tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post4616283322628766872..comments2024-03-27T13:13:25.164-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: The Most Preposterous Marriage Proposal of All Time by Florian Illiesjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-66497974932611623382014-01-16T12:46:25.349-05:002014-01-16T12:46:25.349-05:00It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur...It’s the end of March. Marcel Proust pulls his fur over his night-shirt and goes back into the street in the middle of the night. Then he stares for two whole hours at the Saint Anne portal of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. The next morning he writes to Madame Strauss: ‘For eight centuries on that portal a much more charming humanity has been assembled than the ones with which we rub shoulders.’ This is what is known, logically enough, as being In Search of Lost Time.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-13586801214851191272014-01-14T17:20:49.491-05:002014-01-14T17:20:49.491-05:00Bruno Franks wrote review of Thomas Mann’s Death i...Bruno Franks wrote review of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice:<br />When metaphysics still existed, it meant comparatively little to be a hero. But now, with an inanimate floor of rock beneath us and an empty sky above, where we have no faith, only hunger for it, where we are so disconnected from one another, thrown back into ourselves, probably more than any preceding generation, it is at this very moment that Thomas Mann appears, wakefully and courageously placing this writer into a completely godless world.<br />So there you have it. Gustav von Aschenbach, the last tragic hero of Modernity.<br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-72526587606606047512014-01-14T17:19:39.061-05:002014-01-14T17:19:39.061-05:00Freud continued to work on his theory of parricide...Freud continued to work on his theory of parricide. At the same time, in the newly founded film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, filming begins on The Sins of the Fathers, starring Asta Nielson. In keeping with the title, Nielson feels partly to blame for the ‘kitsch in that early dawn of film’. The film poster shows her wearing a tight skirt and plunging blouse. She was slim, unusual at the time, and a source of great joy for the cartoonists, who immediately saw a stick figure in the making. Most men too were quite happy with how she looked. In 1913 Asta Nielson was the ultimate sex symbol, and a big contract led to her making eight films between 1912 and 1914, which were filmed and released back to back. The new magazine Bild un Film put it like this; “People are queuing up to see the film as if they’re at a bakery during a famine, almost breaking their necks to get a ticket. Many people watch the film two or three times in quick succession and are enchanted by it again and again.”johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-38463318249516390372014-01-14T17:18:54.409-05:002014-01-14T17:18:54.409-05:00One evening in May Else wrote to Frank Marc to tel...One evening in May Else wrote to Frank Marc to tell him how in love she was with Gottfried Benn: “When I fall in love a thousand times, it’s always a new miracle, it’s the same old thing when someone else falls in love. I have to tell you. . . he’s out of the Nibelungs.” But Marc, whether his wife wouldn’t let him or whether he himself was already too exhausted by his demanding Berlin girlfriend, took a few months to write back. To which Else replied by return: “You are glad about my “New Love” – You say that so easily, and have no idea that you should be weeping along with me –because –it has already gone out of his heart, like a sparkler, like a burning Catherine wheel –which has rolled over me.” Write quickly if you want to congratulate Else Lasker-Schuler on a new love, otherwise it will be too late.<br /><br />Oh let me leave this world<br /><br />Then you will cry for me.<br />Copper beeches pour fire<br />On my warlike dreams.<br /><br />Through dark underbrush<br />I crawl,<br />Through ditches and water.<br /><br />Wild breakers beat<br />My heart incessantly;<br />The enemy within.<br /><br />Oh let me leave this world!<br />But even from far away<br />I'd wander – a flickering light –<br /><br />Around God's grave.<br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-41266145139860026192014-01-14T17:18:12.246-05:002014-01-14T17:18:12.246-05:00The euphoric, scatterbrained visionary Lasker-Schu...The euphoric, scatterbrained visionary Lasker-Schuler grabbed testosterone-fueled men by their poetic hearts and propelled them to unsuspected heights. But men afraid of too much femininity –Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kafka, for example – were startled by her surging sexuality and tended to run away. And the women of her time despised this unkempt femme fatale by day for her negligence, her irresponsibility, her licentiousness – and secretly admired her in the evening, when their husbands had gone out for a drink and they were left by themselves to flick through a magazine from their lonely armchairs. Only Rosa Luxembourg admired her unreservedly, and pointedly walked down the streets with her in the hot summer months of 1913.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-38912935158514101312014-01-14T13:37:29.275-05:002014-01-14T13:37:29.275-05:00Though seminal in many respects, 1913 was a diffic...Though seminal in many respects, 1913 was a difficult, even depressing year for the Arts in Europe, as Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ perhaps best attests. Of the First German Autumn Salon at the Sturm Gallery (patterned after the N.Y. Armory show that February) the press reported: Never has pretension been more presumptuous, never less well founded. . . In fact it is a rough fiddle-faddle, this great mass of absurdities, of ludicrous scribbles. You think you are coming out of the art gallery of a lunatic asylum.” Just 14 years old Bertolt Brecht wrote ‘My Girlfriend’:<br />You ask what love is – <br />I didn’t feel it, -<br />you ask what joy is,<br />it’s light has never shone for me.<br />You ask what worry is –<br />Her I know<br />she is my girlfriend<br />she loves me.<br /><br />Oswald Spengler wrote “Life in this century oppresses me. Everything redolent of comfort, of beauty, of color, is being plundered.” Ludwig Meidner began painting his Apocalyptic Landscapes. Oskar Kokoschka was in the midst of his doomed obsession with Alma Mahler.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com