Yearly Archives: 2011

august 11–august 31

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Books

  • Robert Kelly, The Scorpions
  • Massimo Bontempelli, The Faithful Lover, trans. Estelle Gilson
  • Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, ed. Patrick F. Durgin
  • Janet Hobhouse, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein
  • Don Delillo, Love-Lies-Bleeding
  • Julio Cortázar, Save Twilight, trans. Stephen Kessler

Films

  • Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt
  • Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, dir. Sophie Fiennes
  • Tabloid, dir. Errol Morris
  • My Little Chickadee, dir. Edward F. Cline
  • Swimming to Cambodia, dir. Jonathan Demme
  • Monster in a Box, dir. Nick Broomfield
  • The Thing from Another World, dir. Christian Nyby
  • The Thing, dir. John Carpenter
  • I Love You Phillip Morris, dir. Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
  • The Inspector General, dir. Henry Koster
  • The Killing, dir. Stanley Kubrick
  • The Asphalt Jungle, dir. John Huston
  • Hot Tub Time Machine, dir. Steve Pink
  • Something Wild, dir. Jonathan Demme
  • The Kennel Murder Case, dir. Michael Curtiz
  • I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, dir. Mervyn LeRoy
  • 20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang, dir. Roy Mack
  • Diner, dir. Barry Levinson

poetry & prose

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“A friend tells me: ‘Any plan to alternate poems with prose is suicide, because poems demand an attitude, a concentration, even an alienation completely different from the mental attunement required for prose, so your readers will have to be switching voltage every other page and that’s how you burn out lightbulbs.’

Could be, but I carry on stubbornly convinced that poetry and prose reciprocally empower each other and that alternating readings won’t do any harm. In my friend’s point of view I detect once again that seriousness that tries to place poetry on a privileged pedestal, which is why most contemporary readers can’t get far enough away from poetry in verse, without on the other hand rejecting what reaches them in novels and stories and songs and movies and plays, a fact which suggest a) that poetry has lost none of its deep power but that b) the formal aristocracy of poetry in verse (and above all the way poets and publishers package and present it) provokes resistance and even rejection on the part of many readers otherwise as sensitive as anyone else to poetry. . . .”

(Julio Cortázar, from Save Twilight: Selected Poems, trans. Stephen Kessler, p. 25.)

noted

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Sorry there hasn’t been much content here! Things are busy.

  • Doug Skinner has a fine post on acrostics in Roussel at The Ullage Group.
  • Nice images of the film posters of the Stenberg Brothers at Mubi. Meant to see the show at Tony Shafrazi, didn’t make it.
  • I didn’t know that George Morrow & E. V. Lucas had collaborated past What a Life!; it seems as if they did two other books of collage. Change for a Half-Penny is also up at Google Books.
  • Scans of 291 and 391 (incomplete) are up at Ubu.com.
  • The Charles Ruas audio archives are worth spending time with. He put together the old readings of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which one hopes might turn up here?

august 1–august 10

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Books

  • Cozette De Charmoy, The True Life of Sweeney Todd: A Collage Novel

Films

  • The Sign of the Cross, directed by Cecil B. DeMille
  • The Art of the Steal, dir. Don Argott
  • Trouble in Paradise, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • The Merry Widow, dir. Ernst Lubitsch
  • The Dentist, dir. Leslie Pearce
  • The Fatal Glass of Beer, dir. Clyde Bruckman
  • The Pharmacist, dir. Arthur Ripley
  • The Barber Shop, dir. Arthur Ripley

july 21–july 31

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Books

  • Augusto Monterroso, The Black Sheep and Other Fables, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow & Philip Jenkins
  • Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, trans. Vladimir Nabokov & Dmitri Nabokov
  • Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
  • Marie Neurath & Robin Kinross, The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts
  • Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt
  • Julio Cortázar, From the Observatory, trans. Anne McLean
  • Dino Buzzati, A Love Affair, trans. Joseph Green

Films

  • The Bank Dick, directed by Edward F. Kline
  • She, dir. Lansing C. Holden & Irving Pichel
  • It, dir. Clarence G. Badger
  • It’s a Gift, dir. Norman McLeod
  • Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, dir. Edward F. Kline
  • Pool Sharks, dir. Edwin Middleton
  • The Golf Specialist, dir. Monte Brice
  • Tillie and Gus, dir. Francis Martin

Exhibits

  • “Franz Hals,” Met
  • “Paper Trails: Selected Works from the Collection, 1934–2001,” Met

borges on illustration & henry james

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“BURGIN: I don’t know if I believe in pictures with a book. Do you?

BORGES: Henry James didn’t. Henry James didn’t because he said that pictures were taken in at a glance and so, of course, as the visual element is stronger, well, a picture makes an impact on you, that is, if you see, for example, a picture of a man, you see him all at once, while if you read an account of him or a description of him, then the description is successive. The illustration is entire, it is, in a certain sense, in eternity, or rather in the present. Then he said what was the use of his describing a person in forty or fifty lines when that description was blotted by the illustration. I think some editor or other proposed to Henry James an illustrated edition and first he wouldn’t accept the idea, and then he accepted it on condition that there would be no pictures of scenes, or of characters. For the pictures should be, let’s say, around the text, no?—they should never overlap the text. So he felt much the same way as you do, no?

BURGIN: Would you dislike an edition of your works with illustrations?

BORGES: No, I wouldn’t, because in my books I don’t think the visual element is very important. I would like it because I don’t think it would do the text any harm, and it might enrich the text. But perhaps Henry James had a definite idea of what his characters were like, though one doesn’t get that idea. When one reads his books, one doesn’t feel that he, that he could have known the people if he met them in the street. Perhaps I think of Henry James as being a finer storyteller than he was a novelist. I think his novels are very burdensome to read, no? Don’t you think so? I think Henry James was a great master of situations, in a sense, of his plot, but his characters hardly exist outside the story. I think of his characters as being unreal. I think that the characters are made – well, perhaps, in a detective story, for example, the characters are made for the plot, for the sake of the plot, and that all his long analysis is perhaps a kind of fake, or maybe he was deceiving himself.”

(Richard Burgin, Conservations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968), pp. 69–71.)

july 11–july 20

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Books

  • Matthew Derby, The Snipe
  • Stan Mir, Test Patterns
  • Marguerite Young, Moderate Fable
  • Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip
  • John R. Stilgoe, Shallow Water Dictionary: A Grounding in Estuary English
  • Massimo Bontempelli, The Chess Set in the Mirror, trans. Estelle Gilson
  • Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

Films

  • The Bank Dick, directed by Edward F. Cline

images

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“ ‘And now,’ he continued, getting more heated, ‘it’s time you knew the facts. You should know that chess pieces are much, much older than people. Humans were created many centuries after chess pieces, and they are gross imitations of pawns and bishops, kings and queens. Even their horses are imitations of ours. Then they built towers to imitate what we had. After that, they did a lot of other things, but those are superfluous. And everything that occurs among human beings, especially the most important things, which one studies in history, are nothing more than confused imitations and a hodgepodge of variants of the great games of chess we have played. We are the exemplars and governors of humanity. Those things I told you before concerned the other images, and I feel sorry for them, but we are truly eternal. And we, effectively, are in charge of the world. We are the only ones who have a raison d’être and an ideal.’ ”

(Massimo Bontempelli, The Chess Set in the Mirror, trans. Estelle Gilson, pp. 49–50.)