"It is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English?"

[larryhammer]

Thoughts on rereading Byron's Don Juan:

• Reading it straight through in a week and a half, instead of piecemeal over a couple years, it becomes all the clearer that yes, the first couple English cantos are a complete mess.
  
  
• Which makes canto XVI's sudden return to the narrative momentum of the early cantos all the more heartbreaking, given they were immediately followed by Author Existence Failure. The excellently cliffhanger end doesn't help.
  
  
• In memory, canto XII being one long digression divagating around a single narrative event was much stronger than the reality of being several long digressions divagating around one and a half narrative events. That half weakens things considerably.
  
  
• Authentic cultural details I've yet to see used in a Regency novel: "drapery Miss" being "a pretty, highborn, fashionable you female ... furnished by her milliner with a wardrobe upon credit, to be repaid, when married, by the husband (XI.49.1n), "smithfield bargin" meaning a marriage for money (XII.46.6n), and chalk paintings on the floors of fashionable ballrooms (XI.67.4-5); the first of these seems particularly useful for constructing a romance plot. Also, the phrase at the time was "rack and manger" not "rack and ruin" (XI.74.6n) he said pointedly in Georgette Heyer's direction.
  
  (Note that while the English cantos were written in the early 1820s and are nominally set in the early 1790s, they are clearly based on the society Byron knew of 1811-16.)
  
  
• Things can be learned from how Byron handled Juan's escape from the harem -- that's the hand of a master at work.
  
  
• I want to read the novel, which surely SOMEONE has written, that tells Juan and Adeline's story to completion.
  
  
• One doesn't need to be a dog to confess that indeed this profligate masterpiece is the life, it is the thing.

Now to figure out what's next ...

---L.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

Chalk paintings on the floors of ballrooms? Were they varnished over somehow and safe to dance on, or was the gradual destruction by feet part of the point?

Now I want to make a chalk floor mural in some abstract regular pattern, and have a cotillion danced on top of it to see what it looks like afterward. Would the effect be like marbling? Dance marbling. Hm. Maybe chalk isn't the best medium, but I sense an art form here.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I've seen "Smithfield bargain" somewhere, I know.

The chalk would have decreased friction and made for smoother, faster dancing, especially on the turns.

"Wrack and ruin" is the correct form of that phrase, I have always supposed.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

I think "rack and manger" is a synonym for "room and board." I think. Maybe.

And, like movingfinger, I've seen "Smithfield bargain" in, I believe, a Heyer novel. I'd try Convenient Marriage first, of course, but who knows?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Stalls in a barn have racks for hay and mangers for grain, so I assume one is being reduced to living with the livestock when one is headed for rack and manger.

[larryhammer]

I believe that's the image, yes. One that makes more sense than the modern phrase.

The OED quotes Fielding (from The Grub Street Opera): "The moment my back is turned, everything goes to rack and manger."

---L.

[larryhammer]

Unprotected -- temporary art. Which is, after all, a form of conspicuous consumption.

---L.

[larryhammer]

It's entirely possible I'd forgotten it. But it didn't trip any bells when I read it.

---L.