This Side of Paradise

Can it be we’ve now had eight days of warmth and sun in England? Yes, dear readers, it can! What a delight to be here, teaching this class, and to feel genuinely on holiday.

Aside from the weather, my especial pleasure through the last week has been watching the ideas of our class come together. Our readings of the queerness of classical sculpture – both through essays and in person at the British Museum – transitioned into a discussion of the ways Sir John Soane constructed a sense of self (at the turn of the nineteenth century) through architecture and the amassing of artifacts from the world over; such musings offered a perfect opening into the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, in all its orientalist grandeur and absurdity. Queerness here operates in ways that far exceed sexual orientation.

The first performance we attended as a class – the stunning National Theatre production of Terrance Rattigan’s 1939 After the Dance – likewise asked us to think about the ways we shape our selves in relation to others. Toward the end of the second act, not long before she throws herself, Tosca-like, from a balcony, Rattigan’s Joan admits she’d withheld emotion from her husband through twelve years of marriage because she thought that’s what he wanted. Their lives as socialites depend on the notion that most of the real world – including Hitler’s growing armies and the Great Depression – is such a bore.

But like Dorian Gray, who flirts with the accoutrements of culture but never quite lives a vital life (hence the portrait in the attic, more alive than the actual Dorian), Joan and her husband David present only shells of themselves – until feeling finally rushes in and it’s too late to make amends.

Michael and I head off today for Glyndebourne, the opera festival. We’re seeing Britten’s Billy Budd – a queer collaboration if ever there were one (based on the queer-as-pink-ink Melville novella, the libretto was composed by E. M. Forster). After last night’s magical recital – the mezzo Catherine Hopper at Wigmore Hall – and our sunny day in Brighton, I’m feeling lucky indeed.