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Kingfisher
Dedicated to the appreciation of photography, painting, poetry, fiction,
Visit Our Art Gallery at Lake Ketchum.com And Please Take a Look At Our Blog
Spring
2005,
Volume Four, Number One |
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Coming Up Soon: ILLNESS NOT JUST A METAPHOR Susan Sontag dies at 71 from the cancer that chased her for years
I was a free-lance writer who had newly discovered photography, back in the mid-70s, when I first discovered Susan Sontag's book, On Photography, for which she had just received a Pulitzer Prize. I convinced the editor of Seattle's The Argus to let me do an article on her, for she had impressed me with this book, and her other writing, which I had followed in the lit journals of the day.. So I began to read her more fully, and soon acknowledged her as an intellectual who could reach ordinary readers who were willing to give her enough time and thought. She wasn't difficult, though a bit preachy and morally superior. So I followed her career loosely over the following years. Her response to a personal problem, such as cancer, was to write a book about it and her experiences, and to delve deeply into the moral psychology of what was involved. Illness As Metaphor followed the photography book by only a year. How prolific she was, I thought; and what was more, she seemed to be living in the same world as I, though that world seemed to be mostly centered in NYC and Paris. Mine was Seattle and Berkeley. Never mind. Her world was highly recognizable. She wrote a couple of novels that were middling, and I read them and moved on to other writers. But each new book I managed to at least look into out of curiosity, and also into many of her articles published in literary and scholarly journals. So it was with great sadness that I learned that the cancer had come back and recently taken her life. I'd thought, along with the rest of the world, that she had licked it. But illness is no metaphor. It is a gruesome fact of life. None of us will live forever. (Though it may seem, on our bad days, that we will.) Oh, the article. I got a $50 for it, back in 1975, and it only took me a month to write, for I had so much to read first. A good deal. Her most recent book is Regarding the Pain of Others. (2003) One might consider it further reflections on photography, some 29 years later. The pain she finds is reflected in photographs of war and human suffering. Each war has its particular atrocities (though they managed to greatly resemble each other) and each government carefully stages what it wants reflected to influence and sway its general public. But, Sontag finds, it wasn't until the war in View Nam that the small 35 mm. camera came into its own and captured what was truly going on. Previously all pictures were staged, originally because of the great length of time the shutter had to be left open and movement would ruin the picture. During the Vietnamese War, Larry Burrows proved master of the small camera--the Leica and the Nikon-- that told us, truly and up close, that war was an inexperienced hell. And since then have we learned anything about the pain of other? Sontag says we have learned to ignore it in order to ourselves survive. And TV newscasts have done a lot to inure us to its horrors through nightly repetitions of scenes of manifest horror. Much of what Sontag writes about seems almost self-evident. But it must be analyzed and approached through a moral perspective. It is her high seriousness and unflinching candor that we admirers will most miss in her absence. MEMORABLE WORDS FROM A NOTABLE WRITER And please note the ongoing references to photography, which is Sontag's métier, still and always. "An ample reserve of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry." ". . . the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic awareness, that terrible things happen." ( both quotes from page 13) "nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite." (page 22) ". . . the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." (page 41) "We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, 'off guard.'" (page 55) DANCE, ANYONE? One thing leads to another. And another. A reading of volume 3 of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Green evokes that whole vanished world of Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1920s, and what a rich world it was, with George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Yorke (born Green), lingerers from Bloomsbury, Fleet Street, and the whole upper-class British establishment, in which titles proliferated. Powell (pronounced Po-el) was at its center, both physically and literarily, unless Waugh was. All of the Balliol writers produced novels almost without number. But none of them quite so many and any better than Powell, best known for his Dance To The Music of Time. It comprised twelve volumes. They carry a complex cast of characters through about forty years of life and a major war. And then it was time to write his memoirs. One volume would not be enough for a man like Powell; it took four, and later a publisher (he was once one himself) asked him to cut it down to one book, and he did. This is To Keep The Ball Rolling, the quote being from Joseph Conrad's short story, "Chance," in which there is a character most appropriately named Powell. Powell likes catchy titles that are drawn from his wide reading. The four condensed volumes are: Infants of the Spring (from Hamlet), Messengers of Day (Julius Caesar), Faces in My Time (King Lear), and The Strangers Are All Gone (Romeo and Juliet). Shakespeare all, of course, which probably portends nothing, nothing of significance. It is jape which only Powell fully appreciates, I suspect.
I admire him greatly and have read not quite all his books, over a long period of time, but some of them twice. I look forward to the few that remain untouched by me . Rather than seem dated, the novels and the memoirs seem surprisingly contemporary. Why, just the other day, I was listening to the Dave Matthews Band and reading about Powell's school days at Eton, in 1920, and thought, "Talk about your Casanova's Chinese Restaurant"? (For the non-cognoscenti, I point out that the restaurant is the is Powell's novel in which the modern mix of cultures was quietly announced relative to London, producing an early recognition of the complex world in which we live and whose rich ironies repeat themselves daily, for anyone who cares to notice.) Powell did. And this perception makes him more modern than many contemporary writers, that is, ones who are still alive, and not many are. Powell lived to his mid-nineties. When Queen Elizabeth knighted him, he reports hearing her ask the man in line in front of him what he did. "I kill mosquitoes," the man replied. "Oh, good," said her Majesty. Such touches ring true and bring a quick and persisting smile. As do most of the things Anthony Powell chooses to write about. Also of note, along these lines: Pretty good read. He writes well and knows his subject thoroughly. And of course it is about one of the Balliol writers, who are interesting, separately and together. The book was recently remaindered through Dedalus, and my copy cost $2, plus postage. Treglown has also written a biography of Roald Dahl and a book that traces literary criticism from Fielding to the Internet, with a concentration on Grub Street writers in London.
Norman Sherry concludes his thirty-year crusade to pin down the elusive life of writer Graham Greene. Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. III, 1955-1991, Viking Press, 2004. 825 pp. $39.95 How well did he do? Pretty well, considering that he was getting tired and pretty loose, there toward the end, and tended to identify so much with Greene that he often seemingly spoke for Greene, and sometimes not so accurately. But it is a brilliant job and he is the man Greene picked for the tough job. The total page count is 2,251. It was a long, tough job, but somebody had to do it, and the fact that Sherry elected himself to do it is to our benefit. And if one has to enter deeply into a life not his own, Greene's is about as interesting a life as one might encounter. Most writers live desperately quiet lives at their pen or typewriter (or computer keyboard), but Greene managed to get his daily 600-word stint in in the morning, which left the rest of the day free to travel, chase married women (for twenty years or so, it was mainly Catherine Walston, pictured below in one of those moody glamour shots of the time. She looks pretty good still. Greene was her principal lover, one might say. And she was his, though both of them fooled around to a high degree. There were three or four women, besides his wife (long abandoned) whom Greene had ongoing relations with, including Anita Bjork, and for the last twenty years of his life, and through old age, Yvonne Cloetta--a petite, immaculate Frenchwoman much younger than him. Green was a major literary figure of the twentieth century. His novels and stories are gripping and well constructed. He wastes little time getting his story underway. His Catholicism was a prevailing yet sometimes thing; he was a great doubter and often described himself as an agnostic. A wishful agnostic, one might add.
Green published 60 books, including 28 novels and 8 plays that had been performed. Countless short stories, as well. He had a wonderful knack with a story and created a laundry list of tormented male characters. The Heart of the Matter and The Power and Glory are two of the most memorable. He worked hardest, though, on A Burnt-Out Case, and it remains perhaps his most difficult to write. He traveled the world over, particularly the countries to the South, and posited his novels and stories where he had been, and where he found poverty, illness, and religious conflict imbedded in complex personalities.. The Nobel Prize eluded him. There are stories about the politics of the award and how many of the Swedish trustees disliked him for an injustice that was largely imaginary. But universities the world over lately awarded him honorary doctors of letters degrees, including his own , Oxford, plus Edinburgh and Cambridge.
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POETRY SECTION Poem du jour QUITTING TIME The hosed-down chamfered concrete pleases him He'll wait a while before he kills the light On the cleaned-up yard, its pails and farrowing crate, And the cast-iron pump immobile as a herm Upstanding elsewhere, in another time More and more this last look at the wet Shine of the place is what means most to him--- And to repeat the phrase "My head is light," Because it often is as he reaches back And switches off, a home-based man at home In the end with little. Except this same Night after nightness, redding up the work, The song of a tubular--steel gate in the dark As he pulls it to and starts his uphill work. The poet? Seamus Heaney, reprinted without permission from the February 14 & 2, 20051 THE NEW YORKER. And, I believe it is a sonnet. JUSTICE IS DEAD; BUT JUSTICE STILL REIGNS!
It is not often one comes across a poet whose body of work is as impressively well sustained as Donald Justice. And w hat is more--at least for me--it was a discovery. I thought I knew modern American poetry pretty well. It turns out, there were huge gaps (lacunae) in what I thought I knew. Justice is an important poet, with a long illustrious career. As a young man he worked in tight metrical forms; these sustained him well through the long of age of popular free verse and the discipline is inescapable. And in old age, he often returned to these forms--the sonnet, the sestina, the sonatina--and showed his unfaltering proficiency. It is good to be able to read a new poet who scans so well, whose mastery of the forms of poetry is so sure and sustaining. We shall now quote a few poems or passages, with the hope that the reader will go to the books themselves, with a taste for more. MEN AT FORTY Men at forty At rest on a
stair landing, And deep in
mirrors And the face of
that father, That is like
the twilight sound Nostalgia is something Justice handles well. As he aged, he turned more and more to his past, both communal and private. One could say he "mined" it. "The Grandfathers" is another poem in this mode: Why will they
never sleep, And then there is the fine, early poem, "The Poet at Seven": And on the
porch, across the upturned chair, The poem is a sonnet, of course. (Not many are today, so the discovery of one, unannounced, comes as a bit of a surprise and a delight. Justice can produce a rhymed couplet that is as precise as Frost, as sweet as Marvell. And the lines of poetry follow the prosody of normal speech. Other fine poems I marked with ticks in my copy include: Anniversaries, Beyond The Hunting Woods, To My Father, Sonnet About P., Another Song, A Winter Ode to the Old Men of Lummus Park. . . , The Metamorphosis of a Vampire, The Furies (from the early books) and Poem, Homage to the Memory of Wallace Stevens (if you are going to do this, as Auden did to Yeats before him, it had better be pretty damn good poetry, and it is), Sonatina in Yellow, Absences, Presences, Childhood, My South, American Scenes (1904-1905), Villanelle at Sundown, Nostalgia of Lakefronts (one of my very favorites, being a lake lover), and Tremayne. And from the last two books, On an Anniversary, Body and Soul, Ralph, a Love Story (which is really a short story in free verse form). In the last two books of poems, the lure of nostalgia returns strongly, but this is only natural for a poet so well schooled in his craft, growing older and looking backward at memories sweet and not so sweet. It was an admirable life, seemingly fully lived in an intellectual environment, writing verse as he reached the age of 80 and painting his painstaking views of passing rural life, somewhat in the manner of Edward Hopper and the photography of Walker Evan.
A book not to be missed.
See also: a short biography of Justice by his publisher
Poets highlighted in past issues of Kingfisher Journal
The Three Ms: Merwin, Heather McHugh [pictured], and Paul Muldoon
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AT
THE MOVIES tHE gLORIOUS sUNSHINE OF tHE uNTRAMMELED mIND Er, rather "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, and, in spite of my clowning around with its title (which is from Alexander Pope, incidentally) is a very good flick. We recommend it. The quotation: How happy is the
blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each
wish resign'd. -- Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard" Not once did Carrey screw up his face, grimaced hideously, or crack a joke. What did he do, then? He acted. I've always maintained that some of our finest actors and actresses are to be found among the professional comedians--Peter Sellars, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and now Jim Carey. And Winslet is the perfect match for him. Kooky and charming. He is Everyman, a modern lost soul, and plaintively so. Life is a thing up with which he cannot keep. He muddles and sleeps his way through life, and even has given up getting high. Not the others, though. It is a drug culture we live in today. Supporting actors, including Winslet, are ever on the search for something to bring them up or take them down again. And in a small but sweet role, Kirsten Dunst (seen below, proclaiming that she doesn't want to be observed high on reefer) plays a bimbo who wants to be loved for the self that is precisely lacking. ("How true," Annie Hall would say.)
She, more than Winslet, is the Lost Daughter. Winslet knows better than Carrey or anyone else in this wonderful, confusing film what she wants, and sets out to get it. But one's past, memories, get in the way. So they must get "vacuumed out." That is, destroyed. But our memories is all we are. Their compound. We are all victims of our personal histories, and that makes us irretrievable as caring souls. Or so Screen Writer Charlie Kaufman seems to be telling us. And the message is undeniable integral to the drama. The plot weaves in and out of believability. But the acting is so good that we are convinced these are real people, and we suffer along with them, and long for them to be happy together. Or apart, for that matter. Joel and Clementine (great names, by the way) are lovable and we are concerned with their future. If any, for this is an unstable world, and the perils of young lovers are many. A film that bears rewatching, but I plan to take a few months in between screenings. THE PIANO TEACHER Used to be a joke about a middle-aged man who became very strange and started watching pornography because he could feel his Kraftt-Ebbing. Nobody laughed then; nobody laughs now. It's not very funny. Nor is weird sex funny. But the joke has relevance, then and now. Krafft-Ebbing was an Austrian psychiatrist who published Psychopathia Sexualis. It was available in English as early as 1925. In it he describes a range of case histories of abnormal people whose sexual tastes bordered on the extreme. Today we call them perversions and send individuals to jail for practicing them.
Isabella Huppert is the piano teacher, a spinster who lives with her mother, who is pretty weird in herself. (Annie Giradot.) But as we watch Erika Kohut go about her daily piano instruction, we soon notice that she is a bit more than uptight. Demonic might be the better word. Clues start to come fast. She goes to a store that sells magazines and, in the back room, shows pornographic movies. She mixes uneasily but boldly with the boys and men there. (They actually show glimpses of a porno flick and pull no punches, so beware.) She is into self-mutilation and, turning the tactic around, causing physical harm to a female student she is supposed to be helping, but whose talent she is contemptuous of. A fit subject for torment, she believes. Let me count the ways. . . . Enter a handsome young male piano student. She treats him worse than dirt. He is used to easy success with girls. Intrigued, he keeps coming back for more. She tries to discourage his musicality, though he has plenty of talent. Schubert lieder of an erotic nature is played in ensemble fashion and there is plenty of batting of eyes and long looks when he is at the piano, and when he is not. No doubt she is attracted to him, in her own perverse way. What will happen? Well, she has S&M fantasies she want him to act out with her. "Hurt me" is putting it much too mildly. She wants to be bound and tortured in her own bedroom, with her own mother witness behind a barricaded door. He is incredulous, but he thinks it over.. And here we leave the recognizable world for one that is unreal and highly contentious. She wants her own aged mother to engage in a form of sexual intercourse with her. (Yes, the two women sleep in the same bed, for some unexplained reason. It can't simply be domestic economy. can it?) The movie soon becomes beautifully grotesque and unbelievable. The face of Huppert (who must be close to 50 now) is wonderful to watch--along with all that red hair. The camera loves her. But that is not enough to save the film or to explain its unsatisfactory ending. It's worth seeing, however.. I know: let's have a sequel. WE MOURN THE PASSAGE OF GWEN KNIGHT, A FINE PAINTER IN HER OWN RIGHT, AND WIFE OF JACOB LAWRENCE, WHO IS PROBABLY A BETTER KNOWN ARTS PRESENCE.
Here
they are seen as a young couple in NYC, photographed for ARTNews by
Irving Penn, in 1947. She died February 19, at the age of 91. Her first
museum retrospective was held but two years earlier. He died in 2000. What are the ten greatest movies of all time? Tell us and maybe we will publish your list. Or add to ours. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any special order: 1. Citizen Kane 2. Apocalypse Now Redux 3. The Godfather, part 1 4. Once Upon a Time in America 5. The Third Man 6. All That Jazz 7. Casablanca (thanks, Scott) 8. Gandhi 9. Reds 10. Chinatown 11. House of Sand and Fog We are open to suggestions and revisions. Send us your recommendation at the email address at the bottom of this page. Once Upon a Time in America Flesh and The Devil Ingmar Bergman Revisited The Past Recaptured Dune Again? Nora Things You Can Tell Lord of the Rings House of Sand and Fog Sylvia The Hours Return of the Lord of The Rings Girl With a Pearl Earring Before Sunset Before Sunrise
BACK ISSUES Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S.Merwin/Richard Ford issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue. Robert C. Arnold
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