Posted on: June 30, 2008
Papa Hemingway at his desk. 1939.
It’s quite possible I couldn’t pick two writers further apart from one another to deal with back to back. Temperamentally, artistically, biographically. Rilke and Hemingway. Yet both men were profoundly influenced by their days in Paris, and both men learned much about their art at the knee of an older woman. Perhaps it’s less than dime-store psychology to also suggest that both men had “issues” with their relationship to female sexuality. Issues that led to very different attempts to resolve that conflict–internally and externally. But, issues nonetheless. People really are complex.
Finished Humphrey Carpenter’s book about Americans in Paris, and was reminded that the core material for The Sun Also Rises was a rather banal little trip taken by Hemingway and a few friends to see the bulls in Pamplona. Years later, many of those friends looked back at that trip, having read the book, and saw it…
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Posted on: June 27, 2008
Vsevolod Garshin, by Ilya Repin. 1884.
No, this post won’t be about old Vsevolod. He’s already had more than enough great press lately, I imagine. Just thought his visage captured a certain weariness, bafflement and astonishment at the task of reading and writing, and that this was apropos of other things. The artist Repin was apparently good at that, too–good at painting moments like this, having tackled Tolstoy as well as the composer Rimsky-Korsakov in other portraits. And, of course, old Vsevolod looks like a 19th century Spiderman, lost in a Bohemian funk. But that’s another story altogether.
Wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post about Rilke, and elaborate a bit on my translation of The Panther, on what went into it, and how it came to be. In short, I did it in less than a half-hour, at the end of a long, long day, so it was hardly a work…
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Posted on: June 26, 2008
Castle Duino, Italy. Photo by Johann Jaritz.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a sublime poet, one of the greatest lyric poets of the 20th century, and quite possibly a lousy human being. His Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus rank among the finest works of art in any language, taking us softly, profoundly to the nexus between life and death, pain and redemption, mourning and new hope. Through his poetry and other writings, he conveyed a level of empathy and understanding toward women that may surpass any poet in the last 100 years. Though it seemed he rarely showed that insight and understanding in real life, at least if we are to believe several recent accounts about Rilke’s life and loves.
If those portraits of the real Rilke are accurate, it wouldn’t be the first time such an apparent contradiction occurred. Not the first time a great artist, poet, novelist, musician, or philosopher led a…
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Posted on: June 24, 2008
Paco de Lucia. Photo by Kornell.
Am still reading Geniuses Together, and it’s still excellent. Aside from the mention of bullfighting, another thing made me think about Spain and flamenco guitar music. Gertrude Stein once made the rather idiosyncratic observation (for the 20s) that America is the oldest country in the world, which is why so many of her best creative minds left for Europe. She said we were downright geriatric in our ways. This on the heels of a major study (Civilization in the United States, edited by Harold Stearns in 1921) complaining about our all too rapid industrialization and urbanization, which had cost us far too much in creative matters. Stein points out that we got there first, which is why we were so old. They both point out that the goal in the air was business development, not development of the soul. Harold Loeb added to the angst…
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Posted on: June 23, 2008
Paris, France. May, 2007. Photo by Douglas Pinson
Have been reading a wonderful book, Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s, by Humphrey Carpenter (1988). It makes me smile again and again. Amusing, revealing anecdotes about Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon so far. Many of the stories well-known. Others not so much.
The Left Bank. Montparnasse. Expat heaven. Dirt poor writers and wealthy socialites turned patronesses. Heavy drinking inside and outside bars, heavy talk in salons, insurgent antics by the Dadaists in theaters, fights, accidents, love affairs, and, finally, the publication of great literature. Often at great risk.
Sylvia Beach published Ulysses, risking fines and worse. The book was declared obscene in America prior to that. She loses typists when they read certain sections. One husband of one of those typists actually throws the manuscript in the fire. Luckily, Joyce found another copy.…
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Posted on: June 21, 2008
Fender Stratoscaster
Enumerations
I am sitting in a wooden upholstered chair built in the nineteen fifties (I know because the table it came with had the original sales receipt from 1957) at my computer desk listening to Jimi Hendrix performing with the Band of Gypsies on New Years 1970 at the Filmore East almost two years before I was born.
My cat Sibyl is sleeping behind me. She is almost 13. Hard to believe. She looks five and has the most beautiful black/orange tortoise-shell fur I have ever seen. She also has an incredibly sweet and talkative disposition. (I have known many cats and by far she is the most gregarious)
I am 36. Time is spinning a web around my head. I am thinking that the chronometric parsing of our small gasps of life may be the death of us, machinelike, or at least make our oxygen scarcer and sleep consequently less…
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Posted on: June 21, 2008
The Cliffs of Moher. West Coast of Ireland. Photo by Douglas Pinson, Sept 2003.
A music, an art, a philosophy, a religion that inspires us to look at nature and rejoice in our amazing luck. Being there. A literature, a poetry, a choir that lifts us above the smoggy everyday to hold that part of nature in our eyes that is wet, windy, and free.
Everything combined to form the song of the earth, the book of nature, the maxim of the sea. Everything pulled together to make us never forget our place here, our one and only home. Now and forever.
Henry David Thoreau said:
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind…
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Posted on: June 19, 2008
Imogen Heap. Photo by Lee Jordan. October, 2006.
I first discovered Imogen Heap’s glorious sweet voice while watching Zack Braff’s film, “Garden State.” Bought the soundtrack. Followed the trail from there.
Heap’s music is like no other, with her surreal, ethereal, ghostly musical tones and sequences, crafted by a magically eccentric woman-child, waiting to be set free by that music. Electronica with a truly human face. Ethereality with the gaze of a beautiful child become beautiful woman who never forgot that child and can’t. Imogen Heap’s influences are said to include Kate Bush, Bjork and Annie Lennox, though she takes her music in decidedly different directions. Classically trained on the piano, cello and clarinet, she seems the natural polyphonic genius, adept at using new technology as well to heighten her command over her material, as this video shows:
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Posted on: June 19, 2008
Cuchulain slays the hound of Culain. Stephen Reid. 1904.
The character of Cuchulain has always fascinated me, ever since I first read his adventures at the age of nine. Discovering him along with the Iliad and the Odyssey proved to be one of the key formative events in my life. It led to a lifetime of reading mythology, of digging deeply into the sources for those myths, and how subsequent centuries of literature use myth to deepen and broaden fiction, poetry and drama.
My chief source as a young lad was Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), supplemented by her Gods and Fighting Men (1904). Bulfinch’s Mythology added to the mix, as did Yeats’ poetry and plays about "The Hound of Ulster." In fact, it was Yeats’ use of Irish Mythology that first drew me to him. Later, the genius of the work itself . . .
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Posted on: June 18, 2008
When I stumbled on oil pastels several years ago after not having had any formal background or training in art, I surprisingly found myself enjoying working strictly in this medium. I am most intrigued not only by its texture, fluidity, and vibrancy of colour but also with the dimension and depth which can be readily achieved through simple hand and finger smudging. In this way, being so closely connected physically with the paper, I find myself able to become even more deeply immersed in the work.
Ingenue, by Desi Di Nardo
Several of my favourite artists include Leonardo da Vinci, Tamara de Lempicka, and the Group of Seven artists. My greatest influence, however, is Edgar Degas mainly because of his discerning eye for the human form and his masterful portrayal of movement in dance mode. After taking classical ballet at the National Ballet School of Canada for some years, I became very…
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Posted on: June 16, 2008
. . . . when you type Finnegans Wake. I think with that little ditty as your guide, you can’t go wrong in anything you do or say.
James Joyce, by Djuna Barnes. 1922
It must have been remarkable, to sit in on the (off the record) conversation between Djuna Barnes and James Joyce. The author of the masterpiece, Nightwood, and the author of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’m guessing there was more to it than the more famous meeting with Proust, wherein the two literary giants supposedly talked about their various ailments and nothing else. Paris as nexus, perhaps? Paris as the center of the literary world? How racy, bawdy, lofty and sublime it must have been to live through it and be a part of that nexus, that confluence of genius. How different from what we imagine it must have been. To know that difference, to know…
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Posted on: June 16, 2008
The Poolbeg Lighthouse, Ringsend, Dublin.
It’s June 16th, 1904. James Joyce walks with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, out on their first date. They walk together in Dublin, Ireland. More specifically, to Ringsend. He would later immortalize this day in the book, Ulysses, perhaps the greatest novel in the English language. As he celebrated his first date by writing that book, we celebrate him every year on June 16th.
In the novel, Molly Bloom is married to Leopold Bloom, the everyman of Ulysses. The Odysseus of the book. Molly was based on Nora. And Penelope. Leopold was also based on Italo Svevo, the author of The Confessions of Zeno. At least to a degree. Joyce, of course, is in all of his characters. Inside and outside. Joyce is also Stephen Dedalus, the Telamachus of the novel. All of this might be a bit confusing, if not for the fact that there are…
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