Greetings from ALTONA, ca. 1970.
(via the State Library of Victoria)
August Sander, “Secretary at West German radio in Cologne,” 1931. From the portfolio People of the 20th century, III The Woman, 17 The woman in intellectual and practical occupation.
(via NGV, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, August Sander Archiv, Cologne)
[The] notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period … Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times-from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution-that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month-are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.
— Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors: Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America,” The New Yorker, 1999.The Novel as Manuscript, by Norman Dubie
—an ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
like immense museum masterpieces
patchwork
wrapped in linen, tea stained,
with hemp for strapping…
these colored stamps designed for foreign places
were even printed during famine—
so when they vanished, so did the whole
Soviet system:
the Berlin Wall, tanks from Afghanistan
and Ceausescu’s bride before a firing squad.
It had begun with the character of Yuri Zhivago
in a frozen wilderness, the summer house
of his dead in-laws, his
pregnant mistress asleep
before the fireplace
with flames dancing around a broken chair, piano keys
and the gardener’s long black underwear.
Lara lying there. A vulgar fat businessman
coming by sleigh to collect her for the dangers
of a near arctic escape…
But for Yuri, not that long ago, he was
with celebrity,
a young doctor publishing a thin volume
of poems in France, he was writing
now at a cold desk
poems against all experience
and for love of a woman buried
in moth-eaten furs on the floor—
while he wrote
wolves out along the green treeline
howled at him. The author of this novel,
Boris Pasternak arranged it all. Stalin would
have liked to have killed him. But superstition kept him from it.
So, the daughter of Pasternak’s mistress eventually
is walking with a candle
through a prison basement—
she is stepping over acres of twisted corpses
hoping to locate her vanished mother…
she thinks this reminds her of edging slowly
over the crust on a very deep snow, just a child who believes
she is about to be swallowed by the purity of it all,
like this write your new poems.
(Source: poets.org)
Charles Simic on "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing" (via NYRblog | The New York Review of Books)
Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. If there was such a book, I’m sure it would contain hundreds of anonymous masterpieces of this minimalist art, since unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes. Now and then one encounters in antique shops and used book stores boxes full of old postcards valued for their antiquity, their images and their stamps. The writing found on them most often tends to be in faded ink and hard to read. To anyone with plenty of time on their hands, I recommend reading a bunch of them. Postcards continued to be used by people of modest means to convey important family news long after telephones ceased to be a novelty. I once came across one that said:
Francis Brown died last night, funeral on Tuesday.
That was all there was. The image on the other side of the card was of a famous race horse from 1920s, so I immediately pictured Mr. Brown with a straw hat, a cane in his gloved hand and carnation in his lapel, stopping for a beer in a saloon before catching the streetcar to go to the track in Boston or San Francisco.
A. Cordier, page (K) from Amusing Alphabet: Le Jardin d’Acclimatation (The Zoological Garden), c. 1863-65.
Children’s picture alphabet of birds and animals in French with English translation. The fauna are anthropomorphised and dressed in the clothes of the common people. The kanguroo or kangaroo has four joeys in her apron.
From the National Library of Australia Australian Collection.
(Click through to see the rest of the alphabet…)
But there’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.
He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount,
And we and all the Muses are things of no account. — From William Butler Yeats, “The Curse of Cromwell,” 1938
(Source: poetryconnection.net)
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533
“This picture memorialises two wealthy, educated and powerful young men. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, aged 29, French ambassador to England in 1533. To the right stands his friend, Georges de Selve, aged 25, bishop of Lavaur, who acted on several occasions as ambassador to the Emperor, the Venetian Republic and the Holy See.
The picture is in a tradition showing learned men with books and instruments. The objects on the upper shelf include a celestial globe, a portable sundial and various other instruments used for understanding the heavens and measuring time. Among the objects on the lower shelf is a lute, a case of flutes, a hymn book, a book of arithmetic and a terrestrial globe. Certain details could be interpreted as references to contemporary religious divisions. The broken lute string, for example, may signify religious discord, while the Lutheran hymn book may be a plea for Christian harmony.
In the foreground is the distorted image of a skull, a symbol of mortality. When seen from a point to the right of the picture the distortion is corrected.”
Westerham Street in Taringa, Brisbane, during the 1974 floods (via loserdust)
Naming rights
In 1830, Captain Fitzroy (later of the HMS Beagle), landed at the islands around Tierra del Fuego and took hostage four indigenous Fuegians in exchange for haberdashery and other trinkets. Fitzroy brought the four youths back to England, with the aim of educating them in Christianity and civility and perhaps using them to form a friendly link between the British explorers and the Fuegian countrymen.
The names given to the four children (aged from 9-26) were:
- Fuegia Basket, the youngest and the only female, named after Basket Island;
- Jemmy Button, aged about 14, took his name from the pearl button he was exchanged for;
- Boat Memory, who was about 20; and
- York Minster, who was named after a hill that had been likened in shape to the ancient city’s cathedral.
(Source: BBC)
