bloodygranuaile

One of our dippy little multiple-choice reading comprehension prepping-for-AP-test thingies in English today was the beginning of Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying."

When we got the sheet the first thing I noticed was the character names, Cyril and Vivian. And I immediately went "Hey, Oscar Wilde's kids were named Cyril and Vyvyan! I wonder if this is a Wilde piece or of it's just a coincidence?" Then I started reading and it was just SO WILDEAN that I figured it had to be Wilde. Then I got to the end of the excerpt and found the line "everyone that is incapable of learning has gone into teaching," and I've definitely seen that quote a hundred times before. It's Oscar Wilde. So I asked Mrs. O. what piece it was from specifically, and when I came home I immediately tracked it down and read it. I have three volumes of Wilde's work, one at my dad's and two at my mom's, and I think I have everything he's ever written, and some stuff twice. Luckily I had "The Decay of Lying" in the book with the largest print, so that was nice.

"The Decay of Lying" is, essentially, an entertaining and prolonged dialogue about how realism is bad for art, and says everything I've said at Glyphs meetings all year except much funnier and more clearly.

In other news, have been toying with the idea of venturing further into the world of DIY fashion, and moving beyond "what can I do to this t-shirt with scissors and (sometimes) safety pins" and into the realms of dying clothing black myself because the girls-cargo-pants industry is just so not helpful in that department. It actually looks doable.

Also, I have a seven-minute-long 1969 St. Stephen on my iPod now, complete with the pipes bit at the end that usually gets left out. Yay for St. Stephen.

EDIT Just in case anybody cares, this is my 666th LJ entry.

Got around to watching "Wilde" this evening. Thought it was very good, although it may have been better if Wilde had written the screenplay, except then it would have been dreadfully inaccurate. Stephen Fry very Wildean as Wilde; Jude Law utterly despicable as Bosie; Orlando Bloom hysterically recognizable as Orlando Bloom as a rentboy in a dippy hat.

There are a lot of things I admire about Wilde and would love to be a fraction as good at--his writing is almost invariably superbly clever, he's extremely quotable, he's the undisputed master of paradox (in all its useful forms, from avoiding answering questions altogether to saying very serious things in a silly fashion, and sometimes both at the same time), he's a masterful storyteller, a skilled poet, and a lovely essayist, he's utterly and fantastically unconventional, the Aestheticism movement amuses the hell out of me even though I fully agree with it, and he basically got to travel all over the US and Europe and say ridiculous things and is remembered a hundred years later for it.

But Wilde made one mistake that, although a common one, scares me and upsets me greatly when I realized I've come anywhere close to it, and that was his abysmal lack of judgment about Bosie's character. Bosie was a spoilt little child who only liked Wilde when he was amusing, but never, ever thought of anything outside of his own amusement. The film featured a number of (hopefully exaggerated, but I really don't know) scenes of Bosie blowing up over the most idiotic things, getting mad at Wilde for not going into debt over him when he'd spent every penny he could afford on him (and Wilde had a wife and three kids to support, so this was generous), refusing to get him a glass of water when he was sick because he wasn't amusing sick, and eventually, it was ENTIRELY Bosie's fault that Wilde went to jail, because Bosie was trying to get back at his (admittedly rather crazy) daddy. Yeah, sacrifice your devoted boyfriend and mentor so you can piss your dad off one last time--that's really considerate. Wilde loved him anyway.

I don't want to love terrible people. I want to have people to love, people to truly care about and be loyal and devoted to, and I don't think love should be based on a selfish idea of "what does this person do for me," but I don't like getting stuck loving people who are selfish, childish, narcissistic, vindictive, and treat other people--including me--badly. I like the nice-sounding idea of loving without expecting anything in return, but I abhor the idea of loving people and getting beaten or toyed with as a result. There seems sometimes to be a distressingly fine line between judging people, which we all know is Bad, and being any sort of judge of character, in which case it would seem that being a good judge of character is good and being a bad judge of character causes all sorts of dreadful things to happen, although cases such as Wilde's (or King Lear's) are a bit extreme. I am also torn between the warm and fuzzy idea that, all people being equal, all people are deserving of love, and the feeling that people who have more and stronger redeeming qualities than negative ones are better choices for me to love than people who have more and stronger negative qualities than redeeming ones. In addition to potentially getting hurt, I feel ashamed and delusional when I realize I have been holding people in a higher opinion than they merit, as I hate being wrong and I hate finding myself guilty of bad taste. And I fear I'm rather dreadfully snobbish about people in general, but I really do want to be able to love people for who they are, rather than despite it.

Everything is more fun if I talk about it with my mother. Including editing these freaking supplementary college essays. I've decided if I never learn how to develop a plot properly, I'll just publish a book of dippy aphorisms culled from conversations with my mother. Or else I'll write a book with a crappy plot but put in a character whose sole role is to spout dippy aphorisms in order to distract the reader from the lack of plotness, a la Oscar Wilde (except that his plots weren't crappy).

Nothing beats my 5-minute synopsis of Beowulf, though. I wish I had that on tape.