Wilde had a streak of prophecy in him. The children's stories can be read as notes from the future about Wilde's fate. It is as though the little child in him was trying to warn him of the dangers his adult self would soon face. "Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy", he writes in "De Profundis".
(One of the few good things about the mysteriously-DOA Wilde starring Stephen Fry was its framing device, voiceover narration from "The Selfish Giant." Intriguingly, Wilde's wife Constance might have helped write it.)
Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke:
So, though we're used to reading about the lives of the great artists, writers and thinkers, this book is not about them. On the other hand, though we're increasingly drawn to what Woolf called "infinitely obscure lives" that "remain to be recorded", this is not a project of recovery. The idea, appealingly, is to think about women who became well-known for being terrifically good at what they did. They were professional pioneers of the 1950s, respected by their peers and remembered admiringly, perhaps not by millions, but certainly by those working in related fields. They were all career women when that was rare, and today's working women are in their debt.
Prehistoric cave prints show most early artists were women. A friend of mine dryly commented that now of course various scientists and art critics will re-evaluate the cave drawings as lesser -- or, dare we say, even as "chicks sitting around thinking about how they feel about their relatives"?
That Winterson piece also has a gorgeous illustration of Wilde as his fairytale character the Happy Prince by Grahame Baker-Smith:
And a late-breaking addition: We also had, on Gloucester Road, a Partridge’s store that sold all the American foods I missed: Skippy peanut butter, Toll House chocolate chips, breakfast cereals consisting mostly of fluorescent marshmallows.
are you fucking kidding me
(Best dry comment: "I still say that Americans should be given a simple test before they are issued a passport. If peanut butter is essential to their well-being, they (and the host country) would be a lot happier with their staying home.")
#seriously #are you kidding me #oh my God you went to London #and ate peanut butter #and got paid by the NYT to write about it #so angry resorting to hashtags #Tumblritis