[gallery] natgeofound:
Pedestrians walk on bustling Dotombori Street in Osaka, Japan, March 1970.Photograph by Thomas J. Abercrombie, National Geographic Creative
[gallery] Pele & co., Sweden, 1958. Via @BryanAGraham on Twitter.
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“19424”]
biblipeacay: Pablo Picasso etching for poetry book by Robert Desnos: ‘Contrée’, R. Godet, Paris, 1944 (B. 362; Ba. 689; C. books 39)the complete set of one etching, hors-texte, title, text in French, table of contents and justification, on Lafuma pur fil. [source]
Often, Wroe is stepping inside the mind of someone who was utterly obsessive about something, and briefly, their passion must become of great importance to her as well. “There was one man I wrote about who was a carpenter, and he specialized in making drawers. It’s quite difficult to get drawers to go in and out smoothly, and you can understand how that could become an obsession. So I had to learn how to make them as well, and find out which woods were best. I had to be just as enthusiastic about how to do it as he was.”“I think the hardest one was when I did Ingmar Bergman,” she says. “I had to spend the whole night watching the movies, and by the end I was suicidal. They were so dark, and they were getting darker and darker.” She compares it to an Oxford tutorial essay, a kind of fast-paced cramming. “The writers are horrifying; I absolutely dread it when the writers die. There’s such a lot to read!”
Wroe insists on only reading source material by her subject. “I never go to any books written by anybody else. I go to the words on the paper, their diaries. I think it’s the only way to do it, because that’s the voice that has disappeared.”
But Knausgaard gives us too many facts—or rather, he gives them at the wrong speed. It feels absurd to say as much, but his writing, far from being too slow, is actually way too fast. Nothing, in all the profusion of detail, is lingered over; nothing is given time to settle or sink in. Everything feels hastened through—every scene or dialogue, every description, no matter how verbose—with no effort to explore its implications. I can’t think of another writer in which there is so little implication, so little attempt to draw us in by leaving our imaginations room to operate. One of Knausgaard’s incessant themes is meaninglessness: the meaninglessness of our existence in a modern, desacralized world; the meaninglessness of his existence as he humps his way through middle age. But it’s not surprising that there isn’t any meaning, if you can’t be bothered to look for it….[Zadie] Smith sees Knausgaard’s attention to the world around him as a rebuke to today’s distractibility. But his work is all too typical of our technology-assisted culture. The novel strikes me as a giant selfie, a 3,600-page blogologue. Like mumblecore or reality television, it’s premised on the notion that all you need to do is point your camera at the world and shoot. Like all these genres and more, it tells us that breadth is preferable to depth, that art is best created in a spirit of hurried amateurism, that the only valid subject is the self.
[gallery] eastmanhouse:
Coaldock worker with cigarette, Havana
Dockworker, Havana, 1932
Walker Evans, American, 1903 - 1975
Jim Dow, American, b. 19421933, printed ca. 1971
later gelatin silver contact print by Jim Dow from original negative
Overall: 20.5 x 15.6 cm
National Origin: Cuba
[gallery] ransomcenter:
Two portraits of James Joyce etched on the Ransom Center’s windows show different sides of the writer.
Mind you, I am not in the least ashamed of my advancing age. I am rather proud of it, and I have thought about it with interest for years. I am a convinced agnostic, untrammelled by religious conviction, and the prospect of death, the destination of age, has always fascinated rather than perturbed me. Forty years ago and more, I prepared a gravestone for my beloved Elizabeth and me, on a slab of gray slate that has been waiting ever since among all the jumble under the stairs. Its words provide my first text for this conceptual sermon, and this is what they say, in Welsh and in English:Here are two friends,
Jan & Elizabeth Morris
At the end of one lifeBy this I mean that whatever happens in life, friendship can see you through it; and that, well, you never know, there may be more lives to come. I conceive of those simple lines in the slate, patiently waiting there among the bric-a-brac, as a reassurance for their eventual readers, and as a comradely greeting, too!