A straggling procession of demonstrators was moving slowly down the street. The cross-traffic halted them, and the outmost man heard Sophia’s words. He turned towards her a placard which he was carrying. Scrawled on it in large characters were the words, Bread or Lead.
“As you say, Madame…….
"’I envy you, writing about Venice,’ says the newcomer. ‘I pity you,’ says the old hand. One thing is certain. Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice. In time, this becomes the beauty of the place. One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience. One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin. Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself. After a time in Venice, one comes to look with pity on the efforts of the newcomer to disassociate himself from the crowd. He has found a ‘little’ church—has he?—quite off the beaten track, a real gem, with inlaid colored marbles on a soft dove grey, like a jewel box. He means Santa Maria dei Miracoli. As you name it, his face falls. It is so well known, then? Or has he the notion of counting the lions that look down from the window ledges of the palazzi? They remind him of cats. Has anybody ever noticed how many cats there are in Venice or compared them to the lions? On my table two books lie open with chapters on the Cats of Venice. My face had fallen too when I came upon them in the house of an old bookseller, for I too had dared think that I had hold of an original perception.
“The cat= the lion. Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image—the central conceit on which it has evolved” (13)."
“The cat= the lion. Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image—the central conceit on which it has evolved” (13)."
— Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (1963)
If you’re not following theskyovereurope, I recommend that you rectify that immediately… they are traveling throughout European cities taking photographs that are never less than 70% sky, trying to make sense of the way we live, and love, in cities, circulating within the man-made cityscape and the social conventions that orient us, under the ever-changing, ever-same sky.
(Source: theskyovereuropa)
“Cities” series by Atelier Olschinsky (via Atelier Olschinsky’s Cities Series | Magical Urbanism, submitted by drcabl3)
“And since a novel has [a] correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes, trivial. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop— everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists. The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman,’ or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man.’ She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the centre of it. And I thought of all the women’s novels that life scattered, like small pock-marked apples in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw in the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.”
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (pp 73-4)
![chagalov:
Auguste Rodin, Paris, ca 1862 [ab. 22y] -by Charles Hippolyte Aubry
from museerodin](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2wc92vij01qcl8ymo1_1280.jpg)
Today, the Paris-based publication Her Royal Majesty released a preview of their next issue, in select bookshops and galleries May 11th. The theme is The Exotic. It will feature international writers and artists, including Alice Monroe and Anne Simpson, and a drawing by me!
Order yours - or better yet subscribe - here:
"The odyssey of American men in Paris, from Hemingway to Richard Wright, is canonical, as familiar to us as a ride on a bateau mouche. For the women students of the same generation, no matter what their ultimate destinies, the traces of their experience are harder to convey. (…) These young women are determined not so much to ‘embrace irresponsibility’— James Baldwin’s idea about the expatriate student— as to embrace a new language and master a highly coded way of life” (5)."
— Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis
Booked for New York, June 4-18.
See you there?
Clare Caulfield, Flatiron Building, New York (hand-painted screenprint)
(via unicornology)
