Farewell, Hitch

There's really nothing much more to say because it would be far too long. Lovely photograph of Christopher on the picket line, on the left, where I wish he'd stayed. Via Prospect. Washington just got a whole lot duller, believe me. His tag at Vanity Fair.

Update - Ian McEwan's beautiful remembrance in The Guardian.

Every Leaf a Flower

Camus' view of autumn--Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. How very cheerful, really. (I won't hold that against him, though I'm beyond crabby.) It's still mostly green here, the odd yellow leaf blowing past. This beautiful photograph uses the Orton effect (see here) & was taken in Germany by the generous Olga. I was going to sneak political & social commentary in but Arts & Letters Daily is not making it easy. (I saw something interesting & cannot access it within the minutes I allow self to do this sort of thing.) Oh well. I can whip up & fold in sneaky links any time. (You can enjoy the photograph much more on Olga's flickr stream.)

Reminder: Don't forget about this dress design contest. I cannot stress enough: you just have to have a good idea & sketch a bit. You don't have to sew it, make a pattern, etc. Shabby Apple Dresses, Dare to Design. The competition ends Friday, 15 October. Then we'll vote.

Lemon-ism

Can I share with you my worldview? All of humankind has one thing in common: the sandwich. I believe that all anyone really wants in this life is to sit in peace and eat a sandwich.--Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) No. 16 on the funniest Liz Lemon-sims, here.

I had no idea that NBC's website was so amusingly interactive. Probably because MSNBC is trying to draw attention away from the fact that they are fomenting (I love that word) the leftist revolution that they hope to televise. Or something. Someone actually said this within my privacy-bubble-sandwich-consuming space. And I thought getting out to write was a good thing. Criminy.

(photograph of Liz via apartment therapy, she is pondering "decorganizing"; lemon girl by cig harvey via a cup of jo, via little sussy)

Week's End - Fiammetta

It's too soon for autumn leaves but the photograph reminds me of fiammetta - little flame. Or, if you want to be picky about it, fiammette (plural, I am assuming & I'm not checking my dictionary. Correct me, I don't mind at all.) I've been reading Boccaccio via Keats (Isabella and the Pot of Basil). I was vaguely aware that Bocaccio was another Italian inspired by a woman who didn't look at him twice. (Petrarch, too.)

This past spring, I won La Bella Lingua by Dianne Hales from Michelle Fabio's Bleeding Espresso. Dianne wrote a charming chapter on Italian's Literary Lions. As soon as I read, "For years I barely glanced at the white marble busts of Italy's grandi that line the shady paths of Rome's Pincio, the gardens above the Piazza del Popolo," I thought/yelled "I noticed!" But Dianne was doing something I have never done in Rome--jogged. I salute her - it's a great place to run.

I'm in more fragile health & feeling Keats-y, so if there today, I'd be walking by that gorgeous view & sighing. Mainly about the horrible news from Italy & France that Roma are being treated worse than usual. I'm beyond upset. (You just knew I'd turn this into something sad, right? An editor once said to me...you turn a lovely poem into the apocalypse every damn time. Crikey. -- he was English. Then he went on to say something rude about melancholic Welsh ethnic stuff. Harumph.)

Where are the writers, the artists, the poets, the philosophers? (They are actually still valued in some fashion in Europe, unlike here in America.) Well, there are protests, yes. I'll find individual names as soon as I post this. But Italy. France. Shame. Your noble pasts will be so much cold marble statuary lining grand avenues if you continue this outrage. We'll leave WWII out of this, ahem, for now. (I'm talking to you, too, Hungary.) Scapegoats. Remind you of anything? Suddenly, flaming red maples, little flames licking at the blue sky don't seem so innocent.

Apologies to Dianne, for using her charming love letter to Italian in this manner. I did not plan it (obviously, or I'd taken more care with grammar). But that's it; I can't do much more today or the rest of the weekend. Here's where you can buy it (& visit Dianne). I definitely recommend it. This know-it-all didn't know most of it (so far). Giulia Geranium is supposed to start again on Tuesday; but I'm postponing it until I see friends off to Sudan next Sunday.

(The beautiful Jen Gotch photograph via Joanna Goddard's Cup of Jo)

All the Way to the End

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity." --Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm running out of steam for the week, but I've been thinking about Ted Hughes' theory that all art originates from a wound in the artist. He does a better job of 'esplaining it. But Rilke certainly will do.

I heard from a friend today in Prague (he's been living with his wife Vera in an apartment in Prague Castle that Václav Havel arranged for them. It didn't even faze me - of course, you're living in the Castle. I'd already heard but didn't want to spoil his moment.) He is a novelist & filmmaker & friend of perv Milan Kundera. When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was released as book (& then as film later), I asked Arnošt. Well? "Exactly, exactly how it was. That bastard, he did it!" Then he picked me up & whirled me around the room.

It was/is a tight circle of friends/frenemies & a highly competitive bunch, of course: writers, painters, photographers, filmmakers, journos, etc. They supported the "wrong" person in 1968 & were invited to leave. Kundera's success spurred them all on (including director Miloš Forman). I hope someone writes a book about this gang of devils. (There are more.)

Arnošt & Vera lent me 'the borrowed flat' in Jerusalem for many weekends. They sat with me in the - I am not kidding - Elizabeth Taylor Cafeteria...or maybe it was the Frank Sinatra cafeteria (there were two) & tried to make me laugh. One time I got in a car with them. Only once. I was in the back seat with an old friend who then lived in Israel. He started to laugh hysterically...maybe it was the idea of the two of us tootling around the city with our friend--who should never drive (do you hear me, A?) anywhere. Ever. I accessed my "if I go, I go" attitude used to good effect in Greek & Italian taxis. Anyway, those wild & crazy Czechs, they lent me the flat for which I'll be eternally grateful. Now I want to stay at Prague Castle.

Here's to brave people - who, amazingly, miraculously laugh (with a large side of irony). And take it all the way to the end.

[two stills from Unbearable Lightness of Being, still photographer-genius Phil Bray; the "real" iconic photograph via filmwell(dot)org]

Atonement

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no-one was." --From Atonement, by Ian McEwan

Some pretty photographs for the next few days & I hope they will divert bizarre people away from my blogs. I'm being comment-spammed like mad. Found out last evening that my mailing address has been changed (for some things, not sure of extent yet) & much is missing.

I do not apologize for one single thing I have said or written (or thought) the last several days & weeks here...certainly I have much to atone for in my life. But my crime of late, if anything, is silliness. Which never killed anyone. Unless they died laughing. If I die laughing, many years from now (!), I shall be grateful.

I shall respond to your lovely comments & emails. Soon. Difficult week (more than usual) ahead. Cheers, everyone.

[Atonement stills by Alex Bailey - the "happy ending" Briony, in her guilt, her atonement, granted to Cecilia & Robbie. I just reread the novel.]

A Planet Without Flowers

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.--Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Not Murdoch's finest book, but she's so damned quotable. Very sorry to see secret-lover-for-thirty-years stories rising to the top in a quick Iris search. I thought cream rose to the top. Blech. (In March, I'm not linking to any.) Can no one keep their mouth shut anymore? Swine.

Photograph of Gemma Ward by Steven Meisel for Vogue 2006. It's via my crummy scanner (now deceased) but I see that it's in more than a few tumblrs, here. More photos from the Vogue 2006 editorial are in dustjacket attic.

Week's End - Don't Shoot the Piano Player

"Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best."

Laughed out loud this morning when reminded of Oscar Wilde's reaction to an American saloon sign as "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across." Thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac.

Happy 155th Birthday, Oscar. You don't look a day over 30, darling. Never l'esprit d'escalier for you.

[Oscar Wilde in his favourite coat. New York. Picture by Napoleon Sarony(1821-1896) via Library of Congress.]

Gloria in Black & White

We will have real health care reform in this country or I'll eat my huge, polka-dotted umbrella.

[Photographs by Yale Joel for LIFE, 1965]

A Molly Bloom

The first person to send me flowers. [Siobhán McKenna by G. Mili from LIFE archives, taken in Ireland, 1956.]

Ayelet's Essay - A True Story

A writer friend just sent out a link to her essay for The Huffington Post, titled A Modicum of Dr. George Tiller's Courage. I have been remiss in linking her banner & new book on the site. As I said I would do, oh, a few months ago. I hope you will read what Ayelet has to say. She makes it quite clear that it is "Our Story" -- meaning with her husband.

This is necessarily quick; I half-fainted yesterday (not at home, egad), so I'm grounded & cannot go a panel on Jerusalem as scheduled today. The iris because they're Ayelet's favorite (or used to be...OK, she just said, link away & didn't mention any disaffection with iris, so here we go.) Mother's day flowers by the lovely George Brett, a local photographer.

Week's End - The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

No time for other photos, perhaps I'll do that when I return from the outside world. [see 4 June update at bottom, if it really matters.]

This has been in mind all last night (& the past year). I posted about it twice in the Giulia Geranium blog. Once last June (in our random series, "Scots We Like...") & again at the beginning of this year.

Let's just say that if an interesting, attractive, single man approaches you while you are sitting at an Amnesty International table, engages animatedly with you for who-knows-how-long, & offers not once, but THREE times, to fetch his copy of an alumni magazine to give to you...take the offer. Because no matter how much information you've exchanged, if you don't know his name or where he works, duh, you'll never be able to contact him if you finally, finally get what he was trying to say (beyond the importance of hearing this speech).This was witnessed by a good friend who knows what she sees, she couldn't believe what she saw. I am, in fact, an idiot quite often.

Returning home that day, after my personal failure-in-hindsight, I read the speech online (dial-up doesn't do YouTube). I was a sobbing mess after reading about Rowling's early stint at Amnesty's London office. I knew exactly what she meant & have been in the same exact situation. I knew she'd spoken at Harvard; the press mentioned not one bloody thing about Amnesty. I (& enlisted others) badgered them to finally mention her shout-out on the mother-page website. I began to post regularly on GG (one-year anniversary is Monday, 4 May) because of this encounter. I just saw, when I went to get the link that it took me from 15 June to 21 June to post it. Hmmm.

Over the past year, I've received (& continue to receive) scores of email (I didn't take comments on GG until recently) from humanitarian field workers thanking me for posting it. This was the first they heard of the speech, too. So I'm rerunning the photo that I found back then, the link to Harvard Magazine, online.

A stubborn, peeved me wants to reprint the whole thing here & force the issue. But if people don't want to read it, what can I do? It's hugely important to me. And if anything comes out of my personal failure to act, then that will be something. Yes, he came back & left his contact information; the idiot at the table who relieved me of duty felt it was "inappropriate" & tossed it. I got that much out of my colleague. And no, the man does not know it. So, while I hear from people around the world, someone who lives but two miles (at most) is out of reach. Yes, I was a reporter & have excellent investigative skills & a bunch of information. Couldn't be done, gracefully.

I'll be back but I don't know when. Meanwhile, I see that The Clever Pup has a mouth-watering feast to attend ...I see it in my Google Reader...and very important: Tina's dad at The English Muse was rushed to hospital...please check in on her, those of you who are regulars. I can only see that he's OK but can't see the details. She must be slammed with exhaustion.
See you later. Happy May Day.

[4 June 2009 temporary update to photos: JK Rowling writing-in-full-view because I cannot stand to see the Harvard photo come up in LinkedWithin every single day so many times. Still looking for better pix. 4 June 2009]
[second photo/Harvard University Magazine/online]

Never Again: What You Do Matters

Same title as on the Giulia Geranium blog. It's this year's (American) theme for Holocaust Remembrance Days (19-26 April). For more details please go there. Worlds collide but sometimes it's too much--even for me. (photo credit)

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
— Elie Wiesel

Please visit the cleverest of Canadian pups for her fascinating post today. I know (or knew) many people who were at Terezín & have heard about the opera Brundibár, but have not seen the documentary about which she writes so beautifully. The outside world calls, so please visit The Clever Pup & also the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for more archival material than you could hope to use in a lifetime. Some of it is newly-released & I believe some is online now for non-scholarly (in the strictest sense) work.