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…
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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…
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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…
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