David Hockney’s double portrait “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott” (1969) is a striking example of his mastery in capturing personal relationships and individual character through art. This portrait features Henry Geldzahler, the influential New York City-based curator, alongside his partner, painter Christopher Scott. The painting is celebrated for its intimate portrayal and its significant role in chronicling the lives of those within Hockney’s social circle during a transformative period in art and society.
The composition of the painting is both casual and deeply telling. Geldzahler is depicted seated on a lavish, red sofa, engrossed in what appears to be a thoughtful, perhaps even critical, examination of a book or a catalog. His posture and expression convey a sense of intellectual engagement and perhaps a touch of weariness. In contrast, Scott stands at the periphery of the canvas, somewhat distanced from Geldzahler, looking out towards the viewer with an expression that mixes contemplation with a hint of detachment. This spatial and emotional gap between the two figures subtly hints at the dynamics of their relationship.
Hockney’s use of color in this portrait is particularly noteworthy. The vibrant reds of the sofa and the muted background both highlight and contrast the figures, drawing attention to their expressions and the psychological space between them. His style, with clean, precise lines and a clarity of form, enhances the visual impact of the portrait, making the personal narrative strikingly vivid.
This double portrait not only documents a personal moment between Geldzahler and Scott but also serves as a reflection on the era it represents—an era characterized by a burgeoning openness in discussing and depicting homosexual relationships in art. Hockney’s work, through its honest and unapologetic portrayal of his friends and their lives, breaks down barriers and invites a deeper understanding of intimacy and identity. This painting remains a powerful testament to Hockney’s ability to weave complex human emotions into the fabric of visual art.
Billie Nardozzi writes poems every week for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It’s for love, not money: He pays for the privilege of getting them into print.
Sandy and I had a fun trip to Barnes and Noble today, where we mostly browsed through the sales aisle.
Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, Three Soldiers is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence.
Part of the generation that produced Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos wrote one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. Three Soldiers portrays the lives of a trio of army privates: Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York. Hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication in 1921, the novel is a gripping exploration of fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence, and the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers.
In Three Soldiers, he introduces readers to a Harvard aesthete who joins the army out of idealism and his two buddies. Their illusions crumble under the tyranny, red tape, and boredom of the military one by one. The soldiers’ reactions range from bitterness to rage, and—for one—murder, in this vivid portrayal of the human spirit caught in the grip of war.
Thomas Fasano is an old-fashioned guy, and stepping into his home office is like stepping back in time, perhaps like visiting an old C.P.A. who still uses ledgers and adding machines. The office is in the back of the home where he has lived with his wife, Sandy, for the past eleven years. Among his most cherished items are a wooden desk (he built it himself from his own design), a wooden file cabinet, an antique typewriter table with an IBM Selectric II typewriter sitting atop it, several wooden bookcases (he built these too), and a huge corkboard on which he outlines his writing by pinning and arranging index cards. Here Fasano writes the old-fashioned way: in longhand with a fountain pen, on legal pads. Later, he types up his drafts on the IBM. The first few drafts of his writing never see a computer.
Years ago I realized I needed something more, that I had something more to give. That’s why I started writing. After all, I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?
—Thomas Fasano
We at Coyote Canyon Press will soon be publishing a fairly comprehensive grammar book by Mr. Fasano, English Grammar Review: a Handbook for Writers. “It’s a look at the traditional model of grammar,” says Fasano on a recent Sunday afternoon. “I’m a teacher, and most of the teachers I know who teach grammar teach the traditional model, which isn’t a modern grammar at all, that’s for sure, but it’s what everyone teaches. So I thought I’d write a book that explored this antiquated approach and codified it in some useful way.”
[perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”” class=”” cite=”” link=”” color=””]”I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?”[/perfectpullquote]
When asked about the book’s intended audience, “Writers,” he says, picking up one of his many fountain pens and turning up the volume on a Beethoven piano sonata. “Just what the subtitle says — “I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too? — especially student writers. They’re the ones who will benefit most from a handbook like this. I wish I had a book like it when I was a student. It would’ve clarified several aspects of language for me. You must be able to understand the shape of all the pieces in order to fit them together.”
As for future projects, he doesn’t like to talk too much about them for fear of jinxing them. “But you can bet,” he says, “what I’m working on now is a book aimed at students. As you know, I’m a teacher, and I think a lot about my job and how to reach as many students as possible. It’s too easy to get locked into the same old classroom, teaching the some old classes, dealing with the same thing day in and day out. Years ago I realized I needed something more, that I had something more to give. That’s why I started writing. After all, I teach writing. Shouldn’t I write too?”
In the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan stars as an independent bookseller whose livelihood is threatened by a behemoth bookstore chain owned by Tom Hanks.
Thats was fifteen years ago. Today, book selling is a different game, the pendulum having swung so much to the other side that it’s the few chains left who are fighting for survival against Internet book sellers and e-books.
In France, where bookstores are a common site along Paris streets, things are different than in the U.S., where bookstores are vanishing at a fast clip as the popularity of e-books increases. But in France e-book sales don’t threaten book sales, where less than two percent of book sales are e-books. The biggest threat to small booksellers in France comes from Amazon. And for now, small book shops are surviving quite well, selling books, not gifts.
NPR recently ran a segment about a French law that would go a long way toward ensuring the survival of bookstores. The French government has played a big role in fostering the bookstore-friendly environment and lately has accused Amazon of attempting to drive down the price of physical books, the opposite of what’s been happening in the States.
This month France’s lower house passed a bill that would prohibit Amazon from offering a 5 percent discount on books plus free delivery. Limiting discounts on books is one of the ways France is trying to ensure the survival of its independent booksellers. The French culture minister has also accused Amazon of spending several billion dollars on free shipping worldwide in order to gain a competitive edge.
One of Herman Hesse’s earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der alten Sonne) was completed in 1904. The story is of novella length and comes long before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II.
In his early years as a writer, Hesse turned memories of his childhood home of Cawl—called “Gerbersau,” after a favorite fishing spot on the Nagold River—into a steady flow of Novellen, which kept his coffers replenished; and the ranks of his reading public kept growing. “In der alten Sonne,” one of these recollective tales, was first published in Hesse’s Nachbarn (1908), a collection of five works of fiction about the natives of his birthplace.
The novel was first published in English in 1914 in Volume XIX of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature by the German Publication Society. The twenty illustrated volumes in the series were edited by Kuno Francke. The publishing house, which was created specifically for this series, went bankrupt soon after the German U-boat sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. One outcome of the Great War was that America’s taste for German literature and culture dissipated overnight.
The translation by A[lexis] I[renée] du P[ont] Coleman is fairly modern. However, the text contains one slight error that merits correcting: the reference to one of the main characters, Heller, as a “sailmaker” is inaccurate; in the original German he is referred to as a Seiler, a rope maker. In addition to this correction, antiquated punctuation has been silently modernized.
Coyote Canyon Press is proud to bring back into print this “lost novel” by Hermann Hesse.
The Inside Random House series has released another video. This one gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the publisher’s offices as book designers explain their creative processes and the experience of creating covers for some of the world’s best-known authors. What’s great about this video is that we get to see some of the best book cover designers in the business, people like Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund of Knopf, Robbin Schiff of Random House, and Marysarah Quinn and Christopher Brand of Crown. Chip Kidd at one point picks up a manuscript and stresses the importance of a close reading of the text in order to understand how to approach its design. Aspiring designers can learn a lesson from the cover outtakes featured in the video, such as the multiple attempts required for The Dinner by Herman Koch; All That Is by James Salter; Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss; and Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff. The video is not only insightful but entertaining too.
Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, was supposed to be published in a print-only edition by Hard Case Crime. The move was roundly applauded because it demonstrated some real faith in traditional print publishing. It was also a savvy business decision driving sales sky-high.
But as soon as it was released in paper, the book popped up online as a pirated ebook. In response, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai had a few things to say about it in an interview with Jason Boog at AppNewser:
“We’ve seen dozens of websites over the past year purporting to offer pirated downloadable copies of JOYLAND, and so far they’ve all been frauds – if you try to download the file, you get malware or a virus instead. But inevitably the book will eventually be pirated for real, just as every best-selling book and popular movie or TV show or piece of music is. As a publisher, you try to prevent it or to stamp it out when you discover it, but it’s like the “war on drugs” – good luck. Seize a boatload of heroin, and what does it get you? There are more boats, there’s more heroin. . . . In the end you have to rely on the good behavior of the vast majority of the audience – I see no reason to think that pirates represent more than a small fraction of all consumers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about piracy – we do. But it’s just one of the many punches you have to learn to roll with in the rough-and-tumble world of modern publishing.”
It’s hard to see though how some pirated copies have actually slowed Joyland‘s meteoric rise up the bestseller charts. The book is currently the number one selling book on Amazon and has been in the Amazon Best Sellers Top 100 for the last two months.
Of course this feat is not likely to be replicated by many other writers. As everyone in the publishing business knows, people buy authors, not books. And the King brand name, along with a splashy publicity campaign, created a momentum guaranteeing massive sales. I don’t think King is losing sleep over these pirated copies, unless he’s thinking of using the idea in yet another novel.
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