Shitao

Yoshida, Hiroshi, 1876-1950

Born in Kurume, Fukuoka prefecture. Original name Ueda Hiroshi. Studied with Yoshida Kasaburo, his adoptive father. Also studied with Tamura Soritsu in Kyoto in 1893; went to Tokyo in 1894 to study with Koyama Shotaro at Fudosha. In 1899 traveled in the U.S. with Nakagawa Hachiro; exhibited paintings in New York, Boston, and elsewhere. Founding member of Taiheiyogakai in 1902. Traveled to Europe 1903-1905. In 1907 he married Fujio, third daughter of the Yoshida family into which he had been adopted. He was a well-established landscape painter, exhibiting at Bunten and Teiten, before he began printmaking, and he continued to exhibit paintings throughout his career. During his travels, however, he learned of the WestÃÃ,¢Ã¢,Ã,¬s admiration for Japanese prints and in 1920 made his first print, The Secluded Garden of Meiji Shrine, with Watanabe Shozaburo. This was one of a total of 7 prints made with Watanabe before the 1923 earthquake; the blocks of all were destroyed in the fires following the quake. Hiroshi and Fujio traveled in the U.S. and Europe 1923-1925 painting and selling their paintings. Enthusiasm for his prints during this sojourn abroad persuaded him to establish his own print workshop upon return to Japan in 1925. Specialized in landscapes from his travels abroad and in Japan. Yoshida learned the skills of carver and printer and often carved his own blocks and personally supervised every stage of his prints. Most of his extensive production was sold abroad; he did not exhibit woodblock prints at Bunten until 1937. Served as a war correspondent in Manchuria in 1938 and 1940; produced his last print in 1946. The characters "JIZURI" (self-printed) are found in the margin of prints made during his lifetime and under his close supervision.


still arguing
we swim the same river
further upstream



wild berries--
one training wheel lifts
round the curve



Orion rising
she reaches to loosen
the pup's collar



dusklight--
I read her poem
differently



plum blossoms
I make plans
for my ashes



family secrets
a thicket full
of ripe raspberries



childhood home
i park in the shade
of my cherry stone



followed home
by a dog I don't know
autumn dusk

I Know A Man


As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

Robert Creeley "

Virginia Woolf's writing room at Monk's House in Sussex from The Guardian's series, Writer's Rooms. George Bernard Shaw, Jane Austen, and Anne Enright are there too. I love these.

In 1882 the sculptor Auguste Rodin agreed to supervise a small group of young women students, one of whom was the seventeen-year-old Camille Claudel. Auguste and Camille fell in love almost at first sight.

At the outset, Camille had recognised in Auguste Rodin a great sculptor and teacher; she was therefore prepared to submit to his direction and abandon her own will as a step along the road to art. Within a few years, however, it appears that Rodin exhausted her, demanding all her time and energy in his service. In time Camille came to resent the situation she had helped to bring about herself. By the time she broke off the relationship, in or around 1893, she had become anxious to escape Rodin's overwhelming influence and devote herself exclusively to her own art. The outward reason for the breakup was that Camille could no longer tolerate Rodin remaining with his common law wife, Rose Beuret.

Almost as soon as her relationship with Rodin ended, Camille began to neglect herself, showed signs of paranoia and became increasingly introverted. She began to exhibit a pattern of creating her sculpture in a state of euphoria and subsequently destroying it when depressed. Then her brother, the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, stepped in to seal her fate, having her committed to a lunatic asylum. She remained confined for 30 years, until her death in 1943. She was not allowed to practise her art, and when the staff psychiatrists wanted to release her into the family's custody, her mother refused to hear of it.




Je Suis une table

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,

that I dumbly inhabit
a density; in language,
there is nothing to stop it,
for nothing retains an edge.

Simple ignorance presents,
later, words for a function,
but it is common pretense
of speech, by a convention,

and there is nothing at all
but inner silence, nothing
to relieve on principle
now this intense thickening.

--Donald Hall




Adolescence II

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

--Rita Dove

youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]

Não vou viver, como alguém que só espera um novo amor
Há outras coisas no caminho aonde eu vou
As vezes ando só, trocando passos com a solidão
Momentos que são meus e que não abro mão

Já sei olhar o rio por onde a vida passa
Sem me precipitar e nem perder a hora
Escuto no silêncio que há em mim e basta
Outro tempo começou pra mim agora

Vou deixar a rua me levar
Ver a cidade se acender
A lua vai banhar esse lugar
E eu vou lembrar você


Ã... mas tenho ainda muita coisa pra arrumar
Promessas que me fiz e que ainda não cumpri
Palavras me aguardam o tempo exato pra falar
Coisas minhas, talvez você nem queira ouvir

Já sei olhar o rio por onde a vida passa
Sem me precipitar e nem perder a hora
Escuto no silêncio que há em mim e basta
Outro tempo começou pra mim agora

Vou deixar a rua me levar
Ver a cidade se acender
A lua vai banhar esse lugar
E eu vou lembrar você...

Bernard Kliban who signed his work B. Kliban because he hated his first name, studied at the Pratt Institute in New York. During the 1950s, he went to Europe and traveled and painted there for a few years. Back in America, he settled in Marin County, near San Francisco. Kliban held various jobs, at the same time drawing satirical cartoons. In 1962, he sent some of them to Playboy magazine and was instantly hired. In 1975, his book 'Cat', containing cat drawings, appeared. Several other cartoon books followed, with titles such as 'Never Eat Anything Larger Than Your Head', 'The Biggest Tongue in Tunisia', 'Two Guys Fooling Around with the Moon' and 'Tiny Footprints'. Kliban is quite possibly my favorite cartoonist, which is saying a lot, frankly. His ideosynchratic "drawings" (he didn't always call them cartoons, perhaps rightly so) are not everyone's idea of funny ha-ha cartoons.

Occasionally his work is immensely funny and hits you like a lightning bolt. At other times you will look at a Kliban drawing in complete bemusement... there's something there, something you can't put your finger on that's tickling you at the base of your brain, but it's not a "gag cartoon" in the usual sense. Some of his cartoons are obvious and just overtly silly, he loved to stoop to outrageously dumb puns (which I'll admit I'm a sucker for); but some of them are subtle and wonderful to the point of being sublime.

Like Saul Steinberg, who he apparently admired greatly, Kliban explored ideas in his drawings that make you stop and think and perhaps come away looking at the world just a little bit differently. Some of them are crass; Kliban was a regular contributor to Playboy for many years (and elevated the magazine's level of cartooning considerably) and was unafraid to "draw what he thought". He was also somewhat compelled by the marketplace to make sex a topic more often than he might have in another magazine.

If'n yer britches are dry after hearin Imogen and Jeff, you ain't listenin'.......

Well, I rolled and I tumbled,
Cried the whole night long
Well, I rolled and I tumbled,
Cried the whole night long
When I woke up this morning,
Didn't know right or wrong

Well if the river was a whiskey
And I was a diving duck
If the river was a whiskey
And I was a diving duck
Well I would dive to the bottom
I swear, I'd never come up.


Well I could have had religion,
In this bad old Sunday
I could have had religion,
In this bad old Sunday
But whisky and bad love,
Wouldn't let me have my way

I rolled and I tumbled
And I rolled and I tumbled
I rolled and I tumbled

Lord Periwinkle and Lady Primrose Walking Their Beetle


Tale of a Tub

The photographic chamber of the eye
records bare painted walls, while an electric light
lays the chromium nerves of plumbing raw;
such poverty assaults the ego; caught
naked in the merely actual room,
the stranger in the lavatory mirror
puts on a public grin, repeats our name
but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.

Just how guilty are we when the ceiling
reveals no cracks that can be decoded? when washbowl
maintains it has no more holy calling
than physical ablution, and the towel
dryly disclaims that fierce troll faces lurk
in its explicit folds? or when the window,
blind with steam, will not admit the dark
which shrouds our prospects in ambiguous shadow?

Twenty years ago, the familiar tub
bred an ample batch of omens; but now
water faucets spawn no danger; each crab
and octopus -- scrabbling just beyond the view,
waiting for some accidental break
in ritual, to strike -- is definitely gone;
the authentic sea denies them and will pluck
fantastic flesh down to the honest bone.

We take the plunge; under water our limbs
waver, faintly green, shuddering away
from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams
ever blur the intransigent lines which draw
the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact
intrudes even when the revolted eye
is closed; the tub exists behind our back;
its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge
the fabrication of some cloth to cover
such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large:
each day demands we create our whole world over,
disguising the constant horror in a coat
of many-colored fictions; we mask our past
in the green of Eden, pretend future's shining fruit
can sprout from the navel of this present waste.
In this particular tub, two knees jut up
like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise
on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap
navigates the tidal slosh of seas
breaking on legendary beaches; in faith
we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

--Sylvia Plath