Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Colm Tóibín / ‘There's a certain amount of glee at the sheer foolishness of Brexit’

I’m interested in the amount of silence around things. Things you couldn’t talk about: loss, absence’ … COLM TÓIBÍN


Colm Tóibín: ‘There's a certain amount of glee at the sheer foolishness of Brexit’

The author talks about his Enniscorthy childhood, the inspiration behind Brooklyn – and why Boris Johnson is right about the Irish border

EMMA BROCKES
Fri 30 May 2018

T
he last thing Colm Tóibín does every night in New York before turning in is read the Irish Times: “There’s really nothing I don’t know about what’s going on in Ireland,” he says. The 62-year-old is in his overstuffed office at Columbia University, and although he has been coming to the city for years, he has only recently started writing about it: “What the sunset looks like on the Hudson. In the winter, you get this really extraordinary red, and if there’s ice on the river, it looks like the American sublime.” But every night, in his head, he returns home to Ireland.

Monday, April 29, 2019

James Joyce’s Love Letters to His “Dirty Little Fuckbird”




JAMES JOYCE BY ALEX EHRENZWEIG, 1915.



James Joyce’s Love Letters to His “Dirty Little Fuckbird”

By Nadja Spiegelman 
February 2, 2018

On Nassau Street in Dublin, on June 10, 1904, twenty-two-year-old James Joyce saw (as clearly as he could see, since he was not wearing his glasses, and his vision was poor) the twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle, then a young chambermaid, sauntering by.  Nora would later tell the story of their first meeting often, though she often told it differently. Sometimes she said Joyce wore a sailor’s cap, and other times she said he wore a big white sombrero and a long overcoat that hung down to his feet.  Joyce proposed a date, and Barnacle agreed, but though Joyce went to the appointed place at the appointed time, she never showed. He wrote to her, “I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!” A few days later, on what was likely June 16, 1904—the date on which Joyce would later set Ulysses—they had their first proper date, though it was far from proper. Joyce took Barnacle east, past the docks and the harbor, to the deserted area of Dublin known as Ringswald. There, to Joyce’s surprise and gratitude, Barnacle slipped her hand down his trousers and “made me a man.” By October, the couple had eloped to Zurich. Although the couple did not officially marry until 1931, their unconventional relationship was passionate till the end. The letters below were written when Joyce returned to Dublin alone for the first time, in 1909, in an attempt to get Dubliners published. They are delightfully, shockingly dirty. Read in full, they are also quite charming. In the absent spaces, we can hear Nora’s enthusiastic, just-as-naughty replies, and the longing of a man who wants nothing more than to be home. This correspondence was first published in 1975 in the Selected Letters of James Joyce, now out of print. These letters, or excerpts of them, have been floating around the Internet for some time now, but they merit multiple joyous re-readings. Happy birthday, James Joyce. May we all find a soul mate whose farts we would know anywhere.
3 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin
My darling little convent-girl,
There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire. Today I stopped short often in the street with an exclamation whenever I thought of the letters I wrote you last night and the night before. They must read awful in the cold light of day. Perhaps their coarseness has disgusted you. I know you are a much finer nature than your extraordinary lover and though it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be fucked by me yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty. When I got your express letter this morning and saw how careful you are of your worthless Jim I felt ashamed of what I had written. Yet now, night, secret sinful night, has come down again on the world and I am alone again writing to you and your letter is again folded before me on the table. Do not ask me to go to bed, dear. Let me write to you, dear. 
As you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile. Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers, and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes. It was your lips too which first uttered an obscene word. I remember well that night in bed in Pola. Tired of lying under a man one night you tore off your chemise violently and began to ride me up and down. Perhaps the horn I had was not big enough for you for I remember that you bent down to my face and murmured tenderly ‘Fuck up, love! fuck up, love!’
Nora dear, I am dying all day to ask you one or two questions. Let me, dear, for I have told you everything I ever did and so I can ask you in turn. I wonder will you answer them. When that person whose heart I long to stop with the click of a revolver put his hand or hands under your skirts did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? If he did, did they go far enough to touch that little cock at the end of your cunt? Did he touch you behind? Was he a long time tickling you and did you come? Did he ask you to touch him and did you do so? If you did not touch him did he come against you and did you feel it?
Another question, Nora. I know that I was the first man that blocked you but did any man ever frig you? Did that boy you were fond of ever do it? Tell me now, Nora, truth for truth, honesty for honesty. When you were with him in the dark at night did your fingers never, never unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice? Did you ever frig him, dear, tell me truly or anyone else? Did you never never, never feel a man’s or a boy’s prick in your fingers until you unbuttoned me? If you are not offended do not be afraid to tell me the truth. Darling, darling, tonight I have such a wild lust for your body that if you were here beside me and even if you told me with your own lips that half the red-headed louts of Galway had had a fuck at you before me I would still rush at you with desire.
God Almighty, what kind of language is this I am writing to my proud blue-eyed queen! Will she refuse to answer my coarse insulting questions? I know I am risking a good deal in writing this way, but if she loves me really she will feel that I am mad with lust and that I must be told all.
Sweetheart, answer me. Even if I learn that you too have sinned perhaps it would bind me closer to you. In any case I love you. I have written and said things to you that my pride would never again allow me to say to any woman.
My darling Nora, I am panting with eagerness to get your replies to these filthy letters of mine. I write to you openly because I feel now that I can keep my word with you.
Don’t be angry, dear, dear, Nora, my little wild-flower of the hedges. I love your body, long for it, dream of it.
Speak to me, dear lips that I have kissed in tears. If this filth I have written insults you bring me to my senses again with the lash as you have done before. God help me!
I love you, Nora, and it seems that this too is part of my love. Forgive me! forgive me!
JIM
*
8 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin
My sweet little whorish Nora,
I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.
You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over me with a whore’s glow in your slumbrous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometime too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your hot drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.
Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.
JIM
*
16 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin
My sweet darling girl,
At last you write to me! You must have given that naughty little cunt of yours a most ferocious frigging to write me such a disjointed letter. As for me, darling, I am so played out that you would have to lick me for a good hour before I could get a horn stiff enough even to put into you, to say nothing of blocking you. I have done so much and so often that I am afraid to look to see how that thing I had is after all I have done to myself. Darling, please don’t fuck me too much when I go back. Fuck all you can out of me for the first night or so but make me get myself cured. The fucking must all be done by you, darling, as I am so soft and small now that no girl in Europe except yourself would waste her time trying the job. Fuck me, darling, in as many ways as your lust will suggest. Fuck me dressed in your full outdoor costume with your hat and veil on, your face flushed with the cold and wind and rain and your boots muddy, either straddling across my legs when I am sitting in a chair and riding me up and down with the frills of your drawers showing and my cock sticking up stiff in your cunt or riding me over the back of the sofa. Fuck me naked with your hat and stockings on only flat on the floor with a crimson flower in your hole behind, riding me like a man with your thighs between mine and your rump very fat. Fuck me in your dressing gown (I hope you have that nice one) with nothing on under it, opening it suddenly and showing me your belly and thighs and back and pulling me on top of you on the kitchen table. Fuck me into you arseways, lying on your face on the bed, your hair flying loose naked but with a lovely scented pair of pink drawers opened shamelessly behind and half slipping down over your peeping bum. Fuck me if you can squatting in the closet, with your clothes up, grunting like a young sow doing her dung, and a big fat dirty snaking thing coming slowly out of your backside. Fuck me on the stairs in the dark, like a nursery-maid fucking her soldier, unbuttoning his trousers gently and slipping her hand into his fly and fiddling with his shirt and feeling it getting wet and then pulling it gently up and fiddling with his two bursting balls and at last pulling out boldly the mickey she loves to handle and frigging it for him softly, murmuring into his ear dirty words and dirty stories that other girls told her and dirty things she said, and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.
Basta! Basta per Dio!
I have come now and the foolery is over. Now for your questions!
We are not open yet. I send you some posters. We hope to open on the 20th or 21st. Count 14 days from that and 3 1/2 days for the voyage and I am in Trieste.
Get ready. Put some warm-brown-linoleum on the kitchen and hang a pair of red common curtains on the windows at night. Get some kind of a cheap common comfortable armchair for your lazy lover. Do this above all, darling, as I shall not quit the kitchen for a whole week after I arrive, reading, lolling, smoking, and watching you get ready the meals and talking, talking, talking, talking to you. O how supremely happy I shall be! God in heaven, I shall be happy there! I figlioli, il fuoco, una bona mangiata, un caffe nero, un Brasil, il Piccolo della Sera, e Nora, Nora mia, Norina, Noretta, Norella, Noruccia ecc ecc…
Eva and Eileen must sleep together. Get some place for Georgie. I wish Nora and I had two beds for night-work. I am keeping and shall keep my promise, love. Time fly on, fly on quickly! I want to go back to my love, my life, my star, my little strange-eyed Ireland!
A hundred thousand kisses, darling!
JIM


An Interview with Lydia Fitzpatrick

 

Lydia Fitzpatrick


An Interview with Lydia Fitzpatrick

"I know I’m on the right track when I’m terrified for a character": Maggie Shipstead talks with Lydia Fitzpatrick about her debut novel, Lights All Night Long, as well as where books begin, leaps of imagination, the momentum of a murder mystery plot, and more.

by MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD
April 29, 2019

Lydia Fitzpatrick’s debut novel, Lights All Night Long, can be (and has been) described lots of different ways: as a literary mystery, a coming-of-age story, a quest narrative, a novel of dislocation. All of these are true and yet no single label can capture the way it grips the reader from the get-go, both through the eternal question of what’s-going-to-happen and by establishing an almost painfully empathetic relationship with its protagonist, Ilya.

Ilya is a fifteen-year-old from a grim former mining and gulag town in the northeast of Russia, and the book opens as he arrives in Baton Rouge to meet the family that will host him during his time as an exchange student. The Masons are kind, unworldly, devout, optimistic, and generous. Suffice to say, they’re nothing like the people Ilya’s used to, though he feels an immediate kinship with their mysterious older daughter, Sadie. In Russia, he has left behind his brother, Vladimir, hopelessly addicted to the street drug krokodil and in prison for the murders of three women, and the realization of Ilya’s long-held dream of coming to America is the source of shame and guilt, rather than excitement and possibility.

Fitzpatrick alternates between sections set in Ilya’s present in Louisiana and in his past in his hometown of Berlozhniki. Doing so, she accomplishes the rare feat of making both plotlines and settings equally fascinating—Ilya is so lovable and flawed and real that he can support the story wherever it goes. As he tries to exonerate his brother from afar, scouring his memories for clues, he also must keep living, and so the novel continuously enlarges its scope, just as Ilya finds his life expanding, too.

The consensus out there is that Lights All Night Long (Penguin Press) is nearly impossible to put down once begun, and that was certainly my experience. I was lucky enough to talk to Lydia about her experience writing the book and also how she became the writer who wrote this book.

Interview:

Maggie Shipstead: Let’s start at the beginning. What’s this novel’s origin story?

Lydia Fitzpatrick: A lot of writers have novels in a drawer. I have a dozen different beginnings to this novel in a drawer. In graduate school, I wrote a short story about Sadie, albeit a very different version of her, and the story was published. But I had this sort of nagging feeling that I wasn’t finished with Sadie and her world yet, that there might actually be a novel there. So in the earliest drafts of Lights All Night Long, Sadie was the protagonist—and pregnant. In others, the perspective alternated between her and her mom and J.T. There were a few months when an oil worker on the Deepwater Horizon was involved.

None of these beginnings seemed to have the legs to make it past a hundred pages, though. And then Ilya’s character entered the story. This was not a mystical moment—I am generally against the spiritualization of the writing process. I had intended for Ilya to enter the story, but I hadn’t anticipated being so drawn to him. There was an instant energy to my writing, an eagerness to do it (which is rare for me). So I started exploring his backstory as a way to understand what it was that made me want to write about him, and once I delved into his past, the novel as it exists now began to take shape.

Wow, I’d completely assumed that you started with Ilya, partly because he’s the point-of-view character and partly because—and this is a weird leap—the specificity of the Russia sections somehow made me think the project was sparked by a need to write about Ilya’s crumbling, gritty hometown, which is definitely different from the bits of Russia that most often appear in our culture: onion domes, spies, ballerinas, Moscow nightclubs, etc. I think Berlozhniki is fictional, but had you been to a place like it? What kind of research did you do?

I think that energy in writing Ilya’s character did come from a need to write about Ilya and his world. I went to Russia as a teenager in the mid-’90s, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then again in 2008 on a research trip. But I didn’t get north of St. Petersburg on those trips, so Berlozhniki required an imaginative leap and a lot of research. I read political and economic histories of Russia in the ’90s and 2000s. I read memoirs. One Soldier’s War, by Arkady Babchenko, and Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier, were two of my favorites, as were Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories—both as works of art and as research for the novel.

Berlozhniki is loosely based on a city in Russia’s northwest called Vorkuta. I often use photos as inspiration and as research, and Donald Weber shot a series in Vorkuta in 2008 that I became obsessed with. A lot of his images found their way into the book’s imagery. Also, a couple of years into the drafting of the novel, Google added the Street View function to the map of Vorkuta (which I had spent a lot of time studying), and I was suddenly able to virtually roam the city. I spent a creepy amount of time doing this, accruing details: the names of grocery stores and what’s for sale in their windows; the particular graffiti (penises, as I’m sure you might guess, are globally popular); the make and model of the cars; and the fact that in June, when the Google car visited Vorkuta, there was still snow melting in the street.

Lights All Night Long has been described as a literary mystery, and I think that’s apt. I love mysteries. In the classic detective format, I love the satisfaction of seeing information come together to reveal a logical whole. I think there’s something very soothing (and sadly unrealistic) about that vision of a decipherable world. But I also think our lives are actually full of mysteries, big and small, and part of what we do every day is try to solve them. I’m curious what that designation means to you—what you think makes something a mystery—and how or if your writing process was informed by it.

I love murder mysteries. I grew up on them. I had close to an hour drive to and from school as a kid, and my mom and I would listen to mysteries constantly—Agatha Christie and Mary Higgins Clark and Sue Grafton and Arthur Conan Doyle and cozies. We were not picky; we’d check out as many per week as the library would allow. And often, after the drive home from school, we’d just keep sitting in her station wagon in the driveway, listening, wanting to get to the end. There was a formula to them that I understood even then, movements to the plot that were comforting in their consistency. The killer was never the first suspect, often the third. He (or, sometimes, excitingly, she) was someone you’d met, however glancingly, in the story.

When I set out to write a novel, I knew that I wanted it to be a mystery on some level, and it was reassuring to know what plot movements that would require, to be able to narrow my focus in that way. In the drafting, the murder mystery plot gave me momentum, it functioned as the novel’s skeleton, and then as the characters and their worlds developed, a larger, more central mystery started to sort of envelop it. Without spoiling the plot, I can say, too, that I was interested in the ways mysteries, their drama, their promise of a discrete solution, can actually blind us to other, more realistic—perhaps more mundane, but no less heartbreaking—threats.

Yes, totally. And I think the fact that we’re all mysteries to each other (and to ourselves, sometimes) is part of what drives us to read and write fiction. There’s always the hope of connection with a person or a character—successful empathy sometimes brings that feeling of solving something. I know you write short stories, too, and thinking of those and also maybe what you’re working on next, do you have a sense of some commonalities underlying your fiction? Like maybe interests and obsessions that creep in when you least expect? But also intentions or goals that you set for your work?

I’m sort of a chameleon writer—the worlds and characters and concerns of my stories vary a lot. But I often find myself writing from a point of fear, which is like the underbelly of empathy. I know I’m on the right track when I’m terrified for a character. Sometimes this fear is the inspiration for the story, more often it emerges as the story comes to a head. Also, I’m obsessed with memory, and the way these infinitesimal little tweaks in what we remember accrue until we’ve created full fictions about our lives and the people in them. Especially when grief is involved, and it becomes even more difficult to untangle the reality of the person loved and lost from what we might have wished of that person.

What kind of advice would you have for writers who are in the early and middle stages of drafting their first novels? Maybe it’s the same question, maybe separate, but what do you wish you’d known?

When I finished the very first draft of the novel, the ending didn’t work. I think there’s a tendency to talk about the writing process in spiritual terms—the muse singing, and the characters leading the way—and so when I hit this not good end of the draft, I felt a little betrayed (ok, more than a little). The muse had messed with me, my characters had led me to a dead end. There followed a very dark period of pulling the novel’s two storylines apart and trying to figure out where exactly I had gone wrong and how I might fix it. This is a long way of saying that there are those moments in writing, those highs that feel almost spiritual, but that the work of writing is in showing up for all the less inspired days, those days when the muse decides to stay in bed.

What’s a piece of culture—book, movie, TV series—that you’ve loved recently? What’s a piece of culture you’re excited to consume?

I just finished Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, and am in complete awe of it. I love her sentences—their lushness—and the story’s soaring, adventurous spirit that’s grounded by the grit, the texture, of all the settings the novel contains. And there are a lot! And while “excited” doesn’t feel like the appropriate word, I just bought Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl and am going to dive into it tonight. I loved Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, and I’m interested to see what other perspectives Higginbotham’s account offers. Then—full 180 here—there’s the final season of Broad City. I’m so excited about it that I keep not watching it, just cause I’ve managed to convince myself that Abbi and Ilana are my friends, and when it ends, my delusion will have to end with it.

Becoming a writer is a complex process with lots of moving parts, but how do you think about your experiences doing your MFA and your Stegner Fellowship in terms of your development?

Both my MFA program and the Stegner provided that ultimate luxury: debt-free time to write. I think of writing in terms of that Malcolm Gladwell axiom: it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. It’s hard to carve out that kind of time around the demands of a full-time job. At Michigan, where I got my MFA, I was fortunate to work with an amazing faculty—Doug Trevor, Michael Byers, Eileen Pollack, Peter Ho Davies, and Nick Delbanco—and I’m still in awe of their ability to read a terrible story (and the vast majority of those early stories of mine were terrible) and find the one thing in it that was slightly less terrible, that was, in fact, worthy of exploration. I wasn’t an English major, so in a sense I learned how to read as a writer at Michigan too. I remember there was this test the first year, and we got this epically long reading list: Anna Karenina and The Good Soldier and Native Son and Moby Dick…it went on and on. I hadn’t read any of them, and I spent the whole winter on nothing but that list, and what a dream winter it was. I had a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison right out of Michigan, and then a year living in my in-laws’ attic in South Carolina, and  by the time I made my way west for the Stegner program, I was working on a very early draft of Lights All Night Long. I workshopped the novel exhaustively during my Stegner years, and it simply wouldn’t exist without the insight from my fellow fellows and the faculty there.


Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. A third novel, Great Circle, will be published in 2021, with a short story collection to follow. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. A regular contributor to Travel + LeisureCondé Nast Traveler, and Departures, Maggie has also been published many other places, including Outside, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and The Best American Short Stories, and has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction.

FICTION WRITERS REVIEW




Thursday, April 25, 2019

Lucia Joyce / To Dance in the Wake




Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake


Most accounts of James Joyce's family portray Lucia Joyce as the mad daughter of a man of genius, a difficult burden. But in this important new book, Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different, more dramatic truth: her father loved Lucia, and they shared a deep creative bond. 

Lucia was born in a pauper's hospital and educated haphazardly across Europe as her penniless father pursued his art. She wanted to strike out on her own and in her twenties emerged, to Joyce's amazement, as a harbinger of expressive modern dance in Paris. He described her then as a wild, beautiful, "fantastic being" whose mind was "as clear and as unsparing as the lightning." The family's only reader of Joyce, she was a child of the imaginative realms her father created, and even after emotional turmoil wrought havoc with her and she was hospitalized in the 1930s, he saw in her a life lived in tandem with his own. 
Though most of the documents about Lucia have been destroyed, Shloss painstakingly reconstructs the poignant complexities of her life--and with them a vital episode in the early history of psychiatry, for in Joyce's efforts to help her he sought the help of Europe's most advanced doctors, including Jung. In Lucia's world Shloss has also uncovered important material that deepens our understanding of "Finnegans Wake," the book that redefined modern literature.

Book Review: Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake



I recently read Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, by Carol Loeb Shloss. It chronicles the life and death of Lucia Joyce, the daughter of literary legend, James Joyce.



I have to be blunt. I was incredibly disappointed with this book. It is one of the most dreadfully boring biographies I have ever read in my life.

I snatched this book up from the library because Lucia Joyce is fabulous. She was a phenomenal dancer whose talent was overshadowed by her brilliant and famous father. Her career was stifled because of a permanent trip to the loony bin.



Lucia is, in fact, such a fiery, dynamic character that it seems almost impossible that someone was able to make her life seem so dry.

The author, Shloss, spent most of her adult life researching the novelist's daughter.

But, that's the problem. This book reads more like a textbook than a biography. And it's NOT a small book.

It even got to the point where I couldn't finish it.

I don't recommend this book.

But, I do want you to know a little bit about Lucia.



Growing up, Lucia was ambitious for fame. She longed to be recognized for her own talents as a dancer, rather than for simply being James Joyce's daughter.

After all, her father was one of the most influential writers in the 20th century. Everyone, even Marilyn Monroe, was obsessed with his work.



Lucia and her father were extremely close. It is even believed that she was the muse for his final novel, Finnegan's Wake.

Life seemed perfect while she was a young adult. She was the daughter of one of the most famous men in the world, she was becoming a well-known dancer in Europe, and she was dating literary genius Samuel Beckett, who was at the time her father's protege.



But, unfortunately, happiness doesn't last forever.

Her mental state began deteriorating and her life began to fall apart. Samuel called off their relationship. She began showing signs of schizophrenia. She had to quit dancing.



Her father became sick with worry and consumed with helplessness. His friends panicked that his daughter's mental breakdown was causing him to lose concentration on his writing.

Believing his work to be more important than his daughter, his wife and son quickly had Lucia hospitalized.



This caused James even more unhappiness and distress. He never believed his daughter was insane. He believed she was merely a free spirit, driven by passion to dance as he was to writing.

But he died before he could save Lucia.

She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.



Today it is widely believed, especially with the help of Shloss's research, that Lucia might not have been mentally ill, but simply wild-tempered. There are many people who believe she was wrongly imprisoned.

Scary, isn't it?

I feel bad giving this book such an awful review, because the research Shloss did was absolutely incredible. I think the book could be a goldmine for a screenplay. Lucia's life could be an Oscar-worthy film, I would think...




Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Paul Klee / Burdened Children


Paul Klee

Burdened Children

1930



Paul Klee worked on small scale, creating microcosmic worlds in drawingswatercolours and oils. Frequently creations of the imagination and often childlike in their apparent simplicity and directness, his pictures were nonetheless rooted in acute observations of the natural world, human behaviour and an appreciation of the small, unremarked incidents of everyday life. 


Klee’s appointment in 1921 as a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar introduced a new phase in his art. He began to formulate a more theoretical approach, giving his art a rational basis as a counterweight to the power of intuition. His pedagogical notebooks formed the basis of lectures and of several essays he wrote in the early 1920s, in which he explored the fundamental components of his creative process: line, tone-value and colour. However, Klee still believed that theory was but a means to an end. 

Burdened Children illustrates the manner in which Klee elaborated elements of these fundamental principles. ‘I begin where all pictorial form begins: with a point that sets itself in motion.’ (Quoted in Spiller 1961, p.24.) This drawing demonstrates the movement from a point to a line, which in turn creates planar forms. It consists of an almost unbroken line that forms a series of round-cornered, interlocking boxes. Klee then added stick legs and eyes to give the shapes a human character. It was unusual for Klee to have given the two figures such heavy outlines, a feature chiefly associated with his work in the later 1930s. However, the heavy black might have been one reason for giving the drawing its title. Klee clearly found something unusual in this composition, because he made five different variants in different media. Of these, the closest in compositional elements to this work is Twins, 1930 (present location unknown), although Klee filled the inner planes of the figures with a combination of shading, hatching and dots. 

Further reading 
Jürg Spiller (ed.), Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye. The Notebooks of Paul Klee, London 1961 
Agnès de La Baumelle, ‘Paul Klee’, in Die Sammlung Kahnweiler: Von Gris, Braque, Léger und Klee bis Picasso, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, Düsseldorf 1994, pp.158-61
Sean Rainbird, ‘Paul Klee’, in Jennifer Mundy (ed.), Cubism and its Legacy: The Gift of Gustav and Elly Kahnweiler, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2004, pp.50-1, 54, reproduced p.55 in colour 


Sean Rainbird 
December 2003 
Revised by Giorgia Bottinelli 
June 2004

TATE



Paul Klee / Works


WORKS
by Paul Klee


JARDINES TUNECINOS, 1919


GATO Y PÁJARO

ELLA RUGE, NOSOTROS JUGAMOS, 1928

CÚPULAS ROJAS Y BLANCAS, 1914

AD PARNASSUM, 1932

RED BALLOON

CAMINOS PRINCIPALES Y CAMINOS LATERALES, 1929

MÁQUINA TEMBLOROSA, 1922

CAUTIVO, 1922


INSULA DULCAMARA

Drawn One, 1935

EL MENSAJERO DE OTOÑO

LA MÁSCARA

SENECIO, 1922




Bogata Przystan


EROS
AD MARGINEM

RECONSTRUCCIÓN, 1926

REFUGIO, 1930

SONIDO ANTIGUO, ABSTRACTO EN NEGRO, 1924

"El color me posee. No siempre me poseen. Ese es el significado de esta hora feliz: el color y yo somos uno. Soy un pintor"


NEW HARMONY




LA MUERTE Y EL FUEGO


PEZ MÁGICO


EL PEZ DORADO


EL JARDÍN ROSA, 1925

EMERGEN DE LA NOCHE GRIS