line of beauty
2005-06-15 - 12:07 p.m.
Bleh.
I've been swimming -- the past three days out of four, and I'll go again tonight -- but unfortunately it has not resulted in immediate svelteness. Surely, however, there will be results at some point, don't you think?
Book group met. Three of us actually had read the book, but two hadn's, so we didn't talk about it, which was kind of maddening.
Gong back to Line of Beauty, I just gave my copy to Anne. But these are some things to remember.
The whole Homo thing -- glomming on to someone else's family. (Gerald says this, but it's a little bit true of Nick, at least)
The Henry James thing -- the whole thing about style -- the whole thing about the book about a person who just liked things better than people -- the phrase that at first seems so very effete, but then seems to be a real expression of someone who has known alot ot grief.
The line of beauty -- Toby, Wani, Cocaine, Leo (who was beautiful to Nick because Nick loved him -- which Catharine thought was always the case), ogee (what is an ogee, anyway? I still don't know)
"Who are you?"
Why did he hang around the Feddens, and then Wani? Why was he so attracted to the rich? Why did he not want to have his own house, where he could bring people home? Why did he want to belong to the Feddens? Wani was so awful, and Nick so much smarter -- why did he hang around with him? --
Did he have any real friends -- people who cared about him as much as he cared about them? He did feel bad about his distance from his family.
Nick's name (Nick Guest)
Objects -- the HJ story, and then Nick's father, and then how Nick made it his business to know rich people's property better than they did themselves.
How his appreciation for beauty, art (he is an esthete) is real, but seems to have no impact at all on the world. (Wani knocks down the Clerkenwell buildings to make that awful thing, over Nick's objections. The Nick inherits them.) (His friends from Oxford who all go into business, etc. and sort of move beyond him.)
Maybe the place of art, and beauty, in life. Mostly manmade beauty -- the park, the corner, the magazine, the ogee -- but also the fields behind his parents' house.
Thatcher -- the rich -- cocaine -- the 80s. Attractive but destructive. (Lionel didn't like Thatcher because of all the things she'd ruined.)
How precarious art is -- the buildings; his idea for the film hinging on those two stupid americans -- but how durable, too.
Youth-sex-AIDS (although I think these are just the milieu).
Hmmm.
Got to go.
