New York Shorts: Daybreak Express (1953), Skyscraper (1960), Clotheslines (1981), The Bowery (1994)

 

Daybreak Express

“Daybreak Express, Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1953. Shot in 1953, though not completed until 1957, Daybreak Express was the first film D. A. Pennebaker made, a mad rush of images of New York City captured from a train and edited to the rhythm of Duke Ellington's song of the same name. A jazz aficionado, Pennebaker thought his career would continue along this path, making short films cut to songs. Skyscraper, Directed by Shirley Clarke and Willard Van Dyke • 1960. Nominated for an Academy Award, this live-action short film by director Shirley Clarke playfully chronicles the construction of the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Clarke referred to this work as a musical comedy. Clotheslines, Directed by Roberta Cantow • 1981. Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores. The Bowery, Directed by Sara Driver • 1994. Produced for the French television series POSTCARDS FROM NEW YORK, this short documentary captures the poetry of the city’s storied skid row before its gentrification.”

Criterion: Daybreak Express, Skyscraper, Clotheslines, The Bowery (Video)

W - Skyscraper (1959), The Art of the Chore: Roberta Cantow’s Feminist Classic Clotheslines, The Bowery - Luc Sante

YouTube: Daybreak Express (1953), “SKYSCRAPER” CONSTRUCTION OF 666 5TH AVE. NEW YORK CITY DOCUMENTARY, Clotheslines Trailer

 

Clotheslines

​The Chilling Popularity of Anti-Vax Deathbed Videos

 

Artist Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) offers one example in the long tradition of deathbed scenes as morality theater.

“On July 18, Brytney Cobia, a physician in Birmingham, Alabama, took to Facebook to talk about caring for Covid-19 patients. ‘One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine,’ Cobia wrote. ‘I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.’ Cobia’s post, which has since been shared 16,000 times on the social platform and amplified in local and national news outlets, proved to be an early entry in a grisly new genre of pro-vax deathbed confessions from the unvaccinated, where the dying admit their mistakes and beg others not to repeat them. ...”

The New Republic

Art Zoyd - 44 1/2 : Live and Unreleased Works (2017)

 

“ ... Originally founded as a psychedelic / progressive rock band in France in 1969, with the arrival of soon-to-be co-leaders Gerard Hourbette and Thierry Zaboitzeff in 1971 and then with the departure of the band’s founder, the group radically changed direction. By 1975 they were no longer a ‘rock’ band with guitars and drums, the band were now a based around the unique sounds of violins, electric bass and cello and trumpet, with additional instrumentation. ... This 14-disc set is an outgrowth of the celebration of the decades of Art Zoyd’s far-sighted musical work. Every CD is filled to the bursting with nearly 80' of music. There are basically eight CDs of live recordings stretching from the years 1972-2004 and four CDs of studio recordings, sketches and outtakes from 1980-2005. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

allmusic (Audio)

W - Art Zoyd

Discogs

YouTube: 19  Sept 2015  - Rock in Opposition (Live), Présage (Live), Warrior (Live)

2015 September: Rock in Opposition Festival 2015

​“I Would Not Take Prisoners.” Tolstoy’s Case Against Making War Humane

 

 

Albrecht Adam - Napoleon watching the fire of Moscow in September 1812

“It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.“One thing I would do if I had the power,’ Prince Andrei, the debonair and reflective leading man of War and Peace, declares, ‘I would not take prisoners.’ It comes to the hero as an epiphany: if in battle an enemy soldier were captured, or if he laid down his arms and surrendered, it should not save him from death. No one today thinks it is permissible to kill enemies in war summarily when they are captured or surrender. In fact, to do so is today a gross war crime. ...”

LitHub

Tolstoy’s Case Against Humane War By Samuel Moyn

2019 July: War & Peace (TV 2016)

What Comes After - Takeyuki Hakozaki (2021)

 

“This work is an archival piece from my solo exhibition held at HAKO Gallery in Chiba, Japan on February 13 and 14, 2021. During these two days, I had three exhibitions. The first was a recording of an installation of seven guitars and seven circulators titled 'Air', in which the guitars and circulators were arranged in an equilateral heptagon and all the guitars were tuned to D and A. The wind pressure from the circulators caused the guitar strings to resonate, amplifying their faint vibrations and creating an intense drone. It was a means of achieving the flood of differentials, additions, and overtones that Glenn Branca had set out to achieve with greater purity. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

disquiet: Three Takeyuki Hakozaki Videos (Video)

​Norman Seeff: Photographing the Invisible

 

Jodi Foster, 1976

“’What is the nature of change and healing in the creative process? What is invisible in us?’ muses Norman Seeff. ‘Photograph that.’ Seeff has created some of the most recognizable images of iconic innovators in music and pop culture across the past five decades, and this week, a monumental selection of new prints of classic works goes on view in Los Angeles. But as his Sessions Project video series and nascent Power and Passion to Create foundation make clear, in some ways, his truer work exists on a higher plane that transcends portraiture to touch on the very essence of human creativity. ...”

Voice

W - Norman Seeff

 

Robert and Patti, 1969

The abolitionist history of a little house on Riverside Drive

 

Berenice Abbott's photo of 857 Riverside, from 1937

“When Berenice Abbott photographed 857 Riverside Drive near 160th Street in 1937, the small, wood-frame house in today’s Washington Heights was a charming relic from New York’s antebellum era. Built in 1851 in the Italianate style, it boasted clapboard siding, wood shutters, a wraparound porch with decorative trim, and a roof topped with an octagon-shaped cupola. The cupola must have allowed for gorgeous views of the Hudson River in the unspoiled countryside of uptown Manhattan. Today, number 857 retains little of its original beauty. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Stages on Life's Way - Søren Kierkegaard (1845)

 

“Stages on Life's Way is a philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard written in 1845.  The book was written as a continuation of Kierkegaard's masterpiece Either/Or. While Either/Or is about the aesthetic and ethical realms, Stages continues onward to the consideration of the religious realms. ... Here he wrote: ‘When my Philosophical Fragments had come out and I was considering a postscript to clothe the issue in its historical costume, yet another pseudonymous book appeared: Stages on Life’s Way, a book that has attracted the attention of only a few (as it itself predicts) perhaps also because it did not, like Either/Or, have The Seducer’s Diary, for quite certainly that was read most and of course contributed especially to the sensation. That Stages has a relation to Either/Or is clear enough and is definitely indicated by the use in the first two sections of familiar names.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Second Period: Indirect Communication (1843-46) - Stages On Life's Way

New Yorker: Søren K.’s Two-Hundredth Birthday (May 2013)

amazon

YouTube: PHILOSOPHY - Soren Kierkegaard

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843), 2018 November: The Seducer’s Diary (1843), 2020 November: W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952), 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

​A World Cup Every Two Years? Why?

 

FIFA’s Gianni Infantino, who has yet to hear a billion-dollar idea he wouldn’t at least entertain.

“This is soccer’s age of the Big Idea. There is an incessant, unrelenting flow of Big Ideas, ones of such scale and scope that they have to be capitalized, from all corners of the game: from individuals and groups, from clubs and from leagues, from the back of cigarette packets and from all manner of crumpled napkins. The Video Assistant Referee system was a Big Idea. Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams was a Big Idea. Project Big Picture, the plan to redraw how the Premier League worked, was a Big Idea. The Super League was the Biggest Idea of them all — perhaps, in hindsight, it was, in fact, too Big an Idea — an Idea so Big that it could generate, in the brief idealism of its backlash, more Big Ideas still, as the death of a star sends matter hurtling all across the galaxy. …”

NY Times

​Earth, Wind And Fire: An Interview With Annea Lockwood

 

Annea Lockwood and 'Piano Burning'

“This begins with a love story. New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood’s most recent composition ‘For Ruth’ is a reply to a love letter on tape her late partner Ruth Anderson made her in 1974, titled ‘Conversations ‘74’. In ‘For Ruth’, their affectionate conversational fragments, loving affirmations and the bubbling laughter of two people giddy for one another are embraced by field recordings of rich birdsong, grumbling frogs and passing cars, as well as resonant vocal intonations, which sound like the tintinnabulation of struck metal. The few complete sentences that surface contain an exchange that is a sort of found poetry on the feeling that the world has become whole through partnership with another person. ...”

The Quietus (Audio)

2017 March: Source: Music of the Avant Garde, 1966-1974, 2019 April: The Sensual Sound Studies of Annea Lockwood

 

Harvey Matusow, David Tudor & John Cage with Annea Lockwood

Harold Budd - Abandoned Cities (1982)

 

“... Abandoned Cities was originally released in 1984 on Budd’s own Cantil Records (which takes its name from the Californian settlement in the Mojave Desert). It marks a departure from his previous work, exploring synthesizers in a somber landscape of sound that will immediately remind listeners of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s dark Teutonic adventures (cf. ‘Warszawa’), albeit in a minimalist setting. The album contains two songs, although 'song' is clearly the wrong word. Rather, they are two obelisks of sound, immovable and casting a tall, dark shadow over the listener’s mind. ...”

Progrography

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Abandoned Cities (Full Album)

2018 February: Ambient drifting in London

William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen

 

“In his book on the Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky describes the Hermit card as representing mid-life, a ‘positive crisis,’ a middle point in time; ‘between life and death, in a continual crisis, I hold up my lit lamp — my consciousness,’ says the Hermit, while confronting the unknown. The figure recalls the image of Dante in the opening lines of the Divine Comedy. In Mandelbaum’s translation at Columbia’s Digital Dante, we see evident similarities. ... This is not to say the literary Dante and occult Hermeticism are historically related; only they emerged from the same matrix, a medieval Catholic Europe steeped in mysterious symbols. ...”

Open Culture

2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), 2019 May: The Notebook of William Blake, 2019 October: ‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination

​A Household of Minor Things: The Collections of Robert Duncan and Jess

 

“Jess and Robert Duncan pursued separate artistic paths—the former as a visual artist, the latter as a poet, though each experimented with the other’s chosen medium. Jess, who had a lifelong interest in the play inherent in language, wrote poetry and prose, and Duncan, who was drawn to the open form and movement he perceived in abstract expressionism, painted and drew. Yet neither approached the facility with which the other engaged his own field, and the benefits of these excursions into the other’s territory lay more in the insights brought back than in any contribution made on foreign ground. ...”

LitHub

Jess Collins

BOOKFORUM: Very Fine House

Brooklyn Rail: Tara McDowell’s The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess

The Householders | Oh what a fortress our art makes, and oh what an armoire our love

SF MoMA: Salvage and Recuperation

amazon

2008 March: Robert Duncan, 1919-1988, 2011 May: Robert Duncan: May 18, 1959, 2012 January: Ten Poems, 1940 to 1980, 2013 May: An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, 2017 January: Robert Duncan's notes on Ron Silliman's 'Opening'

JESS’S STUDIO (DETAIL) WITH CARAVAGGIO ON THE WALL IN THE BACKGROUND

Auditions: Field Recordings as Otherly Zones of Entanglement

 

Rudy Deceliere – Various Ends of the World

“In recent decades, field recording has come into sharp focus as a rapidly evolving creative practice within the canon of sound arts. Its proliferation heralds an opening up to notions of place, environment, non-anthropic listening, divergent cultural traditions, bio-acoustics, and a curiosity towards the act of being present to our audition in time and in space. ...”

Various Artists (Video/Audio)

​20 NYC subway stations with show-stopping tile art

South Ferry

“Subway stations don’t need colorful mosaics or installations by famous artists to have a distinctive style—but those things do give commuters something lovely to look at while waiting for a train to show up. And New York’s transit system doesn’t disappoint, particularly if you’re the sort of person who pays attention to the intricacies of tile station markers, or the individual pieces of a mosaic mural. In fact, the city’s subway stations are an excellent showcase for that sort of craftsmanship, whether it’s a 110-year-old bas-relief of a beaver, or a brand-new mosaic made up of ceramic tile. ...”

Curbed

W - New York City Subway tiles

[PDF] The Preservation of the Original Tiles in the New York City Subway System

​Jim Jarmusch’s Collages

 

“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces. And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’ ...”

The Paris Review

Anthology

2014 October: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, 2015 December: Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch (2005).,2016 October: An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch, 2016 July: The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona, 2016 December: Jim Jarmusch Lists His Favorite Poets: Dante, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery & More, 2017 December: Paterson (2016)

​Algonquin Round Table

 

Members and associates of the Algonquin Round Table: (standing, left to right) Art Samuels and Harpo Marx; (sitting) Charles MacArthur, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott

“The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of ‘The Vicious Circle’, as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. ... Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution. ...”

Wikipedia, YouTube: The Round Table's Legacy

NY Times: The Vicious Fun of America’s Most Famous Literary Circle

W - Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle - Alan Rudolph (1994)

NY Times: MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE; So Witty, So Sophisticated (1994)

Guardian - Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle: does it get under Dorothy's skin?

Criterion (Video)

YouTube: Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle

2014 August: Dorothy Parker

Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation

 

“In the beginning, there were ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they were good. Midcentury American man could come home after eight hours of work and turn on his television and know where he stood in relation to his wife, and his children, and his neighbors, and his town, and his country, and his world. And that was good. Or he could open the local paper in the morning in the ritual fashion, taking his civic communion with his coffee, and know that identical scenes were unfolding in households across the country. Over frequencies our American never tuned in to, red-baiting, ultra-right-wing radio preachers hyperventilated to millions. ...”

Harpers

The Sibley Guide to Birds

 

“... The Sibley Guide to Birds represents more than 12 years of work by David Allen Sibley. The final draft of the artwork and text took over six years to complete, and the finished book was published in October 2000. Before painting and writing the final draft David spent over 6 years working on the problems of layout and design. The challenge was to meet the goal of illustrating every species and every significant plumage variation; illustrating every species in flight from above and below; describing the complete range of vocalizations for each species; showing all significant subspecies variations; and doing it all in a format that is logical and easy to understand so that even beginners would not be overwhelmed by the amount of information. The solution was a new and unique design arranging each species in a vertical column on the page. ...”

Sibley Guides: About

Sibley Guides: Bird Info

First look: David Sibley describes changes to look for in his revised Guide to Birdsttps

W - David Allen Sibley

amazon

 

Pages 144-45 of the second edition are above.

2008 September: Birds, 2008 June: Bird Songs, 2017 April: Of a Feather, 2017 June: Bird Sounds, 2017 July: Beautifully Designed Tiny Houses… For Birds, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 March: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off., 2019 June: Where Birds Meet Art … After Dark, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 October: A Quest to Protect the World’s Last Silent Places, 2020 June: Making a Garden That Welcomes the Birds, 2020 July: New Bird Song That ‘Went Viral’ Across This Species of Sparrow Was Tracked by Scientists For the First Time, 2020 August: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward, 2020 October: Get the Birds To Come To You, 2020 June: BirdNET, 2021 April: Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade, 2021 June: Leave This Wondrous Island to the Birds

​A case of the Palestinian blues

 

Untitled, from the series 'Islam Played the Blues' by Toufic Beyhum.

“For Kareem Samara, a British-Palestinian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound artist, it was naseeb — meant to be. One day in 2020, American-Palestinian filmmaker and music producer Sama’an Ashrawi messaged asking him to play ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ an American blues standard, on the oud. Ashrawi was curious what the blues would sound like in the quarter tones of the Middle Eastern instrument. Minutes later, Samara sent him a recording of the tune. ...”

+972 (Video/Audio)

A painting by Nour Bazzari, a teenage Palestinian abstract artist, inspired by Azraq’s rendition of ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’

Eluvium - Virga II (2021), Virga I (2019)

 

“The great American writer Frederick Buechner once described vocation as ‘where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.’ A difficult concept simply described, it’s an ideal those privileged enough to pursue often find unattainable. Matthew Cooper is one of the few who could claim to come close. The ambient and classical works he releases as Eluvium are an obvious joy to him in all their painstaking humility, born of the type of industry that comes from hours lost to the world absorbed in a calling. The musical worlds he has built have been a source of comfort to a great many. Enchanting portals to reflect and withdraw, and often ultimately heal. It’s curious, the unexpected places we find our joys meet the needs of the world, and in Cooper’s case his most recent work felt like providence. ...”

TREBLE

Bandcamp: Virga I (Audio) , Virga II (Audio)

YouTube: Virga I, Virga II

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson (1999)

“Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Click Here (May 1999)

Complete Review

amazon, Audible

Bill Evans - Live in Switzerland (1975)

 

“... Over to Switzerland this week for a concert by the legendary Bill Evans, with his trio consisting of Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums. Considered by many to be one of the most influential Jazz Pianists of the post-World War 2 era, Evans was an innovative pianist, taking an impressionistic approach to traditional Jazz pieces which became his trademark over the years. He was also a gifted composer, with his signature tune Waltz For Debby a standard in most Jazz musicians repertoire.Despite a tumultuous and tragic personal life, Evans was one of the most popular Jazz musicians of the 50s, 60s and 70s. His early death in 1980 from a decades-long abuse of drugs and alcohol robbed the music world of one of its most eloquent and visionary voices. ...”

Past Daily (Audio)

Discogs

YouTube: Live in Switzerland 1:18:00

2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005), 2019 November: Some Other Time (2016), 2020 November: Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968), 2021 February: Bill Evans Live in Munch Museum, Oslo (1966)

The Names Heard Long Ago – Jonathan Wilson

 

“Jonathan Wilson’s eleventh book, The Names Heard Long Ago: How The Golden Age of Hungarian Football Shaped The Modern Game, once again sees the celebrated journalist and author delving into a fascinating part of football history, meticulously detailed, thoroughly researched, as one would expect from the architect of the football fanatic’s Bible, Inverting The Pyramid. The Names Heard Long Ago explores the revolutionary concepts found in early 20th Century Hungarian football and the subsequent spread of ideas, tactics and characters around the globe, often granting unprecedented success in the far-reaching countries in which they were adopted, and still found in the game today. …”

How 20th Century Hungarian Football Influenced The Game We Love Today, amazon

Scissors Kick - How Vienna coffee houses gave rise to a new era of intellectualism in football

Scissors Kick - Wunderteam: Hungarian soccer team 1930s (Video)

Scissors Kick - Golden Team (Video)

New York Stories: King of New York - Abel Ferrara (1990)

“King of New York is a 1990 American neo-noir crime thriller film starring Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Laurence Fishburne, Victor Argo, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito. It was directed by independent filmmaker Abel Ferrara and written by Nicholas St. John. Frank White, a drug lord, is riding into New York City in a limousine after being released from Sing Sing. Emilio El Zapa, a Colombian drug dealer, is shot dead and the killers leave a newspaper headline announcing Frank's release. Zapa's partner, King Tito, is in a hotel room with Jimmy Jump, who is Frank's trigger happy right-hand man and Test Tube, who are negotiating the purchase of cocaine. Jimmy and Test Tube shoot Tito and his bodyguards and steal the cocaine. ...”

Wikipedia

Abel Ferrara’s ‘King of New York’ gained a true, cult reputation of a legitimate gangster classic (Video)

Criterion: Trailer (Video), amazon

YouTube:  King Of New York by Abel Ferrara - Trailer

Ray Harryhausen | Titan of Cinema

 

“Film special effects superstar Ray Harryhausen helped elevate stop motion animation to an art. His innovative and inspiring films, from the 1950s onwards, changed the face of modern movie making forever. This is the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of Ray Harryhausen’s work ever seen, with newly restored and previously unseen material from his incredible archive. Ray Harryhausen's work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 1950s and 1970s, One Million Years B.C. and Mighty Joe Young. He inspired a generation of filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animations, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day. ...”

National Galleries (Video)

The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation (Video)

W - Ray Harryhausen

YouTube: The Ray Harryhausen Creature List

​The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy'

 

Alexandria Castle, Egypt

"Lawrence Durrell claimed that the four books of The Alexandria Quartet were 'an investigation of modern love'. It's possible to take that idea at face value. Some have even used it as a stick with which to beat him. Notably, his Guardian obituarist (writing in 1990, at a time when Durrell's reputation was possibly at its lowest ebb) said 'a harsh judgment' of his masterpiece might be that it was 'a four-volume romantic novel written by a poet steeped in Freud and on nodding terms with Einstein'. ...”

Guardian

The New Criterion: Alexandria, Durrell & the “Quartet”

'Justine' at 60: Revisiting Lawrence Durrell's Great Love Novel

2011 December: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell, 2013 September: Villa that inspired Lawrence Durrell faces demolition, as Egypt allows heritage to crumble, 2014 August: Prospero’s Cell (1945), 2015 April: Bitter Lemons (1953–1956), 2015 May: Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, 2016 July: Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), 2016 September: The Greek Islands, 2016 October: Justine (1957), 2017 February: Balthazar (1958), 2017 April: Mountolive (1958), 2017 May: Clea (1960), 2017 October: The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy', 2018 February: Pied Piper of Lovers (1935), Panic Spring (1937), 2020 April: The Alexandria Quartet: Mirrors and telescopes

Lawrence Durrell’s passport, with stamps for entry into Alexandria.