Ferdinand Magellan is credited with first circumnavigating the earth. It's not well known that his ship returned to Spain without him. Magellan died about two-thirds through the voyage, far from returning to his starting point in Spain, having been killed in fighting on an island called Cebu.
Directing the filming of Spartacus (1960), Stanley Kubrick dismissed his cinematographer Russell Metty and took over shooting himself. By contract Kubrick wasn’t able to erase Metty’s name from the credits. Spartacus didn’t win an Oscar for best picture, nor did Kubrick get the award for best director. Metty, however, won the Oscar for best cinematography.
Thomas Hardy’s wife wrote to a friend of theirs: “Tom’s in a very good mood today. He’s just written the most melancholy poem!”
Showing posts with label melancholy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label melancholy. Show all posts
4.05.2025
10.27.2021
not too pure
Cleanse your spirit of spleen, my teacher said, before exercising your function as critics. Not that the voiding of spleen doesn’t pose certain dangers: there are some souls who have nothing else to offer, who run the risk of blanking themselves out with purgation. “Be pure, be pure, and evermore be pure: but be not too pure,” for we live in essential impurity. Melancholia, black bile—asta bilis—has joined with the poet more than once to produce imperishable pages. There is no need to begrudge the critic a little melancholy. Nonetheless, a little soap here, a little swab there have their place in the household of literature.
Antonio Machado, Juan De Mairena* (Univ. of California Press, 1963), edited and translated by Ben Belitt
*‘Juan De Mairena’ was a pseudonym of Machado's. The Marirena persona being a provincial professor of rhetoric, philosophy and literature. The subtitle of this book: Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda, and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor with an Appendix of Poems from The Apocryphal Songbooks.
Antonio Machado, Juan De Mairena* (Univ. of California Press, 1963), edited and translated by Ben Belitt
*‘Juan De Mairena’ was a pseudonym of Machado's. The Marirena persona being a provincial professor of rhetoric, philosophy and literature. The subtitle of this book: Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda, and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor with an Appendix of Poems from The Apocryphal Songbooks.
7.12.2017
when art appears
The most beautiful book would be that which would not be possible to consider as a book.
When art appears, life disappears.
To paint so as not to have to think any more pleases me, to think in order to paint is a piece of nonsense on the high tide of the spirit.
Gallery openings fill me with melancholy, the same goes for weddings and funerals.
—Francis Picabia, Yes No: Poems & Sayings (Hanuman Books, 1990), translated by Rémy Hall
When art appears, life disappears.
To paint so as not to have to think any more pleases me, to think in order to paint is a piece of nonsense on the high tide of the spirit.
Gallery openings fill me with melancholy, the same goes for weddings and funerals.
—Francis Picabia, Yes No: Poems & Sayings (Hanuman Books, 1990), translated by Rémy Hall
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