Vitro Nasu

Wislawa Szymborska

R.I.P. Wislawa Szymborska Feb 1, 2012 (Poetry Foundation)

Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In awarding the prize, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

(Washington Post)

Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in the southern city of Krakow, her personal secretary Michal Rusinek said.

Three Poems by Wislawa
Possibilites

Three Oddest Words

First Love

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst

Dorothea Tanning Surrealist Painter Dies at 101 .

PBS on Mike Kelly see another video.

Mike Kelley dead at 58 – an apparent suicide

Here are some photos of eleven good men whose lives were cut short with Aids. R.I.P

Klaus Nomi Derek Jarman and Tony Perkins in the middle.
Klaus Nomi died on August 6, 1983 – he was 39.
Perkins died on September 12, 1992.. Berry Berenson (Perkins’ wife), was killed on American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
Derek Jarman died In 1994 London, aged 52.

Paul Thek and Peter Hujar
Peter Hujar, Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz at Mathew Marks Exhibition
Susan Sontag by Peter Hujar

Paul Thek New York City in 1988. He was 55.
Peter Hujar November 26, 1987. He was 53.

Wild Combination Arthur was an original Michel Foucault would not mind to be paired with him.

Arthur Russell died on April 4, 1992, at the age of 40
Foucault died in Paris on 25 June 1984, he was 58.

Tseng Kwo-Chiand Herman Costa having a blast at photobooth (Thanks Herman for this photo).
Martin Wong with lunchboxes
Tseng and Martin – pride of Chinese Americans!

In 1990, TSENG died at age 39 in NY.
Martin Wong died on 12 August 1999 in San Francisco.. He was 53.

Nestor & Reinaldo Arenas
They were good friends in Cuba.
Nestor Almendros died on 4 March 1992 in NY. He was 62
Reinaldo Arenas died on December 7, 1990. he was 47.

“All these years, I’ve felt Manhattan was just another island-jail. A bigger jail with more distractions but a jail nonetheless. It just goes to show that there are more than two hells. I left one kind of hell behind and fell into another kind. I never thought I would live to see us plunge again into the dark ages. This plague — AIDS — is but a symptom of the sickness of our age.” Reinaldo Arenas

Beat Poet

Who is Robert Hass?

Robert Hass is one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated and widely-read voices. In addition to his success as a poet, Hass is also recognized as a leading critic and translator, notably of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and Japanese haiku masters Basho, Buson and Issa.

From Robert Hass interview.. we learned..

The first book that really knocked me out was the “Brothers Karamazov.”

“I Am Your Waiter Tonight, and My Name Is Dimitri”

(Robert Hass reading a poem at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival)

Edward Hopper Hotel Room..(Instant Librarian)

O what sadness unaware that it’s sadness! What despair that doesn’t know it’s despair.

A business woman, her unpacked suitcase on the floor, sits on a bed half undressed, in red underwear, her hair impeccable; she has a piece of paper in her hand, probably with numbers.

Who are you? Nobody will ask. She doesn’t know either.

Copyright 2007 by Robert Hass/ Czeslaw Milosz

At Queens College in New York, an audience member asked Hass what it was like spending decades translating Milosz. He answered: “Like being alive twice”.

One more poem
Heroic Smiles

“On Thursday afternoon

when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air. ” Poet Robert Hass wrote on Nov 20 NY times

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See more from Define + Conquer

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Ian Hamilton Finlay

Jacket interview The Death of Piety

Obit 2006

Ian Hamilton Finlay
Individualistic Scottish artist and poet who ran his garden at Little Sparta as a separate city state

Stuart Collection at UCSD: Ian Hamilton Finlay

1895: Auguste & Louis Lumière: Le squelette joyeux

Charles Ives “Hallowe’en”

Kabocha Kusama and Let them eat pumpkin pie.

John Berryman Dream song 63

Edward Gorey a Style icon?

How it works

Where do monsters come from?

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The Unknown Citizen by W.H. Auden

“Even the smallest of voices need to be heard” a placard held by the young Lego artist. (Scroll down..to see her with her lego towers).

Two years ago on Oct 18 Nancy Spero passed away.

As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero’s career spanned fifty years. She was renowned for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life.

Nancy Spero

Oct 18
Birthday of James Brooks – a wonderful painter.

Photo by Fung Lin Hall

Happy birthday Sherman Alexie! October 7, 1966
Sherman is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and occasional comedian.

His cool homepage .fallsapart.com

via

Happy birthday to Emiri Baraka
Who Will Survive America?
Somebody blew up America

Occupy Wall Street Archive is here.

<> <> <> Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Previous Post)

Occupy Wall St

Wall street Anti- Captitalist Protest Picture Gallery slideshow (Guardian)

LiveStream Global Revolution

Wall Street Occupation continues (see a clip of Lawyers back protesters + more)

A line from Salvador Allende

Balancing between abstract
expressionism & futurism
the calm metal instrument
of my voice tweaks the once-

sacred double-helix to create
pyramids in bold colors &
textures. Exquisite tropes. The
great avenues will open again.

Mark Young Sept 19 2011 (gamma way from Australia)

Vittorio Gassman reads Verra’ La Morte e Avra’ i Tuoi Occhi

Cesar Pavese 9 September 1908

Death Will Come with Your Eyes

Death will come with your eyes—
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or a stupid vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a muted cry, a silence.
As you see them each morning
when alone you lean over
the mirror. O cherished hope,
that day we too shall know
that you are life and nothing.

For everyone death has a look.
Death will come with your eyes.
It will be like terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed lips.
We’ll go down the abyss in silence.

Translated by Linh DINH

Cesar Pavese

Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his position as a translator and editor indirectly to bring into Italy messages of freedom and new ideas from English-language authors. Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese’s translations, and also encountered their influence, and echoes of their meditations, in Pavese’s own highly accomplished body of novels, short stories, and poems.

“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

“There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.”

Loren Eiseley September 3, 1907
(anthropologist, philosopher, and natural science writer)

Immense Journey (a book review)
Starfish Story

The Starfish and the Spider The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations is a 2006 book by Ori Brafman (Is this a good book? )

(Bored surf-board) – Fung Lin Hall)

R.I P Samuel Menashe
“We think not in words but in shadows of words,”

There is never an end to loss, or hope
I give up the ghost for which I grope
Over and over again saying Amen
To all that does or does not happen—
The eternal event is now, not when -
Samuel Menashe

Happy birthday Li Young Lee August 19, 1957

Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. Both of Lee’s parents came from powerful Chinese families: Lee’s great grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China, and Lee’s father had been the personal physician to Mao Tse-tsung. In Indonesia, Dr. Lee helped found Gamaliel University. Anti-Chinese sentiment began to foment in Indonesia, however, and Lee’s father was arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After his release, the Lee family fled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, arriving in the United States in 1964. Lee and his parents moved from Seattle to Pennsylvania, where Dr. Lee attended seminary and eventually became a Presbyterian minister in the small community of Vandergrift. Though his father read to him frequently as a child, Lee did not begin to seriously write poems until a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gerald Stern.

(repost)
Happy birthday Gustavo Santaolalla 19 August 1951 is an Argentine musician, film composer and producer. He has won two Academy Awards for Best Original Score in two consecutive years, for Brokeback Mountain in 2005 and Babel in 2006. (He composed the soundtracks for North Country, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Motorcycle Diaries)

Picking Berries from “Into the Wild” – directed by Sean Penn.

The Wings from Brokeback Mountain

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(Photo by Fung Lin Hall)

August 19 birthday
Arthur Waley

Frank McCourt

One more clip..

(via)

The story goes that Frederico Garcia Lorca (the pilot here) erroneously believed that the film by Dali and Bunuel Un Chien Andalou (an Andalucian Dog) referred to him, coming from Granada, having recently fallen out with his surrealist friends. This to my mind seems doubly pained paranoia if you have seen the film. And who needed Dali as a friend anyway? (Walt Disney actually).

Lorca born on 5 June 1898

Jonathan Mayhew Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch

One reader of my blog pointed out to me the word APOCRYPHAL is a perfect anagram of HAPPY LORCA. I took this as a sign that my examination of the apocryphal Lorcas of American poetry and poetics was ultimately a felicitous one.

Lorca’s manuscript discovered

“I offer myself to be devoured by Spanish peasants,” writes the poet Federico García Lorca in a newly-discovered manuscript of a poem from his portrait of the United States during the Great Depression, Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York).