Greg Grandin explains why Hugo Chavez calls Bush “Mr. Danger”: it’s a reference to Rómulo Gallegos’s 1929 novel Doña Barbara, evidently the most famous Venezualan novel. Chavez’s epithet has been repeatedly trotted out as evidence of his craziness – why has nobody in the press bothered to talk to an educated Venezualan, who would presumably recognize the reference? One wonders if all reporting about South America is so elementarily flawed.
Yearly Archives: 2006
variously, mostly translation
variously
kleist’s “on the puppet opera”
Online here in the translation of Philip B. Miller.
various new(ish) things at ubuweb
and many more things I haven’t had time to sift through.
menu 3
“A luncheon which may be difficult, unless you can prevent two of the mail guests revealing to each other that one considers himself a reincarnation of Proust, and another that, though he knows no French, Proust wrote solely for him. It rests with you to steer the conversation away from dangerous subjects, such as cattleyas, light railways, Jews, duchesses and madeleines.
CROQUES MONSIEUR
OR
ALGERIAN RISOTTO
*
PRESSED BEEF OR RÔTI DE VEAU
*
MUSHROOMS AND CELERY
*
PURÉE À LA JANE OR RASPBERRY ICE
WITH CHERRY SAUCE
(from Ruth Lowinsky, More Lovely Food, 1935, The Nonesuch Press, London, pp. 13–14. This particular menu is llustrated with a drawing of “an accumulator jar holding water, goldfish, and a miniature ruined temple, made of wood, painted white” by Thomas Lowinsky.)
on acceptance
“Tender Buttons has made it into a Modern Library selection of Gertrude Stein’s writing, but how many people have actually read it and of those how many can claim to have gotten anything at all from it? Despite lip service, her achievement, though present, is somehow endangered, and it will be a long time before a true evaluation of it will be possible. Matisse’s work is secure; Gertrude’s and Picasso’s, ubiquitous as it is, remains excitingly in doubt and thus alive. This is why the show of the Steins’ collections turns out to be not only very beautiful but at times almost painfully exciting to witness.”
(John Ashbery, “Gertrude Stein”, originally in ArtNews, May 1971, collected in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, p. 111)
joseph cornell’s old house
Here’s Joseph Cornell’s old house, 37-08 Utopia Parkway, returned to suburbia – note the door hanging.
(Related: an account of meeting Cornell as a child.)
moravia interviewed
“Like Kierkegaard said, if man is not desperate, he should be. But he must live with it, not die. That seems right to me. I’m against suicide. I favor the Stoic idea that one must live with desperation. It’s also a Christian thing. A real Christian must be desperate. To accept being desperate is not a compromise. It means to live in desperation. To accept desperation means simply not to kill oneself. It doesn’t mean to live in peace. Desperation is a serious matter and requires a certain amount of play-acting as a way to live with desperation. The main thing is not to bother others.”
(From an interview with Alberto Moravia by Gaither Stewart, quoted in an article in Critique which seems to have lost most of its header information. Other pieces by him there: interviews with Dacia Maraini, Federico Fellini, Umberto Eco, and Natalia Ginzburg, as well as a piece on the Etruscans.)
kleist before rumsfeld
“Who ever wins a war as he would wish it?”
(Diomedes, in Scene 4 of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee)