GARY BRIECHLE ~

My idea here with a camera and a book is not to showcase the whole book for the viewer, or even in order — it's to allow 'a look'. After all, I'm a writer, reader, publisher of books and bookseller, so my plan forever has been the life of the book. I want you to seek out this fine book, this fine photographer, and to have the book in your lap looking it through and to put it up onto a shelf. To keep it, or give it to someone else. Hand to hand. Face to face. Eye to eye. The elemental earth stuff.

Maine is an interesting corner state on the US map. When we talk to our local post office they tell us of all the boxes they use as files to ship mail out from Vermont, little goes to Maine.

Many of Gary Briechle's photographs come out of Maine.

~ BA

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2013/01/gary-briechle-photographs.html

KEVIN BARRY ~

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/apr/10/1



 There Are Little Kingdoms (2007)  short stories
  
 City of Bohane (2011) novel

Dark Lies the Island (2012)  short stories



 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/11/12/jumping-off-a-cliff-an-interview-with-kevin-barry/

MANIFEST ~

Dear —


Another hard wired week in frigid cold. Sweetheart bouncing back after the flu. I'm almost 100%. It takes 10 days we hear but we push by day 5.

I spoke with a logger friend this morning, he's weary. Getting in and out of the woods is four times the work with all this cold and snow. It's taking a toll on every one. Sugaring wants to start, too cold for sugaring to start, it's at a standstill. Stuck in ice. Rhythms are all askew.

You must see The Great Beauty, and it almost deserved the Oscar last night. Like I say, it has too limited of an audience appeal, while marvelous. The Act of Killing is the greater film but too courageous and edgy and independent for the Oscar mentality. The Great Beauty holds all of that old Italian verve and foolishness minced with a Roman appeal. It isn't Fellini though, no one is.

I'm with J — much to be depressed about the Oscars and even angry, starting with a film like Gravity winning hand over fist — it's a sham, relying on pyrotechnics (which work for the most part) but the story line and acting remains ridiculous and trying. And to double the frustration — the director is a long time skilled cinema master, who of course knows better, but is selling out.

Another friend found the ending of Nebraska "manifest" when I find every inch of the film that way, except the ending. Every single character in that film comes through except the sulking and spoiled Bruce Dern. . .who is starting to appear this way now in public. Yes, he looked depressed at the Oscars but not for the same reason I was. I've been following his career a long time, and have taken lots of time to watch and listen to him through every talk show and the IFC Spirit Awards last Saturday night — the same sulking, fragile, tempered old hipster from good family stock. On screen and off.
He's one more true American Boy who believed in the Dream, then played wicked ones and "bastards" (as he says) and somehow can't get why he didn't make it. He was used. If they can, they use up all us Dreamers.

In Nebraska each character is well-etched and they hold true: the two sons make a rounded appearance; June Squibb as the wife does her part, nagging and all, and manifests by lifting her dress over the gravestone to a former skirt chaser, giving a wiggle. Stacy Keach plays his swarmy "right and wrong" theme onto Will Forte, and finally, Forte, smashes the 250 pound feed bag Keach into the bar stools (hurts his hand). The gorgeous choreography of the old farm couple not at home, who come home, catch the wily family in their car in the dooryard and wander over to see what is up. Beautifully handled. Manifest. All the brothers, reticent and pure, come through in the living room and dining room scenes, and all along the way we have to tolerate the sulking Dern. Barely lifts an eye. Even slightly more unkempt than I believe he would have been. A little exaggerated. After Forte buys his father (Dern) the used truck, the new air compressor, Dern lifts his head and gives his son a side-long glance in the cab of the truck, but he quickly drops his head so it isn't quite seen except by us. . .and that's why I believe the character missed out, and so did the director, in that final far away silhouette shot. . . The Grapes of Wrath distance (Tom Joad on the road). . . I believe the story and both characters needed certainly not a hug (that would be exaggerated), but a hand from the father onto the shoulder of his son as he passed him by changing seat positions in the truck. A sureness. Without it, the film remains a little too dry, austere, and even bruised with cynicism.

The young Kenyan woman, Lupita Nyong’o, winning was all I wanted to see happen at the Oscars last night. 12 Years A Slave receiving its recognition. The rest was shalmtz. It's crushing how low it's been pitched.

To build a fire.

I'm off to snowshoe the woodlot trail. It's been so cold so long the deer have driven deeper into the wood and are bedded down not moving a muscle. I get a vole or bird tracks at best on my trail. At the window: cardinals, bluejays, nuthatch, chickadees, and two burly gray squirrels who like to talk back.

 

                      

Man With A Movie Camera ~

Russian 1929 silent documentary by "Dziga Vertov" 
who was actually born David Abelevich Kaufman in 1896.

POSTCARD 28 ~

In Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

A typical scene long remembered by travelers along the Loop Highway

during the spring and early summer months.

published by eastman's studio, susanville, ca.

TABU LEY ROCHEREAU ~

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/11/tabu-ley-rochereau

FAKING IT ~

Room with Eye (1930)

Maurice Tabard, French, 1897-1984

"Maurice Tabard, like other Surrealist photographers, practiced darkroom sleight of hand to produce bizarre and dreamlike effects, using photography as a means of uncovering the hidden recesses of the mind. Working as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris, Tabard began to incorporate into his own photographs his mentor's experimental techniques: multiple exposure, solarization, negative printing, and photomontage. He often combined several techniques in a single image, deliberately and elaborately manipulating his negatives to confound and disorient viewers. 

. . .In the photomontage of 1930, a woman's eye peers into a small, empty room furnished only with a radiator and a door at the far end. Whether a reference to the inner life of the mind, to the soul, or even to the camera obscura — literally, a dark room fitted with a lens at one end — the image reads as a metaphor for photography itself."

— Emily Ackerman

Faking It

Manipulated Photography 

Before Photoshop
by Mia Fineman

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

2012

JOSEPH CORNELL ~

 

Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels
103 illustrations

Thames and Hudson
(2012)

PIERRE REVERDY ~

click on image to enlarge

 New York Review of Books / Poets, edited by Mary Ann Caws, NYRB 2013

TUCKED IN ~

Hello, Susan here — while Bob is tucked in recovering from the flu, let me tuck in this review from Gerald Hausman on Bob's new book Stone Hut.

It's a warming note for a bone chilling deep snow end of February.

____________________________________________________

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Once again Longhouse Publishers in Vermont has produced a book exquisite in design, fat enough to be a feast, pretty enough to just wade around in, and deep enough to dive into and stay with for days and weeks and even months on end. Could be it's the first of its kind, a scrapbook novel that is also a how-to and a mystery -- how did he do it, and how does he make rocks balance like Thor?

Author Bob Arnold is a poet, well-known for well-crafted verses of the back country. But Bob Arnold the builder, the stone mason, the rock wall maker is for those of us lucky enough to have gone walking on his grounds or dining in house with his lovely wife, Susan. 

I've known these guys a very long time, but frankly it takes a long time to know people who have the woods in them. They are like trees you love to look at, and you can give them a good hug, but that doesn't mean you know them. It takes years to do that and even then there's more mystery below the bark.

Well, there are years upon years in this shining, stunning photographic book of buildings, walls, stones, woods, flowers, lakes and of course trees. It's a book of family built with love, and like each rock, hand-held and sort of loved into place, it's a book that couldn't have come in a night or a day. It's taken Bob Arnold a lifetime to write it as his life was written around him in loving circles of tribute to his wife and son.

The beauty of this book is that it is truly a scrapbook novel, as solidly true as stone and bark. And it's not about one house, it's about many, and all made by the same man,woman, and son. If you want a life you have to make one. This is the story of a family who did just that. 

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/

Posted by Gerald Hausman at 1:15 PM

http://geraldhausmanstoryteller.blogspot.com/2014/02/once-again-longhouse-publishers-in.html 

http://www.longhousepoetry.com/bobarnold.html

MAEVE BRENNAN ~

Maeve Brennan
The Visitor
Counterpoint, 2000



http://thehairpin.com/2013/08/of-long-winded-female-writers-and-role-models-remembering-maeve-brennan

NEBRASKA ~

Just watched Nebraska which hits the nail on the head repeatedly. Probably won't win much; nails don't much any more. At the age of 9 I learned fast and furious the essence of a nail. I spent weeks on end picking them up in the nail room of the old lumberyard learning the difference between common, box, penny, galvanized, cement coated, tapered, cut. By learning that nails were different at age 9 I quickly learned people were different. The carpenters that came in and I watched who was neat and who wasn't. I picked up after the slobs. Later saw their work. Sure enough. 

BA


"Nebraska"
a film by Alexander Payne

PACO DE LUCIA ~

Paco de Lucia

 ( b. 1947 Algeciras, Spain ~ 2014 )

GAO XINGJIAN ~

click onto images to enlarge

ROGER GILBERT-LECOMTE ~

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte died on December 31, 1943 at age 36 in Paris from tetanus caused by a dirty needle. According to the poet  David Rattray, "A morphine addict, Lecomte had been jabbing the needle into a thigh muscle through a pair of dirty trousers."
Another source has stated experiments with carbon tetrachloride led Lecomte to a visionary poetic encounter (felt in the poems below) and an early death. He's gone. The poems are here.

In 1933 Lecomte published a book of poems titled La Vie l'Amour la Mort le Vide et le Vent (Life Love Death Void and Wind). The book went forgotten except for a rave review by Antonin Artaud.  Lecomte's only other book was a 1938 privately printed tiny volume, Le Mirror Noir (Black Mirror).

http://www.rogergilbertlecomte.com/

Testament


I come from afar in the marches of night
          Much farther than one might imagine
My story is slight in the city of light
          Well known in the deserts of famine
With her teeth and her nails she's everywhere
          I let her mangle me
But her eyes say I'm a piece of slime
          And she will strangle me
And if my berth tonight I choose
          In the havens of misery since
I never knew how to refuse
          Misery's blandishments
To the bottom of the heap I slide
          With neither pisspot nor candle
But oblivion's obscene solicitudes
          To me alone a lovely scandal









To the North Wind


Alive yet not alive you crawl in stone
Prisoner of an air castle
Lover in a dream
Crushed in advance
By the heavy heavy
Marble anchor of the
Death you have been howling for for a hundred centuries
In the ravagaes and corpses you embody
Alert scarecrow wicket in the north wind
Giddily dancing in a cold sweat
On a footing of slippery air where your weight is the weight of fear

A burst heart empty of blood and woe
Caught in frozen air
At the stony edge of space
Sealed for eternity in the crystal icebox of the sky. 









Holy Childhood
           or
Concealment of Birth


I'll speak of the dark:China doll
Buried in the floor of a false forgetful forest
Where skeletons dressed as spiders dance
Lacework of dead leaves
I'll speak of the dark
To dank caves
Mushroom beds eyes glowing in the blackness
I'll speak of the dark to coiled snails
I'll speak of the dark
To rain to soot
To the circle of moonwater motionless at the bottom of a well
To barrels rolling in the cellar at midnight
When the white lady moaned
I'll speak of the dark
On the blind side of mirrors
I'll speak of the dark
Of immortal torture
Of most ancient despair
In the absence of a universe
And should a light shine
I'll speak of the light
I always see when falling asleep
That woman stretched
On the ground weeping
An admirable death's head
Veiled in black the murdered hope of childhood
An evil scowl flaps its wings
Next to the empty blood-soaked bed
The mother will have to hang
For the crime of a former life
Restored to its point of origin the stillborn child
Will never believe the lie of broad daylight
    Black air never entered its lungs
Without making its nostrils quiver and its eyes
Widen at the horror of awakening
Having let go of life before even existing
It returns to the place it came from
By a thread linking its belly button to the top of the sky
To crystal fountains of wondrous emptiness



______________________

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Black Mirror
Station Hill
http://www.stationhill.org/products-page/all/black-mirror

PHILIP BERRIGAN ~

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/philip-berrigan

POSTCARD 27 ~

art by jeff steinberg

Remembering an important moment in the Hurricane Katrina tragedy

GEORGE MITCHELL BLUES (1967) ~

W.G. SEBALD ~

• 1988 After Nature
•  
• 1990 Vertigo 
•  
• 1992 The Emigrants 
•  
• 1995 The Rings of Saturn 
•  
• 1998 A Place in the Country
•  
• 1999 On the Natural History of Destruction 
•  
• 2001 Austerlitz
•  
• 2001 For Years Now
•  
• 2003 Unrecounted 
•  
• 2003 Campo Santo 
•  
• 2008 Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964–2001
•  

LEG UP ~

 

A Burrowing Owl near Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil. It is standing on one leg.