Morning Read
¶ Decameron, V, vi: I wonder if anyone has studied what it is about the Fifth Day’s stories that sets them apart from the tragic love stories that surround them. Today’s tale begins with the usual young lovers, but by the time it hiccups into melodrama, the reader might have missed something.
On Ischia, which is an island very near Naples, there once lived an exceedingly charming and beautiful girl called Restituta… She was loved to the point of distraction by a young man from Procida, a small island close to Ischia, whose name was Gianni, and she in turn was in love with him. Not content with going from Procida to Ischia every day to catch a glimpse of his beloved, Gianni would frequently make the crossing by night, swimming there and back if no boat was available, so that, even if he could see nothing else, he could at least gaze upon the walls of her house.
Directly after this passage, Restituta is abducted by a bunch of Sicilians. Unable to decide which among them will possess her, they hand her over to their lord, King Frederick of Sicily. Now: note that none of the usual impediments has been placed in the lovers’ way. Restituta’s father does not have another suitor in mind. There is no explicit class difference. No reason is given for Gianni’s failure to get beyond mooning outside Restituta’s house after his nocturnal swims* — which of course call the old story of Hero and Leander to mind, suggesting that what we have here is the severely cut-down fragment of another story altogether.
Later, when Gianni visits Restituta in the villa where the King has sequestered her, he enjoys the pleasures that, in the world Western love, require obstacles (abduction, seclusion) as a kind of foreplay. Who knows how long he would have gone on swimming back and forth between the islands if his lady-love had not been kidnapped?
¶ Today’s lines in the Aeneid remind me of Pascal’s attribution of all the sorrows of this world to our inability to sit quietly in a room. As the Fury Alecto infects Queen Amata with “Gorgon venom,” Virgil paints an extraordinary picture of itchy discontent sprawling into outrage. This is just the beginning:
Allecto flings a snake from her black hair at the queen
and thrusts it down her breast, the very depths of her heart,
and the horror drives her mad to bring the whole house down.
It glides between her robes and her smooth breasts but she
feels nothing, no shudder of coils, senses nothing at all
as the viper breathes its fire through the frenzied queen.
The enormous snake becomes the gold choker around her throat,
the raveling end of a headband braiding through her hair,
Writhing over her body.
The passage ends with the truly magnificent metaphor of a spinning top, “whipped insane by ghastly horrors.”
¶ After a spate of lengthy chapters, today’s installment of Le rouge et le noir is almost disappointingly brief. Julien goes riding with his new employer’s son — and takes an embarrassing fall in the mud. He shakes off the mishap with such good grace, however, that he’s allowed to go riding again on the very next day. This time he almost falls, “twenty times,” but only almost. In between these excursions, Stendhal introduces a new character, Tanbeau, another one of the Marquis’s secretaries. Will we see more of him? Stendhal seems not to want to.
¶ Clive James on Erik Satie: “No writer who has heard and loved Satie’s piano pieces (they came back in a big way only in the early 1960s) will be proof against the urge to strip from prose everything except its melody, as if, in the necessary interplay of word and thought, there could be a purely lyrical essence.” I’ve never had the urge to write more simply; when I cut back, it’s simply for the sake of order and hygiene.
I remember well how puzzled I was when — it happened in the Seventies here — Satie albums began popping up everywhere, and the Gymnopédies became ubiquitous. “Satie was the kind of eccentric who unites normal men by making them feel protective.” That’s an impulse that doesn’t get written up very often.
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Rebecca Lieb, of ClickZ.
Self-tagged as “the largest resource of interactive marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion, research, and reference in the world, online or off-,” ClickZ is arguably the most search-engine-obsessed site on the Web.
But notwithstanding all of that, Ms Lieb does have something to offer to anyone who’s thinking of starting a blog.
Well, yes, but you still have to have a sustainable niche, meaning you have to have new things to say. I go through this all the time when people tell me they want to write a column for ClickZ or SEW. Many of them don’t want to write a column. They want to say something, and once they’ve said that, they don’t have anything else to say.
(Emphasis supplied.)
* We’re told, toward the end of the tale, that, before her abduction, Restituta responded with “cruel” chastity to Gianni’s advances.