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I will not read Billy Budd until I have finished Vanity Fair.
I will not read Billy Budd until I have finished Vanity Fair.
I will not read Billy Budd until I have finished Vanity Fair.
The library was shut by the time I'd dropped into JW's office to natter about the use of Beethoven in Forster and just about everything else, but on the way back I nipped into the bookshop formerly known as MacFeely's and found a copy of the Melville. It's scribbled on, but for 50p who cares. I acquired Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet earlier this afternoon since it was being quoted every other page in Queering the Pitch, and she turns out to have an entire chapter on it, so between that and my interest in the Britten opera, it was high time. I wonder if it'll be as screamingly queer as I expect? Closets in the nineteenth century seem to be very strange affairs, just look at Ben Hur. Here's what's on the back of this edition:
When Billy, a handsome, unpretentious, stuttering young able-seaman, is falsely accused of inciting mutiny, he lashes out, kills his accuser and is condemned to die. Written in allusive and beautiful prose, many-layered, resonant with ideas and meanings, Billy Budd has inspired drama, films and opera and continues to elude interpretation.
The main theme of the novel, however, is generally considered to be the vulnerability of innocence in a fallen world. Billy, a victim of one man's unnatural hatred, is the embodiment of a goodness destroyed by evil, but as "the criminal pays the penalty of his crime", a greater justice comes into play.
Yup, sounds like it. Speaking of homosexual panic amongst critics, the accompanying booklet to the CD I own of the the opera remarks snootily, "to over-emphasise the fashionable homo-erotic element is to miss the real point of the opera" (Michael Kennedy). Bit like complaining about people talking about the heteroeroticism in Romeo and Juliet, that. Honestly, what's wrong with these critics? If you're a raving homophobe, don't write about queer texts. There seems to be a popular technique of saying, "It's really all about Good and Evil", as a way of avoiding talking about uncomfortable subjects.
I will not read Billy Budd until I have finished Vanity Fair.
I will not read Billy Budd until I have finished Vanity Fair.
The library was shut by the time I'd dropped into JW's office to natter about the use of Beethoven in Forster and just about everything else, but on the way back I nipped into the bookshop formerly known as MacFeely's and found a copy of the Melville. It's scribbled on, but for 50p who cares. I acquired Sedgwick's The Epistemology of the Closet earlier this afternoon since it was being quoted every other page in Queering the Pitch, and she turns out to have an entire chapter on it, so between that and my interest in the Britten opera, it was high time. I wonder if it'll be as screamingly queer as I expect? Closets in the nineteenth century seem to be very strange affairs, just look at Ben Hur. Here's what's on the back of this edition:
When Billy, a handsome, unpretentious, stuttering young able-seaman, is falsely accused of inciting mutiny, he lashes out, kills his accuser and is condemned to die. Written in allusive and beautiful prose, many-layered, resonant with ideas and meanings, Billy Budd has inspired drama, films and opera and continues to elude interpretation.
The main theme of the novel, however, is generally considered to be the vulnerability of innocence in a fallen world. Billy, a victim of one man's unnatural hatred, is the embodiment of a goodness destroyed by evil, but as "the criminal pays the penalty of his crime", a greater justice comes into play.
Yup, sounds like it. Speaking of homosexual panic amongst critics, the accompanying booklet to the CD I own of the the opera remarks snootily, "to over-emphasise the fashionable homo-erotic element is to miss the real point of the opera" (Michael Kennedy). Bit like complaining about people talking about the heteroeroticism in Romeo and Juliet, that. Honestly, what's wrong with these critics? If you're a raving homophobe, don't write about queer texts. There seems to be a popular technique of saying, "It's really all about Good and Evil", as a way of avoiding talking about uncomfortable subjects.
