Posted on: February 16, 2009
Mysteries, by Knut Hamsun. 1892
Okay. So, yes. The title of my blog post is a bit misleading, if not melodramatic. It’s a bald attempt to merge two new additions to Spinozablue — by Alexis Wingate and George Spencer, respectively. Here and here. Alexis brings us a provocative essay on Knut Hamsun’s novel, Mysteries, and George gives us his unique improvisation from a line of Barbara Guest’s poetry.
But there is a precedent for that merger. Women and roses have been connected for millennia, in obvious and covert ways. Mysterious ways. Wild, secret, deep under the surface ways. Secret societies used The Rose as a multi-faceted symbol for woman, growth, love, birth, beauty, the unfolding of life, surprise, shock and awe. Perhaps Dagny is Hamsun’s rose.…
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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.…
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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.…
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