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Jan. 14th, 2007 10:12 amI seem to be destined to build things in my head that are better than real life. Or -- I suppose it's something one can train onself out of, but then you wouldn't get at least the anticipation, and there's something to be said for anticipation.
I'm not saying necessarily that I wrote De Profundis in my head and it was better than Wilde's version. It's more that I had heard so much about the great opus he wrote from prison, and had read so much of his work and about his work, that I had a different idea of what it would be. I thought it would be something like his preface to Dorian Grey, the most sublime statment on art and the theatre ever to come out of modern drama ("The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim...").
I did not expect petty grievances about who called who a naughty name or who was ungrateful for whose love. True, I didn't expect brilliant discourse upon Christ's life and actions either, but it's a small wonder that everyone praises De Profundis and nobody really talks of what it's about. The first half is an angry letter to a lover and the second half is a peculiar religious treatise.
The same happened with Selling Hitler, another book I'm reading at the moment. It concerns the appearance in the early eighties of forged "diaries" supposedly kept by Hitler but actually written by a petty criminal and informal Nazi historian in postwar Germany. I'm not very interested in WWII history; I was primarily interested in the scam, which was big enough to have some dramatic importance attached to it. It could have been the secret diaries of Winston Churchill for all I cared, so long as it was a con worth reading about.
What I expected -- perhaps I should say, what I wanted -- was a forged diary as a brilliant piece of social commentary, a con-job pulled off by a supreme master of the flim-flam who nearly got away with millions through meticulous attention to detail. Instead, the story of the Hitler Diaries is the story of a few sad men who fetishised the Nazi legacy to dangerous and disgusting extremes, fooled by a small-time forger who used postwar-era materials and carelessly cribbed most of the contents of the diaries from published timelines. In essence, the story of the Hitler diaries should have been a rival to Han van Meegeren's forged Vermeers, and instead it was one fool scamming another fool in front of the world.
The bright spots in this week's reading have been King's Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, which was every inch the story it should have been, and Shaw's Geneva, a fire-breathing indictment of warmongering and human stupidity:
JUDGE. Your objective is domination: your weapons fire and poison, starvation and ruin, extermination by every means known to science. You have reduced one another to such a condition of terror that no atrocity makes you recoil and say that you will die rather than commit it. You call this patriotism, courage, glory. There are a thousand good things to be done in your countries. They remain undone for hundreds of years; but the fire and the poison are always up to date. If this be not scoundrelism what is scoundrelism? I give you up as hopeless. -- Geneva, George Bernard Shaw, act IV
I'm not saying necessarily that I wrote De Profundis in my head and it was better than Wilde's version. It's more that I had heard so much about the great opus he wrote from prison, and had read so much of his work and about his work, that I had a different idea of what it would be. I thought it would be something like his preface to Dorian Grey, the most sublime statment on art and the theatre ever to come out of modern drama ("The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim...").
I did not expect petty grievances about who called who a naughty name or who was ungrateful for whose love. True, I didn't expect brilliant discourse upon Christ's life and actions either, but it's a small wonder that everyone praises De Profundis and nobody really talks of what it's about. The first half is an angry letter to a lover and the second half is a peculiar religious treatise.
The same happened with Selling Hitler, another book I'm reading at the moment. It concerns the appearance in the early eighties of forged "diaries" supposedly kept by Hitler but actually written by a petty criminal and informal Nazi historian in postwar Germany. I'm not very interested in WWII history; I was primarily interested in the scam, which was big enough to have some dramatic importance attached to it. It could have been the secret diaries of Winston Churchill for all I cared, so long as it was a con worth reading about.
What I expected -- perhaps I should say, what I wanted -- was a forged diary as a brilliant piece of social commentary, a con-job pulled off by a supreme master of the flim-flam who nearly got away with millions through meticulous attention to detail. Instead, the story of the Hitler Diaries is the story of a few sad men who fetishised the Nazi legacy to dangerous and disgusting extremes, fooled by a small-time forger who used postwar-era materials and carelessly cribbed most of the contents of the diaries from published timelines. In essence, the story of the Hitler diaries should have been a rival to Han van Meegeren's forged Vermeers, and instead it was one fool scamming another fool in front of the world.
The bright spots in this week's reading have been King's Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, which was every inch the story it should have been, and Shaw's Geneva, a fire-breathing indictment of warmongering and human stupidity:
JUDGE. Your objective is domination: your weapons fire and poison, starvation and ruin, extermination by every means known to science. You have reduced one another to such a condition of terror that no atrocity makes you recoil and say that you will die rather than commit it. You call this patriotism, courage, glory. There are a thousand good things to be done in your countries. They remain undone for hundreds of years; but the fire and the poison are always up to date. If this be not scoundrelism what is scoundrelism? I give you up as hopeless. -- Geneva, George Bernard Shaw, act IV
