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Still Flaming After All These Years, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
June 12, 2015
On the Shelf
Frederic Lord Leighton,
Flaming June
, 1830–1896.
Everyone holds up
Anna Karenina
as a milestone for realism—“We are not to take
Anna Karénine
as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life,” Matthew Arnold wrote—but
Janet Malcolm raises an eyebrow at all that
. “The book’s ‘astonishing immediacy’ is nothing if not an object of the exaggeration, distortion, and dissimulation through which each scene is rendered … If the dream is father to imaginative literature, Tolstoy may be the novelist who most closely hews to its deep structures.”
Now at the Frick Collection: Frederic Leighton’s
Flaming June
,
an iconic Victorian painting whose subject’s well-developed right thigh set the world on fire
. “The beautiful woman asleep in some archaic past was a recurrent motif in Victorian art … The figure of the languid woman is more than just an object of erotic desire. She’s the opposite of the rationalist, ever-striving, murderously competitive spirit—once conventionally thought of as distinctively masculine. She embodies a yearning to relax, to retire from the fray and take pleasure in just being alive.”
Jenny Diski is dying of lung cancer
, and facing the illness the only way she knows how: in prose. “A marvel of steady and dispassionate self-revelation, Diski’s cancer essays are bracingly devoid of sententiousness, sentimentality or any kind of spiritual urge or twitch … they also testify to an inner life of undiminished hyperactivity.”
Nesh
,
gloaming
,
cochineal
,
swamm
,
clart
:
writers pick their favorite words
. “The chosen words are mostly regional, often monosyllabic, and frequently richly onomatopoeic: the natural poetry of the heterogeneous English-speaking tongue.”
In which Orson Welles dabbles in pornography: in a pro-bono gig for the picture
3 A. M.
, the filmmaker “
wound up editing a hard-core lesbian shower scene
that he couldn’t resist cutting in Wellesian fashion with low camera angles and other trademark flair.”
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