I bought this because I was planning to re-read his amazing novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and then watch the film; I hadn’t known much about his life or that he was widely travelled, in the years at the end of the eighteenth century when his native Poland was gradually being dismembered and removed from the map of Europe.
Potocki is a careful observer with a good eye for detail and a focus on the exotic (or what would have seemed exotic to a European traveller at the time). The book is extremely well presented with a very detailed commentary and copious annotation, rather like the current Hakluyt Society volumes in the UK. The one thing seriously lacking is maps of any sort, to allow the curious reader to track the traveller’s progress.
It’s a strange mish-mash of places: travel through Holland during a revolution, extensive…
Any chance you’re making summer travel plans? International, local, or just with a lemonade in the backyard, you’ll need something to read, right? Here are books I’ve read over the last nine months and would highly recommend to keep your brain engaged and traveling, even if you don’t set foot outside your hometown.
The best place to read is with your cat at your side
The Admiral’s Wife by M.K. Tod – This book is just really good historical fiction, a page turner I could not put down. I learned about an era and culture I knew almost nothing about (early 20th century Hong Kong), and it was woven so well with the modern day story. The author did a wonderful job with the plot, the history, the emotions, the family dynamics, and the nuance. (Not to mention that I did a presentation with Mary this winter, and she’s…
In the autumn of 1889, Paul Signac (1863-1935) was busy completing a set of plates for two books by Charles Henry, a project which he estimated took him over six hundred hours. He was disappointed, though, by the rift between his Neo-Impressionists and Camille Pissarro, who had returned to Impressionism.
In January 1890, Signac again attended the Salon des XX in Brussels. This was marred by the painter Henry De Groux, who had made offensive remarks about Vincent van Gogh, which nearly ended in a duel. Over the winter, Signac was also busy finishing his masterpiece Sunday, which he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendents in March.
Paul Signac, Un Dimanche (Sunday) (Op 201) (1888 Oct – 90 Mar), oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, Private collection. WikiArt, Wikimedia Commons.
Sunday, which Signac started in October 1888 and completed in March 1890, is perhaps the best-known of his interiors…
the new LG TV with its True Voice advanced technology.
The channel didn’t matter, what we cared about was clarity
and pitch, the digital dialling down
of background noise, homing in on the frequency
of the newsreader’s voice: far off famine
wars, a politician sacked, another
celebrity whose phone was hacked. We sat
in the sweet spot, the speakers concentrating
sound
I tend to collect books of poetry and poetry magazines and came across the above poem which I have not copied in full in the Poetry Review Volume 101:2 Summer 2011 This edition was subtitled The New Political Poetry and inside Dautch has written a letter to Emily Dickinson in which she writes about the Talmudic tradition in which contradictory truths are allowed to co-exist. and also about doubt in contradistinction, she says to a Western Tradition that emphasises single truths or epiphanies. This seems apparent too in the first section of the poem -or perhaps prose poem quoted above.
As is widely known Friday evenings in Jewish families constitute the advent of Shabbat and the poem has a certain cosiness, one might say Gemutlich quality about it. Yet also there exists a troubled contrast between the technical sound quality and the dreadful news on the radio which has been arbitrarily chosen. In the remainder of the poem, there is a concern shown about the intensity of the experience becoming overwhelming.
All that evening, as we transformed secular time into Shabbat, everything seemed heightened: the candles, bread, wine, vibrating; each molecule its own distinct, sacred, world.
There are several ways of looking at this feeling. Psychologically Melanie Klein might refer to feelings of envy overwhelming what on a deep level might represent the maternal perfect breast. This state also reminds me of certain lines from the beautiful hymn by W.Chalmers Smith (1824-1908) Immortal, Invisible, God only wise–
Great Father of glory, pure Father of light.
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render:O help us to see
Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.
and in the next verse-
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccesssible hid from our eyes
…..and in this poem, of course, our ears as well although the background sound of snow shuffling down the roof paradoxically helps the evening feel complete. Reading Col Toibin’s book Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know just yesterday on W.B.Yeat’s artist’s father and the concept of the gaze, I came across the former’s well known poem about the Second Coming-
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun…
In any event Aviva Dautch is worthy of future consideration and here is a discussion on displacement, migration and exile in which she takes part:-
I bought this because I was planning to re-read his amazing novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and then watch the film; I hadn’t known much about his life or that he was widely travelled, in the years at the end of the eighteenth century when his native Poland was gradually being dismembered and removed from the map of Europe.
penwithlit 