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In Montparnasse between the wars, Kiki, 'Queen of Montparnasse', danced and sang; Prévert created Baptiste there; Desnos traveled astrally, then woke to harvest the crop; painters- Kisling, Pascin, Foujita, Modigliani, Derain and others, labored and partied there; Bronia came from Holland, destined to meet Radiguet, Cocteau's Boy Wonder; later she would, marry René Clair; Satie opened umbrellas there, always hoping for rain. There are triumphs,...
Author
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From the meteor crater in Australia's northwest to the fashionable Galleria in Rowe Street, Sydney, Gosse steps out in mid-century. Sydney, in an era before computers, is relatively innocent. Circular Quay still dips its encrusted planking into the harbor; the coffee shops are just discovering coffee; Krishnamurti could still be expected to walk through the Heads. Here Gosse falls under the spell of several would-be wizards who will spin a tale and...
3) In Cumbria
Author
Description
What unites Henri Beyle (who blossoms as Stendhal), the Watcher on the glazed veranda, Leah Lee (wife of Jules Laforgue), the Lady presiding over the Game of Tanka, and Kurt Schwitters (migrating from Dada to Cumbria)? A fastidious gentleness perhaps? Nostalgia certainly. But equally the presence of brewed tea. In Cumbria is a new collection by the author of Montale: A Biographical Anthology, Occam's Aftershave, Three Painters and other books, as...
4) Tristan
Author
Description
The story of Tristan is well known in the Western tradition of Romance. Few have not heard of Wagner's opera and the love elixir which Tristan and Iseut drink by accident. The story is already well established in the early medieval period, where there are several competing manuscripts, most of them incomplete for various reasons. John Watson has revisited these medieval origins and achieved a synthesis, a complete Tristan. Here are the sea voyages,...
Author
Description
Daphnis and Chloe is the most acclaimed of the early Greek novels. Its popularity is enhanced by the splendid illustrations it has generated - from High Victorian to Bonnard and Maillol, and of course musically in the ballet of Ravel. There are numerous translations of the prose text of Longus, but the reader may sense that something is missing, that some poetic charm in the original has been lost. Accordingly, John Watson has devised a metrical version...
6) Theatricals
Author
Description
The idea of retelling theatre stories began with a second-hand copy of Donald Sinden's Theatrical Anecdotes. Other anthologies, biographies and histories followed. Widening circles of bibliographies soon spread out into earlier anthologies and accounts, from practitioners within the theatre — Oxberry, Bunn, Wilkinson, Macready — as well as from the memoirs of ardent theatregoers — Pepys, Hunt, Moore, Haydon... But the remarkable degree to which...
7) Two Legends
Author
Description
Famously in the twentieth century, Frank O'Hara spends his lunch hour stepping out of the Museum of Modern Art to type poems on shop demonstration typewriters. Following his accidental death on Fire Island, he becomes a legend in his own lifetime. Watson's extended riff on these lunch perambulations addresses this first legend. An interlude follows in which O'Hara and his friends emerge from MOMA to see figures from the legendary past. The second...
8) Plagiarisms
Author
Description
The rewriting of prose texts in iambics is perhaps primarily a way of reading them with deliberation; the texts here, favorites of course, have much in common. Those from Lampedusa posit the possibility of extraordinary events. Similarly, 'Sylvie' depends on extremities of tenderness exemplified by the scene in the Othys section when the narrator and Sylvie, descending the stairs, stage a re-enactment. And, in the scene from Dali's novel Hidden Faces...
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