Those were the days, my friend ...

Dead at forty-six, destitute in Paris.

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young"
 
  ... Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), an Irish writer and poet

Surrealism avante garde

Object, 1936

Also known as Fur-lined Tea Cup, this work is one of Surrealism’s greatest hits. Its origin lies in a conversation between Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a café in Paris. The story goes that Picasso, complimenting Oppenheim’s fur-trimmed bracelet, noted that just about anything could be covered with fur, to which Oppenheim replied, “Even this cup and saucer.” Soon after, when Surrealism’s supremo, André Breton, asked Oppenheim to exhibit in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to sculpture, she went out and bought a cup, saucer and spoon and applied pieces of pelt to them. The work’s sexual connotations are unmistakable, but unfortunately for Oppenheim, Object’s instant success meant that she was never able to top it.






"just about anything could be covered with fur"

   


 ... Méret Oppenheim (1913-85), Swiss photographic artist, member of the artist Surrealist movement of the 1920s.

Motion is relative

notions of relativity

"The earth does move but we´re not aware of it. Tiring is more to be feared for the stellar sphere than the terrestial globe".



... observed by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Italian physicist and astronomer, when speculating about the earth´s rotation.

The Devils Advocate

Cool, quizzical, oriental stare

"There is no such thing as absolute evil. The worst criminal has a secret garden in his heart, and the most honest man a nest of reptiles".

         ... Jacques Vergès (1925-2013), a French lawyer who earned fame defending a long string of well-known clients accused of  crimes against humanity.

The view from 80

Pathologically tender-hearted

"We start by growing old in other people´s eyes, then slowly we come to share their judgment"

   ... Malcolm Cowley, american writer (1898-1989)

The abject sullenous of poverty ...

Unmasking the worst of society´s ills ... the apathy of human beings

"George’s red body, already a little squat with the burden of thirty years, knotted like oakwood, in its clean white cotton summer union suit that it sleeps in; and his wife’s beside him, Annie Mae’s, slender, and sharpened through with bone that ten years past must have had such beauty, and is now veined at the breast, and the skin of the breast translucent, delicately shriveled, and blue . . . and the tough little body of Junior, hardskinned and gritty, the feet crusted with sores; and the milky and strengthless littler body of Burt whose veins are so bright in his temples".


... James Agee (1909-55), American author. excerpt from his epic prose "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men"  describing the sharecropper family he was living with as part of a study of poverty in the southern states during the Great Depression.

... one of the very few women in movies who really had a face

Teresa Wright

"She has also always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent as an actress, and with something of a novelist’s perceptiveness behind the talent… This new performance of hers, entirely lacking in big scenes, tricks, or obstreperousness — one can hardly think of it as acting — seems to me one of the wisest and most beautiful pieces of work I have seen in years.”


  ... James Agee (1909-55), american author and film critic, reviewing The Best Years of Our Lives in The Nation, Dec. 1946

What time has wrought

... for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls



"a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn"

"I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls". 

    ... Albert Einstein (1879-1955), theoretical physicist

... the ideal French man of letters

Proust's literary idol "Bergotte"

"I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom"

  ... Anatole France (1844-1924), French poet, journalist, and novelist. 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Good stuff

 

"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets"

 
"What I saw during the Depression left me with the feeling that the economic system is subject to instant collapse at any particular moment--I still think so--and that security is an illusion which some people are fortunate enough not to outlive. On the long run, after all, we've had these crises--I don't know how many times in the last hundred years--not only we but every country. What one lived through in that case was for America a very unusual collapse in its depth and its breadth. A friend of mine once said that there were only two truly national events in the history of the United States. One was the Civil War and the other one was the Depression".

... Arthur Miller (1915-2005), an American playwright and essayist ... comment from an interview late in his life concerning his 1949 Pulitzer Prize play Death of a Salesman in the context of modern times.

... an expression of homely sagacity

sallow, queer, sagacious visage

"The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,—at least endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in front. But, on the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place."


... Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), american author, descibing Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) after meeting him at the White House in the midst of the Civil War (1862)


... in the last round

 

 

 

 

 

 

" ...there’s a difference between men and women in the last round. Men break the habit of a lifetime and start blaming themselves; women break the habit of a lifetime and stop blaming themselves. Good news for women.”

     ... Martin Louis Amis (b.1949), a British novelist