from Martin Lewis
I frame this verse, in somewhat antique style,
For thee, Miranda open-eyed and bright,
The sole lady of thine enchanted isle
Now Prospero hath sailed into the night:
And both to him, and thee, I offer thanks
For that haven of fellowship and art
He conjur’d up on swift Sequana’s banks
By Notre Dame, Lutetia’s very heart.
In thy heart also may there ever dwell
The humane passion that thy father proved,
And strength besides, to live that passion well
And love the calling as he also loved.
Fight, like Sir George, with reason and with rhyme
The dragons of this calibanic time!
Pia Copper-Ind writes:
The world sees few men like George Whitman. In the harsh capitalist world of today, George’s morals and his motto “Live for humanity” almost seem a thing of the past. For so many people, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris was so much more than a bookstore, it was home for a few months, a place to dream, to write and be inspired in front of one of the most beautiful cathedrals in the world, Notre-Dame, a site Whitman referred to as “Kilometer Zero”, the ultimate address.
Many thousands of twenty-something men and women from all over the world, would-be writers and artists, were served up George’s pancakes and his strawberry ice-cream while they strove to become the next Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce. Whitman would tell people to ‘read a book a day’ and ‘write the next great novel’ upstairs. Everyone had to write their biography and leave it for posterity. And there were writers. Lawrence Durrell was one of George’s greatest friends, Richard Wright was a regular, Henry Miller called the place a “wonderland of books”. His companion-in-arms was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who also came to Paris in the postwar years with POW money and then started his own bookstore in San Francisco publishing the “Beats” who drifted between Paris (Shakespeare and Co.), Tangiers and Big Sur. George was even rumoured to be a “Don Juan” of the arrière-boutique, seducing the mysterious Anais Nin. But perhaps he was more of a Prince Myshkin or a Don Quixote, as he liked to call himself: a man of books and letters more than a man of passions. Anais Nin called him “a saint among his books, lending them, having penniless friends upstairs in his Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows wrinkled shutters.”
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A Kolya-n tapestry?
For those who lurked about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in the early 2000s, Kolya, or Nicholas as many of us knew him, was a familiar face. He was a sans-papiers from Eastern Europe with a entrepreneurial flair that boggled the mind. He devised elaborate hustles to fleece department stores of money, recruiting many an empty-pocketed Shakespearean to abet him along the way. He resold cheap Chinese jewelry to tourists at a 1,000 per cent mark up. He painted henna tattoos on the legs, backs, and breasts of the young and foolish at the Les Halles park for 50 or 100 francs a pop, often using KMZ friends Tom Pancake or Ryan McGlynn as a sidekick. And, yes, suspicions were rife that perhaps he lifted a book or three from Shakespeare and sold them down the road.
Well, like most everybody from that time, Kolya moved on from Paris. He drifted to America where, once again living without papers, he lived for a long time by selling contraband punk rock T-shirts. Now, he has surfaced again with a Kickstarter project that seems to defy logic. Kolya, the man of the thousand scams, has discovered a love for tapestry.
From what we can tell, Kolya hopes to create a series of contemporary tapestries and donate them to modern art museums across the United States. ”Coming to America, I was excited to explore native American tapestry as well as contemporary tapestry,” he writes. “[U]nfortunately I was also disappointed that such great tradition was somewhat shunned away by commercialization of the art scene.” Continue reading →
Reading in a book, I came across the following Zen koan:
Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply raised a finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.
Do you get it? I don’t know if I get it. How does the boy become enlightened? What does the visitor make of it all? What does the master do with the finger?
Zen koans are famous for simultaneously suggesting and resisting meaning. This one however I cracked. Through a process of ‘inductive leapfrog-thinking’ I realised there had been an error in the translation. The translator had consistently rendered “raised a finger” for what in the original Japanese had in fact been “gave the finger”. Thus the true koan reads:
Whenever Gutei Osho was asked about Zen, he simply gave people the finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy gave him the finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei gave him the finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.
Makes much better sense. Still, not very Zen.
All or nothing for Tiger Woods?
Tiger Woods has long been one of the most dominant figures in all of sport. He’s won 71 PGA golf tournaments and an astonishing 14 majors. And thanks to his golfing prowess, he’s earned more than $1 billion in combined prize money and endorsements.
But, as those of you who follow the scandal sheets know, Tiger has suffered a spell of personal trouble. Despite marketing himself as a loving family man, Tiger was actually a raging horndog who had affairs with a sordid collection of women. When the seamy mess became public, Tiger’s marriage imploded and he took a leave from professional golf.
What’s now truly stunning is how poorly Tiger has played since returning to the pro golf tour in April 2010. He’s gone from being the top player in the game to a mundane also-ran. He hasn’t won a single tournament in the past 17 months and he’s even missed the cut a handful of times, something that was unheard of for pre-scandal Tiger. His poor form has golf pundits abuzz: Is it residual anxiety from the marriage break-up? Lingering effects of an old knee injury? A change in caddies? Or simply a question of age?
Well, based on the theories of Roy Baumeister, there may be another explanation: Tiger is expending so much mental energy resisting the urge to horn it up with skanks that he can no longer focus on the golf course. Continue reading →
Onna Solomon has a new collection out with Press 34. Onna’s poetic reputation is prospering; she recently won the Chad Walsh poetry prize. And the concept underpinning Press 34 is compelling: it’s an art book project which produces 34 hand-crafted copies of each title produce. Read away:
What It Takes
A man who lost his family
—two kids and a wife—
in a blameless accident.
He knows whatever there is
can’t imagine
how we sustain ourselves,
whatever there is must also be
surprised when we are
consumed by senselessness:
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