Tuesday, August 21, 2001
Devices and desires
Tennessee Williams once said that his plays were built on the wreckage of the American family. This is true, of course - the same could be said of Theodore Dreiser's immensely gloomy novels - and yet the wreckage of Williams's own family life comes carefully concealed, its frets and fractures covered up with all manner of innocuous lumber.
The Sunday Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 2:18 AM
Monday, August 20, 2001
Here are a couple of articles with references to Edward Lear:
PET TRADE BLUES (the efforts and moral problems involved in attempting to save Brazil's Lear's macaws from extinction), by Richard Hartley, from International Wildlife, March-April, 2000.
Voyage of a painter (Charles-Alexandre Lesueur), by Errol Fuller, from Natural History, April, 1998.
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:30 AM
Sunday, August 19, 2001
artnet.com Magazine Reviews - Drawing Notebook
He called himself "The Painter of Poetical Topography," but the world knows this superb draughtsman better as the inventor of the limerick. He was the Englishman Edward Lear (1812-1888).
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:46 AM
John Gould (1841-1881)
John Gould (1804-1881) was the most prolific artist and publisher of ornithological subjects of all time. In nineteenth century Europe his name was as well known as Audubon's was here in North America. Unlike Audubon, whose life's work focused on one region, Gould traveled widely and employed other artists to help create his lavish hand-colored lithographic folios. Nearly 3,000 lithographs were created during the span of his long career.
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:31 AM
Saturday, August 11, 2001
Land of make-believe
Eggs on legs and free booze: Marilyn Corrie enters a medieval fantasy in Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life by Herman Pleij
Guardian Unlimited Books
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:09 AM
Biography choice: Inventing Wonderland by Jackie Wullschläger
Edward Lear lived a solitary life, preferring children to adults as an escape from his homosexuality. Lear’s attitude to children is presented as being the kindest, his nonsense limericks having none of the menace of Carroll’s work.
The Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:43 AM
Thursday, August 02, 2001
Twentieth-Century American Children's Literature
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:39 PM
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Lear-ing
by David Noland, about Lear's travels in Calabria.
Delta-Sky.com
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:20 PM
Thursday, July 12, 2001
Word-Twisting versus Nonsense
from The Spectator, reprinted in Littell's Living Age, Fifth Series, Volume LVIII, Apr-May-Jun 1887, pp. 379-81.
posted by Marco Graziosi 2:47 PM
A Review of Illustrated Excursions in Italy
(and Fanny Kemble's A Year of Consolation) from the Quarterly Review, reprinted in Littell's Living Age, no. 187, 11 December 1847, pp. 481-94.
Cornell University Making of America
posted by Marco Graziosi 2:13 PM
Lear necrology from The New England Magazine. / Volume 6, Issue 33
March 1888, p. 302.
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:37 PM
Friday, June 29, 2001
Why I'll always have a soft spot for the lovely Lady Mondegreen
Homophones upset grammarians. But Mondegreen Rules, OK? They are a source of gaiety in the English language. Falstaff, Alice, Dickens and Edward Lear would be lost without them. Thomas Hood made an oeuvre from them. “His death which happen’d in his berth,/ At forty-odd befell:/ They went and told the sexton, and/ The sexton toll’d the bell.” Schoolboy riddles depend on them. “Waiter, waiter, what’s this?” “It’s bean soup.”
The Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 6:29 AM
Monday, May 21, 2001
The Uses of Enchantment
In ''The Little Mermaid,'' Hans Christian Andersen suggests that immortality can serve as a substitute, however unsatisfactory, for human love. The story is clearly an allegory for his own life, for the unloved Andersen, more than 125 years after his death, can lay as good a claim as anyone to artistic immortality. At a time when children's stories were exclusively moral and didactic, he revolutionized the genre by infusing it with the humor, anarchy and sorrow of great literature. He expressed the most painful and rawest emotions with extraordinary aesthetic control; the results rivaled anything produced by the great Romantic writers who were his contemporaries. In his simple, unpretentious way he told us as much about the human condition (think of ''The Emperor's New Clothes,'' ''The Snow Queen,'' ''The Fir Tree'') as any of the world's writers and philosophers.
The New York Times Book Review
posted by Marco Graziosi 2:22 PM
Tuesday, May 01, 2001
How Come the Translation of a Limerick Can Have Four Lines (Or Can It?)
by Gideon Toury
in: Word, Text, Translation: Liber Amicorum for Peter Newmark,
eds Gunilla Anderman & Margaret Rogers. Clevedon etc.: Multilingual Matters, 1999, 163-174.
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:12 PM
Poetics of Children's Literature
by Zohar Shavit
The University of Georgia Press, Athens and London, 1986 ©
[Full text online.]
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:50 PM
Saturday, April 28, 2001
Pinocchio, questo benedetto toscano
Concepito nell'aprile 1881, il capolavoro di Collodi compie centoventi anni. La Toscana ha perciò indetto il "1° Festival del Teatro di Pinocchio". Molti spettacoli in tutta Italia.
[On the aniversary of Collodi's conception of Pinocchio, with a short reference to EL.In Italian.]
Il Nuovo
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:13 AM
Thursday, April 19, 2001
Granddaughter of Lewis Carroll's Muse Puts Collection Up for Sale
The archive includes hundreds of letters, photographs, manuscripts, journals and other pieces of family memorabilia, among the most prominent of which are a group of photographs by Lewis Carroll; two highly personal letters from him, to Alice and to her mother, Lorina; and Alice's own, specially bound facsimile of Carroll's handwritten, hand-illustrated manuscript of "Alice's Adventures Under Ground," the basis for "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." The book is inscribed by Carroll to "her whose namesake one happy summer day inspired his story."
On June 6 the collection, which has been housed for some years in Christ Church college, Oxford, is to be sold in one fell swoop by Sotheby's in London. The auction house has high hopes for the sale, estimating that it will bring in at least £2 million, or close to $3 million.
The New York Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:36 AM
Thursday, April 12, 2001
The Learian Limericks Augmented and Revised
[I never thought they needed augmentation and/or revision; anyway here is Mr Jeliss's presentation of his 'improvements' — Marco.]
Many of the nonsense verses of Edward Lear which take the form now known as a limerick end with a line that merely repeats the first line with but slight variation. Since his time the necessity for the last line to provide a twist in the tail, or a kick in the pants in our less genteel age, has become apparent. Accordingly I have undertaken, in what I hope will be taken to be sincere affection for the originals, and not sacrilege, to provide some of Mr Lear's limericks with a little more punch in their final lines. Unfortunately many modern writers seem to think that all limericks should be obscene and some have 'reduced' Lear's work in this way. My aim has been to 'enhance' his work with a little added wit or humour of a simple kind. The new lines are in italic.
[This project reminds me of Arthur's tour de force in The Edwardian Leer, an 'uncensored' version of all 112 limericks from the Book of Nonsense.]
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:33 PM
Saturday, March 24, 2001
Gazing Into a Penholder
Why is it de rigueur for members of the avant-garde to try to stump us? Think of the Surrealists and the Dadaists, with their deadpan refusal to make sense; the authors of the French nouveau roman, with their poker-faced descriptions of trivial things; and the inexplicable mathematical games of Raymond Queneau. The present-day heirs of this tendency are conceptual artists, with their penchant for inscrutable brainteasers. When did ''experimental'' become synonymous with ''mystifying''? Mark Ford's smart new biography, ''Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams'' (Cornell University, $35), hints at a novel answer: with Roussel (1877-1933), a strange and possibly mad French poet and fantasist whose following has included many of the most influential avant-gardists of the 20th century. Roussel's power is that for them he functioned as a kind of proto-Andy Warhol. They could never be sure if he was pulling their leg.
The New York Times Book Review
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:50 AM
Friday, March 23, 2001
Les illustrateurs jeunesse
Cette sélection présente un nombre important d'illustrateurs et d'auteurs-illustrateurs pour la jeunesse, classés par ordre alphabétique, par nationalité et par époque. Cette liste est régulièrement mise à jour. Elle signale les artistes confirmés mais aussi ceux moins connus. Chaque entrée introduit à une biographie de l'illustrateur, une bibliographie, à une série d'illustrations de l'artiste, ainsi qu'à des liens éventuels.
Régulièrement, de nouvelles images, visibles en format vignette, sont intégrées à cette base.
[A very complete database.]
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:20 PM
Picturing Childhood: Illustrated Children's Books from University of California Collections, 1550–1990
Welcome to Picturing Childhood, an online version of the catalog produced to accompany an exhibition held at UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, April 16 through June 29, 1997. The catalog was published by the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and the Department of Special Collections at the University Research Library, UCLA.
[This exhibition seems to completely ignore Lear's production.]
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:18 PM
University of Delaware: WORLD OF THE CHILD - Two Hundred Years of Children's Books
An exhibition at the Hugh M. Morris Library
University of Delaware Library
February 17 - June 12, 1998
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:09 PM
Exhibit Essay for Hey Diddle Diddle: A History of Children's Book Illustration
An exhibit featuring books from the University Library's Special Collections, Multicultural Children's Literature Curriculum Collection, and Private Collections.
McHenry Library
University of California, Santa Cruz
January 3 - March 19, 2001
posted by Marco Graziosi 12:47 PM
Sunday, March 18, 2001
That Elgar moustache
On Victorian beards and moustache, with a reference to Lear, though it does not mention that Lear himself wuld be a perfect candidate...
Guardian Unlimited
posted by Marco Graziosi 6:01 AM
Friday, March 16, 2001
A comic strip that sang
If Walt Kelly had written "regular" books, he might be recognized today as one of the finest satirists of the 20th century. As a wizard of wordplay he might well be mentioned, if not in the same breath with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, then in the very next.
But he didn't. He drew a comic strip, which was then, as now, a low estate, and most of the books he produced were compilations of his strip, "Pogo," featuring Pogo Possum, Albert the Alligator and a whole raft of animals inhabiting Kelly's highly imaginative rendering of Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp. And so Kelly, while not exactly an obscure figure, is remembered primarily by a fiercely loyal band of enthusiasts.
Chicago Sunday Times
posted by Marco Graziosi 3:21 PM
Friday, February 09, 2001
auteurs.net "Le meilleur du web littéraire"
Le site "Edward Lear Home Page" n'est pas recommandé aux grandes personnes, ni aux gens raisonnables : exclusivement consacré aux inepties rimées d'Edward Lear et au non-sens, il risque en effet de faire "grincer" leur entendement. Par contre, ceux qui ne répugnent pas à l'escamotage du bon sens y trouveront largement de quoi satisfaire leur penchant. Marco Graziosi (auteur d'une thèse sur Edward Lear) leur propose une liste de diffusion ainsi qu'une foule d'informations (biographie, bibliographie…) et de documents (portraits, dessins, études…) sur ce peintre et illustrateur anglais qui écrivait des bouts-rimés incongrus (limericks) entre deux esquisses. Même s'ils n'eurent pas la notoriété des ouvrages de Lewis Carroll, ses Books of Nonsense comptent néanmoins parmi les plus beaux fleurons de l'art non-sensique.
[This review of the site had me so excited I could not stop myself... Just for once!]
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:16 PM
Thursday, February 08, 2001
Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema- Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray was born into an illustrious family in Calcutta in 1921. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore Ray-Chaudhary, was a publisher, musician and the creator of children’s literature in Bengali. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a noted satirist and India's first writer of nonsense rhymes, akin to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear.
Does anybody know anything of this Sukumar Ray?
posted by Marco Graziosi 12:46 PM
Friday, February 02, 2001
Edward Lear: "Dong, co ma swiecacy nos"
... and this one looks like a commentary on the Dong with a Luminous Nose, in Polish.
Gazeta Wyborcza
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:59 PM
?????? ???
Well, ehm, it really looks like a Lear biography but... it's in Russian! Can anybody confirm?
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:54 PM
1 Portrait of Catherine Lear
From the National Portrait Gallery, London, a silhouette portrait of Edward's youngest sister, by an unknown artist.
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:11 PM
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
JOHN UPDIKE: Lear, Far and Near
Even during Edward Lear's lifetime, his nonsense verse tended to detract from the seriousness of his landscape painting. In the corner of a letter Lear had written Ruskin in 1883, the great critic nonresponsively jotted, "Is this the nonsense man?" A few years later, Ruskin in Pall Mall Magazine praised the writer but ignored the artist. Posthumously, appreciation of the art must work its way around (to quote a review from 1930) "the Himalaya of nonsense [whereupon] Edward Lear sits enthroned." The catalog of one exhibit of his watercolors almost insultingly speaks of "Edward Lear, 'the landscape painter' as he was wont to call himself."
New York Review of Books
posted by Marco Graziosi 2:46 PM
Monday, January 22, 2001
You Elegant Fowl
This is only the Food column from the New York Times Magazine, but I could not resist the title! No reference to Lear is made in the article.
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:51 AM
Thursday, January 18, 2001
A replica of the complete Birds of America, by Audubon
the only one who could compete with Lear in bird illustration.
This site includes the full text and several indexes, but the scans could be better. Unfortunately, the Elwell Sale Stewart Library seems to have stopped archiving images from its Audubon.
posted by Marco Graziosi 3:43 PM
Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Foundation for the Preservation of the Hyacinth Macaw
A nonprofit foundation incorporated in 1991 with the goal of preserving the Hyacinth Macaw and other birds of the world's tropics through education, research, ecotourism and captive breeding.
[Has a gallery with some reproductions of Lear's macaws.]
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:00 PM
Tuesday, January 16, 2001
Misguided genius
"I bleed over every phrase," Raymond Roussel told the psychologist Pierre Janet, who believed that his patient suffered a "displaced form of religious mania" that accounted for "Roussel's misguided conviction of his literary genius".
The Sunday Times: Books:
posted by Marco Graziosi 4:03 PM
Saturday, January 13, 2001
Observer review: Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford
By 30, feeling he had achieved the required 'sensations of art', he embarked on the novel Impressions d'Afrique. This reveals an extraordinary world which he elaborated for the rest of his life, suspended, as Cocteau said, 'from elegance, fairyland and fear' and full of inventors, virtuosi and miraculous inventions. A worm, for instance, in a trough full of a strange water as heavy as mercury with a narrow slit in its base, suspended above a zither. Trained by a Hungarian musician, the worm arches its body to regulate the flow of drops on to the zither and thus plays wondrously complex rhapsodies and waltzes with 'a savagely dramatic range of expression'. Entering his flood of stories is, as André Gide said, like being swept up in a Gulf Stream of the imagination.
Books Unlimited
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:42 PM
Monday, January 08, 2001
Edward Gorey
No one sheds light on darkness from quite the same perspective as this Cape Cod specialist in morbid, fine-lined jocularity.
[This is a long article on Gorey's career from Salon's 'Brilliant Careers' series. A 'Gorey Gallery' is also included.]
Salon People
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:45 PM
The following items link to pages in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, with descriptions of collections containing Edward Lear material.
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:39 PM
ALFRED TENNYSON COLLECTION
Ongoing collection of documents acquired by gift and purchase from various sources. Type of accession (gift or purchase) and date of acquisition is noted in the box-and-folder list. For further information, consult the appropriate curator.
[Includes several letters on the Lear-illustrated Tennyson's Works, as well as a few letters from Lear to the Tennyson family, generally containing caricatures.]
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:20 PM
STEVEN H. SCHEUER COLLECTION OF TELEVISION PROGRAM SCRIPTS
[Includes script for a 10 Jun 1956 'Nonsense (Edward Lear)' program.]
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:17 PM
OSBORN 19TH CENTURY BOUND MANUSCRIPTS (FOLIO)
[Full list of the Osborn shelves material, which includes Lear watercolors.]
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:14 PM
BURNEY-LEAR DRAWINGS
The Burney-Lear Drawings consists of over 1,000 watercolors, sketches, and drawings by Edward Francis Burney, other members of the Burney family, members of the Hoare family, Edward Lear, and others. Most of the drawings are unsigned, and some of the attributions are still uncertain. The majority of the material appears to date from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
posted by Marco Graziosi 12:57 PM
Saturday, January 06, 2001
Edward Lear.
The author of one of the most original books of comic verse ever written, Edward Lear, though he was a great traveller, had not much to do with Bohemia. An artist he was in more than one sense and in more than one branch of art; but none of his artistries led him Prague-wards, just as the fact that he owed not a little to patronage did not, in the least, subject him to any of the trials, or tempt him into any of the revolts and excesses, of Bohemia’s uglier elder sister Grub street. Severe critics in the arts of design have admitted him to be an excellent draughtsman: it would be a sufficient and final testimony of the hopelessness of a literary critic if he failed to find in Lear a super-excellent writer of an almost unique kind.
The delightful Book of Nonsense (the form of the verse of which was long afterwards senselessly vulgarised and, in fact, prostituted, in newspaper competitions under the equally senseless name “Limerick”), taking, perhaps, a hint from the immemorial nursery rime, combined sense and nonsense, after the specially English fashion, in a way never known before; while his somewhat longer peoms—The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, the famous Jumblies and others—readjusted the combination in a fashion almost more delectable still.
The Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. 13. The Victorian Age, Part One. VI. Lesser Poets of the Middle and Later Nineteenth Century. §11.
Bartleby Project
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:03 PM
Wednesday, January 03, 2001
ALISON LURIE: On Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Edward Gorey, who died on April 15, was associated with The New York Review of Books from the beginning. His fantastic and memorable cover illustrations were a feature of every anniversary issue; and in 1975 he contributed an ongoing serial, Les Mystères de Constantinople, whose heroine was thought by some to resemble one of the NYR's editors.
The New York Review of Books
posted by Marco Graziosi 5:38 AM
Monday, January 01, 2001
The Art of Dr. Seuss
Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel's first children's book, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street," was published in 1937; in the year 2000, nine years after his death, the ageless appeal of his whimsical world is selling seats on Broadway ("Seussical") and at the movies ("The Grinch").
Yet most of Geisel's legacy is on paper: nearly four dozen books and countless sketches, drawings, editorial cartoons and commercial art.
latimes.com
posted by Marco Graziosi 1:50 PM
|
