Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

in Art, Letters | September 23rd, 2013

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Important twentieth-century painters, as every student of art history learns, didn’t tend to sail smoothly through existence. Those even a little interested in famed Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo have heard much about the travails both romantic and physical she endured in her short life. But in this lesser-known instance, another artist suffered, and Kahlo offered the solace. Available to view from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, we have here a letter Kahlo sent to Georgia O’Keeffe, painter of blossoms and southwest American landscapes (and more besides), on March 1st, 1933. At that time, O’Keeffe, who the year before had struggled and failed to complete a mural project for Radio City Music Hall on time, lived through the aftermath of a nervous breakdown which had hospitalized her (diagnosis: “psychoneurosis”), sent her to no less remote a locale than Bermuda to recuperate, and prevented her from painting again until 1934.

Kahlo’s letter, sent from Detroit where her muralist husband Diego Rivera had taken a commission for 27 frescoes at the Institute of the Arts, runs as follows:

Georgia,

Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you ? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.

Frieda

“Clearly Kahlo hoped for a deeper friendship, or perhaps more, with O’Keeffe, when she and Diego went to New York a few weeks later,” writes Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own. “From there, she wrote to a friend on 11 April (by which time O’Keeffe had gone to Bermuda to convalesce) that because of O’Keeffe’s illness there had been no lovemaking between them that time. A boastful exaggeration of their closeness? Knowing Kahlo’s predilection for sexual hyperbole, this seems likely.”

via A Piece of Monologue, A Writer’s Ruminations

The Real Georgia O’Keeffe: The Artist Reveals Herself in Vintage Documentary Clips

Watch Moving Short Films of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera at the “Blue House”

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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James Joyce’s “Dirty Letters” to His Wife (1909)

in Letters, Life, Literature | September 23rd, 2013

Writer and artist Alistair Gentry once proposed a lecture series he called “One Eyed Monster.” Central to the project is what Gentry calls “the cult of James Joyce,” an exemplar of a larger phenomenon: “the vulture-like picking over of the creative and material legacies of dead artists.” “Untalented and noncreative people,” writes Gentry, “are able to build lasting careers from what one might call the Talented Dead.” Gentry’s judgment may seem harsh, but the questions he asks are incisive and should give pause to scholars (and bloggers) who make their livings combing through the personal effects of dead artists, and to everyone who takes a special interest, prurient or otherwise, in such artifacts. Just what is it we hope to find in artists’ personal letters that we can’t find in their public work? I’m not sure I have an answer to that question, especially in reference to James Joyce’s “dirty letters” to his wife and chief muse, Nora.

The letters are by turns scandalous, titillating, romantic, poetic, and often downright funny, and they were written for Nora’s eyes alone in a correspondence initiated by her in November of 1909, while Joyce was in Dublin and she was in Trieste raising their two children in very straitened circumstances. Nora hoped to keep Joyce away from courtesans by feeding his fantasies in writing, and Joyce needed to woo Nora again—she had threatened to leave him for his lack of financial support. In the letters, they remind each other of their first date on June 16, 1904 (subsequently memorialized as “Bloomsday,” the date on which all of Ulysses is set). We learn quite a lot about Joyce’s predilections, much less about Nora’s, whose side of the correspondence seems to have disappeared. Declared lost for some time, Joyce’s first reply letter to Nora in the “dirty letters” sequence was recently discovered and auctioned off by Sotheby’s in 2004.

I do not excerpt here any of the language from Joyce’s subsequent letters, not for modesty’s sake but because there is far too much of it to choose from. If those prudish censors of Ulysses had read this exchange, they might have dropped dead from grave wounds to their sense of decorum. As far as I can ascertain, the letters exist in publication only in the out-of-print Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by pre-eminent Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, and in a somewhat truncated form on this site. Alistair Gentry has done us the favor of transcribing the letters as they appear in Ellmann’s Selected Letters on his site here. Of our interest in them, he asks:

Does anyone have the right to read things that were clearly meant only for two specific people…? Now that they have been exposed to the world’s gaze, albeit in a fairly limited fashion, does anybody except these two (who are dead) have any right to make objections about or exercise control over the manner in which these private documents and records of intimacy are used?

Questions worth considering, if not answered easily. Nevertheless, despite his critical misgivings, Gentry writes: “These letters stand on their own as brilliant and, dare I say, arousing Joycean writing. In my opinion they’re definitely worth reading.” I must say I agree. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus once wrote in a diary entry: “Jim is thought to be very frank about himself but his style is such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign language—an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue.” In the “dirty letters,” we get to see the great alchemist of ordinary language and experience practically revel in the most vulgar confessions.

Related Content:

James Joyce Plays the Guitar, 1915

On Bloomsday, Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Trace Darwin’s Footsteps with Google’s New Virtual Tour of the Galapagos Islands

in Biology, Environment, Google | September 23rd, 2013

As famously studied as they are, the 18 Galapagos Islands haven’t been well mapped. And research in the Galapagos, situated more than 500 miles west of Ecuador, is expensive and difficult. Maybe that’s part of the islands’ allure—that and the stunning biodiversity.

In partnership with the Charles Darwin Foundation and Galapagos National Park, Google sent a team armed with Street View Trekker cameras to create an entirely new 360 degree Street View experience that makes three major islands, a fragile tortoise breeding area and coastal areas, available to visitors located anywhere with an Internet connection.

Darwin made his first expedition to the islands 178 years ago. This might have been his first view of San Cristobal Island.

After exploring San Cristobal’s rocky coast, Google trekkers made their way to Galapaguera, a giant tortoise breeding center, where they saw newly hatched babies and adults munching on leaves and stalks.

Off the coast of Floreana Island, trekkers went underwater and caught images of seals playing in the water. They also shot images inside the Charles Darwin Research Station’s vertebrate, invertebrate and plant collections.

Google does a good job of documenting its own process. Trekkers traveled to Galapagos in May and spent 10 days hiking, boating, and diving. It’s fun to watch them climb and scoot around the islands loaded with a geodesic camera backpack.

Scientists get really excited when they find new tools to do their work. And why shouldn’t they? These islands are amazing and are home to so many unique species, like the Marine Iguana. We landlubbers may not get there anytime soon, but this is the next best thing.

The Genius of Charles Darwin Revealed in Three-Part Series by Richard Dawkins

Darwin: A 1993 Film by Peter Greenaway

Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Follow her on Twitter.

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10th Graders Draw Pictures Imagining Philosophers at Work

in Architecture, Art | September 21st, 2013

The Tumblr called Philosophers at Work has gathered together a fun series of drawings by 10th graders from Madison WI, who were asked by their teacher to — you guessed it — “draw a philosopher at work.” I will leave it to you to peruse the gallery of drawings. But I’ll just say this: Whatever their virtues, the drawings don’t look anything like real philosophers. (For some pictures of real philosophers, see, of course, the Looks Philosophical tumblr.) Nor do tenth graders, no disrespect to them, depict philosophers nearly as artistically as Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, whose paintings of Wittgenstein, Frege and Russell we showed you a few weeks back. If you missed her paintings, I’d encourage you to see Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists. Enjoy your weekend.

Note: if you click on the images above and below, you can see each in an expanded format.

via Leiter Reports

Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein Released by Archives at Cambridge

Philosophy: Free Courses

The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps

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William S. Burroughs Explains What Artists & Creative Thinkers Do for Humanity: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

in Art | September 20th, 2013

The interview clip above, from the 1991 documentary Commissioner of Sewers, puts a two-part question to Naked Lunch author, “cut-up writing” master, and counterculture eminence William S. Burroughs: “What is the original feel of the writer? What mechanisms should he consider, work on?” That may sound like a slightly odd line of inquiry — the interviewer, bear in mind, doesn’t speak English natively — but Burroughs responds with an important point, clearly made. “The word should should never arise,” he first insists, though perhaps self-contradictorily. “There is no such concept as should in regard to art — or anything — unless you specify. If you’re trying to build a bridge, then you can say we should do this and we should do that, with respect to getting a bridge built, but it doesn’t float in a vacuum.” All well and good for engineering. But what can art do, if not build a bridge?

“One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and what they don’t know that they know,” Burroughs says. “This applies to all creative thinking. For example, people on the sea coast in the middle ages knew the Earth was round. They believed the Earth was flat because the church said so. Galileo tells them the Earth was round, and nearly was burned at the stake for saying so.”

Burroughs summons as examples Cézanne, whose studies of what “objects look like seen from a certain angle and in a certain light” at first made viewers think “he’d thrown paint on canvas,” and Joyce, who “made people aware of their stream of consciousness, at least on a verbal level,” but “was first accused of being unintelligible.” Yet Burroughs found he lived in a world where, this art already having expanded humanity’s consciousness, “no child would have any difficulty in seeing a Cézanne” and few “would have any difficulty with Ulysses. The artist, then, expands awareness. Once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.” Such insight makes Burroughs, as one Youtube commenter puts it, “so down-to-earth that he’s far-out.”

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Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

William S. Burroughs’ Short Course on Creative Reading

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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What Was Your First Live Concert? We’ll Show You Ours, Share Yours.

in Music | September 20th, 2013

I’m gonna tell you something. Most of my life I’ve been a snob. A music snob. I know, people like me can suck the fun out of a five-year-old’s birthday party. But I wasn’t always such a twisted killjoy. For a couple years of my life, between the tender ages of 11 and 13, I was a wide-eyed naïf, grooving to whatever late eighties R&B power ballad rap hits happened to come on the radio, and it all sounded pretty good to me. Sure, I should’ve known better—I grew up folk and blues and golden age rock and roll. But that was my parents’ music. To paraphrase Morrissey, it had nothing to say about my life.

No, in that excruciatingly earnest yet also oh-so painfully awkward way, the first band I believed spoke to me was INXS. Yes, that’s right, those ridiculous Aussie arena rockers whose tumble from cheesy to morbidly tawdry to Reality TV we all know so well. At 13, I was convinced that Michael Hutchence was my generation’s Jim Morrison. And so one night in March, dressed in a sleeveless INXS t‑shirt, ripped jeans and high-top sneakers, my hair teased into some kind of Prince-like pompadour, I told my parents I was going to a sleepover. Instead, I rode with a few neighborhood friends to the Patriot Center at George Mason University, the ticket I’d had a buddy’s older brother buy with the last of my paper route money tucked neatly into the fold of my black Velcro INXS wallet. I mounted the stairs to a section so high that our view of the stage looked like a Georges Seurat up close, all disorienting little colored dots.

But I was there, man, in the throng, in the thick of a rock and roll show, hearing the hits blare across acres of screaming heads. And it was magical. Not very long after, I would turn to harder stuff, become jaded and crusty and look back with disdain on the smooth sounds of INXS. But that feeling then… standing there amidst those crowds, almost everyone older than me, wobbling in the haze of surreptitious pot smoke and the slightly nauseating high of cheap beer drunk fast in an old muscle car… I had arrived. I told my parents about this years later, when the statute of limitations ran out. And they laughed. And so did I. Because, c’mon. It’s INXS. Then again, watching the footage above from 1988, the same year I saw them at 13, I have to admit that they don’t sound half bad. But goodness, those outfits. Probably for the best I couldn’t actually see them on the stage back then.

So there’s my story, readers, inspired by this Metafilter thread. Now that I’ve told you mine, please tell me yours. What was your very first concert? There’s no shame here, friends. Only nostalgia. Extra points to those who provide links to live concert footage.

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The 55 Strangest, Greatest Films Never Made (Chosen by John Green)

in Comedy, Film | September 20th, 2013

The Lord of the Rings starring the Beatles?

The Little Prince, adapted by Orson Welles?

Batman vs. Dwight D. Eisenhower?

These are movies I’d pay to see! The first two made Mental Floss’ list of 55 Unfortunately Unfinished Films, a roll call of movies that got hung up in production or pre-production, never making it to the screen. As far as Batman battling the 34th president goes, that one’s mere wishful thinking, delivered as a typically off-the-cuff remark from list presenter, author John Green.

Moving at a speed that will be familiar to fans of his Crash Course series, Green races through a tempting menu of trivia and misfortune, obsession and obscurity.

Superheroes figure prominently, as do musicians. The Clash in Gangs of New York, The Sex Pistols in Who Killed Bambi? (The screenplay of which is available online, courtesy of its author, Roger Ebert.)

Death turns out to be another big plug-puller here. The untimely if not entirely surprising early exits of John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley led to the “curse” of A Confederacy of Dunces.

As for Don Quixote, both Terry Gilliam and the aforementioned Mr. Welles have tilted at that windmill only to find out their dream was impossible, if not unfilmable.

Martin Scorsese Brings “Lost” Hitchcock Film to Screen in Short Faux Documentary

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Ayun Halliday would love to see John Green undertake a Crash Course Cinema series. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Dewars Channels the Ghost of Charles Bukowski to Sell Scotch

in Business, Poetry | September 20th, 2013

In 1993, the GAP used the ghost of Jack Kerouac to help sell khakis to desk jockeys across the nation. That was odd. 20 years later, Dewars has called upon Charles Bukowski, dead since 1994, to peddle Scotch. That makes complete sense. As you may recall, Bukowski once told Sean Penn in a 1987 Interview magazine piece: “Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth — alongside of me. Yes…these are two of the greatest arrivals upon the surface of the earth. So…we get along.” Bukowski liked to drink. He also liked to talk about his memorable hangovers. Dead or alive, Bukowski has the creds to sell Scotch.

As the Dewars ad rolls (above), you’ll hear lines from Bukowski’s poem “so you want to be a writer?” (below). And if you’re familiar with the poem, you’ll notice that the narration in the commercial is abridged. They’ve removed various lines referring to the writing life, making it so that the narration speaks to a broader audience. Rock climbers. Motorcycle mechanics. Musicians. Journalists. People who aspire — or need to be inspired — to “live true.”

Two quick notes: If I’m not mistaken, you can hear the same voice in the clips above and below. That would make it the voice of “Tom O’Bedlam,” who runs the Spoken Verse channel on YouTube. Also, you can view a Spanish version of the Dewars ad here.