Monday, November 07, 2005
1) Weekend of missed connections. Annoying.
2) Hey, Sasha: Loud and clear. Cardinal never happened for me, but I know many for whom they did, and (irrelevantly) Bob Fay is a prince. By the by -- Suzanne Valadon was also the woman with whom Toulouse-Lautrec had the closest thing in his life to a sustained romantic relationship. Which was not very close, in that she, with her mother's help, feigned a suicide attempt in order to elicit a marriage proposal; their motive was economic. T-L was one of the few painters she modeled for and/or slept with who was respectful of her own artisitc ambitions (though that Wikipedia article says Degas encouraged her as well). Her work is, as you say, more than interesting -- I was tempted by a catalog in the Orsay this summer, back when I was cosmopolitan and Paris was merely the archive of tumult.
3) Which obliquely reminds me -- clipped this unsigned review of Tout le fer de la tour Eiffel, a novel by Michele Mari, from a bilingual in-flight magazine in August:
"The main character of Mari's book resembles the real-life Walter Benjamin down to the last detail. In the novel he has decided to compile a collection of emblematic artistic and literary artifacts: Kafka's cockroach, Proust's madeline, a soft watch out of a Dali painting, etc. But it so happens that a German philologist and Nazi sympathizer also covets the same treasures. Benjamin engages his rival in a battle of wits whiole simultaneously thwarting the schemes of a gang of a malevolent dwarves. And what about the Eiffel Tower? Perhaps you didn't know, but the iron it is made of has magical powers."
Sounds awfully trivializing -- no idea whether it will be translated.
4) Disappointed but not shocked to see which party dominates the L. Gore/K. Hanna interview that appears in the new Ms..
4) BenjyWatch, pt. 2., in which our man is "gaga" over Anna May Wong. [I also should have read Hoberman's review of Masc/Fem before seeing it again recently -- the parodied film" is Bergman's The Silence.]
5) Bullseye.
6) Re Hit It or Quit It: An earlier version of this post went off at some length about the presence of an interview question concerning my resemblance to a BBC Detective. The gist of being expressible as "wtf?," we can forgo the rest. As to what it's like to be my friend: Try it!
2) Hey, Sasha: Loud and clear. Cardinal never happened for me, but I know many for whom they did, and (irrelevantly) Bob Fay is a prince. By the by -- Suzanne Valadon was also the woman with whom Toulouse-Lautrec had the closest thing in his life to a sustained romantic relationship. Which was not very close, in that she, with her mother's help, feigned a suicide attempt in order to elicit a marriage proposal; their motive was economic. T-L was one of the few painters she modeled for and/or slept with who was respectful of her own artisitc ambitions (though that Wikipedia article says Degas encouraged her as well). Her work is, as you say, more than interesting -- I was tempted by a catalog in the Orsay this summer, back when I was cosmopolitan and Paris was merely the archive of tumult.
3) Which obliquely reminds me -- clipped this unsigned review of Tout le fer de la tour Eiffel, a novel by Michele Mari, from a bilingual in-flight magazine in August:
"The main character of Mari's book resembles the real-life Walter Benjamin down to the last detail. In the novel he has decided to compile a collection of emblematic artistic and literary artifacts: Kafka's cockroach, Proust's madeline, a soft watch out of a Dali painting, etc. But it so happens that a German philologist and Nazi sympathizer also covets the same treasures. Benjamin engages his rival in a battle of wits whiole simultaneously thwarting the schemes of a gang of a malevolent dwarves. And what about the Eiffel Tower? Perhaps you didn't know, but the iron it is made of has magical powers."
Sounds awfully trivializing -- no idea whether it will be translated.
4) Disappointed but not shocked to see which party dominates the L. Gore/K. Hanna interview that appears in the new Ms..
4) BenjyWatch, pt. 2., in which our man is "gaga" over Anna May Wong. [I also should have read Hoberman's review of Masc/Fem before seeing it again recently -- the parodied film" is Bergman's The Silence.]
5) Bullseye.
6) Re Hit It or Quit It: An earlier version of this post went off at some length about the presence of an interview question concerning my resemblance to a BBC Detective. The gist of being expressible as "wtf?," we can forgo the rest. As to what it's like to be my friend: Try it!
