Monday, March 23, 2015

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde, photogenic aesthete, and an 1881 parody of his early public image. Max Beerbohm's caricature of Wilde on his successful American tour.

The full text of Wilde's essay in dialogue form, "The Decay of Lying."

More full text of Wilde's works online, inelegantly, from the Victorian Web, and very elegantly at a nonacademic site.

Visual analogies from An Ideal Husband: Boucher's Triumph of Love. Ladies at start of play would have appealed to Watteau. Mrs Cheveley is Lamia-like ("The Lamia," H. J. Draper, 1909). A Tanagra statuette. Another Tanagra.

One of Beardsley's famous illustrations for Wilde's Salome (English tr. by Douglas pub. 1894); another one of Beardsley's illustrations, and another.

More Beardsley and Decadence: A Suggested Reform for... Ballet" (1895); another title page; a collection of Beardsley's art for the Yellow Book, which contrary to reputation never published Wilde.

Wilde's image and identity sell coffee. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop.

Stills from a few recent productions of Earnest: Seattle's Village Theatre (what is Lady Bracknell wearing?). Algernon and Jack, from the Village Theatre again.

An all-male, perhaps too modern Earnest.

Another recent Earnest from the National Theater School of Canada.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

More LGBT and/or Q writers of color; furries; other maps

Early 1970s gay liberation. More memories. US GLBTQ history, from Michael Bronski.

Thinking about kinds of feminism.

A performing artist who could certainly be in this course. Some clips.

A major science fiction writer who could also be in this course.

The latest book from a challenging poet. A significant new poet and his much noticed new book.

A new book about queer and trans artists of color. Comics by Nia King.

Fifty queer zines by people of color.

A critic, poet, translator and autobiographer.

Another significant poet and some of his poems. An especially explicit example of his thoughtful work.

A DC-based pioneer of performance-oriented poetry. A poetic manifesto. On his legacy.

One more poet (he's reading this Sunday in Brookline)!

A critic, memoirist, YA writer, short story writer, and poet.

A terrific fiction writer and some of his essays and stories.

(This blogger got asked a similar question and came up with a neat miscellany.)

Back in the alphabet soup. More soup.

Some tools for writing about poetry. The most important tool. Diction, or spices. Syntax, or routes. A toolbox. A very useful tool or recipe book.

Finally, furries. Also, intersectionality. Definitely not representative. What about this non-furry? Lots of furry events.

Quantifiable research on furry. Furry demographics, for example.

Valdor and other fursuiters. Furry video central. A performance by Sardyuon.

Michael Arthur on furry. Arthur's comics.

Morris Stegosaurus, a furry who's quite a good writer. His performance and his book.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Walt Whitman

Deathbed edition text for Children of Adam poems in Leaves of Grass.

Deathbed edition text for Calamus poems.

The entirety of the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass.The 1860 Calamus poems. The 1859 proto-Calamus manuscript, "Live Oak with Moss." A close-up view of calamus, or sweet-flag (Acorus calamus).

The kind of awesome Whitman Archive landing page.

A late 1850s photograph of Whitman, "one of the roughs." Whitman seated, in Boston, 1860. Whitman in D.C., 1863: "Do you detect a scowl?" Whitman in 1866 or so by Matthew Brady. Whitman in 1880.

The first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The 1860 edition. The 1872 edition.

Phrenology, the pseudoscience of head bumps! More phrenology. American popular "science" in lots of books from the 1850s. Mesmerism. Whitman's early work as a temperance writer.

All about Peter Doyle. Whitman with Peter Doyle. Whitman with Harry Stafford.

A delightful and very non-scholarly Whitman fan blog. Remembering Robert K. Martin. Colm Toibin on Edward Carpenter. A nonacademic Carpenter fan site, with unreliable editions of Carpenter's writings (check before you quote!)

Sherman Alexie's poem "Defending Walt Whitman."

Federico Garcia Lorca's "Oda a Walt Whitman" in Spanish and in one English translation b A. S. Kline. Mayakovsky's looking at you.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Renaissance sonnets

Aspects of sonnets. How to write sonnets, by Rachel Richardson.

The sonnets on our syllabus: Sidney, Astrophel and Stella 1. Sidney, Astrophel and Stella 71 ("Who will in fairest book of nature know"). A lot of reliable resources for the study of Sidney (and Wroth and their family). Sidney's whole sequence, reliably edited and in 1580s spelling. An engraving of Sidney. A portrait.

Shakespeare, sonnet 105 ("Let not my love be called"). Shakespeare, sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"). Sonnet 129 ("The expense of spirit"). All Shakespeare's sonnets in a decent modern-spelling edition. An online edition (with commentary) of the first quarto.

Lady Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 2. Wroth, Pamphilia 7. A reliably edited text for the whole sequence, with notes. A short life of Wroth. A longer reliable life, with more on what happens in her enormous Urania. Her complete writings online.

Quite a lot of reliable texts, and commentary, on Barnfield. Barnfield's Affectionate Shepherd, sonnet 16 ("Long have I long'd") and sonnet 17 ("Cherry-lipt Adonis"). The polemical Rictor Norton on Barnfield and other gay shepherds.

Some precursors and parallels: Thomas Wyatt's "long love. Thomas Campion's cherry garden. Petrarch's Canzoniere in modern English by A. S. Kline.

A Nicholas Hilliard miniature. And another. J. E. Delaunay's Ixion (late 19th c.). Botticelli's Cupid.