Allen Ginsberg Photographs to the University of Toronto

A giant collection of some 7,500 Allen Ginsberg photographs have been donated by the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation to the University of Toronto, which announced the gift in January. They now reside there in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and some have been made available online.

According to the University's press announcement:

"The Ginsberg prints provide visual insight into New York urban landscape from the 1950s to the 1990s. They also document Ginsberg’s international travels to Canada, France, India, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, the USSR and many other nations."

Here's a photograph that is not in their collection, taken January 21st, 1986 upon arriving at the Sandino International Airport in Managua. Ginsberg, Pedro Pietri and a group of North American writers and artists (myself included) had been invited to participate in an "invasion of poets" for the 1986 Ruben Dario Festival.

Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Cardenal, Allen Ginsberg
Sandino International Airport, Managua
January 21, 1986

Bruegel in Words

As Above, So Below (2002), a novel by Rudy Rucker, gives us a lively if somewhat melodramatic fictional account of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The known details of Bruegel's life are few so Rucker layers his novel with fairly prosaic relationships, almost soap opera-esque, and colors the narrative with known historical detail of the Low Countries under the reign of Charles the V and Phillip the II of Spain. What the novel lacks in prose elegance and style it makes up for by conjuring the sights, sounds, smells, and day-to-day goings-on of life in places like Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen in the 1500s.

During Bruegel's short life (1525-1569) he no doubt witnessed the atrocities and persecutions perpetrated by the Spanish monarchy against the occupied peoples of the Low Countries. His Massacre of the Innocents, a Biblical theme, has been adapted to portray a village scene in his native country and depicts the depredations unleashed on the citizens by the soldiers and mercenaries of the Spanish Crown. Rucker includes various details and scenes that aptly illustrate life under occupation and weaves these into the imagined narrative of Bruegel's life.

Massacre of the Innocents, 1567

The novel begins with Bruegel as a young man traveling to Rome and encountering real mountains (the Alps) for the first time (a salient detail as Bruegel would become known as one of the greatest landscape artists of all time), and ends with his untimely death of an unspecified stomach condition in 1569. In between, Rucker uses Bruegel's masterpieces as jumping off points for creating the fictional details of his novel. It's a useful method and lends meaning, real or not, to the works themselves while allowing the author to sketch key periods of the artist's life.

For those interested in his research and process, Rucker has posted his notes on the writing of So Above, So Below.

Two other novels in which Bruegel plays a staring role are Bruegel, or A Workshop of Dreams by Claude-Henri Rocquet (1991), and Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn, both worth reading.

Close to the Fireworks

The balcony on the 4th floor of the Hotel Odinsve provided a bird's eye view of the local neighborhood fireworks on New Years Eve in Reykjavik.

Iceland, No Irony in New Years Celebration

Arriving at the Hotel Odinsve, Reykjavik, 12/31/13

The New Years celebrations that go on in Iceland, particularly in Reykjavik, could never happen in the United States. They could never take place in a country that routinely bombs other countries, that has an aggressive military industrial complex, a country in which police violence is endemic. Not with the gusto on display in Iceland and on such a massive scale, essentially 24 hours of thunder and lightening. Oh wait, there are the 4th of July celebrations across the US, true. They are certainly ironic given our penchant for launching missiles from drones. But I digress.

Iceland celebrates with explosions. With rockets and flares and showers of colored sparks. And without irony. Iceland has no military and the first police killing of a civilian in the country's 50+ year history occurred last year. And the police apologized. So no, there's no irony in the great Nordic fiesta. Instead, there's fun, glee, impish delight in loud noises, civic rapport.

View from the 4th Floor Balcony

Fireworks are sold legally throughout the holiday period and sales are especially brisk on the day of New Years Eve. All the proceeds from fireworks sales go to the country's emergency response and search & rescue teams so buying, and setting off, fireworks is not only encouraged but something of a citizen's duty. Throughout Reykjavik and its suburban environs, explosions and flashes of light and sparkles of flame begin early in the day and continue on into the night, increasing in intensity as midnight approaches.

Just to be clear - you can buy powerful, commercial strength fireworks on the street in the city and set them off right there on the sidewalk, between the buildings, firing them aloft right above the neighborhood. This goes on all over town. You literally have to be careful where you walk for fear of rounding a corner and coming upon a box of bottle rockets about to launch.

Everyone is good-natured about the whole thing, whole families stroll the streets, groups of friends gather in bunches talking and drinking. Toward midnight everyone streams up Skólavörðustígur St heading to the Hallgrímskirkja, the towering church that sits atop a hill in central Reykjavik.

 Hallgrímskirkja

Normally I'm unnerved by thronging masses, particularly in America where decorum and civility can often go missing, but this crowd was, in as much as a crowd can be one thing, polite. Or maybe considerate. Certainly not threatening. Plenty of civility. And enough decorum to make the genuinely enthusiastic reveling charming rather than boorish.

I witnessed one scene that sort of epitomizes the consideration of the citizens. From our hotel room's top floor balcony I watched a father & son, later joined by the mother, emerge from their apartment building across the street. They carried a duffel bag-sized cache of fireworks which they set down on the sidewalk. A few feet farther on was the entrance to an iced-over parking lot and there the family began setting of their fireworks. First little fizzy ground sparklers, then hissing ground spinner things, then firecrackers in whole packs and long strings. Finally they got to the big stuff, the rockets. The fuses crackled with white sparks and then the rockets whizzed upward and exploded not 30 feet above where we stood on the balcony. A wild burst of volcanic energy of the kind that almost never manifests in the demeanor of an Icelander.

Scene of the Fireworks, December 31, 2013

When the explosions finished I cheered and whooped the way an American sports fan would but the family below kept silent, almost as if they'd committed a solemn task that shouldn't be profaned with raucous behavior. Without saying much to each other, they very carefully picked up all the debris from their little explosive fun and took it with them, back into their building. A few minutes later, the father re-emerged to pick up a final scrap of something he'd dropped. I was particularly impressed because it was very clear that these people were just ordinary conscientious Reykjavikians who cared about their city and who simply did the right thing. They didn't do what they did because they thought someone was watching, because they thought they would look good or would receive an offer to do a reality TV show about their lives. They were just being stewards of their neighborhood and, by extension, their country.

But I saw them. They moved me.

What I didn't see was a single policeman during the entire celebration. Granted, I didn't stay out until the wee hours but I was out for the hubbub of the night, the main event. In America, the police presence would have been massive. And no one would have dared light off a firecracker. In America, the police shoot people everyday. But here, in Iceland's capital, with public drinking in the streets and amateur pyrotechnics setting the sky ablaze, not one uniformed official appeared in the midst.

That, I realized, was real freedom.

Crosby in December

December 10, 1929. Eighty four years ago yesterday. What a bizarre loss & waste of vibrant life. Harry Crosby (1898-1929).

2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of The Great War. A catastrophic war across generations. The media will wallow in relentless memorializing and somber grandstanding. But who among the talking heads will mention Crosby?

Image from the Collection of Southern Illinois University

1924 entry from Shadows of the Sun:*

December 11.  Studied Sufism. ...  " - The human soul belongs to the spiritual world and is ever seeking to be re-united to its source (the Sun). Such union is hindered by the bodily senses but though not permanently attainable until death, it can be enjoyed at times at the state called ecstasy when the veil of sensual perception is rent asunder and the soul is merged in God (in the Sun)"

* Black Sparrow, 1977, pg.63

Scholars point to Crosby's experience as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I as singularly influential on the course of his life. That's hard to argue with.

Bruegel in Detroit

How did Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Wedding Dance" end up in the Detroit Institute of Art? It was purchased by the city for the museum, true, but whose idea was it to buy it? And what kind of discussions went on in the offices of city power over whether to buy it or not? I would love to know the back story of how it ended up where it did. Unfortunately, whether it stays in that beleaguered city remains to be seen.

Detroit is a broken city, buried in debt. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported on a federal ruling holding that the city could formally enter bankruptcy and that city pensions were "not inviolable." Now, the city's creditors and a host of economists, politicians, art world professionals, and lawyers are vying for a say in what happens to DIA's collection. They say the art collection is a city asset and selling it to raise capital to service the debt should be considered. If legally binding pensions are in jeopardy, is there any doubt the art is going to the auction block?

DIA's director, Graham W. J. Beal, thinks not. He stated so in a September 2013 post on DIA's blog, writing that the museum has "...no intention of breaching the most fundamental tenet of the art museum world: that art in the collection can only be sold to acquire more (and better) art." Unfortunately, when it all plays out, the director may be powerless in deciding what happens to the collection he oversees. And what happens in Detroit may have wider ramifications. Other cities across America will no doubt face similar dilemmas in the future. It's not too far a stretch to think that other major public collections around the country could one day end up being sold to pay down city or state debt.

What will happen to "The Wedding Dance" or to the great Diego Rivera murals that adorn the walls of the building itself?

The Wedding Dance, 1566

The Kraus Project

I'm no fan of Jonathan Franzen, at least not his fiction. I didn't care much for Freedom. But wait. That's the only fiction by Franzen that I've read, so it's unfair of me to say that I don't care for his fiction. All right, point taken - let's just say that, though I read the whole book, I did not like nor enjoy Freedom.

His essay "Farther Away" (it first appeared in The New Yorker and later was included in the eponymous volume, Farther Away) I found brave and engaging. That he would dare convey personal negative thoughts about David Foster Wallace in print was scandalous (to some). I found it refreshing, and interesting. Other essays in the same book are appealing as well. Franzen writes clean prose and his thinking is not trite nor his observations banal. He is a writer worth reading.

Yet he seems to be a lightening rod for animosity. Critics, offended women writers, amateur literary commentators and bloggers, all loathe him. In particular, the techies despise him and heap scorn upon him for criticizing the internet, social media, the fetishization of gadgets and technology. Oh, and heavens, he's a birdwatcher too. Scorn! Caustic flame attack! Ridicule!

His latest publication, The Kraus Project, hadn't been out a week before its contents had raised a firestorm of invective and condemnation. Shame on Franzen! He criticized Rushdie for using Twitter. He dared suggest that the internet and social media were NOT the greatest cultural advances since the printing press. He took Amazon to task for its destructive impact on independent bookstores. Heresy!

Yet lost in all the derision was any discussion (that I read, anyway) of what seems to me the most interesting thing about The Kraus Project, namely the concept of the work itself, and the form it takes. Basically, he presents two essays by the Viennese curmudgeon, writer, critic Karl Kraus (think fin de siecle Vienna) that he, Franzen, translated from the German. Okay, if you're a Karl Kraus fan (and there surely are some out there) or if you're a German lit major or a translator, you might come at this volume from your singular perspective. But if you're like me, who'd never heard of Karl Kraus, who doesn't care about the adequacy (or inadequacy) of Franzen's translation (it turns out that Kraus wrote deliberately opaque & difficult prose), then you'll come at this book from another angle. Or not pick it up at all.

I'm enthralled with it. I can barely read two pages at a time. I don't understand most of the Kraus stuff. And I'm only 40 pages into it. But you know what? It's fascinating! Why? Because the form is very different, very innovative. (Okay, sure, someone has to have done something like this before - who can possibly do anything completely "original" anymore?). Well, this work seems very new and fresh to me.

As I see it, the translations are simply a platform from which to jump off into a wide array of other topics; memoir-ish recollections, social criticism (the aforementioned condemnation of our gadget & internet-obsessed cultural moment), literary history, historical anecdotes, etc. It's collage-like and divergent, informed and curious. It meanders. It rants. It elucidates. It praises.

These days it's as if people who write about books, who review books,  people who read & discuss books, all seem hell bent on either smarmy, wise-ass put-downs, or hyper-critical analysis, all very serious and edgy and pointed. After a point, I get sick of it all and have to throw up my hands with an expectorated "WTF?!" At least when it comes to Franzen, everyone tries to one up the next person in their ability to lay waste to the man's work (or reputation, or hobbies, or choice in glasses or whatever).

Be that as it may .... I recommend this odd book. Even if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and don't care a thing about essays in translations. Actually, it might even be more interesting if you know nothing about Karl Kraus and could care less about the accuracy of the translation from German into English. It's a quirky original dalliance, the best of eccentric intellectual sketching.

Oh, and the footnotes. What I don't mention above is that the Kraus essays seem like just material that Franzen can hang his footnotes on. This is not a bad thing. This is the oddity of the work, the weirdness that makes it so intriguing. The heart of the book are the footnotes. In the footnotes, we get the memoir stuff, the human connection stuff, the divergent interesting literary aside stuff. In short, we get the stuff that transcends the stuffy huffing and puffing of Karl Kraus on, per the first essay, Heinrich Heine.

But what did Franzen think when he decided to go all in with the footnote set-up? Surely he must have been aware that people would call him out on their use and infer that he was aping David Foster Wallace. Oddly, I have not seen that particular complaint leveled at him (though I stopped reading the carping reviews after a few). For what it's worth, I love footnotes. And David Foster Wallace, for all the fame (or infamy) his extensive use of them engendered (technically-speaking, in Infinite Jest, they are endnotes, not footnotes, but they function the same), he did not invent the footnote. He used them to great effect, and Wallace's are brilliant, engaging and, I would argue, essential to the character of the works in which he employs them. But they are not solely Wallace's domain.

So I'll give Franzen credit for crafting his own book around them, it's a courageous undertaking, one that, in my opinion, earns The Kraus Project enthusiastic accolades.