Coming Soon: 'The Birth of Venus' on Your Toilet Seat!

Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, dear, dear. It is not as though it is inconceivable. No, indeed; not in the slightest. Absolutely to be expected, in fact. And, had I troubled myself to think about it, I should definitely both have conceived and expected it. No questions asked, no surprises whatever. One would not be far off to call it ineluctable.

But the fact is that, as with so many other distasteful and frightening things, I rightly - righteously! - keep my delicate soul from straying into such foul places when possible. It is a great stretch to say I am blissfully ignorant of the ills plaguing this world; it is rather the case that I must cultivate what ignorance I can in order merely to sustain the crudest emotional equilibrium, in order not to plunge a 'French Provincial' rooster-shaped carving knife into my jaded heart, or attempt futilely, yet again, to impale myself on a 'shabby chic/Paris apartment' Eiffel-Tower-motif pepper grinder.

But here (and I swear I was looking for something else; you must believe me; I am not a masochist, nor do I enjoy inflicting this sort of thing on you!) on Design Observer I couldn't help but read every last letter, and linger over every last plaintive semi-colon, of a heart-rending account of those Tuscan varlets' invasion of solid, stolid - and hitherto predictably 'Spanish'/neo-rancho in its design choices for suburban subdevelopments - Orange County, California. Tuscany already has the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Brunello, Vino Nobile, and Chianti. It doesn't need to annex the whole bloody United States (not to mention parts of China, too!).

Look, I understand if postmodernism scared off a few people, looked a bit jarring, felt a bit dislocating. And I for one don't ever need to see another purportedly postmodern BP station, I assure you. However, at least postmodernism was inquisitive. At least it involved thought. At least it was, well, not inherently dishonest, not an impoverished, anemic, false, wheezy new version of a distinctive, geographically specific older thing.

You can object that 'thought' and 'inquisitiveness' are not exactly what most people are looking for in a bedroom or latrine, but I fail to see the superlative soothing powers of pseudo-Tuscan kitsch. Granted, I am not the sort who wishes to stay in the 'Jungle Room' or 'Circus Room,' either, or indeed find myself in the sort of hotel that has such things, but as Ms. Wild correctly points out,

'Perhaps it is not so much styles per se, and "Tuscan" in particular, that I am whining about, but the transformation of styles generated from the heart and the brain that actually contained meaning, to lifestyles generated by highly paid marketers and branders that are deliberately emptied out of meaning.'

It could even be argued that the Jungle Rooms of this world, coming from the (admittedly kitsch-riddled) heart as they do, do contain meaning, because they are an expression of someone's honest desire. The only desire the faux Tuscan McMansions of the world express is the vulgarian's desire to seem cultured, rich, and stylish: Nabokov's poshlust, in other words:

'Russians have, or had, a special name for smug philistinism—poshlust. Poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of civilization. A peasant has to become a townsman in order to become vulgar. A painted necktie has to hide the honest Adam's apple in order to produce poshlism.'

I would also concur with Ms. Wild that the variety of anachronisms and other discontinuities that inhere in such endeavors as tracts of 'Tuscan' homes irritate rather than soothe in my case:

'The appearance of this faux Italianate style (tile roofs, stucco walls, shuttered windows and crenellated corners) is not all that different from the "Spanish" but it seems a world away from the coherency of the rancho house. This is not helped by the fact that the new construction in this style is generally too big and proportioned poorly, and made of materials that are veneers, blatantly more contemporary than the image that they are constructing. Real Tuscan villas possess a sort of laconic elegance from their relatively unornamented rustic style: the rough hewn here is more of the Home Depot "I forgot" variety. And the houses sport "great rooms" and "master bedroom suites" and beveled or stained glass windows and brass fixtures that no Tuscan house ever witnessed.'

I need to be more careful in my browsing, more judicious in my reading. Heaven knows the sort of permanent damage that could befall my psyche should I continue to encounter such troubling stories.

Your Tuscan Holiday Awaits. In Fredericton.

And while we are on the subject of appalling taste, I would like to go to Tuscany for a moment, if you don't mind. Not the real Tuscany, of course, but the false, 'fauxed' Tuscany of interior designers and housebuilders and underpaid furniture painters in China.

I am not certain when this started, as I am a delicate soul and try not to notice things that will wound me. I still remain unaware, for example, that people use bed sheets sewn from tee-shirt material. But it has been going on at least a few years: the first 'Tuscan Square' restaurant cum 'Tuscan Lifestyle' shopping plaza went up in 1997 in Rockefeller Center. And I don't fault Americans or anyone else for wishing they had more time to sit around drinking brunello and eating good olives. It's just that they don't actually live in Tuscany, and that drywall from 1997 made to look like cracking marble or rotting lumber is still drywall from 1997. (Notice in the decorating example left that the ceiling has been painted, as well, to make you believe you are simultaneously outside in the Tuscan sun and inside a 'Tuscan' dining room with real faux masonry!)

One of the problems with attempting to copy something is that you are unlikely to get it right. Think of any number of 'period films' and you'll realize it's not just a matter of adding in a few Studebakers and bakelite phones, but being able to resist, as well, current fashions in such seeming minutiae as eyebrows, lip shape, location of hair partings, and how to line (or not line) eyes. A film made in 1984 about Joan of Arc or Marie Antoinette will always look like a film made in 1984. Likewise, you're not fooling anyone with your 'Tuscan villa' in Manitoba or Missouri.

Nor do I understand why someone would wish to try. On the one hand, if I am overtaken by the urge to stay in an Alsatian chateau, that urge is predicated on the Alsatian chateau being in Alsace. Not in Edmonton, and not in Buenos Aires. As for 'Tuscany,' no amount of 'timeworn' copper pots, 'sun-drenched accents,' hideous pre-cracked 'majolica' knockoffs, 'Old-World' murals of grapes and vineyards, dining tables that 'cleverly' incorporate wine racks, or wooden beams 'aged' by having the gardener beat them with tire chains are going to evoke anything other than sadness and dyspepsia in a reasonable person.

On the other hand, there is a persistent belief here in an inexorable correlation between price and worth. I remember someone proudly and wistfully showing me a pre-aged, pre-yellowed, 'crackle-finished,' 'French Provincial' (I think, although it is easy to get these things wrong, and, frankly, I tried not to look at it too long) formal dining set he was soon to need to replace, once his estranged spouse's boyfriend's wife was completely moved out of her residence. 'You can't imagine how expensive this was,' he whispered as his hand caressed its 'crackled' corner gently, believing (quite reasonably, under normal circumstances) that only with this knowledge would I be able fully to appreciate its 'timeworn,' 'Old World' charm, and grasp by extension the measure of the sort of man willing to lay down thousands of dollars for a Sino-Gallic gamboge monstrosity such as this, with its premature patina so skillfully achieved through the meticulous application of coats of various subtly contrasting tints overlain with caustic solvents and a gloss finish by 75-cents-an-hour artisans in Guangdong.

Clearly, his revelation had a rather different effect than that intended. Nonetheless, I cannot help hoping I am not alone in this, that someone else, wherever he may be, finds the existence of a series of tract homes (with 'old world charm' and 'individual Tuscan flavor'!) called Toscano as odious and incomprehensible as it patently is. Not to mention the 'Tuscan' salt shakers, 'Tuscan' latrines, and 'Tuscan' condo kitchenettes one cannot help but encounter no matter how assiduous or numerous the precautionary measures undertaken. I am starting to feel as though I am living inside an Escher drawing of a purgatorial pizzeria in which each step I take leads me not to a door, not to respite or sanctuary, but to another stairway up to another 'marble'-columned, plastic-grape-arbor-festooned, trompe-l'oeuil toilet-wall mural that doesn't trompe anyone.

And if anyone has the vaguest notion what the following sentence means, I'm all ears. I, for one, have never hid any gold in any of my 'furthermost crevices', and I shudder to contemplate the day when that would seem desirable or well-advised: The earth's hues in ranges from blistering yellow like the sun itself to the concentrated gold's like those she hides in her furthermost crevices are used throughout this theme.

Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.