“How can a poor man stand such times and live..?”
Dorothea Lange: White Angel Breadline, 1933
You're viewing everything posted on August 18, 2008
“We’d rather die on our feet,
Than be livin’ on our knees”
Gordon Parks: Black Muslim Rally, 1963
Birthday of less well-known folk singer, Cisco Houston (1918 - 1961) - frequent singing partner of Woody Guthrie…
Theme song: I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore…
Violin and waistcoat. 1933
Today’s birthdays include Estonian artist Adamson-Eric (1902 - 1968). His museum in Tallinn is fascinating…
Alain Robbe-Grillet working on the final pages of Angélique ou l’enchantement in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Robbe-Grillet (b. Aug. 18, 1922; d. 2008) was a novelist and screen writer whose metafictional work is associated with French (Nouveau Roman) and American postmodernism…
A quote from La Jalousie (1957):
“When do you think you’ll be going down?” A… asks.
“I don’t know….” They look at each other, their glances meeting above the platter Franck is holding in one hand six inches above the table top. “Maybe next week.”
“I have to go to town too,” A… says; “I have a lot of shopping to do.”
“Well, I’ll be glad to take you. If we leave early, we can be back the same night.”
He sets the platter down on his left and begins helping himself. A… turns back so that she is looking straight ahead.
“A centipede!” she says in a more restrained voice, in the silence that has just fallen.
Franck looks up again. Following the direction of A…’s motionless gaze, he turns his head to the other side, toward his right.
On the light-colored paint of the partition opposite A…, a common Scutigera of average size (about as long as a finger) has appeared, easily seen despite the dim light. It is not moving, for the moment, but the orientation of its body indicates a path which cuts across the panel diagonally; coming form the baseboard on the hallway side and heading toward the corner of the ceiling. The creature is easy to indentify thanks to the development of its legs, especially on the posterior portion. On closer examination the swaying movement of the antennae at the other end can be discerned.
A… has not moved since her discovery: sitting very straight in her chair, her hands resting flat on the cloth on either side of her plate. Her eyes are wide, staring at the wall. Her mouth is not quite closed, and may be quivering imperceptibly.
It is not unusual to encounter different kinds of centipedes after dark in this already old wooden house. And this kind is not one of the largest; it is far from being one of the most venomous. A… does her best, but does not manage to look away, nor to smile at the joke about her aversion to centipedes.
Franck, who has said nothing, is looking at A… again. Then he stands up, noiselessly, holding his napkin in his hand. He wads it into a ball and approaches the wall.
A… seems to be breathing a little faster, but this may be an illusion. Her left hand gradually closes over her knife. The delicate antennae accelerate their alternate swaying.
Suddenly the creature hunches its body and begins descending diagonally toward the ground as fast as its long legs can go, while the wadded napkin falls on it, faster still.
The hand with the tapering fingers has clenched around the knife handle; but the features of the face have lost none of their rigidity. Franck lifts the napkin away from the wall and with his foot continues to squash something on the tiles, against the baseboard.
About a yard higher, the paint is marked with a dark shape, a tiny arc twisted into a question mark, blurred on one side, in places surrounded by more tenuous signs, from which A… has still not taken her eyes.
Roman Polanski (here w. his then wife Sharon Tate), born this day in 1933 - director of good films such as Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown (one of Jack Nicholson’s better parts)…
Brian Aldiss, science fiction author and critic/historian, was born on Aug. 18 1925…
Aldiss led the British New Wave of s-f in the sixties and also wrote one of the first and best histories of the genre. Try Barefoot in the Head (1969)…
Birthday of Marcel Carné (1906 - 1996), director of Les Enfant du Paradis (1945 - screenplay by the great Jacques Prévert)….
Of today’s many Hollywood birthdays we should mention Robert Redford (1936). Here with Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby (1974)…
Poet Ed Dorn in his Gunslinger persona. Dorn was ‘the fourth man’ among the Black Mountain poets… Here he is having fun with WCW’s This Is Just to Say:
—-
the hazards of a later era: variation on a theme
——————————-
I would like to thank you
for the plums that were
in the ice-box, but
I’m afraid I just can’t
do it—in the first place
it’s not an ice-box, and the plums
having come from California
are a mix of over-ripe
and hard-as-rocks,
both undesirable states,
no doubt shot through
with systemic chemicals.
Add to all that
the fact that I put
them there myself
and you have
the whole sorry picture.
—-
(More Dorn through the image…)
Jacques Prévert:
Alicante
An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet gift of now
Crisp cool of night
Passion fire of my life
Une orange sur la table
Ta robe sur le tapis
Et toi dans mon lit
Doux présent du présent
Fraîcheur de la nuit
Chaleur de ma vie.
At the famous Six Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg had his big break reading Howl, there were according to the bill “Six Poets at Six Gallery”…
However, only 5 poets read work that night: Kenneth Rexroth - in all probability the 6th poet - did introductions but no poetry. Kerouac only cheered the poets on - which leaves the 5 that read: Ginsberg, Snyder, McClure, Whalen and Lamantia. However, Lamantia did not read his own poetry, but paid homage to a dead poet friend of his, John Hoffman, by reading only his work…
Here is a Wordle of Hoffman’s work. Click through it to learn more about this lost Beat poet…
Blind children studying the hippopotamus - photo by Julius Kirschner, May 1914 - via American Museum of Natural History Library’s Picturing the Museum.
Hundreds of images are here.
Jack Spencer, Cooter in the Corn with Horn, Coila, MS (1996)
Spencer’s extraordinairy photography depicts an America or Mexico that looks unreal or from another time - populated with strange, magical human beings. Click through Cooter to explore Spencer’s work further…
via wood_s_lot, as ever
Robert L. McDonald has an excellent article on Spencer in Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004:
“Looking at Spencer’s work, artistic intentions are evident. In his bold, large prints, typically 20” x 24”, we immediately recognize a style developed in an attempt to communicate a vision. Though many of them depict the traditional, even iconographic, subjects of a documentary photographer, his images are not casual in any respect: we never face the question asked of some art photography: How is this, what looks on the surface like a snapshot, art? His photographs appear instead as renderings, constellations of tones and patterns that accumulate as impressions of women and men bearing the marks of age and time, youths parading their innocence, landscapes and houses or other human spaces that seem decidedly less literal than imagined, though clearly located somewhere. Indeed, if you didn’t know that Spencer was from the South - born in Mississippi, raised in Louisiana, living and working now in Nashville - you might be inclined to suspect it based on the mood of his work.”
Can’t imagine how we managed to miss Larry Rivers’ birthday yesterday (Aug. 17, 1923; d. 2002)…
Matisse with a Model, 1986 - Mixed media on canvas
