Donald Hall matriculates into Ezraversity

Donald Hall interviewed Ezra Pound in Italy in 1960. After editing and much backing and forthing with Ez, Hall published it in 1962. The Paris Review has now made the entire interview available as a PDF.

jazz at Newport

Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960) - a film about jazz at Newport - is available online to anyone here.

1936 painted in 1960

1958-60, oil and charcoal on canvas. Although he was only 21 when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Robert Motherwell was deeply affected by the conflict, and would make over 200 works on the subject. I found this one at MoMA and took the photo with my iPhone (forgive the poor quality). A monumental canvas, stark imagery, an apparently symbolic use of color (smoldering blackness...of death?... against vital whiteness...of life?...) convey passionate feelings. And we know which side Motherwell was on: the side of the Republic, a lost cause. MoMA acquired this canvas in 1998.

Zukofsky's home-made recording

The 22nd episode of PoemTalk is a discussion of a poem written in the 1940s but recorded, at home, onto a reel-to-reel player. Click here for program notes and a link to the discussion.

fun cocktail glasses

...that belonged to my wife's parents.

Alex Katz at Bowdoin

This untitled oil painting is Alex Katz in 1960 - rendering a landscape in Skowhegan, Maine. The canvas is in the permanent collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. As I write this, it's on exhibit at the college through 2010, part of a show called "Grounded: Two Centuries of American Landscape Painting."

In 2006 there was a show of Katz' 1960s paintings at PaceWildenstein. (Here's a review of that.)

Here are his one-man shows of the era:


Compare the 1960 landscape with this one--below--of 1972:


(The 1972 piece is a silkscreen, called "Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett IV.")

post-WW2: separate & professional but still fighting like a unit

Ian McLellan Hunter, blacklisted in the U.S. and writing teleplays and screenplays in England and Europe under assumed names (including Samuel B. West), wrote and/or helped write two episodes of the British TV series, The Four Just Men, based on 1921 and 1939 films that had been based on Edgar Wallace's novel Just Men. In the novel, four British veterans of WWI pledge to use their different professional specialties to fight postwar injustice. In the 1959-60 series the four are WW2 vets, spread out now that the war is long done but still fighting like a unit.

"Crime and mystery series that starred Jack Hawkins (as British M.P. Ben Manfred), Hollywood song and dance man Dan Dailey (as US journalist Tim Collier -who was based in Paris), Richard Conte (as New York Professor of Law, Jeff Ryder) and Vittorio de Sica (as Italian hotelier Ricco Poccari) all of whom had been members of the same unit during the war. They took turns each week in tackling an injustice (the episode being set in either London, New York, Paris or Rome) and each was aided by a female assistant, one of whom was future 'Avenger' Honor Blackman."

This show was a production of ITC and also of Sapphire Films. Sapphire was the group that put out "Adventures of Robin Hood," which had a pinko coloring to it and for which Ian Hunter also wrote.

great society before Great Society

Don't you love how planful & totalizingly synthetic--willing to generalize--intellectuals were circa 1960? This quality becomes more and more remarkable to me the further into the details of the books and projects of the time I get.

Howard Mumford Jones took over the American Council of Learned Societies in 1955 (ACLS was in turmoil then) and by 1960 he published a book to make the case generally. Imagine an intellectual today talking about one society? Humanities saves all.

Nicholas Joost and the 1920s rage

Nicholas Joost had been a Chicago-area professor and, for several years in the early 50s, was an associate editor at Poetry magazine. After a while his main interest became The Dial, the avant-garde magazine whose heyday had been the 1920s. Eventually he would write several books about the Dial but first, from 1956 through 1960, he helped prepare a major exhibit on the Dial put on at the Worcester Museum (in Massachusetts). Joost's manuscripts (at Georgetown) include correspondence of the late fifties and they seem (to judge from the finding aid) almost entirely taken up with the Dial exhibit. I haven't seen the exhibit catalogue for the show, which opened in '59 and ran through part of '60, but I'm soon going to be in touch with the folks now at Worcester, get a copy of the catalogue and find out what institutional records they have kept. I've long been curious about specific reasons why the 1920s were so much the rage in the mid and late 1950s, why specifically Fitzgerald's fiction had such a comeback, why American modernists circa 1925 was of such great interest. This Dial show and its reception will, I think, give me some further clues.

Julie as Emily

Click here for more.

Pound as a central image

Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, which reshaped the discussion of Pound in the 1970s, and in some ways re-ignited the debates about Pound's politics (because, for Kenner, Pound's fascism by no means mooted his poetic centrality), was published in 1973. Not knowing much about Kenner's earlier work, I'd always assumed it was written in the early 70s, maybe the late 60s; such a big book surely took a while to make.

Yesterday I spent the day reading around in the Poetry magazine papers at the University of Chicago and read Kenner's correspondence with Poetry editor Henry Rago in the years 1957, '58, '59, '60. And in a letter to Rago dated 1960, Kenner told Rago, "I plan a Great Book" which will use Pound's "career as a central image," etc. etc. There you go. Kenner first conceived of The Pound Era in 1960.

In one sense, the Pound era is 1960-73. Kenner was incensed by Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce, which was also published in 1960. His book on Pound is in part a corrective.

dear diary

January 11, 1960: Susan Sontag writes in her diary:

I: You know why you find it so hard to stay alive? You've been running without gasoline?
S: How? Is honesty the gasoline?
I: No, honesty is the smell of the gasoline.

group therapy live on TV

Airing live on Playhouse 90, April 22, 1960: John Franken- heimer's direction of the Rogert O. Hirsen script, Journey to the Day, in which six patients in a state mental hospital are brought together for group therapy. The play was based on actual conditions at two mental hospitals, one in Ohio and the other at St. Vincent's in NYC. Mike Nichols plays one of the roles, as does Steven Hill. That's Frankenheimer, standing, and Nichols seated in the center. Mary Astor stands behind Nichols and Steven Hill has his back to us, at left. I've ordered the playscript and look forward to reading it.

spit out the truth

The photo at left shows Hemingway with Fidel Castro in 1960. But for now let's talk about Hem's poems. Yes, poems.

Over the years there have been nine unauthorized editions of the poems. All or most of these editions contain 18 poems, which are most of the poems Hem wrote and published while he was living in Paris in the 1920s. The critical response to his verse is mostly based on the pirated editions, which are filled with errors.

One of these unauthorized editions was published by City Lights in San Francisco in 1960. It sold for 50 cents. We have not been able to find any reviews of this edition at all. (The edition of Hem's poems to consult is Nicholas Gerogiannis's Nebraska edition of 1992, 171 pages in length.) The City Lights book is 28 pages.

The bio note in Poetry for January 1923 calls Hem "a young Chicago poet now abroad, who will soon issue his first book of poems." Edmund Wilson quipped that these "are not particularly important" but they do show the writer moving in the main poetic current of the time, at least very generally: what might be called precise yet poignant discernment.

He tried to spit out the truth;
Dry-mouthed at first,
He drooled and slobbred in the end;
Truth dribbling his chin.

Seems like a bad page in a Nick Adams story, lineated.

non-sewing circle and non-profit

"The spirit of Dada is perhaps the best attitude for editors." So wrote Marvin Malone of the Wormwood Review.

The Wormwood Review seems to have started publishing in 1960, although I've found one note that suggests 1959.

Malone (born 1930) was its long-time editor, living (at some point during the long run) in Stockton, California. By 1990 an observer was noting 30 years of the mag. "If anyone wants to find out what is going on in today's avant-garde (yes, it lives), here is one of the first places to turn," says Bill Katz in the Library Journal (May 1, 1990). The communist-affiliated magazine Mainstream ran a symposium on little magazines in 1962 and for the December issue featured a statement by Malone. The role of the little mag in the USA, Malone opined, was "to persist in publication even though the format goes from print, to offset, to mimeograph," "to air the taboos" including "the stasis of culture in the USA at the pre World War II level," "to discomfit as much as possible the self-assured literary critics; to set up an active dissent against the easy success of X. J. Kennedy, Alan Dugan," and "to oppose the idea that 'black is black, white is white, and that gray is red'" (Mainstream, Dec. '62, pp. 41-42).

Well, it seems that actually Sandy Taylor founded Wormwood, along with Jim Scully and Morton Felix and that a little "later on" (how much later?) Taylor "ran it with Marvin Malone." Malone apparently took Wormwood to the west coast, although I have no info that it was founded elsewhere.

Malone was "a pharmacologist. He was a very well-known...researcher in pharmacology." (Obscure in the Shade of the Giants ed. Jerome Gold, Black Heron Press, 2001.) Malone died at 66 on 11/26/96.

Yes, Marvin Malone did Wormwood all these years on the side. Otherwise he served on editorial boards for the Journal of Natural Products, Economic Botany, and the International Journal of Pharmacognosy and was active as a member of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapuetics. He was on the faculty of the University of the Pacific School of Pharmacy for many years.

Wormwood issued a broadside in 1963 that finally made an editorial statement (earlier issues had not): "The Wormwood Review is still non-beat, non-academic, and non-sewing circle and non-profit... not afraid of either wit or intelligence... published when sufficient good material has accumulated--this happens about four times a year."

space worked out logically

The year 1960 was the peak of the era of the powerful new space planners, who were specialists "in the science of making interior office space work out logically, i.e. profitably" (so said Architectural Forum in 1957). Michael Saphier Associates, a firm that really established itself with the design of its own new offices, had been founded in 1937. Lawrence Lerner joined them '49. Lerner studied design at Brooklyn College and studied in an experimental program organized by the Russian-born architect Serge Chermayeff. The photo here was taken in 1960, not long after the completion of the Saphier offices at 488 Madison Avenue.

Source: New York 1960, Stern, Mellins, Fishman, p. 562.

reel-to-reel Zukofsky

On November 3, 1960, Louis Zukofsky turned on his reel-to-reel recorder and made a tape of himself reading 40 poems, and then sent it off to the Library of Congress. Where it sat for many years in their audio collection. Well, sat is not quite fair. Probably some researchers ventured into the archive there and listened. But then PennSound got permission from Zukofsky's executor, Paul Zukofsky, to put the poet's recordings of his poems online. Above you see just the poems he read that day from Some Time. There is much more, so have a look and listen.

This morning I blogged about an extra poem I heard embedded in there. Go here to find out more about that bonus track.

Yahweh's tautology cycled through

I am that I am. Am I? Am that. I am. I am. That I am. I am that I am. I am that I'm I. Am I I that I am? Am I? That I am I am. That am I am I. I I that am am. Am that. I am. Am I that I am? I am I that. I am I am that. Am that I am I. And that I. Etc. This is Brion Gysin performing "I Am" in 1960. Thanks to Danny Snelson and Ubuweb. Now have a listen.

first book

In the photo: poet Barbara Guest in 1960. That year Guest published her first book of poems, The Location of Things (Tibor de Nagy).

off the road in Long Island

Kerouac resided in Northport, L.I., from 1958 to 1964. George Harris went there last year with a video camera and gives us a 5-minute video tour of the two with a Jack p.o.v. Go here for more info and links.