Harold Brodkey on Spring

Some prose written after the third kiss from her (and after the doctor took three stitches in my thumb).

I sit at her desk in her office looking out her large window: Give me the huge actual clouds of the Republic and not the meagre udders of water vapor painted on the old backdrops the Republic Studio used in John Wayne's day. We like the actual big baggy clouds of a New York spring. One doesn't want to flog a transiting cloud to death, but if we are to have sentimental light, let us have it at least in its obvious local form--dry, white, sere, and, I guess, provincial. The spiritual splendor of our drizzly and slaphappy spring weather, our streets jammed with sneezing pedestrians, our skies loony with bluster are our local equivalents of lilac hedges and meadows.

Blustery, raw and rare--and more wind-of-the-sea-scoured than half-melted St. Petersburg. Yuck to cities that have an immersed-in-swamp-and-lagoon moist-air light. They are for watercolorists. Where water laps at the edges of the stones and bricks of somewhat wavery real estate is not home. Home is New York, stony and tall: its real estate is real.

So is its spring.

More from Harold Brodkey HERE.

Leroy Grannis - SURFING (1966)

More about Leroy Grannis, the proto-surf photographer here, and about Taschen's republication of his work here.

Epilogue by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

-- Robert Lowell

... hat tip to Miss Whistle

The Sweet Genius of Walker Percy

A book I need to turn to every couple of years, for reasons like this:

"In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

- The Moviegoer

Kapuscinski: Revolutions

"All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people. They should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process, sometimes accomplished in an instant like a shock or a lustration, demands illuminating. Man gets rid of fear and feels free. Without that there would be no revolution."

-from Ryszard Kapuscinski's "Shah of Shahs" (1982)

A Note from Tehran - "Meet Now at Afte-Tir Square"

This below from a friend of a friend in Tehran. Always good to hear from those folks. By the way I understand if lots of people set their twitter account to "location: Tehran" it creates extra work for the Basij who are hunting down the people who wear green. Accordingly, I've changed my location for this blog. Right now we're standing in Afte-Tir Square.

here are my observations from last night march in Vali-Asr

1) The crowed was much younger, and less diverse, but still very very large in numbers
2) Very well organized and disciplined, no side incidents and very very silent
3) Posters appearing calling Mussavi the Ghandi of Iran and Ahmadinejad as enemy of Iran.. no mention of Mr. K or the system at all
4) Things got tense as we approached Jame-Jam (the official TV and Radio)
5) Protesters in Green headbands had formed a human chain preventing other protesters from approaching Jame-Jam main enterance
6) Riot police and Bassiji were in full force behind the fence at Jame-Jam...with people taunting them to come out
7) People started shouting that they will take revenge for the killings of the day before
8) Amazingly right in the middle of this... Charles-Junior Burger restaurant (appearing in Iran as Super Star Burger) was open and doing brisk business, (got myself a coke and and cheese burger).
9) Today the news is to convene at Afte-Tir square after the Iran-South Korea world cup game......around 17

Sent from my TehranBerry® wireless device

1700! That's now. Better hurry...

“Hafiz, Keep Scattering the Grain of Your Tears”