Category: Art

Culmin’s Ghost Appears to His Mother — Nicolai Abildgaard

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Culmin’s Ghost Appears to His Mother, 1794 by Nicolai Abildgaard (1743–1809)

Near are the steps of Culmin; the youth came, bursting into tears. Wrathful he cut the wind, ere yet he mixed his strokes with Fillan. He had first bent the bow with Rothmar, at the rock of his own blue streams. There they had marked the place of the roe, as the sunbeam flew over the fern. Why, son of Cul-allin! why, Culmin, dost thou rush on that beam of light? It is a fire that consumes. Son of Cul-allin, retire. Your fathers were not equal in the glittering strife of the field. The mother of Culmin remains in the hall. She looks forth on blue-rolling Strutha. A whirlwind rises, on the stream, dark-eddying round the ghost of her son. His dogs are howling in their place. His shield is bloody in the hall. “Art thou fallen, my fair-haired son, in Erin’s
dismal war?”

From The Poems of Ossian by James McPherson. 

Camus, Eliot, and Kuper’s Kafka (Books acquired, 31 Aug. 2018)

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I went to my favorite used bookshop on Friday afternoon to browse, order another Gerald Murnane novel, and pick up a copy of George Eliot’s Silas Marner.

I spied a late fifties mass market copy of Albert Camus’ novel Exile and the Kingdom from Vintage Books. I fell in love with the cover (by George Giusti) and ended up picking it up, although I’ll admit I haven’t read a Camus novel since college (it was The Plague if memory serves).

Browsing copies of Silas Marner, I found this monstrosity:

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I don’t even know where to start with this cover. I mean, even the colors seem to clash. It doesn’t really come across in the photo, but this hardback has a cheap greasy feel to it. I initially assumed that it was some kind of TV or film tie in, but as far as I can tell…no. Horrifying. I ended up going with the Oxford edition with Ferdinand Hodler’s painting Unemployed on the cover.

When I got home, the mail had come. It included a copy of Peter Kuper’s Kafkaesque, which collects 14 of Kuper’s illustrated Kafka translations. Publisher Norton’s blurb:

Award-winning graphic novelist Peter Kuper presents a mesmerizing interpretation of fourteen iconic Kafka short stories.

Long fascinated with the work of Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper began illustrating his stories in 1988. Initially drawn to the master’s dark humor, Kuper adapted the stories over the years to plumb their deeper truths. Kuper’s style deliberately evokes Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel, contemporaries of Kafka whose wordless novels captured much of the same claustrophobia and mania as Kafka’s tales. Working from new translations of the classic texts, Kuper has reimagined these iconic stories for the twenty-first century, using setting and perspective to comment on contemporary issues like civil rights and homelessness.

Longtime lovers of Kafka will appreciate Kuper’s innovative interpretations, while Kafka novices will discover a haunting introduction to some of the great writer’s most beguiling stories, including “A Hunger Artist,” “In The Penal Colony,” and “The Burrow.” Kafkaesque stands somewhere between adaptation and wholly original creation, going beyond a simple illustration of Kafka’s words to become a stunning work of art.

Pigs, on a march, do not subject themselves to any leader among themselves, but pass on, higgledy-piggledy, without regard to age or sex | Sketches from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for Friday, August 31st, 1838

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A tailor is detected by Mr. Leach, because his coat had not a single wrinkle in it. I saw him exhibiting patterns of fashions to Randall, the village tailor. Mr. Leach has much tact in finding out the professions of people. He found out a blacksmith, because his right hand was much larger than the other.

A man getting subscriptions for a religious and abolition newspaper in New York,–somewhat elderly and gray-haired, quick in his movements, hasty in his walk, with an eager, earnest stare through his spectacles, hurrying about with a pocket-book of subscriptions in his hand,–seldom speaking, and then in brief expressions,–sitting down before the stage comes, to write a list of subscribers obtained to his employers in New York. Withal, a city and business air about him, as of one accustomed to hurry through narrow alleys, and dart across thronged streets, and speak hastily to one man and another at jostling corners, though now transacting his affairs in the solitude of mountains.

An old, gray man, seemingly astray and abandoned in this wide world, sitting in the bar-room, speaking to none, nor addressed by any one. Not understanding the meaning of the supper-bell till asked to supper by word of mouth. However, he called for a glass of brandy.

A pedlar, with girls’ neckerchiefs,–or gauze,–men’s silk pocket-handkerchiefs, red bandannas, and a variety of horn combs, trying to trade with the servant-girls of the house. One of them, Laura, attempts to exchange a worked vandyke, which she values at two dollars and a half; Eliza, being reproached by the pedlar, “vows that she buys more of pedlars than any other person in the house.”

A drove of pigs passing at dusk. They appeared not so much disposed to ramble and go astray from the line of march as in daylight, but kept together in a pretty compact body. There was a general grunting, not violent at all, but low and quiet, as if they were expressing their sentiments among themselves in a companionable way. Pigs, on a march, do not subject themselves to any leader among themselves, but pass on, higgledy-piggledy, without regard to age or sex.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for Friday, August 31st, 1838. From Passages from the American Note-Books.

Edward Hopper was my inspiration for a lot of the songs I made up with my band The Modern Lovers

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Edward Hopper, especially that painting of the gas station at night—Gas (1940)—was my inspiration for a lot of the songs I made up with my band The Modern Lovers when I was a kid. Especially “Roadrunner” owes to that gas station painting, but any songs I made up about lonely nights on lonely highways and the way lights were like friends in the dark. This is what “Roadrunner” was about. The Velvet Underground covered this kind of stark, lonely feeling of wonder and had a sound which, with its drowning darkness, felt right for my explorations into bleak, modern-world terror. That plus Hopper was a big part of my starting music.

From the Art News Muses column by Jonathan Richman.

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