As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't many opportunities to post things. Also, my waking hours are relentlessly overcommitted, and I'm always running from one thing to the next. I'm leaving for Sleater-Kinney in a few minutes, so I won't have enough time to write a nuanced, well-composed post. However, the blog is a mouth that must be fed, and also, I'd like to comment on the Dorothea Tanning profile in the new New Yorker while it's still fresh and new. And of course, who knows when I'll be back again, and I don't want to leave you with nothing to ponder. The experimental solution I've devised is that I'm just going to type my notes for tonight, and we'll see what comes of it.
Life & Letters dispatch from The New Yorker
by Jane Kramer
"A gallant + glamourous life," emerges
read Dorothea Tanning's memoir!
Charmed and Dangerous? [ed. note: already looking for a title]
"At ninety three, Tanning is still working on what, by any standards, has been a gallant and glamourous life, revisiting it here and there to make it more enticing."
Notes:
Things I must see
Tate Modern, "where her famous 1970 pnk wool sculpture 'reclining nude' sits in a big Plexiglas box in the 'subversive objects' gallery."
Phila. Museum paid almost $1m for "birthday" self-portrait, 1942 - saw that at the Surrealism exhibition at the Met last year. It's the one with the lemur, I think.
"oldest living emerging poet" she will say when she's...
read Another Language of Flowers
"Between Lives" is memoir title
Surrealism: Desire Unbound was @ The Met in 2002
She endowed the Tanning Prize in poetry, and then changed the name to honor Wallace Stevens and deflect attention from herself.
[poet J.D.] "McClatchy calls her Lolita - 'the wide-eyed voice of a ferocious, fanged wisdom'
She is complex but not complicated. She is provocative, smart.
Well, that's all there is, and it sort of works because it must for now. Do pick up the magazine; it's well worth it for her mordant wit alone. Here's an interview she did a couple of years ago. Elizabeth has more on Ms. Tanning over at the Cupcake blog.
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