My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction.
In 1952 a rich and lively magazine given to moral teachings and the wonders of science published a “factual study" of the hangover, sub-titling it in block letters A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS, and sub-sub-titling it (for the immediate relief of drunks and advertisers): “The damage is not real; headache may be due to liver and shakes to remorse; a cure would be worth a fortune.”
In the fall of 1957 Giacometti was asked by the editors of the French magazine Arts to visit the great auto show which is held annually at Paris’s Grand Palais and to comment afterwards on the relation of the car to sculpture. Could the “beauty” of a car be compared, he was asked, to that of a statue? His essay in reply follows.
They say that after seven years every cell in your body has changed. You are a different person. I wish I could remember what day it was, in July 1949, that I landed in Genoa. Or the day (one or two days before?) when we first came in sight of the Spanish coast.
The twelve months ending in May, 1957 are counted as the 2500th year of the Buddhist Era, and they have been a holy occasion for the millions of Buddhists in Asia. The big moment was last year at the May full moon, a time that is always celebrated as the triple anniversary of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and departure from this world.
These letters written during the period September 20, 1950—May 20, 1952, while James Blake, a night club pianist by profession, was a convict in a southern county jail. The Mr. X to whom a number of the
Marrakesh is the essence of cosmopolitanism. Its streets buzz with the dialects of the Sahara and the Atlas mountains. It is the meeting place of all the tribes of the south and the range of costumes
Manuel Rodriguez ‘Manolete’ had entered his thirty-first year on July 4th, 1947. His birthplace was Cordoba, a hundred and twenty kilometres down the Guadalquivir from Linares. Since 1939 he had been at the height of his profession; lean, hawk-nosed, and saturnine, he was
I like cats as far as creatures go. I like almost any animal that does not have horns or scales on it for that matter, but I especially like cats. Any sort and denomination: spotted or solid, fat or thin, with and without fleas. I like them and admire them and almost anything they do is a pleasure to me.
A little house. Abandoned. Rank with grasses. We must have passed it by a dozen times before we knew it was the place, so undistinguished it was, looking for all the world like any peasant cottage, squatting on its haunches behind a wooden gate closed up to stay with ivy and trumpet vine, mixed impartially in the business of regaining possession.
The production of Obéron which M. Lehmann has just produced at the Opera must really be considered a first performance. Commissioned by the management of Covent Garden after the great success of Euryanthe in Vienna in 1823, Obéron was tailored to the requirements, conventions, and machinery of the English opera house, and was undoubtedly far from the real opera that von Weber had in mind.