View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
sent to my group www.flickr.com/groups/abc-visualized for the letter C: 1. Happy Furry weekend..., 2. Maiden Flight Concorde 002, 3. Colliding planes, 4. Untitled
Mae hwnna wedi bod ar ei wyliau. Arhosodd rownd y gornel o'r caffi hanesyddol hwn a chafodd frecwast yma (yn hen sedd Jean-Paul?). Cliciwch yma am ragor o wybodaeth: Cafe de Flore
Hwnna has been on his holidays. He stayed around the corner from the legendary Cafe de Flore
From an assignment set by module leader Tatiana Bachkirova
Image editing assistance by Joseph Elliott-Coleman
Key
Light Blue for Maslow
Dark Blue for Eisenberg
Orange for Wilson
Brown for Piaget
Light green for Kohlberg
Dark green for Rodgers
Red for Krishnamurti
Purple for existentialism
The foremost left image and connections in the transpersonal area came about from a discussion with the mind that is Benjamin Stone
“There has been no century in human history that has made despair more plausible than the century that is now passing away,” says a 1999 TALK MAGAZINE. It is suggested, on this basis, that Samuel Beckett neatly fixes the twentieth century with this exchange from “Waiting for Godot.”
ESTRAGON: “I can’t go on like this.”
VLADMIR: “That’s what you think.”
In these two simple lines, expressing a theme he would come back to repeatedly in his work, Beckett—The Irishman who wrote in French, who was a friend of James Joyce, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969—neatly summed up existentialism and the resolve which fueled the century: Life is cruel and meaningless. There is no hope. Now, let’s all get on with our lives.
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“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” ― Umberto Eco
. . Because I don't feel like thinking too deeply; because I feel the need to be blank. And yes, my feet were in the shoes. Why did I waste my time? Precisely. . .
Edit Notes: Photo of my shoes (with my feet in - why?) taken in Procamera; Edited in Snapseed then Noir in hard contrast; Blur fx then Vintage Scene, Modern Grunge and Pixrl-o-matic
As I'm sure we all know French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once said 'Words are loaded pistols'. I think we can all appreciate the sentiment behind this statement as surely we've all said something we regret every once in a while. And once those words are said the pistol has been fired and there's no turning back.
This design started life as the image of existential French Jean Paul Sartre's head with his loaded pistol words alongside but as I love an earworm if I can possibly get away with it I took some inspiration from the world of music to see if I could get Cher's seminal 1989 hit 'If I could turn back time' playing unheeded in your brain.
In the song Cher utters the immortal words 'Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes' and this rang a bell in my brain as it seemed close enough to Sartre's words to make use of. Hopefully that will strike a chord in your brain and you'll be singing it all day. Mission accomplished!
Whilst we were painting it some hapless busybody decided to try and let me know that I'd misquoted Sartre but, of course, I hadn't as she had neglected to read my 'Jean Paul Sartre as paraphrased by Cher' small print graffiti. id-iom 1 - random passerby 0. Ha! In your face!
Cheers
id-iom
Why a fox? Why not a horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? I'm saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who am I? And how can a fox ever be happy without, you'll forgive the expression, a chicken in its teeth?
Mural by Okuda San Miguel aka @okudart at the Wynwood Walls outdoor museum in Miami, Florida.
Okuda San Miguel, known as OKUDA, is a street artist based out of Madrid. Since 1997 his pieces have appeared on railroads and abandoned factories around his hometown.
His multicolored geometric structures and patterns are combined with gray bodies and organic forms in artistic pieces that can be categorized as Pop Surrealism, with a clear influence of street forms. His works often raise contradictions about existentialism, the universe, the infinite, the meaning of life, and show a clear conflict between modernity and our roots.
His works can be found in the streets and galleries around the world including India, Mali, Mozambique, United States, Japan, South America, South Africa, Mexico and the European continent, among others.
Stereolab, ‘Transient Random-Noise With Announcements’, 1993. Ah, the ‘Lab. I loved them. Saw them play in a small Camden pub early 1992. Bought the single ‘Super Electric’ and saw them whenever I could. Gigs were small and full of happy dancing bodies. During Britpop I lived abroad and when I saw them again after a gap of 3 years it was at the Kilburn National. A big venue as befits a band who’d been on ‘Top of The Pops’ (something that had happened whilst I was away) and it was… sad. From seeing this lovely little groop in a pub only a few years before they were now flavour-of-the-month Indie. Nobody danced. It was all standing and gawping. We’re cool coz we’re watching a cool band. No joy. Killed it for me.
So, with my lockdown hat on, I dug out an album. I had fun but definitely a band who were ‘better live, prefer their old stuff’. This double album has everything you need from the band. Extended motorik beats (the drummer was a rockin’ machine live!), Ye-Ye French pop vocals (lots of “ba-ba-ba”s), analogue synths, locked guitar riffs, fierce bursts of electronic squall, pretty floating harmonies and melodies. Singer Laetitia is French, which lends the whole thing an air of inscrutable cool. Plus, the lyrics reference Marxist thought, underground cinema, Sixties pop, Existentialism and the like, but all slightly tongue-in-cheek.
‘Tone Burst’ swirly keyboards over jangly riff. ‘Our Trinitone Blast’ female voices driving another riff and beat. ‘Pack Yr Romantic Mind’ pretty and floaty with Sixties pop feel fused with riffage. ‘I’m Going Out of My Mind’ channel the Velvets in another extended riff with droning keyboard. ‘Golden Ball’ slowly building riff – what they do best. ‘Pause’ is slow woozy keyboards before veering off into Bontempi beats and French voices. ‘Jenny Ondioline’ is more Velvets-esque/Krautrock riffing, with harmonies, filling up all of Side 3. Good driving track. ‘Analogue Rock’ is more metronome beat with stabbing keyboards and harmonies. ‘Crest’ the same, but different. ‘Lock-Groove Lullaby’ big strummed bass and noises with floaty French vocal.
Nice. A lovely little jewel of a pop combo.
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Outlining a Theory of General Creativity . .
. . on a 'Pataphysical projectory
Entropy ≥ Memory ● Creativity ²
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Study of the day:
On appelle claustrophilie (φιλία philía) cet amour inconditionnel du photographe qui fait qu'il aime le mur pour ce qu'il peut lui prendre quand il le prend, et non pour ce qu'il peut lui cacher lorsqu'il le montre aux autres .. ou autre chose comme ça.
One calls claustrophilia (φιλία philía) this unconditional love of the photographer which makes that he loves the wall for what it can take to him when he takes it, and not for what it can hide to him when he shows it to the others .. or something else like that.
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(...) Self ? Ego ? . . this worst common concept is this trap set by anthropocentric theologisms, narcissistic existentialisms, etc. "Cogito ergo sum !" as "I think my self, so I am my self !" is the worst game strategy born of "being/otherness" dualism, reduced to "individualism", this "ism" as illusive as its reciprocal "collectivism".
If we hope to play again the desperately jotful game of Entropy's wanderings, let's jump on a rebirth vanishing line : "We are thinking, so we are rhizoming !". In our dis-re-evolving noosphere, only collaborative games between our cognospheres, are able to be performative enough to survive the next round, i.e. to maintain at once the persistence of our memory and of our creativity, i.e. to maintain the persistence of our plane of emergence.
Don't let us be only what we can, let's become what we want together." (...)"
Yo mismo? Es el “Yo” lo que no admito. El peor y más común de los conceptos en esta trampa ideada por teologismos y existencialismos antropocéntricos. “Cogito ergo sum !” como “yo pienso entonces soy yo mismo !”, es una estrategia de Juego tan mala.
Si tenemos la esperanza de seguir jugando, saltemos a una línea de renacimiento: “Estamos pensando por ende estamos rizomando !” En nuestra des-envolvente noosfera, sólo los juegos cooperativos entre esferas cognitivas son capaces de interactuar lo suficiente como para sobrevivir.
No nos permitan ser sólo lo que podemos, volvámonos lo que queremos juntos.
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| . rectO-persO . | . E ≥ m.C² . | . co~errAnce . | . TiLt . |
Iceland - 2013 (Press "L" please)
After 9 hours of driving, and for the last 2 hours, saw no cars, people in either (or any) direction. I came across this:
I'd been listening to Sigur Rós and the song 'E-bow’ came on. Without understating, it was one of the most intense moments of my life. I pulled over, came undone for nine minutes and nine seconds, got out of the truck, took this photo. And was hit with sadness, and happiness, that I was the only one seeing this moment with blessed eyes.
I feel any Joe with a camera, could have taken this photo, and it is one of my best, but is a shadow of the greatness I saw.
Sterlings statement via RedLine
"My art making practice is exploratory in nature and involves me in a wide variety of subject matter. I am currently working in video, digital imaging software, computer programming/data visualization, traditional/non-traditional image making and objects.
The following is a list of my recent interest: perception, new media techniques, emptiness, space-time, humans, existentialism, computing, self narratives, entropy, and post-humanism in relation to a technological singularity. "
Left: Geekgirly
Right: me
This week for The Divine Diptych Project I was paired with the lovely and very talented Geekgirly. Our theme was 'Absurd', and I think my part at least needs explaination.... As I discovered when I actually looked into the meaning of the word absurd, there is a whole philosophy behind it. Absurdism being the result of humans searching for meaning when there is none. The only escape from absurdity is suicide or faith. Well I was very stuck on how to interpret that, so looking further I saw connections to existentialism, especially Camus, and Absurdist literature, such as The Nonsense Poets, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear... Ideas started to form.
So this is an absurd self portrait representing existentialism and absurdist literature..... clear ? ; )
Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man II (1/6), 1960, bronze, 188.5 × 27.9 × 110.7 cm (National Gallery of Art)
Andrei Platonovich Platonov was a Soviet Russian novelist, short story writer, philosopher, playwright, and poet. Although Platonov regarded himself as a communist, his principal works remained unpublished in his lifetime because of their skeptical attitude toward collectivization of agriculture (1929–1940) and other Stalinist policies, as well as for their experimental, avant-garde form infused with existentialism. His famous works include the novels Chevengur (1928) and The Foundation Pit (1930).
Early life and education
Platonov was born in the settlement of Yamskaya Sloboda on the outskirts of Voronezh in the Chernozem Region of Central Russia. His father was a metal fitter (and amateur inventor) employed in the railroad workshops and his mother was the daughter of a watchmaker. He attended a local parish school and completed his primary education at a four-year city school and began work at age thirteen, with such jobs as an office clerk at a local insurance company, smelter at a pipe factory, assistant machinist, warehouseman, and the railroad. Following the 1917 Revolution, he studied electrical technology at Voronezh Polytechnic Institute. When Civil War broke out in 1918 Platonov assisted his father on trains delivering troops and supplies and clearing snow.
Early career
Meanwhile, Platonov had begun to write poems, submitting them to papers in Moscow and elsewhere. He was also a prolific contributor to local periodicals. These included Zheleznyi put ("Railroad"), the paper of the local railway workers' union; the Voronezh Region Communist Party newspapers Krasnaia derevnia ("Red countryside") and Voronezhskaia kommuna ("Voronezh commune"); and Kuznitsa, the nationwide journal of the "Smithy" group of proletarian writers.
From 1918 through 1921, his most intensive period as a writer, he published dozens of poems (an anthology appeared in 1922), several stories, and hundreds of articles and essays, adopting in 1920 the pen-name Platonov by which he is best-known. With remarkable energy and intellectual precocity, he wrote confidently across a range of topics including literature, art, cultural life, science, philosophy, religion, education, politics, the civil war, foreign relations, economics, technology, famine and land reclamation, and others. It was not unusual around 1920 to see two or three pieces by Platonov, on quite different subjects, appear daily in the press.
He has also been involved with the local Proletcult movement, joined the Union of Communist Journalists in March 1920, and worked as an editor at Krasnaia Derevnia ("Red countryside"), and the paper of the local railway workers' union. in August 1920, Platonov was elected to the interim board of the newly-formed Voronezh Union of Proletarian Writers and attended the First Congress of Proletarian Writers in Moscow in October 1920, organized by the Smithy group. He regularly read his poetry and gave critical talks at various club meetings.
In July 1920, Platonov was admitted to the Communist Party as a candidate member on the recommendation of his friend Litvin (Molotov). He attended Party meetings, but was expelled from the Party on 30 October 1921 as an "unstable element". Later, he said the reason was "juvenile". He may have quit the party in dismay of the New Economic Policy (NEP). like a number of other worker writers (many of whom he had met through Kuznitsa and at the 1920 writers' congress). Troubled by the famine of 1921, he openly and controversially criticized the behaviour (and privileges) of local communists. In spring, 1924 Platonov applied for re-admission to the Party, offering reassurance that he had remained a communist and a Marxist, but he was denied then as on the next two occasions.
In 1921 Platonov married Maria Aleksandrovna Kashintseva (1903–1983); they had a son, Platon, in 1922, and a daughter, Maria, in 1944.
In 1922, in the wake of the devastating drought and famine of 1921, Platonov abandoned writing to work on electrification and land reclamation for the Voronezh Provincial Land Administration and later for the central government. "I could no longer be occupied with a contemplative activity like literature", he recalled later. For the next years, he worked as an engineer and administrator, organizing the digging of ponds and wells, draining of swampland, and building a hydroelectric plant.
Chevengur, The Foundation Pit and For Future Use
When he returned to writing prose in 1926, a number of critics and readers noted the appearance of a major and original literary voice. Moving to Moscow in 1927, he became, for the first time, a professional writer, working with a number of leading magazines.
Between 1926 and 1930, the period from NEP to the first five-year plan (1928–1932), Platonov produced his two major works, the novels Chevengur and The Foundation Pit. With their implicit criticism of the system, neither was then accepted for publication although one section of Chevengur appeared in a magazine. The two novels were only published in the USSR during the late 1980s.
In the 1930s, Platonov worked with the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Lifshitz, who edited The Literary Critic (Literaturny Kritik), a Moscow magazine followed by Marxist philosophers around the world. Another of the magazine's contributors was the theoretician György Lukács and Platonov built upon connections with the two philosophers. A turning point in his life and career as a writer came with the publication in March 1931 of For Future Use (″Vprok″ in Russian), a novella that chronicled the forced collectivisation of agriculture during the First Five Year Plan.
According to archival evidence (OGPU informer's report, 11 July 1931), Stalin read For Future Use carefully after its publication, adding marginal comments about the author ("fool, idiot, scoundrel") and his literary style ("this isn't Russian but some incomprehensible nonsense") to his copy of the magazine. In a note to the publishers, the Krasnaya nov monthly, Stalin described Platonov as "an agent of our enemies" and suggested in a postscript that the author and other "numbskulls" (i.e. the editors) should be punished in such a way that the punishment served them "for future use".
In 1933, an OGPU official Shivarov wrote a special report on Platonov. Attached were versions of The Sea of Youth, the play "14 Red Huts" and the unfinished "Technical Novel". The report described For Future Use as "a satire on the organizing of collective farms," and commented that Platonov's subsequent work revealed the "deepening anti-Soviet attitudes" of the writer.
Official support and censure
In 1934, Maksim Gorky arranged for Platonov to be included in a “writers' brigade” sent to Central Asia with the intention of publishing a collective work in celebration of ten years of Soviet Turkmenistan. (Earlier that year, a collective work by over 30 Soviet writers had been published about the construction of the White Sea Canal.) Platonov’s contribution to the Turkmen volume was a short story titled “Takyr” (or “Salt-flats”) about the liberation of a Persian slave girl. Platonov returned to Turkmenistan in 1935 and this was the basis for his novella Soul (or Dzhan). Dzhan is about a “non-Russian” economist from Central Asia, who leaves Moscow to help his lost, nomadic nation called Dzhan, of rejects and outcasts possessing nothing but their souls. A censored text was first published in 1966; a complete, uncensored text only in 1999.
In the mid-1930s Platonov was again invited to contribute to a collective volume, about rail workers. He wrote two stories: "Immortality", which was highly praised, and "Among Animals and Plants", which was severely criticized and eventually published only in a heavily edited and far weaker version.
In August 1936, The Literary Critic published "Immortality" with a note explaining the difficulties the author had faced when proposing the story to other periodicals. The following year, this publication came under criticism in Krasnaya Nov, damaging Platonov's reputation. In 1939, the story was republished in the intended collective volume, Fictional representations of Railway Transport (1939) dedicated to the heroes of the Soviet railroad system.
Platonov published eight more books, fiction and essays, between 1937 and his death in 1951.
Stalin's ambivalence and Platonov's son
Stalin was ambivalent about Platonov's worth as a writer. The same informer's report in July 1931 claimed that he also referred to the writer as "brilliant, a prophet". For his part, Platonov made hostile remarks about Trotsky, Rykov, and Bukharin but not about Stalin, to whom he wrote letters on several occasions. "Is Platonov here?" asked Stalin at the meeting with Soviet writers held in Moscow at Gorky's villa in October 1932 when the Soviet leader first called writers "engineers of the human soul".
In January 1937, Platonov contributed to an issue of Literaturnaya gazeta in which the accused at the second Moscow Show Trial (Radek, Pyatakov and others) were denounced and condemned by 30 well-known writers, including Boris Pasternak. His short text "To overcome evil" is included in his collected works. It has been suggested that it contains coded criticism of the regime.
In May 1938, during the Great Terror, Platonov's son was arrested as a "terrorist" and "spy". Aged 15 years old, Platon was sentenced in September 1938 to ten years imprisonment and was sent to a corrective labour camp, where he contracted tuberculosis. Thanks to efforts by Platonov and his acquaintances (including Mikhail Sholokhov), Platon was released and returned home in October 1940, but he was terminally ill and died in January 1943. Platonov himself contracted the disease while nursing his son.
During the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), Platonov served as a war correspondent for the military newspaper The Red Star and published a number of short stories about what he witnessed at the front. The war marked a slight upturn in Platonov's literary fortunes: he was again permitted to publish in major literary journals, and some of these war stories, notwithstanding Platonov's typical idiosyncratic language and metaphysics, were well received. However, towards the end of the war, Platonov's health worsened, and in 1944 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1946, his last published short story, "The Return," was slammed in Literaturnaya Gazeta as a "slander" against Soviet culture. His last publications were two collections of folklore. After his death in 1951, Vasily Grossman spoke at his funeral.
Platonov's influence on later Russian writers is considerable. Some - but not all - of his work was published or republished during the 1960s' Khrushchev Thaw.
In journalism, stories, and poetry written during the first post-revolutionary years (1918–1922), Platonov interwove ideas about human mastery over nature with scepticism about triumphant human consciousness and will, and sentimental and even erotic love of physical things with fear and attendant abhorrence of matter. Platonov viewed the world as embodying at the same time the opposing principles of spirit and matter, reason and emotion, nature and machine.
He wrote of factories, machines, and technology as both enticing and dreadful. His aim was to turn industry over to machines, in order to "transfer man from the realm of material production to a higher sphere of life." Thus, in Platonov's vision of the coming "golden age" machines are both enemy and savior. Modern technologies, Platonov asserted paradoxically (though echoing a paradox characteristic of Marxism), would enable humanity to be "freed from the oppression of matter."
Platonov's writing, it has also been argued,[by whom?] has strong ties to the works of earlier Russian authors like Fyodor Dostoevsky. He also uses much Christian symbolism, including a prominent and discernible influence from a wide range of contemporary and ancient philosophers, including the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.
His Foundation Pit uses a combination of peasant language with ideological and political terms to create a sense of meaninglessness, aided by the abrupt and sometimes fantastic events of the plot. Joseph Brodsky considers the work deeply suspicious of the meaning of language, especially political language. This exploration of meaninglessness is a hallmark of existentialism and absurdism. Brodsky commented, "Woe to the people into whose language Andrei Platonov can be translated."
Elif Batuman ranked Soul as one of her four favorite 20th century Russian works. (Batuman is author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and was Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Idiot.)
Novelist Tatyana Tolstaya wrote, "Andrei Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century".
Each year in Voronezh the literature exhibition is held in honour of Platonov, during which people read from the stage some of his works.
The style and subject matter
One of the most striking distinguishing features of Platonov's work is the original language, which has no analogues in world literature. It is often called "primitive", "ungainly", "homemade".
Platonov actively uses the technique of ostraneny, his prose is replete with lexical and grammatical "errors" characteristic of children's speech.
Yuri Levin highlights Platonov's characteristic techniques:
syntactically incorrect constructions, such as verb+place circumstance. «Think on head», «answered... from his dry mouth», «recognized the desire to live into this fenced-off distance».
redundancy, pleonasm. «Voschev... opened the door to space», «his body was thin inside the clothes».
extremely generalized vocabulary. "Nature", "place", "space" instead of specific landscape descriptions. «Prushevsky looked around the empty area of the nearest nature», «an old tree grew... in bright weather».
active use of subordinate clauses about the cause (“Nastya ... hovered around the rushing men, because she wanted to”), as well as subordinate clauses about purpose (“It's time to eat for the day's work”). Moreover, they are often superfluous or logically unmotivated.
active use of typical Soviet bureaucracies, often in an ironic way (“confiscate her affection”), but rarely.
According to the researcher Levin, with the help of these turns, Platonov forms a "panteleological" space of the text, where "everything is connected with everything", and all events unfold among a single "nature".
In the works of Andrey Platonov, form and content form a single, indissoluble whole, that is, the very language of Platonov's works is their content.
Among the key motives of Platonov's work is the theme of death and its overcoming. Anatoly Ryasov writes about Platonov's " metaphysics of death». Platonov in his youth came under the influence of Nikolai Fedorov and repeatedly refers to the idea of raising the dead. In the minds of his characters, it is associated with the coming arrival of communism.
Tribute
A planet discovered in 1981 by Soviet astronomer L.G. Karachkina was named after Platonov.
Works
Novels
Chevengur – 1928 (1972)
The Foundation Pit – 1930 (1969)
Happy Moscow [de] (unfinished) – 1933–1936 (1991)
Short fiction
"The Motherland of Electricity" – 1926
"The Lunar Bomb" – 1926
The Sluices of Epifany (novella) – 1927
"Meadow Craftsmen" – 1928
"The Innermost Man" – 1928
"Makar the Doubtful" – 1929
For Future Use (novella) – 1930 (1931)
The Sea of Youth (novella) – 1934 (1986)
Soul, or Dzhan (novella) – 1934 (1966)
"The Third Son" – 1936
"Fro" (short story) – 1936
"Among Animals and Plants" (short story) – 1936
"The Fierce and Beautiful World" – 1937
The River Potudan (collection of short stories) – 1937
"Immortality" – 1936, 1939
"The Cow" – 1938 (1965)
"Aphrodite" – 1945
"The Return" or "Homecoming"– 1946
Other
Blue Depths[29] (verse) – 1922
The Barrel Organ (play) – 1930
The Hurdy Gurdy (play) – 1930 (1988)
Fourteen Little Red Huts (play) – 1931 (1988)
Father-Mother (screenplay) – 1936 (1967)
English translations
The short story collection The Fierce and Beautiful World, which includes his most famous story, "The Potudan River" (1937), was published in 1970 with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and became Platonov's first book published in English translation. During 1970s, Ardis published translations of his major works, such as The Foundation Pit and Chevengur. In 2000, the New York Review Books Classics series republished The Fierce and Beautiful World with an introduction by Tatyana Tolstaya. In 2007, New York Review Books published a collection of newer translations of some of these stories, including the novella Soul (1934), "The Return" (1946) and "The River Potudan". This was followed by a new translation of The Foundation Pit in 2009, in 2012 by Happy Moscow, an unfinished novel (not published in Platonov's lifetime), and in 2023 a new translation of Chevengur.
The Fierce and Beautiful World: Stories by Andrei Platonov, introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, E. P. Dutton, 1970 (tr. Joseph Barnes)
The Foundation Pit, a bi-langued edition with preface by Joseph Brodsky, Ardis Publishing, 1973 (tr. Mirra Ginsburg)
Chevengur, Ardis Publishing, 1978 (tr. Anthony Olcott)
Collected Works, Ardis Publishing, 1978 (tr. Thomas P. Whitney, Carl R. Proffer, Alexey A. Kiselev, Marion Jordan and Friederike Snyder)
Fierce, Fine World, Raduga Publishers, 1983 (tr. Laura Beraha and Kathleen Cook)
The River Potudan, Bristol Classical Press, 1998 (tr. Marilyn Minto)
The Foundation Pit, Harvill Press, 1996 (tr. Robert Chandler and Geoffrey Smith)
The Return and Other Stories, Harvill Press, 1999 (tr. Robert Chandler and Angela Livingstone)
The Portable Platonov, New Russian Writing, 1999 (tr. Robert Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Eric Naiman, Harvill Press, 2001 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Robert Chandler, New York Review Books, 2012 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Happy Moscow, introduction by Robert Chandler, Vintage Classics, 2013 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Soul, Harvill Press, 2003 (tr. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler)
Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Penguin Classics, 2005, (tr. Robert Chandler and others). Includes two important stories by Platonov: "The Third Son" and "The Return"
Soul and Other Stories, New York Review Books, 2007 (tr. Robert Chandler with Katia Grigoruk, Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson, and Eric Naiman).
The Foundation Pit, New York Review Books 2009 (tr. Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson).
Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, Penguin Classics, 2012 (tr. Robert Chandler and others). Includes Platonov's subtle adaptations of traditional Russian folk tales.
Fourteen Little Red Huts and Other Plays, Columbia University Press, 2016 (The Russian Library) (ed. by Robert Chandler; tr. by Robert Chandler, Jesse Irwin, and Susan Larsen; with notes by Robert Chandler and Natalya Duzhina)
Chevengur, trans. Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler (New York Review Books, 2023)
30/52: Prime
Cannes, France
This picture accurately describes my current feelings for this project.
I attempted to complete the primary colour scheme of the backstage stairwell in the Palais des Festivals in Cannes by wearing the only yellow thing I own upside-down, but that didn't turn out as well as I'd liked, so here is an intermediary picture of the process of trying to wear clothes creatively.
compare flickrcomments.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/dream/ - grabbed my guitar, remembered a story, once heard, threw all my black & white photos of my FLICKR set into the slide show software - I hope I'm not boring you with my voice, I'm not a singer, it's just home-recording for fun... - view this video on black: bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=3328218100&size... - visit the youtube version at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksfQhC8fI8M
+
A bee from two years ago, long dead and withered, but look at how it used its time, buried nose-first in beauty and what really, really mattered. An existential model for all of us to follow.
I'm resisting the urge to ask for more, because what I have is amazing.
Note how the bee stores what it gathers on its legs. Amazing.
"The somewhat overarching ambitions of a sorority girl who, after dabbling in the study of Newtonian physics decided to have a bit of a whirl with her own ideas of space exploration."
Kathleen onseca
Now this is my kind of memorial. Sculptor Maria Rossen designed this monument with the assistance of Arild Veld. It was unveiled at a ceremony on Sept. 24, 2010; the 50th anniversary of the Dutch writer's death. The motorcycle monument is located on Heemraadssingel, at the end of the street and across from the Rotterdamse Volksuniversiteit, where (at the time and since) I have taken language courses in Nederlands (Dutch).
The motorcycle monument, titled: "eenzaam avontuur" (Solitary Adventure) memorializes the post-war writer known to have a passion for motorcycle riding, personal autonomy and authenticity. In the 1940's this gained her attention, but the publishing of her book "Eenzaam Avontuur " (1948) garnered the attention of the Catholic Church's moral monitoring machine. Journalists and members of the book trade, along with the church thrust the book into a February 8, 1949 mock tribunal, "Het Boekentribunaal". They exaggerated the book's flaws and lashed out at its scandalous gay eroticism. Overall, it appeared to be an ugly media situation that got out of hand, bringing her public humiliation. Shortly after this debacle, an unruffled City of Amsterdam judged the book's merit and awarded Blaman the 1949 literature prize. In literary circles, the book has since been regarded as a Dutch classic with Blaman named winner of the 1956 P.C. Hooftprijs (Dutch national prize for literature). Her bibliography credits her with 13 books.
Anna Blaman was the pen name for Johanna Petronella Vrugt. Blaman is short for van Ben Liever Als Man (I'm a better man). Johanna was a teacher from 1926 up to 1934, but chronic poor health reportedly limited her abilities, and in 1935 she resigned her teaching position. Following a brief period of work as an assistant at a gas station and having to deal with a mis-diagnosis of kidney disease, she remained unemployed and focused on writing poetry and fiction. Her real debut was the novel "Romance in Work" (1939). Writing provided her the opportunity to re-enroll at the university and in 1945 she received her degree in French language. This opened many avenues where she spent her summers on the Parisian southcoast immersing herself also in the waters of French existentialism.
In the gaps between Rotterdam, Paris and Amsterdam, where her lesbian lover lived, Johanna forged her identity, but it was her beloved Rotterdam where she returned to live. She was committed to the repair of the war-torn city and her formerly disgraced reputation. Johanna invested in the reconstruction of Rotterdam and in 1952, with W. A. Wagener and A. J. Teychine, she founded the Stakenburg Circle of Authors. She translated for the Rotterdam Theatre, worked as a dramaturge for Rotterdamse Comedie and taught at the Nederlandse Amateur Theatre Union.
In 1955, six months after the publishing of her book, "On Life and Death" Johanna suffered a heart attack. Reportedly her health improved, but she was subsequently forced to live at a moderate pace, and remained in her childhood home, living off the proceeds of her book sales and lectures. In 1960, at the early age of 55, Johanna died from the effects of a cerebral embolism.
Don't waste your time looking for her grave. It was "cleared out in 1990". As you see in this video link below, the museum director places a rose under a tree because Johanna's grave "is no more"; and he goes on to say that "she (her work) must not be forgotten. He offers a commitment to get her books available in the stores again-as noted in this Literary museum video clip. Someone knows the truth about why her grave cannot be found. Perhaps Ram Horna, who organized the 2010 Anna Blaman Year activities can unearth the information related to the mystery and we'll be reading about it over this next year- or at least, that's my hope!
It is brilliant that sculptor Rossen uses this object, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, in memorial to the spirit of Anna Blaman; an object often associated with brazen, independent, men. I can only imagine that when Johanna rode her motorcycle through the war-torn streets of Rotterdam in the late 1940's, she turned many heads. Some journalists and biographers have commented that she lived the lonely, unhappy, yet flamboyant life of a lesbian writer. Whether these descriptions and pieces of information are truth or fiction, this memorial gives Johanna the freedom to ride forever in legend as Anna Blaman- "Ben Liever Als Man".
For specific details and more about the work of this Dutch author, please refer to the newly formed Anna Blaman Society or her current champion, Ram Horna.
*I am grateful for Lilian Dana's language translation and Gabi Helfert's editorial assistance.
Claar Plattèl sings an emotional tribute titled Anna Blaman during LaVita Tea Party.
Good spirited women, the Sirenes honor Anna's memory in their song. Enjoy.
**May 16, 2011 addition- RTV Rijnmond elected to tell Anna's story in this televised program- Rotterdammers van formaat
Are we part of the universe? are we individuals or it's just an evolution illusion?
Existentialist issues
©2012 Cristina Polop
Title: The Mother of Us All, Artist: Robert Indiana, Published by: Poster Originals, Printed by: Johnson Printing, Date: 1967, Printing method: Photomechanical Reproduction, Image Size 36 X 22, Full Sheet 37 X 24. Collection Ken C. Arnold Santa Monica, Ca. Robert Indiana
Born Robert Clark
September 13, 1928 (1928-09-13) New Castle, Indiana, U.S.
Nationality American
Occupation Artist, Theatrical set designer and Costume designer
Robert Indiana (b. September 13, 1928) is an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement.
Life and work
Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana. His family relocated to Indianapolis, where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School. He moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls "sculptural poems".
In 1962, Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery hosted Robert Indiana's first New York solo exhibition. He has since enjoyed solo exhibitions at over 30 museums and galleries worldwide. Indiana's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Brandeis Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts; Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California, among many many others.[1]
Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best known example, LOVE.
Ahava (אהבה "love" in Hebrew), Cor-ten steel sculpture by Robert Indiana (American), 1977, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, IsraelIndiana's iconic work LOVE was first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later was included on an eight-cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." Sculptural versions of the image have been installed at numerous American and international locations. In 1977 he created a Hebrew version with the four letter word Ahava (אהבה "love" in Hebrew) using Cor-ten steel, for the Israel Museum Art Garden in Jerusalem, Israel.
In 2008, Indiana created an image similar to his iconic LOVE (letters stacked two to a line, the letter "o" tilted on its side), but this time showcasing the word "HOPE," and donated all proceeds from the sale of reproductions of his image to Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Raising in excess of $1,000,000. A stainless steel sculpture of HOPE was unveiled outside Denver's Pepsi Center during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The Obama campaign sold T-shirts, pins, bumper stickers, posters, pins and other items adorned with HOPE. Editions of the sculpture have been released and sold internationally and the artist himself has called HOPE "Love's close relative".[2]
Other well-known works by Indiana including: his painting the unique basketball court formerly used by the Milwaukee Bucks in that city's U.S. Cellular Arena, with a large M shape taking up each half of the court; his sculpture in the lobby of Taipei 101, called 1-0 (2002, aluminum), uses multicoloured numbers to suggest the conduct of world trade and the patterns of human life;[3] and the works he created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and exhibited in New York in 2004 called the Peace Paintings.[4]
Indiana has lived as a resident in the island town of Vinalhaven, Maine since 1978. Indiana has been a theatrical set and costume designer, such as the 1976 production by the Santa Fe Opera of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. He was the star of Andy Warhol's film Eat (1964), which is a 45-minute film of Indiana eating a mushroom in his SoHo loft.
See Metropolitian Museum for a similar Print.
I like to have discussions with guitarists ... here: Gennadiy Pilch - comment by backroom.angel: ..."these nylon strings are so much pleasanter to the fingers..." - frizz-feedback: in reality he talked about Andrew York and his composition SUNBURST - soon some videos, featuring his solo work ...
French postcard by Editions du Globe (EDUG), no. 221. Photo: Studio Harcourt, Paris.
French actress and chanson singer Juliette Gréco (1927) was the muse of the existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Later she became the protégée of film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast her in his films.
For more postcards, a bio and clips check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
"C'était... Enfin je m'étais imaginé qu'à de certains moments ma vie pouvait prendre une qualité rare et précieuse. Il n'était pas besoin de circonstances extraordinaires : je demandais tout juste un peu de rigueur." -- La nausée, roman de Jean-Paul Sartre
sharpie on mylar, larger view
A 40 party, 2010-07-18: no cars allowed today on the highway / Autobahn "A 40" in Germany, Ruhrgebiet, geotagged: near Ruhrpark. 60 km of the highway had been closed, 3 million visitors had come. the action was called STILL-LEBEN = living quietly (and healthy) - "political art" I think ...
Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France
I headed south to le Cimetière Montparnasse. After the Paris churchyards closed in the 18th century, a full three quarters of a century before the English closed their urban churchyards, four great cemeteries were laid out to the north, east, south and west of the city. Pere Lachaise is the most famous, Montmartre the most aesthetically pleasing, but Montparnasse probably the most interesting. I spent about three hours and three hundred photographs pottering about. Some of the famous graves are easy to find because they are well documented, and visitors have placed tributes on them. For example, the first grave I went in search of, Samuel Beckett's, has metro tickets placed on it by visitors as a mark of having waited for something.
I already knew where Beckett's grave was, but two others in the same section were more difficult, as I did not have exact locations. I eventually found the grave of Phillipe Noiret, an actor I very much admired particularly for his role in my favourite film, Cinema Paradiso, but also for his role in Le Cop, which has criminally never had a DVD release with English subtitles. There were no public tributes on it, merely a plaque from his wife saying 'pour mon Cher Philippe' and a picture of a horse. While I was photographing it, four gendarmes, two men and two women, passed behind me and came across to see why I was photographing it. "Noiret!" exclaimed one of the men, and then "mais pourquoi le cheval?" wondered one of the women. But they didn't stop for me to explain, for I had read an article about Noiret about fifteen years previously in a copy of La Nouvelle Observateur while staying in a hotel in Boulogne, and I knew that he had bred horses in his spare time.
The other grave I had hoped to find in this section was that of Susan Sontag, but I couldn't track it down.
The joint headstone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is easily found by the main entrance, and I thought it rather sweet that they were remembered together. Despite all their efforts for existentialism and feminism, it was like a headstone in a quiet English churchyard which might have 'reunited' or 'together in eternity' inscribed on it. I think he wasn't pleasant company, and while she was certainly more intelligent than he was she made intellectual arrogance respectable. I photographed their headstone more out of interest than admiration.
Admiration was at the heart of my search for a gravestone lost in sections 6 and 7 which I think is not found often. It is for the surrealist photographer Man Ray. I was delighted to find it after barely 20 minutes searching. He designed it himself, and in his own handwriting into the cement it says 'unconcerned, but not indifferent', which could be taken as rebuff to Satre and his circle I suppose. Charmingly, beside it like the other half of a book is a photograph of him with his wife and the inscription 'Juliet Man Ray 1911-1991, together again'. Enough to leave De Beauvoir spluttering into her Pernod.
You can read my account of my travels at pariswander.blogspot.co.uk.