The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and The Artists They Inspired by Francine Prose - 2002

 The Lives of the Muses:  Nine Women and The Artists They Inspired by Francine 

Prose - 2002

After recently Reading Reading Like a Writer - A Guide for People that Love Books by Francine Prose i recalled I had snother of her books on my E reader, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and The Artists They Inspired.

These  are the Muses and their Artists:

Hester Thrale - Samuel Johnson 

Alice Liddell - Lewis Carroll

Elizabeth Siddal - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Lou Andreas Salomé - Rilke and Nietsche

Gala Dali - Salvador Dali

Lee Miller - Man Ray and other photographers

Charis Weston - Edward Weston (photographer)

Suzanne Farrell - George Balanchine 

Yoko Ono - John Lennon

Prose begins with an account of the place of the Muses in ancient Greek Mythology.  Each chapter on an individual Muses also begjns with a lead into her account of the relationship of the Muses and their Artists through a digression into ancient Greece.

Of  the artists covered I am most familiar with Samuel Johnson whom i first began to read about fifty years ago.  Once on a two week excursion to London I visited fhe Johnson House Museum.  While there i read his poem London” everyday.  I stopped and had lunch at the historic Old Chedder Cheese Pub where he often dined.

Of course like every one else I have read the two Alice books. In 2014 I read a biography by a leading authority, Lewis Carroll The Man and His Circle by Edward Wakeling.  Like his subject Wakeling is an Oxford Don.  Carroll’s muse was about ten when he met her. The relationship ended when she turned 13, as directed by Alice’s mother.  Prose deals with the big question here- what is up with the nude and erotic photographs of pre-adolescent girls?  

“He was very into photography for many years and now the big question about Carroll comes up.  What is behind the many, about 1500 photographers of young girls, including nude photographs.  Why did a mature Oxford Don love to socialize with young girls?” Edward Wakeling

Wakeling tries to defuse the long raging controversary concerning whether or not Carroll was sexually interested in young girls by telling us several times he also photographed young boys and socialized with them also. I found that a tremendously poor defense

The answer is still unknown.  Carroll never married and never had any sex of any kind.  He took a vow of celibacy on becoming a Don. No one suspected him of being a pedophile, just odd, though he made Alice’s mother uncomfortable.

I have been to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida and read a bit of Rossetti and have viewed jmages of pre-Raphalite art.

On the rest i have no knowledge.  I was never into post Beattles John Lennon music.

I found her thoughts on Johnson and Thrale to challenge my conception of their relationship.

One issue is of course do  the Muses sleep with their artists?  The modern answer would be “it’s complicated”.  The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and The Artists They Inspired was consistently fascinating.

I was left with a question- are there any male muses to well known female artists ?

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Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris1932 by Francine Prose (2014). A Post for Paris in July # 6

Paris in July # 6. 

Paris in July # 6. , hosted by Tamara editor of one my favorite book blogs, Thyme for Tea, is a great event.  This is my fourth year as a participant.  There are posts on every thing from French movies, food, tours of Paris and of course there is the glorious French literature.  Paris has inspired writers and artists from all over the world like no other city.  

Not long ago I read an excellent nonfiction work by the well known American novelist Francine Prose, How to Read Like a Writer.  Several months ago I was kindly given a review copy of her latest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.  I decided if I am ever going to read this book, I might as well do so during Paris in July # 6. 

Starting in Paris in 1932, the novel takes as its focal point a Paris nightclub, The Cameleon Club.  It is a place where sexual lines are blurred, homoeroticism is encouraged, decadence is the order of the day. This is the Paris the Germans saw as the height of depravity, while of course many a Nazi spent their evenings at the club.  There are five  narratives all covering pretty much the same events, mostly focusing on a Lesbian race car driver who will turn Nazi spy named Lou.  Each narrator sees things in their own way and this added interest to the work.

As I read on I ultimately found what kept me reading was the interesting narrative structure of the novel, wanting to see what outrageous thing would happen next, waiting for the Nazis to take over Paris and wondering how the various characters would end the novel.  As I passed the halfway point I had become fascinated by the narrative.  

I had to wonder what is being said about preWar Paris and the French.  They hardly come off with much nobility, the lead character tortures people for the Germans, the French seem to hate the Jews, there is your obligatory Baroness, a gay American movie director, and a kind of weird meeting with Hitler scene in which Lou is mesmerized by him.

I am glad I read Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.  I cannot really make a general recommendation that people unknown to me spend money and time on it.  

Mel u

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for those Who Love Books and those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose (2007, 275 pages)

IIf your first thought on realizing you have a three day weekend coming soon is to plan your reading, 

then you might be living The Reading Life.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a delightful book about how novels  and stories work 

their magic, about what distinguishes predestarian work from sublime art.  In addition to being full of great advise to neophyte fiction authors it is a wonderful study in close reading.  This book will for sure make most people who take it seriously better readers and it might  help even book bloggers to write in a less clumsy fashion.   Francine Prose loves literature and this come shining through. 

Prose has drawn on her extensive pedagogical experience in creative writing to deal with some of the basic challenges faced by writers.  She talks about her class room experiences in several great segments.  There are chapters devoted to word choice, to sentence structure, to narration, to dialogue among others.  Prose makes her point through close analyses of passages, some several pages long, from famous writers.  I loved her quoted selections and found her close readings very illuminating. 

Her biggest advise to writers is to read the greats and try to understand their artistry.  She devoted one chapter to "Lessons We Can Learn from Chekhov" which will get me reading him again soon, I hope.

This is not  a text book like work but more a conversation.  Prose lets us see how her love of reading, I was so happy when she cited Samuel Johnson as perhaps the greatest of close readers, has impacted her life.  Reading the short stories of Chekhov helped her get through a dark period.  

This is a very interesting highly informative book I endorse without reservation to all who fit the title description.

At the end of the work she lists several pages of books she says must be read by aspiring writers as soon as possible.  Great list.

Official Biography

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.

I have just started her latest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932 to see how she puts her ides into practice.  

Mel u