Adrienne Rich: 5/16/29 – 3/27/12

To take note of the recent death of the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich,
here are two of her  "Twenty-One Love Poems"  (written 1974-6):

VI
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—
only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power-tools or steering-wheel
or touching a human face… Such hands could turn
the unborn child rightways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through icebergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup
bearing on its sides
figures of ecstatic women striding
to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—
such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limits of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.

XIX
Can it be growing colder when I begin
to touch myself again, adhesions pull away?
When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward
and looks into the present,
the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death
and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living?
Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream
or in this poem, There are no miracles?
(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,
this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)
If I could let you know—
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has make simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
—look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

The Unsheltered Movie

Finally got around to seeing Bertolucci's "adaptation" and even with the lowest of expectations managed to have them not met … or exceeded … I'm not sure which — but the upshot is it was terrible! Surprisingly so for the director of Last Tango in Paris. To paraphrase Clara Peller, "Where's the butter!?" A nice film to watch if you're into meharis on eregs. Plus a great shot of an ostrich (sorry I don't know the recherché Arabism), the mascot of the movie, whose director dug his head into the sand to escape the novel he was supposed to be filming.

"sheltering"

From Daniel Halpern's note on the text of The Sheltering Sky in the Library of America edition:

According to Bowles' autobiography, Without Stopping, the novel's title came first: "Before the First World War there had been a popular song called 'Down Among the Sheltering Palms'. … [I was fascinated by] the strange word 'sheltering.' What did the palm trees shelter people from, and how sure could they be of such protection?"

Bowles' comment suggests that the adjective in "sheltering sky" is meant with some irony, and yet the only time the phrase occurs is in the very last paragraph of Chapter 23—Port's dying breakthrough—indeed, in the very last sentence: "Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose." The irony here seems much less evident.

Bowles' Short Stories

We read "Pages from Cold Point" in the The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction over ten years ago, so almost none of our current members could be expected to remember that. Nevertheless, it's a story that everyone would find worth reading, and doubly so for his other early short stories "A Distant Episode" and "The Delicate Prey," which both take place in settings similar to The Sheltering Sky. They're all to be found in his first short story collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories as well as any other collection of his stories. (Additionally, most anthologies of post-WWII stories would contain one of them.)

"Lavender Scare" — The Movie

Our April book is The Lavender Scare. A documentary is being made from it and a trailer (and other cool stuff) is now available at the movie's website.

Bowles

As I get to the end of the Bowles I'm reminded of Rimbaud when he said, "The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable."

Another Royal Road through Proust …

is provided by Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust, wherein passages mentioning paintings occur along with the paintings themselves. This can lead to some disappointment, as when Charlus praises Mme de Surgis' portrait by Jacquet


whereas Van Dyck's portrait of the brothers Stuart is more concordant with his greater interest (in her sons).


Still and all, a most attractive and well-made volume, and selling at a steep discount on Amazon.