Friday, November 22, 2024

About Bach and Keats

Thinking about the scene early in the movie Tár, where the ghastly Juilliard student Max announces that because he’s a pansexual BIPOC with an overactive leg (I paraphrase), he doesn’t feel able to love Bach because he had 20 children and maybe didn’t do his share of the housework (I paraphrase further) and I wonder how many people who watch the scene think, yeah, fair point, awful Juilliard bloke.

And then I encounter this poem, which reminds us that it’s all about the art, you utter clowns.

Romantic Poet, by Diane Seuss  

 

You would not have loved him,  

My friend the scholar 

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied,

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

 

But the nightingale, I said.

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