Trite Fitting Books on Shelves// SL
Stuart Leichter
You can tell something about a man by his library:
Bibles baseball bibliographies Pope Koufax Macintosh
Graves and Belzer Buber and Goebbels
chap books, for charity, and love
monographs biographs autographs photos and films--
a woodifice of an almanac, an organic headstone, a prebituary--
and relationships,
many hardback many softcover more than a few inexpensive paperbacks
some intimate some fleeting some foreign some in translation some one
night stands
some open yet and some still stand as vestal virgins
who allow me to hold them and open them now and again
--
Stuart Leichter
E Selow
obpoem:
closing books
............................
after the last page
some you want to re-read
to avoid that final swat
others you stroke back on
the shelf, cannot imagine to
ever enjoy another work -
then those which end
before they begin, leaving
you nothing but a
hangover
es (Sept 2000)
Joy Yourcenar
I like the idea of books as relationships. Prebituary is a keeper but
do you write that yourself? We used to have them on file for famous
people at the newspaper.
Joy
On Sat, 09 Feb 2002 01:12:14 -0500, slei...@nb.net (Stuart Leichter)
wrote:
Joy Yourcenar
Mythologies http://evolvingbeauty.com/myth
icon/graphy http://evolvingbeauty.com/myth
As the wind blows through my long hair.
I am a lily in your storm.
~By Shu Ting~
Stuart Leichter
penelope@<removeANTISPAMdevice>evolvingbeauty.com wrote:
> I like the idea of books as relationships. Prebituary is a keeper but
> do you write that yourself? We used to have them on file for famous
> people at the newspaper.
Well, no, the personal library can simply serve as a prebituary either by
analogy or metaphor. But now you've made me realize that the first line is
pre-redundant, so I suppose my entire fallacy is wrong. Happy Valentine's
Day.--SL
>
> Joy
>
>
>
> On Sat, 09 Feb 2002 01:12:14 -0500, slei...@nb.net (Stuart Leichter)
> wrote:
>
> >Trite Fitting Books on Shelves
> >
> >You can tell something about a man by his library:
> >Bibles baseball bibliographies Pope Koufax Macintosh
> >Graves and Belzer Buber and Goebbels
> >chap books, for charity, and love
> >monographs biographs autographs photos and films--
> >a woodifice of an almanac, an organic headstone, a prebituary--
> >and relationships,
> >many hardback many softcover more than a few inexpensive paperbacks
> >some intimate some fleeting some foreign some in translation some one
> >night stands
> >some open yet and some still stand as vestal virgins
> >who allow me to hold them and open them now and again
>
> Joy Yourcenar
> Mythologies http://evolvingbeauty.com/myth
> icon/graphy http://evolvingbeauty.com/myth
>
> As the wind blows through my long hair.
> I am a lily in your storm.
> ~By Shu Ting~
--
Stuart Leichter
Art
> Trite Fitting Books on Shelves
>
> You can tell something about a man by his library:
> Bibles baseball bibliographies Pope Koufax Macintosh
> Graves and Belzer Buber and Goebbels
Old Madison Ave. Joe G? Didn't know he had anything published except
his diaries--The guy who brought us "Wring around the collar of the
jew," and "I'd Rather Fight the whole world than switch?" There are
those in my business who think of Old Madison Ave Joe as their Pappy.
> chap books, for charity, and love
> monographs biographs autographs photos and films--
> a woodifice of an almanac, an organic headstone, a prebituary--
> and relationships,
> many hardback many softcover more than a few inexpensive paperbacks
> some intimate some fleeting some foreign some in translation some one
> night stands
> some open yet and some still stand as vestal virgins
> who allow me to hold them and open them now and again
Sorry I missed this the first time around. Nifty, as usual, but I'm
sure your falacy is correct. Vermeer, the painter, was obsessed by
this concept---his portraits are a study in attaching what is in the
background to the subject of the portrait. If the head is surrounded
by the frame of the library shelf in the backgound he was trying to
communicate to the viewer that the subject was an intellectual. A wall
map might indicate a leader. A white wall, as in "Girl at the Window"
a virgin, or someone who is pure. The technique of "grounding" in
portrait painting was enriched and raised to a new level by Vermeer.
What surrounds the subject expresses who the subject is, inside.
Home is where the heart is, and we tend to surround ourselves with
what is in our hearts. Cluttered in our hearts, as in your case, and,
it is true, in mine too. Maybe you could have made it even more
ecclectic by presenting more contrast: Ibsen and King, Plato and
Charles Schultz, Rand and Duchamp, Albee and Sophocles. Eh. Then
again, maybe not. However--more "B's" would have been interesting.
--
Art