Behind the Seen

Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes
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Journal
Christ
There goes another year in which I haven’t thought about You
Since I wrote my penultimate poem Easter
My life has changed so much
But I’m the same as ever
I still want to become a painter
Here are the pictures that I’ve done displayed here on the walls this evening.
They reveal to me strange perspectives into myself that make me think of You.
Christ
Life
See what I’ve unearthed
My paintings make me uneasy
I’m too passionate
Everything is tinted orange.
I’ve passed a sad day thinking about my friends
And reading my diary
Christ
A life crucified in this journal that I hold at arm’s length.
Wingspans
Rockets
Frenzy
Cries
Like a crashing aeroplane
That’s me.
Passion
Fire
A serial
Diary
No matter how much you try to stay silent
Sometimes you have to cry out
I’m the other way
Too sensitive


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Photo of Romare outside The Apollo, c. 1950



Works: Harold and Maude, 1971; Shampoo, 1975; Bound for Glory, 1976; Coming Home, 1978; Being There, 1979
Photo of Ashby directing Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, 1971


One of Ruth Orkin’s portraits of Leonard Bernstein:
Bernstein Playing Piano, 1947

From Ruth Orkin’s book: A World Through My Window, 1978

A World Through My Window, 1978

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e. e. cummings, poet - died from a stroke, aged 67, on this day in 1962…
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when god lets my body be
from each brave eye shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles there
from the purpled world will dance upon
between my lips which did sing
a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes
will lay between their little breasts
my strong fingers beneath the snow
into strenuous birds shall go
my love walking in the grass
their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be
with the bulge and nuzzle of the sea

Photo: Man Ray, 1926


There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.
(Photo: George Pastier)




Photo: Bernie Aumuller


Richard Wright: Children in Ghana, 1953

Via The Beinecke

Photo: Gisele Freund, via The Beinecke
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German film director Werner Herzog is 69 today, Sept. 5…
Herzog is known for directing films about questing souls with impossible projects, shot under exacting circumstances…

Koestler was proficient in math, philosophy, history and psychology; spoke several languges and wrote major works in 3 of them: Hungarian, German and English…

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From ZAMM: A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. “The ancient Greeks,” I say, “who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?”
Above: Photo from the road trip that Pirsig took with his family in 1968, and which got permutated into the novel - it’s Pirsig on the right, holding his boy Chris together with his friend John Sutherland…

Photo: Brigid, Candy, Andy & Ultraviolet (Brigid with her usual wardrobe malfunction…)

Above: Fureurs, 1946


Edith Sitwell was born Sep. 7, 1887 (d. 1964). She was a full-time Bohemian, muse, poet and critic…
“I am not an eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of goldfish.” — E.S.
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Photo: Howard Coster, 1930 - half-plate film negative (NPG, London)


Classic Pink Panther
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So, we’ll go with his poster for the opening night of Ubu Roi, 1896.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French artist - died on this day in 1901, aged 36, from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis…
Photo of Lautrec at work, 1890


Stéphane Mallarmé, French symbolist poet - died on this day in 1898 from a series of laryngeal spasms that suffocated him…
What silk of time’s sweet balm
Where the Chimera tires himself
Is worth the coils and natural cloud
You tend before the mirror’s calm?
The blanks of meditating flags
Stand high along our avenue:
But I’ve your naked tresses too
To bury there my contented eyes.
No! The mouth cannot be sure
Of tasting anything in its bite
Unless your princely lover cares
In that mighty brush of hair
To breathe out, like a diamond,
The cry of Glory stifled there.

Italian poet Cesare Pavese: Sep. 9, 1908 - 1950 (suicide by barbiturates)…
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Cesare Pavese: Alter Ego
From morning till evening he saw the tattoo
on his silky chest: a russet woman,
lying concealed in the field of hair. Beneath there was
sometimes chaos, she leapt up suddenly.
The day passed in cursing and silence.
If the woman were no tattoo but
clung alive to his hairy chest, he’d
cry out more loudly in the little cell.
Wide-eyed, he lay silently stretched on the bed.
A deep sealike sigh swelled
the big solid bones in his body: he lay
as on a boat-deck. He rested heavily on the bed
like someone who on waking might jump up.
His body, salted with spray, poured out
sweat full of sunshine. The little cell
was not big enough for a single one of his glances.
His hands showed he was thinking of the woman.

Works include War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well as numerous other novels and novellas…
“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” — Leo Tolstoy
The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower—
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint—
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots—
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.
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Ben Shahn picked up the art of photography from Walker Evans…
Above - one of the shots Shahn took during a two- or three-month trip through the South and Midwest in the fall of 1935…

Ben Shahn: …and Know the Gestures with which the Little Flowers open in the Morning, from the Rilke Portfolio, “For the Sake of a Single Verse”, 1968 - color lithograph on paper (Smithsonian)

Louis MacNeice (Sept. 12, 1907 - 1963), poet - born in Ireland but spent most of his life in England: Oxford, Birmingham, London…
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Louis MacNeise: Sunday Morning
Down the road someone is practising scales,The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man’s heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate’s great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.
But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.
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Stanislaw Lem, Polish science fiction writer and critic was born Sep. 12, 1921 (d. 2006). Lem has been translated into English and 40 other languages, and his novels and stories have also supplied material for films such as Solaris (whether by Tarkovsky or by Soderbergh)…
“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.” — Stanisław Lem (Solaris)
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Michael Ondaatje, important Sri Lanka-born Canadian novelist and poet, is 68 today. His main success was The English Patient, 1992…
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Speaking to You (From Rock Bottom)
Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation
surround us tock
tock like Go tablets
Everyone has learned
to move carefully
‘Dancing’ ‘laughing’ ‘bad taste’
is a memory
a tableau behind trees of law
In the midst of love for you
my wife’s suffering
anger in every direction
and the children wise
as tough shrubs
but they are not tough
—so I fear
how anything can grow from this
all the wise blood
poured from little cuts
down into the sink
this hour it is not
your body I want
but your quiet company
(Photo: Chris Felver)
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Édouard Boubat - Sep. 13, 1923 – 1999 - a well known French art photographer, born in Montmartre, Paris…
Self-portrait w. his muse and first wife, Lella


Jacqueline Bisset, English actress - b. Sep. 13, 1944
Photo by unknown photographer, 1967 - C-type colour print (NPG, London)
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American author Sherwood Anderson, often regarded as one of the lesser prose modernists: Sep. 13, 1876 - 1941…
“You must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.” — Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)
Photo: Carl Van Vechten, November 1933
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Roald Dahl (Sep. 13, 1916 - 1990) - spy and author, mostly in the light genres of mystery and imagination…
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.” - R.D.
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French-born actress Claudette Colbert - Sep. 13, 1903 - 1996 - came with her family to the US at age 3. She became a major Broadway star in the 1920s and went to Hollywood when the talkies began…
Still from Cleopatra, 1934

Michel Butor, French new wave writer is 85 today…
Butor, along w. Robbe-Grillet, ‘invented’ the Nouveau Roman in the 1950s as a form of highly self-conscious metafiction.
“Every word written is a victory against Death.” ― Michel Butor
Photo: Renate von Mangold, 1989
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Kate Millett, controversial feminist, is 77 today. Author of Sexual Politics (1970) - a pioneering critique of patriarchy in Western literature and thinking…
“To love is simply to allow another to be, live, grow, expand, become. An appreciation that demands and expects nothing in return.” — Kate Millett (Sita)
Photo: Robert Giard

Rosalie Gwathmey (Sep. 15, 1908 - 2001): Paris, France, 1949 - silver print on paper (Smithsonian)




Swedish Modernist master poet, Gunnar Ekelöf: Sep. 15, 1907 - 1968…
Ekelöf flirted with surrealism in his first poetry collections in the 1930s and translated much French poetry. Later he took a turn in a more Romantic direction and found a greater audience… His last works (a 1960s trilogy of collections) were coloured by Oriental mysticism and used a prophetic idiom.
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Gunnar Ekelöf: A poem from Partitur
A bowl of eyes
I leave to autumn
Yes, a bowl full
of the unseen
For I have been granted
to see
The faces of the dead and the living
Human insufficiency
and the one thing needed
But of that
I am forbidden
to speak
I stand in Epicurus’ garden
There the laurel is in bloom
And the high gods
are endlessly remote
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Jean Renoir (Sep. 15, 1894 - 1979), son of great painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was a filmmaker, writer and actor - best known for The Great Illusion (La Grande Illusion, 1937)
As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s - living a transatlantic life for the greater part of his career, directing films in both France and the US.
Photo: Richard Avedon
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (Sep. 15, 1890 - 1976) has sold approx. 4 billion copies of her novels - so in theory two out of every three inhabitants of planet Earth could own their own private Miss Marple or Poirot mystery…
“Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.” ― Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia
Photo: Godfrey Argent, February 1969 - bromide print (NPG, London)
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Celebrating Pierre Gassmann (Sep. 15, 1913 - 2004), the excellent printer whose work allows us to still appreciate the photos of Man Ray…
Above - Man Ray: Joan Miro, 1930 (printed after 1960) - silver print on paper (Smithsonian)
James Fenimore Cooper (Sep. 15, 1789 - 1851), American author whose most famous work, Last of the Mohicans (1826), became one of the most widely read American novels of the nineteenth century…
“Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?” - James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Photo: Matthew Brady, 1850
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Hans/Jean Arp (Sep. 16, 1886 - 1966) German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper…
Above: Aquatic, 1953 - marble (Walker Art Center)

Jean Arp: The Domestic Stones (A Fragment)
The feet of morning the feet of noon and the feet of evening walk ceaselessly round pickled buttocks on the other hand the feet of midnight remain motionless in their echo-woven baskets
consequently the lion is a diamond
on the sofas made of bread
are seated the dressed and the undressed
the undressed hold leaden swallows between their toes
the dressed hold leaden nests between their fingers
at all hours the undressed get dressed again
and the dressed get undressed
and exchange the leaden swallows
for the leaden nests
consequently the tail is an umbrella
a mouth opens within another mouth
and within this mouth another mouth
and within this mouth another mouth
and so on without end
it is a sad perspective
which adds an I-don’t-know-what
to another I-don’t-know-what
consequently the grasshopper is a column
the pianos with heads and tails
place pianos with heads and tails
on their heads and their tails
consequently the tongue is a chair
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Above: Composition, 1925
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The one and only Finnish Nobel Literature Laureate is Frans Emil Sillanpää: Sep. 16, 1888 - 1964…
Photo: F.E. Sillanpää receives news about his Nobel prize, 1939
PS: He received the Nobel “for his deep understanding of his country’s peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature…”

Ken Kesey, counterculture hero and author of One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion: Sep. 17, 1935 - 2001…
Kesey about his peers, past and present:
“Kerouac had lots of class—stumbling drunk in the end, but read those last books. He never blames anybody else; he always blames himself. If there is a bad guy, it’s poor old drunk Jack, stumbling around. You never hear him railing at the government or railing at this or that. He likes trains, people, bums, cars. He just paints a wonderful picture of Norman Rockwell’s world. Of course it’s Norman Rockwell on a lot of dope.
Jack London had class. He wasn’t a very good writer, but he had tremendous class. And nobody had more class than Melville. To do what he did in Moby-Dick, to tell a story and to risk putting so much material into it. If you could weigh a book, I don’t know any book that would be more full. It’s more full than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. It has Saint Elmo’s fire, and great whales, and grand arguments between heroes, and secret passions. It risks wandering far, far out into the globe. Melville took on the whole world, saw it all in a vision, and risked everything in prose that sings. You have a sense from the very beginning that Melville had a vision in his mind of what this book was going to look like, and he trusted himself to follow it through all the way.” — “Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136” by Robert Faggen, in The Paris Review No. 130 (Spring 1994)
Photo: Still from the film Magic Trip
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Doctor-poet William Carlos Williams, Sep. 17, 1883 - 1963…
Williams was friends with members of the avant-garde such as Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1915 Williams began to be associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as “The Others.” Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and by Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Duchamp. Through these involvements Williams got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America…
Williams’ magnum opus is Paterson, a poem composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book is considered to be Williams’ epic attempt at a rewritten American history.
While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained through his research into the poem. On a worksheet for the poem, he wrote, “Make it factual (as the Life is factual-almost casual-always sensual-usually visual: related to thought)”. Williams considered, but ultimately rejected, putting footnotes into the work describing some facts. Still, the style of the poem allowed for many opportunities to incorporate ‘factual information’, including portions of his own correspondence with the American poet Marcia Nardi and fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg…
Photo of Williams at the 92th Street Y, 1954


William Carlos Williams: It Is A Living Coral
a trouble
archaically fettered
to produce
E Pluribus Unum an
island
in the sea a Capitol
surmounted
by Armed Liberty—
painting
sculpture straddled by
a dome
eight million pounds
in weight
iron plates constructed
to expand
and contract with
variations
of temperature
the folding
and unfolding of a lily.
And Congress
authorized and the
Commission
was entrusted was
entrusted!
a sculptured group
Mars
in Roman mail placing
a wreath
of laurel on the brow
of Washington
Commerce Minerva
Thomas
Jefferson John Hancock
at
the table Mrs. Motte
presenting
Indian burning arrows
to Generals
Marion and Lee to fire
her mansion
and dislodge the British—
this scaleless
jumble is superb
and accurate in its
expression
of the thing they
would destroy—
Baptism of Poca-
hontas
with a little card
hanging
under it to tell
the persons
in the picture.
It climbs
it runs, it is Geo.
Shoup
of Idaho it wears
a beard
it fetches naked
Indian
women from a river
Trumbull
Varnum Henderson
Frances
Willard’s corset is
absurd—
Banks White Columbus
stretched
in bed men felling trees
The Hon. Michael
C. Kerr
onetime Speaker of
the House
of Representatives
Perry
in a rowboat on Lake
Erie
changing ships the
dead
among the wreckage
sickly green


Oscar Dominguez: The Freud card from the Tarot de Marseilles deck designed by the Surrealists waiting for passage out of occupied France in the winter of 1940/1…
“In 1939 Breton was mobilized as a doctor, and attended a school for pilots in Poitiers. Peret had joined his regiment, but would soon be imprisoned in Rennes for anti-military Trotskyist propaganda within the army … At the time of the armistice, and exodus, Ernst and Bellmer being German were taken to Le Camp des Milles. The other Surrealists met at the Air-Bel residence near Marseilles (in the “Free Zone”) after their discharge. They would remain housed there during the winter of 1940-41, taken care of by an American committee for aid to intellectuals, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Masson, Peret would kill time by playing cards — Tarot, “the Game of Marseille.” — From Surrealism by Rene Passeron
Freud is The Mage (Jack) of Stars in this deck - The Sirène (Queen) and Génie (King) of the same suit of Dark Stars were Alice and Lautréamont respectively…
(Source: shigepekin.over-blog.com)

SPILLED BLOOD
The ashes which are the cigar’s malady
imitate the concierges rushing down the stairs
after their broom that fell from the fifth floor
killed the gasman
that employee resembling a bug in a salad
The bird lies in wait for a bug and it’s the broom that got you gasman
Your wife’s hair will be white as sugar
and her ears will be unpaid bills
unpaid because you are dead
But why didn’t this gasman have feet shaped like a three
why didn’t he have the lucid look of a glovestore
why didn’t he have his mother’s dried-up breast hanging from his belly
why didn’t he have flies in the pockets of his jacket
He would have passed away damp and cold like a smashed porcelain vase
and his hands would have caressed the bars of his prison
But the sun in his pocket had put on its cap
—Benjamin Péret
translated by Keith Hollaman
(Photo: André Breton (R) chasing butterflies with Benjamin Péret (L) in St.-Cirq, c. 1959)
Tarot card (one of four) by Roberto Matta used as an illustration for André Breton’s book Arcane 17: Les Etoiles, 1945
(Source: Flickr / ajourneyroundmyskull)
Oscar Dominguez: The Freud card from the Tarot de Marseilles deck designed by the Surrealists waiting for passage out of occupied France in the winter of 1940/1…
“In 1939 Breton was mobilized as a doctor, and attended a school for pilots in Poitiers. Peret had joined his regiment, but would soon be imprisoned in Rennes for anti-military Trotskyist propaganda within the army … At the time of the armistice, and exodus, Ernst and Bellmer being German were taken to Le Camp des Milles. The other Surrealists met at the Air-Bel residence near Marseilles (in the “Free Zone”) after their discharge. They would remain housed there during the winter of 1940-41, taken care of by an American committee for aid to intellectuals, the Emergency Rescue Committee. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Masson, Peret would kill time by playing cards — Tarot, “the Game of Marseille.” — From Surrealism by Rene Passeron
Freud is The Mage (Jack) of Stars in this deck - The Sirène (Queen) and Génie (King) of the same suit of Dark Stars were Alice and Lautréamont respectively…
(Source: shigepekin.over-blog.com)
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Today we celebrate Greta Garbo (Sep. 18, 1905 – 1990), the Swedish enigma - a hat-model made good she became one of the highest paid stars of the early talkies era, only to retire at age 36 in 1941, preferring to lead a secluded life in her N.Y. apartment…
First of today’s four close-ups: Still from Anna Christie, 1930
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