portrait of Dora Maar by Picasso

from "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein

Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, or at most Mademoiselle Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume but everybody called Marie Laurencin Marie Laurencin.

27 Rue de Fleurs

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

cheers for West 4th St. (New York, NY)

Of all the 4ths from east to west,
West 4th is the 4th that's best!
Yayyyyyyyyyy... West 4th!

Of all the 4ths from worst to best,
the best 4th is the one that's west!
Gooooooooo... West 4th!

Of all the 4ths from best to worst,
West 4th is the 4th that's 1st!
Rah, rah, rah, WEST 4TH!

O

"L'Histoire d'O" by Guido Crepax via Beta

casual encounter #33

Middle Eastern/Arab Cigar Smokers! - w4m - 25 (Astoria)

Reply to: pers-734153183@craigslist.org

Date: 2008-06-26, 11:39PM EDT

Looking for cigar smoking men only -- Middle Eastern/Arab who like a good cigar and an obedient bitch close by. Hit me back if you're interested -- pic appreciated. Again, cigar smokers only! 5'5.125 (me)

Here's my Thanskgiving post: Free Leonard Peltier!

The Tragedy of Leonard Peltier v. the US by Peter Matthiessen

[image via one day it's really gonna be over]

one

"Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker."

"How can you tell?"

"I counted."

from Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Larry Rivers (1953)

ON SEEING LARRY RIVERS' "WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE" AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they’re smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don’t shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

Frank O’Hara


[thanks to Ordinary Finds]

[George Washington crossing the Delaware River] by Henry Mosler (c.1912)

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" is not about Washington crossing the Delaware.

The fame of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" as a patriotic monument has obscured its origin as a political declaration, the proper context of which is German.

The painting was a response to the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany. The story of how Washington had revived the morale of his troops and brought the colonists together with renewed zeal through his last-ditch attack at Trenton was then well known in Europe. Leutze decided on his subject in the fall of 1849, in the period immediately following the disbandment of the Frankfurt Parliament. Few viewing the work in Germany at that time would have missed its message: the demoralized revolutionaries of 1848, trapped in the web of the reaction, could yet rally and fight on to win, even as Washington had led his forces from despair to victory.

adapted from "'Washington Crossing the Delaware': The Political Context" by Barbara S. Groseclose, American Art Journal (November 1975)

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" by Emanuel Leutze (incomplete study, 1850)

WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

A hard, howling, tossing, water scene:
   Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
   O silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
    Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When general's star action wish'd "Go!"
   He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands—sailor crew went going,
   And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens—Winter again grows cold;
   A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with 's hands in;
He's astern—so, go alight, crew, and win!

Reading this vivid poem, could anyone fail to feel the raw whipping of the winds, the violence of the waves, the threat of the oncoming Brits, the bravery of our valiant Johnnys . . . ?

Well, yes, I admit it's a little odd. Some lines, like the one about the redcoats, are a bit hard to parse. And does "anger" really rhyme with "danger"? Here and there, in fact, the poem seems somewhat forced. Still, its defects might be excused when you consider that David Shulman, its author, was working under duress when he wrote it. Like a poor soul penned in jail, he had to do without certain key resources. For instance, the letter u is utterly missing. It appears nowhere. As a matter of fact, it was the bard himself who barred it, and some other letters as well. You will search in vain for b, f, j, k, m, p, q, v, x, y and z. Indeed, what letters do appear in this poem, which was first published in 1936? The answer—and I hope this knocks your socks off—is: exactly the letters in the poem's title, and no others! Now, that is really crazy, is it not?

And yet, there is more. Notice that on every line there is a w. Or rather, two of them. Exactly two—count 'em. But why? Because there are exactly two w's in the title. And similarly, on every line there are exactly three a's—again, an inheritance from the title. And so forth. To summarize: in this fully metrical and rhyming sonnet, every single line is a perfect anagram of the title, and still the whole thing basically makes sense.

Douglas Hofstadter
The New York Times
March 10, 1996

"Washington Crossing the Delaware" (artist unknown, after 1851)

Government out of the bedroom!

Among the many brilliant observations of Morse Peckham in his 1969 book Art and Pornography: An Experiment in Explanation (written under the auspices of Alfred Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research) was that the concern with sexual behavior has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with policing. American sexual prudery is part of political and social policing within the nominally legal context of supposed individual freedom. People learn to be prudish about sex before they understand anything else in society, and this prudery is transferred to other areas later that are even more important for social control and stability. The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt censorship regime. Sexual repression, often through the allegation of "deviant" fantasy crimes, is the designated stand-in for violations of the social order that are hard to crush in a courtroom. The function of many sexual crimes is to advertise threats to the established order on the rationale of supposed personal deviance and not on any actual material challenge.

Alexander Cockburn
The Right to Remain Naked?

"Two Models in a Window with Cast Iron Toys" by Philip Pearlstein

the question of influence

Q: What about Brecht? Read much of him?
A: No. But I've read him.
Q: Rimbaud?
A: I've read his little tiny book, "Evil Flowers."
Q: You're thinking of Baudelaire.
A: Yes, I've read his tiny little book, too.
Q: How about Hank Williams? Do you consider him an influence?
A: Hey look, I consider Hank Williams, Captain Marvel, Marlon Brando, The Tennessee Stud, Clark Kent, Walter Cronkite, and J. Carrol Nalsh all influences. Now what is it — please — what is it exactly you people want to know?
Q: Tell us about your movie?
A: It's gonna be in black and white.
Q: Will it be in the Andy Warhol style?
A: Who's Andy Warhol? Listen, my movie will be — I can say definitely — it will be in the style of the early Puerto Rican films.
Q: Who's writing it?
A: Allen Ginsberg. I'm going to rewrite it.
Q: Who will you play in the film?
A: The hero.
Q: Who is that going to be?
A: My mother.

from "Dylan Meets the Press" (March 25, 1965)

the market in Harar, photographed by Arthur Rimbaud around 1883

SOIR HISTORIQUE (Historic Evening)

On whichever evening, for example, that the naive tourist finds himself withdrawn from our economic horrors, the hand of a master animates the harpsichord of the meadows; people play cards at the bottom of the pond, mirror evocative of queens and favorites; there are saints, veils, and threads of harmony, and legendary chromatisms, in the sunset.

He shudders at the passing by of the hunts and the hordes. The play drips on the stage of sod. And the confusion of the poor and the weak over these stupid plots!

In his slavish vision, Germany raises herself on scaffolds toward the moons; the Tartar wildernesses light up; ancient revolts stir in the center of the Celestial Empire; on stairways and armchairs of rocks a little world, pale and flat, Africa and Western lands, is going to be built. Afterwards a ballet of well-known seas and nights, a worthless chemistry, and impossible melodies.

The same bourgeois magic at all points where the mail transport deposits us! The most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible to submit to this personal atmosphere, mist of physical remorse, whose ascertainment is already an affliction.

No! The moment of the sweating room, of the seas raised up, of the subterranean conflagrations, of the planet swept away, and of the ensuing exterminations, certainties indicated with so little malice in the Bible and by the Norns and which it will be granted to the serious person to inspect. —Nevertheless this will by no means be a result of legend!

Arthur Rimbaud

translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel (and slightly modified)

graffiti on the Temple of Luxor

Grafitti in the Temples of Ancient Egypt

Dominique Vivant-Denon, author of "Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt" (1802), on the Pyramids

It is hard to decide what is more astonishing, the tyrannical dementia that dared order their building, or the stupid obedience of the people who agreed to help build such things.

empty frame

opening lines: "Red Harvest" by Dashiell Hammett

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

my grandfather would have been 100 years old today (he almost lived to 98, and in my dreams he's still alive)

My grandfather read two or three books a week.

He never graduated high school. He laid brick and cinder blocks for a living. Sometimes he pointed out houses and other buildings he had worked on. He used to tell me, "I worked hard, very hard."

He started reading seriously as a young boy. He knew a lot about history and geography.

When I knew him he read mainly fiction. He liked most kinds of popular novels but especially ones that were historically based. He also liked spy novels. I remember him reading John le Carré, James Clavell, Gore Vidal, Robert Graves, E.L. Doctorow, James Michener, Robert Ludlum, Philip Roth, Richard Russo, Leon Uris, Umberto Eco, and Norman Mailer.

He would go to the library once a week and come back with four or five books, because he knew there would be one or two he wouldn't like.

He didn't like writing with a lot of description. When he liked an author's style he said, "It flows."

A lot of the books he liked I couldn't read and vice versa, I guess, but a favorite of his that he let me have when I was in middle school has been very important to me: a one-volume edition of the novels of Dashiell Hammett.

my grandfather, painted by my aunt from a snapshot

from "The Interrogative Mood" by Padgett Powell

Have you ever heard of the sexual practice of setting a person's buttocks on fire and quickly spanking out the fire? Would setting a person's buttocks on fire and spanking out the fire constitute, in your view, a violation of antisodomy laws or otherwise be regarded as an unnatural act? Do you think it might be sanctioned or proscribed in the Bible? Have you been able to read the entire Bible?

The Parts of the Body

Portland man gets probation after stabbing ex-girlfriend's pet fish

According to an affidavit filed with the court, Sarah Harris had broken up with Fite, but returned to her East Burnside Street apartment in Portland last July 25 to find Fite lying on her bed. Fite wanted to get back together, but Harris didn't.

When she told him she had plans that evening, Harris refused to let her leave the room she was in, the bathroom, according to the affidavit. She tried to push past him. He threw her against a wall. She again tried to leave, punching him in the nose to get by. He grabbed her by the hair and threw her against the bathtub—ripping out her hair extensions and causing her to hit her head.

She escaped and called 9-1-1 from a pay phone. When she returned with an officer, she discovered her fish, a brilliant purple betta named DeLorean, had been impaled on her wood floor. It still had a knife sticking through it.

"I started crying hysterically," said Harris, who didn't attend the hearing but spoke with The Oregonian by phone.

"Donald bought the fish for me, and I'm sure he knew how much I cared for it."

Fite admitted to police that he killed the betta, saying, "If she can't have me, then she can't have the fish."

Fite pleaded guilty to first-degree animal abuse and fourth-degree domestic-violence assault. In addition to probation and a mental-health evaluation, he must work 80 hours of community service, pay $617 in fines and fees and stay away from Harris.

Deputy district attorney Eric Zimmerman told Judge Eric Bergstrom that the victim had requested restitution for an unusual reason—she wanted Fite to pay for a memorial tattoo she plans to get of the fish. The judge declined to order Fite to pay for the tattoo.

The judge also decided against banning Fite from having contact with fish, saying the stabbing was probably a one-time incident.

Fite misinterpreted what the judge had said, and appeared upset. "What? I'm not allowed to walk into a pet store?"

The judge repeated himself, to Fite's relief. "I'm not imposing that condition," Bergstrom said.

By Aimee Green for The Oregonian
October 13, 2009

New York City marathon passing my corner yesterday morning

casual encounter #33

breaking up is (not) hard to do - w4m - 26

Reply to: pers-qhyca-1446567797@craigslist.org

Date: 2009-09-29, 7:32PM EDT

Ok this post may seem messed up but its real, it all started 3 weeks ago when I hook up with this hot guy while we were in the middle of having a great time his GF came home and walked in on us, at first i freak but he kept fucking me and told the GF that he was over her andthat my pussy was the best he had every had, this chcick started freaking out and he kept fucking me. The chick started call me whore and he kept fucking me and I loved it, he told he her to shut up and at the same minute he said I am done with you and he shot his load in me and then quicly pulled it out and said look I creamed her pussy and I am done with you bitch. The girl left and the guy looked at me and smiled an evil smile that made me cum.

I want to do this again, if you want to break up with your wife,GF maybe a FWB hit me up. I am goodlooking so I ask that you are too. Send your stats or pics and lets plan your break up

"Halloween Breakfast" by Terry Rodgers

Terry Rodgers on ProyectoblogSpace

"And what is sin?"

"I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?"

from The White People by Arthur Machen

Halloween is another excuse to post pictures of Asia Argento.

spooky news

Mostafa Mahmoud Zayed had apparently been dead since Monday with a single gunshot wound to one eye. He was slumped over a chair on the third-floor balcony of his apartment on Bora Bora Way, said cameraman Austin Raishbrook, who was on the scene Thursday when authorities were alerted to the body.

Neighbors told Raishbrook that they noticed the body Monday "but didn't bother calling authorities because it looked like a Halloween dummy," he said.

Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2009


The 42-year-old woman used rope to hang herself across the street from some homes on a moderately busy road yesterday, state police said.

The body, suspended about 4.5 metres above the ground, could be easily seen from passing vehicles.

State police spokesman Jeff Oldham and neighbours said people noticed the body at breakfast time but dismissed it as a holiday prank.

Associated Press, October 28, 2005


A bank robber in Loudoun County got into the Halloween spirit early when he slipped on a spooky mask, pulled out a handgun and demanded cash from tellers at a BB&T Bank, authorities said.

"This time of year Halloween masks are more prevalent in bank robberies," said Loudoun County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kraig Troxell.

The Washington Examiner, October 27, 2009


The weeks leading up to Halloween can be a scary time, even for black cats.

Some city pet shelters and adoption agencies ban black-cat adoptions this time of year—fearful the felines could be used for religious or sacrificial purposes by groups engaged in witchcraft and paranormal communication.

Antonia Kwalick at Hope Veterinary Clinic in Boerum Hill recently used her feline instincts to thwart a potentially scary situation. A woman came into the clinic, hoping to swap her two tabbies for two black kittens. Kwalick turned her away.

"She was a little too freaky, a little too out there," Kwalick said, adding that the clinic maintains a rigid screening process.

amNewYork, October 28, 2008

enshrouded

Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Fall of the House of Usher"

opening lines: "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.

"Sex Magic"

"Sexe et Magie"

"Haunted House" by Pierre Reverdy (translated here by John Ashbery) is one of my favorite books.

So you, there, you think it's nothing?

You're walking along the highway at night. You have only a vague idea of where you're headed, having received no certain information concerning your itinerary. Where will you sleep tonight, where will you die someday? You don't know exactly what degree of longitude and latitude you are occupying on this gnarled praline that barely tolerates you and that you tolerate even less. But you're beginning to be really tired; the rain that has fallen all day hasn't rendered the going easier; you stumble at each step. No light in the distance, the immense plain surrounds you, solitude, somber thoughts. Abruptly you sense a presence behind you. Little by little the feeling that you are being followed takes shape, you don't dare turn around. With a dull rumbling sound a very heavy step spatters the puddles, squashes the ruts' smudges. A powerful breath stirs the leaves and begins to make your ears tremble. The poplars groan gently in their mother tongue, the oaks puff out their powerful chests and flex their biceps, the willows, shamefaced old men or squalid philosophers, bow their dented foreheads under their disheveled hair.

You hear voices, voices that whisper to you of good, that preach evil to you, voices of women hoarse with debauchery. They are perhaps not so much voices as pangs that rend your stomach, your heart, your abdomen, they are black veils, heavy silences, inextricable knots of conscience.

Suddenly you realize you are being escorted by a building nine stories tall. You think that's nothing, do you? A metallic fear seizes you like a bale of oats in the terrible hurricane of the threshing machine, madness turns in a heavy spiral around your head and down to the base of your spine.

Finally, you arrive at a crossroads; at one corner is a wayside shrine, a cross. The building stops, takes the place of the cross. A door opens. You go in.

Rape is evil. Consensual sex should never be a crime.

Free Roman Polanski!

image from Cinema Is Dope

John Ashbery revising "Three Poems"

He puts a line through the sentence "At this point an event of such glamor and such radiance took place that you forgot the name all over again," but later he changes his mind and restores it. He crosses out "chimpanzee" and substitutes "tame bear." He crosses out "Pay attention to this passage, it could mean war." He crosses out "It is like being 'taken around' by a guide, or like visiting a big house on a hill before its contents are auctioned. There is so much one may wish to learn, and it all stops here—in the head." He rereads a little stanza he wrote on the first page and decides that it has to go:

When you flushed the toilet
And the shit boiled up
You said, Now is the time to act,
Act! Before the turds of your endurance
Disappear forever, say something,
Anything! But you live by avoiding
From left to right, carving a road so,
Old man.

New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar

Phillips Exeter Academy Library, designed by Louis Kahn

BIBLIOTECÁRIOS SEM FRONTEIRAS

John Ashbery revising

When he revises, the words he substitutes are often ones that sound like the ones he's replacing, or feel like them somehow, rather than synonyms. In recent poems, for instance, he has replaced "translucent" with "spiffy," "prisoners" with "pensioners," "unsurprising" with "undetonated," and "Just a little bit longer" with "Just a little critical wondering."

New Yorker profile by Larissa MacFarquhar

photo by Hasisi Park

Hasisi Park

Ian Fleming revising

‘Scent and smoke hit the taste buds with an acid thwack at three o’clock in the morning.’ That was his first try. ‘Scent and smoke and sweat can suddenly combine together and hit the taste buds with an acid shock at three o’clock in the morning.’ That was his second. He got it right third time, with the sentence that became the opening line of his first book, Casino Royale: ‘The scent and smoke of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’

John Lanchester
London Review of Books

Early black folk art. Carved from a tree root. Found in Atlanta.

Anonymous Works

John Brown answers the slaveholding Senator Mason of Virginia in Charleston Prison, October 18, 1859

Mr. MASON What was your object in coming?

Mr. BROWN We came to free the slaves, and only that.

A YOUNG MAN (in the uniform of a volunteer company) How many men in all had you?

Mr. BROWN I came to Virginia with eighteen men only, besides myself.

VOLUNTEER What in the world did you suppose you could do here in Virginia with that amount of men?

Mr. BROWN Young man, I don't wish to discuss that question here.

VOLUNTEER You could not do anything.

Mr. BROWN Well, perhaps your ideas and mine on military subjects would differ materially.

Mr. MASON How do you justify your acts?

Mr. BROWN I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly.

Mr. MASON I understand that.

Mr. BROWN I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and all times. I hold that the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you," applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.

read more

John Brown in 1856

October 14-17 is the 150-year anniversary of John Brown's great raid on Harpers Ferry.

REPORTER OF THE HERALD I do not wish to annoy you; but if you have anything further you would like to say I will report it.

Mr. BROWN I have nothing to say, only that I claim to be here in carrying out a measure I believe perfectly justifiable, and not to act the part of an incendiary or ruffian, but to aid those suffering great wrong.

I wish to say, furthermore, that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet....

Q. Brown, suppose you had every nigger in the United States, what would you do with them?

A. Set them free.

Q. Your intention was to carry them off and free them ?

A. Not at all.

A BYSTANDER To set them free would sacrifice the life of every man in this community.

Mr. BROWN I do not think so.

BYSTANDER I know it. I think you are fanatical.

Mr. BROWN And I think you are fanatical. "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad," and you are mad.

Q. Was it your only object to free the Negroes ?

A. Absolutely our only object.

Q. But you demanded and took Col. Washington's silver and watch?

A. Yes; we intended freely to appropriate the property of slaveholders to carry out our object. It was for that, and only that, and with no design to enrich ourselves with any plunder whatever.

New York Herald, October 21, 1859.

"A sweeper girl of the lowest caste"

from "The Baloon" by Donald Barthelme

But in fact it was January, the sky was dark and ugly; it was not a sky you could look up into, lying on your back in the street, with pleasure, unless pleasure, for you, proceeded from having been threatened, from having been misused.

(read it here)

Françoise Hardy

Things That Excite Me

It feels a little better with "Bulldog Skin" on repeat.

I played the part
I played the start
I made a table out of clay
I placed my hands upon the plans
I waited for a proud display
I played around
I heard the sound of certain trouble on the way

I got bulldog skin

I took a car
I drove it far
I dug the quality of steel
I crashed my nerve
I made it swerve
I made it back—was no big deal
I tasted blood
A date with scud
And now I don't know how to feel

I got bulldog skin

(Spark from the master)

GbV

Summer Reading (#12)

things magazine's Pelican Project

why I probably won't be able to finish my novel by the end of the year (and I have email)

The distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever affected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

Samuel Johnson
Lives of the Poets, re Pope's translation of the Iliad

poster

ephemera assemblyman: Robert Bresson film posters

why I should be able to finish my novel by the end of the year (and I have fewer distractions)

Generally it took Simenon less than two weeks to write a complete novel. During a 44-year period which ended in 1972, Simenon produced four to five novels each year. In 1928 alone, he wrote 44 books. The next year, 34.

Yet Simenon felt unfulfilled unless he made love to three or four different women each day.

"The Man Who Loved 10,000 Women"
The Toledo Blade
May 23, 1993

The Parts of the Body

While looking for Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge poem online, I found this one by Marianne Moore.

Untried expedient, untried; then tried;
way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!
Climactic ornament, a double rainbow,
as if inverted by French perspicacity,

John Roebling's monument,
German tenacity's also;
composite span—an actuality.

from "Granite and Steel"

I have a little bit of a thing for afros.

Nathalie Chablat, photo: Marc Baptiste

"He was the son of a candy-maker, the one who invented life-savers. Hart Crane drowned, so that was pretty strange."

I’m thinking about a line Hart Crane wrote two different ways.

“The Bridge of Estador” is the name of the poem the good version’s in. It was just one of those back of the book poems. Really cranky. In many ways Hart was like any weird guy—or the poem was like what you’d find that was great in the back of anyone’s notebook. It was subtitled “An Impromptu,/Aesthetic/TIRADE.”

High on the Bridge at Estador,

Where no one has ever been before,—

Then a few lines below, is the killer: “But some are twisted with the love / Of things irreconcilable,— / The slant moon with the slanting hill,” and then he follows it up, getting all echoey and vatic: “O Beauty’s fool, though you have never / Seen them again, you won’t forget.”

Twisted with the love of things irreconcilable. That was it. That was being gay for me—the slant moon with the slanting hill. The line just never undid itself for me—it’s unbelievable—and every time it ripples in the exact same light.

Hart tormented by the love of a remote (but certain) resemblance that you could not consume but could only view. That got under my skin. I just sat at my typewriter and felt. I thought about Rose. I’m your sister, Eileen, she whispered. What did that mean? I didn’t think incest was so bad. If you loved somebody. She said no.

Eileen Myles

read the whole essay at Harp and Altar

(Quiz: Where did Harp and Altar get its name? Hint.)

off the grid (No. 12,802)

Andrea Posada

TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy pat—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Hart Crane

"If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning" by Joe Brainard

famous American eccentrics #22

In his review of the film "Capote," David Denby indicates that the filmmakers used the character of William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker during the period depicted in the film, as "an aggressive force who moves the plot along" (The Current Cinema, October 10th). As William Shawn's sons, we would like to amplify Denby's comment by noting, for the record, that in detail and in substance the William Shawn depicted in "Capote" is invented out of whole cloth by the filmmakers. In the film, Shawn speaks of "building interest" in Capote's piece, organizes a book reading for the writer at which he introduces him personally, arranges to have Richard Avedon go out to Kansas to photograph the author and the two murderers, and flies out to Kansas himself to visit with Capote. The real-life William Shawn did not believe that articles or their authors should be publicized. He resisted even putting a table of contents in the magazine itself to trumpet what each issue contained. He never organized a reading for Capote or any other writer, and never addressed one, as he never spoke in public on any occasion. He didn't arrange Richard Avedon's photographic trips or publish any photographs by Avedon, as he didn't think there should be photographs in The New Yorker. The film's Shawn expresses rapt interest in the details of the crime Capote wrote about, whereas the actual Shawn found even the mention of blood disturbing, and, much as he revered Capote's writing, found editing "In Cold Blood" upsetting. Quiveringly empathic by nature, the real William Shawn was literally the last man on earth who would make a joke about the killer Perry's impending death, as the character Shawn in the film does. The real Shawn never went to Kansas to visit with Capote, and in fact he never had the experience of flying on an airplane.

Allen and Wallace Shawn
Bennington, Vt., and New York City

(letter in the April 3, 2006 New Yorker)

"If Nancy Was the Santo Niño de Praga" by Joe Brainard

famous French eccentrics #9-14

Jacques Cujas ‘could write only while flat on his stomach, with his books and papers scattered all around him’; ‘Corneille, Hobbes and Malebranche liked to compose their works in total darkness’; Crébillon ‘dressed in dirty clothes and wrote while perched on a ladder’.

One day, under the delusion that he had turned into a plant, the Prince de Condé ordered his servant to water him and attacked him when he refused. On another occasion, believing himself to be a bat, he sensibly had his study padded in case he banged his head on the ceiling. Later, he became convinced that he was dead; consequently, he stopped eating, and died.

from the article "originalité" in Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel (1867) per Graham Robb

"Nancy Diptych" by Joe Brainard

famous English eccentrics #34

“I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way as it interferes with the functioning of my gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”

notice hung by Sir George Sitwell on the gate of his manor

"If Nancy Was a Boy" by Joe Brainard

The Nancys

famous English eccentrics #33

"We are an eccentric English person,” says the artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, greeting me at his apartment, where he’s touching up collages. “You’re okay with that?” I nod. “Good,” he purrs, his voice dropping an octave. “Then we’re going to do just fine."

New York magazine

Genesis P-Orridge

what novels do that movies can't

Nothing in all the motion-picture arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment: the house that is too grand or too dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too crude.

Which brings us to another major shortcoming of the movies as a technology: they have a hard time explaining... anything. They are a time-driven medium compelled by their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three movies have been made from things I've written, and in each case I was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it came time to explain... anything... in the midst of that vital flow, whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx.

Tom Wolfe
"My Three Stooges"

strangely unconvincing (number 16)

the sweetest psychopath