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| Upper Town Fiesole 30 x 20 cm |
THE TREES
OF LUCCA
Some of his
friends
called D.H.
Lawrence “Lorenzo,”
I suppose
because of his love for Italy. He had
utopian
fantasies about the Etruscans
who,
judging from their tomb paintings,
seemed to
think the afterlife was an elegant orgy.
He enjoyed
long walks in the countryside, and after
didn’t mind
getting down on his knees and scrubbing floors.
It would be
interesting to see how Don Lorenzo would react
to a
pierced, tattooed, wired-for-sound urban
proletarian
riding the subway some Manhattan morning,
abundantly,
inspiringly female
on her way
to Columbia or the New School
for a
seminar on English Modernist Novelists.
How would
she react to him?
No doubt she’d
give him crap about his sexism,
his laughable
phallic imagery, that he sometimes punched
his German
wife, Frieda, and about his endless tourism
and negative
views on masturbation
which is,
as everyone knows, like, a very cool activity.
The whole
time that she’s putting
not only
his work but his existence into question,
she’s sucking
some coffee shop product
from a cup/mug/baby
bottle made out
of a
substance he’s never seen before
since it hadn’t
been invented yet in the 1920’s. The fact that she
calls him
“dude,” and advises that he “chill,” also is perplexing.
It might be
humane at this point to send him back to Tuscany,
buy him a
caffè “corretto” (espresso with a splash of grappa), and draw
his
attention to the strange fact that actual trees do grow out of the towers and
walls of Lucca.
O Soave Fanciulla from La Boheme
Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti
I can't make any sense of D.H. Lawrence's life story. He decries modernity, and then he ends up as a modernist? Hmm. Maybe I'd better read some of his works.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I did just read Mark Leach's book, so that I can read your quote from him intelligently. I found myself wanting to adopt much from Raw Colour, yet resisting much as well. All in all, a good experience, and I was impressed with how Leach expresses himself in writing. Must have been a wonderful teacher.
Glad to see Fiesole again. This time the Alto area.
Casey, one has to make a destinction between "modernity" and "modernism". Most of the great modernists -- Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and Lawrence, et al -- distrusted modernity. One of the nice ironies of literary history. Hence the interest of having a great modernist like D.H. Lawrence confront a brazen example of modernity in the form of a young, educated urban woman. Of course all of this is played for comedy. Try reading D.H. Lawrence and I can also recommend "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy", by Peter Gay.
DeleteThis was Ken talking!
Thank you for commenting and your interest.