Manuscript page from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Near the end of the novel Marlow goes to visit Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ to tell her of the manner of Kurtz’s death. His last words run through Marlow’s head: “The horror. The horror”. But in the manus, Conrad had not yet come up with the signature phrase’s repetition, as can be seen at the end of the first paragraph…
The male gaze, in memoriam…
A page from Tom Phillips’ ‘treated book’ A Humument (mid1960s - 2008), based on W.H. Matlock’s Victorian novel, A Human Monument (1892).
“A HUMUMENT is eternally a work in progress. Tom Phillips started his treatment of W.H. Mallock’s Victorian novel in the mid sixties and an initial complete version was privately published by the Tetrad Press in 1970.
With Thames and Hudson’s first trade edition in 1980 A HUMUMENT rapidly became a cult classic. It was seen to be a defining product of post modernism linking traditions as various as medieval illumination, experimental poetry and non-linear narrative with the procedures of modern art.”
Emily, ghostly…
————
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.”
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Edgar Degas, born today in 1834, (d. 1917):
Dancers, 1878
Mayakovsky, Soviet poet-hunk - born today in 1893, suicide in 1930 - tried in vain to be both an apologist of Leninism and a Dadaist…
“The love boat has crashed against the everyday. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts”
(from his unfinished last poem/suicide note)
We always want to understand something. But there is nothing to understand. Everything that you can contemplate here, in the atelier, only has one merit: that you are living it.
— Constantin Brâncuşi
Frank O’Hara’s ‘Spanish’ poem, “Having a Coke with You”
The Polish Rider - Rembrandt
(just in case you were curious, re O’Hara’s line: “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick”…)
