Frida Kahlo

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The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire

By BENJAMIN IVRY
Fifty years ago, at the 100th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection “Les Fleurs du Mal” (Flowers of Evil), the French writer Pierre Jean Jouve stated, “‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ is no centenarian!” In 2007, on its 150th birthday, the book retains its freshness. A new prose translation by avant-garde American author Keith Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 228 pages, $24.95) and “The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire” by Walter Benjamin (Harvard University Press, 320 pages, $15.95) are among the tributes suggesting that Baudelaire’s book is still path-breakingly modern.

Baudelaire (1821–1867) was obsessed with modernity and found inspiration in what he called the “ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.” He also embraced forbidden knowledge considered satanic by some stodgy 19th-century readers. If experience — of drugs, sexual immorality, or other debauchery — was morbidly evil, then the poet was determined to weave highly structured artificial flowers of immense power from such degradation. Typically uncompromising, the poet addresses us at the start of the book: “Hypocrite lecteur! Mon semblable, mon frère!” (Hypocritical reader, my ally, my brother).

Baudelaire’s life was grim, highlighted by unrequited love, penury, lack of critical acceptance, prosecution on charges of obscenity, and illness leading to his early death at 46 from syphilis. Some American fans have tried to add humor to alleviate the gloom, like the San Francisco writer Daniel Handler who in his mock-ghastly Lemony Snicket series of books for young readers dubbed his protagonists the “Baudelaire Orphans.” “Say it with Flowers” Baudelaire T-Shirts and tote-bags are sold online (cafepress.com) by Leaping Dog Press, a small literary publisher in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Baudelaire Soaps, a Swanzey, New Hampshire-based company (baudelairesoaps.com) explains that its bath and beauty products are named in honor of the poet, “or ‘Chuck’ as we call him around here.”

Ludicrous salutes distort our view of “Chuck,” as do the weighty Marxist musings of the suicidal German-Jewish essayist and toy collector Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a talented writer whose reading of “Fleurs du Mal” as sociological evidence of 19th century Paris is narrow and eccentric, however fascinating. Marcel Proust and Théophile Gautier, to name only two, are more cogent guides to the writer. Proust’s critical text “Against Saint-Beuve” relishes Baudelaire’s “solemn diction” and “biblical idiom.” Gautier’s 1868 short book about Baudelaire calls his late friend the “morbid lover of the Hottentot Venus,” and evokes their mutual taste for “dawamesk,” a Middle Eastern jam made of opium, hashish, honey, almonds, and spices, and served — according to Baudelaire’s “Artificial Paradises” — on sacramental bread for ideal blasphemy. …

Tess Of The D’Urbervilles – Episode 1 Part 1

From BBC – Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Best adaptation of one of Hardy’s novels.

Hans Fallada’s anti-Nazi classic becomes surprise UK bestseller

A little-known thriller about the German resistance against the Nazis has become the sleeper hit of the summer – more than 60 years after it was written.

Now it has finally been translated into English, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin is taking bestseller lists by storm on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK alone, Penguin Classics has sold more than 100,000 copies in just three months and is expecting to exceed 250,000 sales within the year – astonishing figures considering that most English novels barely sell a few thousand copies.

It has reached the official UK Top 50 for all UK publishers, a rare achievement for a classic. In the US, Melville House Publishing, a small independent company from whom Penguin bought the rights, is also seeing vigorous sales.

Word-of-mouth recommendations, partly through book clubs, are resurrecting an author who had been practically unknown in the English-speaking world. That this translation has taken so long is particularly surprising as Primo Levi, the revered Jewish Italian writer who survived the Nazi concentration camps, once described it as “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis”.
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Arvo Part – Magnificat

Music video of Arvo Part’s Magnificat. Video taken from: http://www.archive.org/deta…

Who Was Charles Dickens?

by Robert Gottlieb

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there’s no such thing as a boring biography of them—you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again. I’ve never encountered a life of the Brontës, of Dr. Johnson, of Byron that didn’t grip me.

Another such character is Charles Dickens. His history, of course, is less obviously dramatic than that of Byron, but the turbulence of his emotional life, the violent contradictions in his nature, and the amazing story of his instant accession, before he was twenty-five, to the highest level of literary fame and popularity—where he remained for thirty-five years, and where he still resides—are endlessly recountable, and have indeed been endlessly recounted.

Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies—to achieve, to prevail—carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform.

He was almost certainly the best-known man in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and certainly the most loved: his very personal hold on his readers extended from the most distinguished—Queen Victoria, say—to illiterate workers who clubbed together to buy the weekly or monthly parts in which his novels first appeared so that one marginally literate man could read them aloud to his fellows. And this popularity and influence carried to America, Germany, France, and Russia as well. There was universal sorrow when he died. “I never knew an author’s death to cause such general mourning,” wrote Longfellow. “It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief.”

Within months of Dickens’s death the first biographies were appearing, and in 1871 the first volume of the cornerstone of the Dickens biographical industry was published: the long, personal, revelatory Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, Dickens’s most intimate and trusted friend since they met in their early twenties. Forster told the world much that it did not know, most startling the story of the twelve-year-old Charles’s degrading (to him) employment in the blacking warehouse off the Strand to which his family’s near destitution had condemned him. He adapted this experience for David Copperfield, but no one—not even his children—had known that it was autobiographical. “He was almost certainly the best-known man in England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and certainly the most loved: his very personal hold on his readers extended from the most distinguished—Queen Victoria, say—to illiterate workers who clubbed together to buy the weekly or monthly parts in which his novels first appeared so that one marginally literate man could read them aloud to his fellows. And this popularity and influence carried to America, Germany, France, and Russia as well. There was universal sorrow when he died. “I never knew an author’s death to cause such general mourning,” wrote Longfellow. “It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief.” …

My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst

KNOCK, knock, knock. That’s me, rapping on the front door of a large brick house set high above Main Street in Amherst, Mass. September 1963. I’m 16.
A woman in a white uniform — a nurse? a maid? — appears. “Someone important to me once lived here,” I say. “I wonder if I could look inside.”
She’s puzzled. Speaking softly, as if not to wake a sleeper, she explains that the owner is upstairs and can’t come down. “Oh, no need to bother anyone. I just want a peek.” She hesitates, sees I’m earnest and harmless, and stands back. I go in.
A Victorian interior. Polished wood floors; soft, dim light. A curving staircase. To the right a library; to the left a parlor. I step into one room, cross to the other, then stand by the staircase trying to soak the place in. But this is awkward. The woman is waiting. I glance up the stairs and then say thank you. She lets me out.
Emily Dickinson was born in this house, known as the Homestead, in December 1830 and died there on May 15, 1886. She spent much of her adult life inside it, in an upstairs corner bedroom, writing poems and letters all night at a table the size of a child’s school desk, sewing the poems into packets, locking the packets away for discovery after she’d gone. …