Journal

Are there precedents for a female Mephistopheles?

Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857) lays the groundwork—especially when considered alongside the Symbolist art typically used to illustrate them—but there is no Mephistopheles in those poems. There is an 1889 novel Mephistophela, by Catulle Mendès, but the story is not Faustian. In a 1925 edition of Goethe’s Faust, the many drawings by the Irish illustrator and stained glass artist Harry Clarke suggest a feminine aspect (see accompanying image) and in those where Mephistopheles is specifically identifiable it is often not clear what the character’s sex is—they are quite androgynous. But—apart from the occasional provincial production where the character is played by an actress—in literature, art, and opera, Mephistopheles is male.

There are few enough precedents for a female Mephistopheles; there are none, as far as the author is aware, for a Mephistopheles who seeks to enlighten rather than inveigle Faust.

By the author, ago

Did Ch. Mouton Rothschild really have to relabel their 1993s?

In the American market, yes; in the rest of the world, no.

Château Mouton Rothschild has commissioned works for their labels since the 1945 vintage, and the list of artists reads like a Who’s Who of Twentieth-Century painters: Picasso (’73); Warhol (’75); Dalí (’58); Miró (’69); Cocteau (’47); Braque (’55); Kandinsky (’71); Bacon (’90); and even the then Prince of Wales and now King of England, Charles (’04). Balthus has always been a little provocative, but the label for the ’93 vintage (see photo) is hardly salacious. Nevertheless, under pressure from distributors, Mouton was forced to withdraw it and go through the expensive process of relabeling all their bottles bound for the US market with the artwork removed.

This is best understood as an artifact of the chronic Puritan-based wariness-of-women strain that has been an aspect of the American character since Cotton Mather and the Salem witch trials—something still evident in our own troubled times.

This prudishness does not extend to New York City: the Met successfully organized and hosted a major Balthus retrospective in 2013.

An interesting epilog: lithographic reproductions of the ’93 label now sell for many hundreds of dollars—that is, for far more than the original bottle with the wine did.

By the author, ago

Is Château Valaire based on a real château?

Many aspects of the fictional Château Valaire are based on the actual Château de Servigny, although not location, the former being situated “midway between Orléans and Tours on the Beuvron,” the latter outside the village of Yvetôt-Bocages on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy.

Château de Servigny dates from the Sixteenth Century but had its moment of fame in the Twentieth, when following the landings at Utah Beach it was used as the headquarters for General “Lightning Joe” Lawton’s 7th Army Corps during the siege of Cherbourg. The German surrender was signed in a drawing room on the second floor, and the room remains preserved as it was that day.

It still serves as the private residence of the family whose ancestors built it and so is not open to the public but, like Château Valaire, arrangements can sometimes be made for special events, including D-Day celebrations, in which it often features.

By the author, ago

Do the Jeff Koons paintings exist?

The two fictional paintings that Andromeda encounters in the Vaughn villa are based on “Bracelet” and “Ribbon” (pictured: “Ribbon,” Jeff Koons, 1995–1997, © Jeff Koons; from www.jeffkoons.com). They may depict small things but are monumental works, each about 9 by 12 feet, something that Koons practices in other media, notably sculpture–monstrous candies and balloon dogs made of highly polished stainless steel–and even topiary. In New York City, there have been two major exhibitions in recent years: the Whitney put on a retrospective before moving downtown; prior to that there was a rooftop exhibition of the sculptures at the Met. Koons artworks can often be found at the auction houses or in Chelsea galleries.

Andromeda badly underestimates their market value, as indeed does her accoster on South Beach: “Bracelet” was sold in 2007 for $2.25 million.

By the author, ago

Was the Venice ball based on a real event?

The ball that Andromeda attends is based on two masquerade balls held annually in Venice during Carnival: the Gran Ballo Mascheranda and Il Ballo del Doge. Both of these take place in the Palazzo Pisani Moretta on the Grand Canal, and much of the fictional Ca’ d’Inverno is adapted from this palace.

The accompanying photograph shows the palazzo’s facade on the evening of Il Ballo del Doge, lit by flame as Andromeda saw Ca’ d’Inverno, and with the dark shadows of boats carrying ballgoers in the foreground, waiting for their turn to land guests.

These balls are far from restrained but not to the level of indulgence in Andromeda’s affair. Her episode has more in common with certain private events organized for those fortunate few with sufficient prosperity and pulchritude to qualify—the bel mondo of the type depicted at Ca’ d’Inverno.

By the author, ago

Do the murals described in ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA actually exist?

The frescoes in Pompeii’s Villa dei Misteri are, in both appearance and scholarly understanding, as Dr. Leatherwaite describes them in Chapter Thirteen. The villa’s name, meaning mysteries, refers not to puzzles but the paintings themselves, which depict a Dionysian “mystery”—that is, a secret rite in which a young woman is initiated into the cult of the half-Greek, half-Oriental god, Dionysus.

This is a photograph of the triclinium—the dining room where the aristocratic Romans feasted under the gaze of gods, unaware that Vesuvius was about to consume them. The far wall, the northeastern, depicts three incidents: scene four, the catoptromancy episode where the future is observed in a silver bowl (filled with mercury?); scene five, with the god Silenus lying back in ecstatic exhaustion (note the damage where the lava came flowing through); and scene six, with the initiate undergoing ritual flagellation by a winged goddess.

The frescoes are best viewed by arriving at Pompeii at opening time, turning left after entering and walking past the funerary monuments directly to the villa, situated a little out of town—you will likely have the place to yourself. Later, around noon, with Pompeii now crowded and sweltering, drive over the spine of the nearby Amalfi peninsula to Ravello and enjoy a leisurely lunch washed down with local wine in the cool of the hills while gazing out over the Gulf of Salerno glittering a thousand precipitous feet below.

By the author, ago

Does the book have a motion-picture analog?

No. The final film made by the late French New-Wave auteur Alain Robbe-Grillet, Gradiva (2007), captures some of the same style and sensibility—a nebulous search; present but imprecise menace; somewhat surrealistic & hallucinogenic. Also, the Gradiva legend, strange enough to have fascinated both Freud and Dalí, is dreamlike, much as the experiences that Sabrina undergoes. (See the accompanying tableau-vivant-like still from the movie: you can see how it would have appealed to those two dream-obsessed figures from the last century). But as an analog it soon breaks down—different stories, settings, underlying themes; Floreat Lux has other sources.

By the author, ago

Has Boyle’s Wish List been fully realized?

What Boyle actually meant by some of the items on his Wish List is not always clear, such as “Varnishes perfumable by Rubbing,” but here is an item-by-item accounting, assessing each in turn as having been achieved or not, with explanatory comments where appropriate.

The result: twenty items accomplished and four not yet. But all four not-yets are just variations on the same theme: making human beings physically more capable than nature created them. Now that we are on the brink of the era of genetic programming, it is reasonable to assume that these four will be achieved sometime in the near future, perhaps within a generation, thus completing a list that must have seemed to Boyle to be a wild dream, but most of whose items are so commonplace to us now that we don’t even think of them.

Photo: Portrait of The Honourable Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691), Irish natural philosopher. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

By the author, ago

What was the inspiration for the “star journey”?

It is hard to say what lies behind an act of imagination, but Sabrina’s hallucinogenic voyage into deep inner/outer space has several identifiable sources. The fact of the scene being labeled “The Fire Sermon” points to two: Buddhism, by way of T.S. Eliot. Recent advances in the mathematics and physics of laser light—a field of study loosely labeled “nonlinear wave topology”—were also influential; these are manifested in Bronaryre’s description of the mechanism. And the imminent launch of the James Webb telescope, which promises to look back 13.5 billion years into the 13.8 billion years of the Universe’s existence, no doubt influenced the imagery at the end of Sabrina’s journey.

A vivid inspiration was the artist Marco Brambilla, whose work the author first became acquainted with in 2016 at The Standard High Line, down in New York City’s Meatpacking District. One of Mr. Brambilla’s video artworks—Creation (Megaplex)—is installed in the hotel’s elevators, otherwise darkened, and this has the effect of seeming to plummet passengers through cosmic spacetime as they journey up and down between the lobby and the rooftop bar—a clever way to display such art.

The accompanying photograph is a snapshot from the video inside those elevators, showing strands of DNA with life (including mermaids) emerging from the primordial swirl, but the full effect is inseparable from movement and needs to be appreciated in video form. So, if in New York, take a trip to The Standard High Line’s rooftop bar and enjoy the show along the way—or it can be seen here.

By the author, ago

What is the background photo at the bottom of the website?

The background of the Contact section is a shot from the interior of an E-Type Jaguar—the basis for Bronaryre’s—and is the same vehicle as on the rear jacket of FLOREAT LUX. The exact model is a 1969 Series 2 Roadster, right-hand-drive and British specification, which is to say that the 4.2-liter straight-six is equipped with triple SU carburetors—Sabrina’s “row of shiny little tea kettles”—not the dual Zenith-Stromberg units on American XKEs, fitted to meet US emission standards but reducing power. In this shot is visible “a lever to the left of the steering column” that Sabrina thinks of as “selecting flap for take-off” (in fact it chokes those triple SUs, enriching the mixture for a cold start).

By the author, ago