What’s in a Lady’s Name?
I like old books. Sometimes I buy them just for their looks. Yeah, I totally judge them by their covers. If they bear quirky titles and quaint designs; if they’re beaten up and shabby, and looked well used, then I will reach for them.
All these books bear lady’s names, and two of them have been made into films. Patricia Brent, Spinster opens with this:
“She never has anyone to take her out, and goes nowhere, and yet she can’t be more than twenty-seven, and really she’s not bad-looking.”
And to think she is only twenty-four after all! Poor Patricia. She goes on to be quite indiscreet, and declares that she is dining with her fiancé the next day – and then she has to make good on her word or face the humiliation of being found out. I think I must actually read this book!
Here’s some more oldies but goldies.
Franz Roh, Magic Realist
Total Panic, 1937
Franz Roh, by Lucia Moholy 1926Unlike the sometimes brashly coloured collages cut from modern magazines today, the images Franz Roh (1890–1965) created are masterful subtleties in warm greys and olive. Somehow this restrained palette lends a more disturbing air to his compositions. Inspired by Max Ernst’s Surrealist collages, Roh pasted together nineteenth-century engravings, excising them from the stolid gravity of the middle-class and casting them into an avant-garde world of whimsy.
Roh was a German art historian and critic of avant-garde film and photography. He began his career as a freelance writer and art critic, and when the Nazis forbade him to continue this work, with the encouragement of László Hoholy-Nagy, he turned to experimental photography.
Orchid Thief, 1935
He Handles the Clay-Toned Boat, 1945
Bride of the Winds, 1930Loathing photography that was simply representational, he often used a combination of techniques, such as multiple and negative printing, collage and photograms to create his fantastic and sometimes disturbing imagery.
It was he who coined the term ‘magic realism’ in a different sense from today’s accepted literary usage: referring to art style the New Objectivity. In his terminology, Magic Realism was related to Surrealism, though in distinct difference, it focussed on the object and its actual existence in this world, rather than the subconscious reality that the Surrealists explored.
After the war, Roh resumed his critical and academic career, and only publicised his photographic work near the end of his life. They still manage to surprise and fascinate today.
Strange Ark, 1930
The Isolation of the Narzisms
Stolen Words
Playing with random poems this week … they give birth to little fancies and longer written poems and strange dreams. Last night I dreamed it was the end of the world, apocalyptic storms rolling in off the ocean, fleeing people and abandoned streets. I might have to write a poem about it.
Random Words :: Americana // DC // No flash
Tattoo Nouveau
You know, I don’t sport any tattoos on my body (although I have an amusing anecdote about getting a fake one of a tiny red-backed spider on my neck when I was about twenty and on holidays in Lorne on coastal Victoria), but I thought this one was amazing. I came across it when I was researching a story on the Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. Pretty, and pretty intricate – I have to admire their high pain threshold. There are more at The Art Nouveau Blog.
I Speak Respected Mârbingwë
Look at the strangest thing I found in one of my journals last night. I was searching for some random poetry notes and came upon this. For the life of me I have no idea. It is certainly my messy handwriting scribbled down in a hurry, but I cannot recall writing such an obscurity. It’s like I was channelling someone from another time, or another planet. Perhaps it was a dream?
On the opposite page is a drawing by an ex-boyfriend. I hope it is not supposed to be me, because honestly, my nose doesn’t look like that at all.
Maybe Anghârad was a figment of his imagination and I was taking dictation, but that doesn’t seem likely either. He was not so fanciful – nor I his secretary, may I add.
And I find it slightly annoying there is no full stop after Ceir. It seems as though I had intended to write more. It’s like a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, tantalising me. And ‘gold is the currency of your mind’ – what does that even mean? Still, it would make a great opening first page of a novel.
She must remain a mystery.
Anghârad writes about speaking another language starting with M. Mârbingwë? I speak respected Mârbingwë.
I could see only the first three words on the page, the light was so bright. They said I am writing. I will say nothing until the gold is on the table. What gold? What am I buying?
Her story. The gold is the currency of your mind.
She is from Ceir …