Trivial Decadence: A brief Christmas Post

Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin.--Against the Grain, Chapter 6

Kafka may have been skeptical of the midrash, but he succeeded in becoming a canonical author because biblical guilt carries over in his work. Scripture is two dimensional; Kafka is absurdly abstract in his cockroach as an extended metaphor of patriarchal judgment. Spastic has not read her St. Joseph's edition in a very long time, but remembers enough to know the Gospel of Mark presents Salmone as a collusionist to her mother's will. The queen wants the Baptist silenced, tells Salmone, less a figure of peace, more a hedonistic nullification, to dance for Herod. The rest gives way to Hollywood's variation on Apocrypha which is a disservice in the conflict between faith and rational progression.

In comparison to what we're beset with today, 1953 revisionists were a placid bunch, but the critics should have castigated Dieterle for casting Rita Hayworth as a clean run girl whose innocence is duped in an era of Gnostic flowering which created the second branch of monotheism. Getting a script past the censors is one thing. Transforming Semitic deviance into an American chorus line erases what the metaphysical conflict seeks to teach. Sexual gluttony perverts the gift of duty to a higher purpose, and Salmone, at least in the Baptist thread, seeks to subvert the coming of the Incarnate through offering appeasement to insatiable appetite. The Silent Generation as represented by mio padre may be dying off, but one thing which hasn't changed in all these years, keeping tempo on the American scene, is how shallow we are as a nation. Huysmans may be cloying, and claustrophobic, but he doesn't walk away from the threat of annihilation which sensory fulfillment poses, and narratives from a camera should never be the last word.

Hayworth had a troubled life in her later years, and if lacking depth is a flaw, her tormented alcoholic rages seem amply deserved.   

Adopting a guardian mentality, no.1

Kelly Clark, who has a more lively twitter feed than I'll ever aspire to, posted something cute about books remaining mysteries if they're never finished, which led to my recollection of a short thread in Speakeasy led by a journalist named Lynn, the typical suburban writer who probably believed my posting activity justified institutionalization, about abandoning a book. With maturity we learn not to feel guilty about it. I certainly do not when it comes to badly plotted commercial texts of the sort which made Jeff Bezos a modern oligarch (worrisome in my view). 

I could name a slew of kindle franchise authors who make me puke, who deserve abandon just as readily as the poison of too much fructose in processed food diets, leading to the diabetic industry, which will be a growth industry for decades to come, but then there are troubling texts, sometimes post-modern, or classics not easy to classify, particularly philosophical novels, a term I do not like, but there are writers who use fiction loosely to explore things like hedonism.

My nominee for potential abandon by shallow American idiots is A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans was an important figure in the blossoming of Decadence as it culminated in the work of Oscar Wilde, the British Empire's most cultivated pederast, but to downplay Jois-Karl's interior examination of Esseintes' mind, the novel is little more than sensual indulgence-- and even Wilde tempered this by giving ...Dorian Gray a plot.

I do not know if, in fidelity to the text, Huysmans' chapter where Esseintes' tries to drive a man to commit murder was restored in the original French, but in the free kindle translation I read, I doubt it would have invigorated the story all that much, and in fact, Huysmans might have done better to write a treatise on hermiticism and pleasure. I finished the edition I have, as I must-- but living for the senses isn't as radicalized as it might have seemed back then, in all the contradictions under Victoria's long reign.