there were ten other students in the room besides me and they were all women. She complained that there weren’t enough chairs for a class with twenty students and so she went to get a couple more. Student number twelve walked in and it was a guy.

            One of the female students is an elderly woman who walks with a cane and another looks like she’s in her fifties. Everyone else looks about twenty. Two more female students walk in. Professor Li sounds like she has a British accent.

            Our seminar will focus on the British Aesthetic and Decadence movements. Our primary objective concerns the forms of aestheticism that modern life does not allow us to appreciate such as feeling, shapes, lines and colour.

            Secondly: critical vigilance to text and developing analytical skills. Be alert and ask yourself why you focus on and choose a theme to respond to.

            Not just analysis but pedagogy. How knowledge is conceived and presented in a logical and persuasive argument. The ability to raise a question is harder than finding an answer.

            Formal analysis: Speaking and writing precisely.

            She says she’s a process person and does not expect a finished work of art in answers to questions. It’s about self-reflection, awareness and approach. Don’t just take things in. Participate in an exchange of ideas. Respect all views.

            She urges us to tell her to back off if she puts us on the spot.

            The thirteenth female student arrived.

            Professor Li likes to give out short assignments because they are harder.

            She talked about our seminar starter assignments. We each have to write a 100 to 150-word essay on one aspect of a work we will study in one of our classes. We need to post it online for discussion the day before that class. It was agreed upon that she would open up the website for sign-up on Friday at noon. I asked her to explain it further because I didn’t understand how we could pick a topic so soon when we haven’t even read any of the works in question yet. From her answer I concluded that we should just pick something and jump in. She said nothing is too narrow for our topics.

            I found her to be quite kind and considerate in her response to my question and I started to feel like I was going to like this course.

            She told us that she uses her phone a lot and that we can discuss issues with her over the phone.

            She had us all fill out an information sheet answering various questions like what English courses we’ve taken, what year we are in, what languages we speak, what authors covered in this course we’ve already studied and so on.

            We had a short break and I was glad to discover that the men’s washroom is directly across the hall from our classroom.

            In the second half of the class we were given a formal introduction to the course with a slide show of paintings from different periods. She showed us Madonna and Child with St John, 

Madonna and Child with the Book, 

Annunciation, 

Lady Lilith, 

Lady of Shallot, 

the cover for Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”, 

and “Dancer’s Reward" by Beardsley.

            She asked us for reactions. I said the first two are more realistic in the sense that a mother and child is a more common sight than the dreamlike image of the Annunciation. I said that the image of “Flowers of Evil” is frightening because it looks like it has a human face with a mouth that could bite you.

            People think that aestheticism is about beauty but it means perceived by the senses. It is the ability to feel or to be made to feel. It is to wake up the senses.

            Kant says that beauty comes from a disinterested judgement rather than a response to pleasure.

            In Britain and North America Aesthetics and Decadence are thought of as separate groups. Should the Pre-Raphaelites be included? Where is cut-off? In Britain critical collections of essays start with the Pre-Raphaelites in literature, painting and history to the Decadence movement.

            The Aesthetic and Decadence movements were a reaction to the Pre-Raphaelites, who linked art with morality. In the United States they drop the Pre-Raphaelites and focus on the Arts and Crafts Movements.

            Following the European connection this course will include the Pre-Raphaelites.

            The principal Pre-Raphaelites were the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Ford Madox Brown. They rejected utilitarianism, machinery and money while elevating the natural and the unforced. The literary movement emphasized thematic symbolism and naturalism.

            The second stage came in the 1850s to influence literature with erotic medievalism. They changed the concept of feminine beauty to tall, thin women with long necks like The Lady of Shallot.

            The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was taken over by writers. The early writing, especially the poetry, tended to draw its themes from medievalism, classical mythology, the union of flesh and spirit, sensuousness and devotion.

            The first aesthetic tradition of poetic form goes from Spencer to Keats to Tennyson. The second is more political and goes from Milton to Wordsworth to Browning. The writing is characterized by lush vowels, swinging rhythm, musical effects, sensual description, and rigid archaic poetic forms such as the sonnet all of which influenced the later Decadent poets. The Pre-Raphaelites influenced decadent poets such as Yeats.

            The French had a powerful influence on the Decadence movement with writers such as Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysman.

            The British Aestheticists were against materialism and considered the high moral attitudes of the Pre-Raphaelites to be bourgeois. They believed in art for art’s sake. The prominent writers were Walter Pater, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Max Beerbohm. The major publications were The Yellow Book and The Bodley Head.

            The Decadents wanted to shock the bourgeoisie with dandyism, showiness, affectation and Bohemianism. They wanted an ironic twist to complacency. If natural is good then they would become artificial. The outsider is superior. They wanted us to wake up to a critical perspective of what we take for granted. The themes were of ennui, nostalgia, loss, exile, isolation, perversion, the ornate, the elaborate, artifice and the exotic. They used elaborate poetic forms such as the villanelle. They were a direct influence on the Modernists. Yeats started out as a Decadent and became a Modernist.

            Be alert for overlaps and distinctions between Aestheticism and Decadence.

            Decadence is the second stage of Aestheticism. It’s not just indulgence. It signalled that culture had passed its prime. T.S. Eliot was influenced by the Decadents.

            Look for the big picture of what these writers are doing. What problems are they tackling and why? What are they for and what are they against? What is their story? Be alert to shapes, lines and colours. Put yourself on the spot. Be alert for the sincerity of mannerism and the political agenda, which do not usually come together.

            The Victorian realism of the Pre-Raphaelites is a harsh reality. Take everything as a story and give its value. The value of art and sensibility is not in education or politics but in itself. How does this relate to the values of society? Don’t conform to what we take for granted.

            After class I rode up to Print City at 180 Bloor Street west to buy the course pack. I was surprised that it wasn’t ready. They always print it each time it’s requested and so I got fresh baked Baudelaire literally hot off the press.

            I rode west along College and stopped at She Said Boom to ask about Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance but they didn’t have it there or at Balfour.

            I stopped at Freshco to buy three bags of milk.

            I had three corn crackers with cheese for lunch.

            I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy.

            In this story Andy and Kingfish are working together against a mystery competitor to win a sales competition in order to be the exclusive Harlem representatives of the Ink Flow Pen. They hire an incompetent secretary named Miss Blue who doesn’t have any secretarial skills. They keep hearing about their competitor outselling them until they discover that their competitor is Miss Blue.

            For dinner I baked some puff pastries that I’d found in the freezer and had them with a beer while watching Wagon Train.

            In this story a beautiful young woman named Sally Potter that had been on her own at a fort is delivered by soldiers to the wagon train. She says she can work and so she is hired to care for a sick young boy for his parents. Sally is not exactly flirtatious but she is a free spirit friendly to men. Matt Trumbell falls for her but so does his Uncle Joe. A gambler arrives who knows Sally from her recent wilder life. There is competition among the three men. Joe promises Sally wealth and Matt promises her a more prosperous version of her old life. Matt has nothing but love. Matt and Joe fight and to keep the wagon train from trouble she leaves with Cliff. Joe tells Matt to go after her and he does. She returns with him to the train.

            Sally was played by Vanessa Brown, who was an Austrian Jew who escaped with her family to Paris in 1937 at the age of nine and then to the States. She could speak fluent German, French, Italian and English. She started working in theatre at 13. She had an IQ of 165 and became a regular of the Quiz Kids radio show for two years. She played Jane in “Tarzan and the Slave Girl”. She was a regular on “My Favourite Husband” for two seasons. She was also a successful painter.