kvetchlandia

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Uncredited Photographer John Waters and Divine, San Francisco 1970

"I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value."

Happy Birthday, John!!!

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Jeff Pott Place des Vosges on a Sunny Early Spring Day, Paris March 24, 2024

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Jeff Pott Île-d'Arz, Gulf of Morbihan, Bretagne, France March, 2024

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Saul Leiter Don't Walk, New York City 1952

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Saul Leiter Jean with Cup, New York City 1947

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Saul Leiter Marianne, New York City 1947

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Saul Leiter Black Umbrella, New York City c.1955

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Saul Leiter Cracks, New York City 1957

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Saul Leiter Soames Bantry, for "Harper's Bazaar," New York City 1960

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Saul Leiter Bus, New York City c.1955

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Saul Leiter Blue Door, Patterson, New Jersey c.1955

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Saul Leiter Driver, New York City c.1950

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Saul Leiter New York City Undated

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Saul Leiter New York City 1960

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Poet Delmore Schwartz, New York City Uncredited and Undated Photograph

O Delmore how I miss you. You inspired me to write. You were the greatest man I ever met. You could capture the deepest emotions in the simplest language. Your titles were more than enough to raise the muse of fire on my neck. You were a genius. Doomed.

The mad stories. O Delmore I was so young. I believed so much. We gathered around you as you read Finnegans Wake. So hilarious but impenetrable without you. You said there were few things better in life than to devote oneself to Joyce. You’d annotated every word in the novels you kept from the library. Every word.

And you said you were writing “The Pig’s Valise.” O Delmore no such thing. They looked, after your final delusion led you to a heart attack in the Hotel Dixie. Unclaimed for three days. You—one of the greatest writers of our era. No valise.

You wore the letter from T.S. Eliot next to your heart. His praise of In Dreams. Would that you could have stopped that wedding. No good will come of this!!! You were right. You begged us—Please don’t let them bury me next to my mother. Have a party to celebrate moving from this world hopefully to a better one. And you Lou—I swear—and you know if anyone could I could—you Lou must never write for money or I will haunt you.

I’d given him a short story. He gave me a B. I was so hurt and ashamed. Why haunt talentless me? I was the walker for “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” To literary cocktails. He hated them. And I was put in charge. Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie skewed, fly unzipped. O Delmore. You were so beautiful. Named for a silent movie star dancer Frank Delmore. O Delmore—the scar from dueling with Nietzsche.

Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t finished reading—liquid rivulets sprang from your nose but still you would not stop reading. I was transfixed. I cried—the love of the word—the heavy bear.

You told us to break into __’s estate where your wife was being held prisoner. Your wrists broken by those who were your enemies. The pills jumbling your fine mind.

I met you in the bar where you had just ordered five drinks. You said they were so slow that by the time you had the fifth you should have ordered again. Our scotch classes. Vermouth. The jukebox you hated—the lyrics so pathetic.

You called the White House one night to protest their actions against you. A scholarship to your wife to get her away from you and into the arms of whomever in Europe.

I heard the newsboy crying Europe Europe.

Give me enough hope and I’ll hang myself.

Hamlet came from an old upper class family.

Some thought him drunk but—really—he was a manic-depressive—which is like having brown hair.

You have to take your own shower—an existential act. You could slip in the shower and die alone.

Hamlet starting saying strange things. A woman is like a cantaloupe Horatio—once she’s open she goes rotten.

O Delmore where was the Vaudeville for a Princess. A gift to the princess from the stage star in the dressing room.

The duchess stuck her finger up the duke’s ass and the kingdom vanished.

No good will come of this. Stop this courtship!

Sir you must be quiet or I must eject you.

Delmore understood it all and could write it down impeccably.

Shenandoah Fish*. You were too good to survive. The insights got you. The fame expectations. So you taught.

And I saw you in the last round.

I loved your wit and massive knowledge.

You were and have always been the one.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him think.

I wanted to write. One line as good as yours. My mountain. My inspiration.

You wrote the greatest short story ever written. In Dreams

-- Lou Reed, "Oh Delmore How I Miss You" 2012

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*Autobiographical Character in several Schwartz works

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Uncredited Photographer Poet Delmore Schwartz, Ellery St, Cambridge, MA c.1940

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,   

Metropolitan poetry here and there,   

In the park sit pauper and rentier,   

The screaming children, the motor-car   

Fugitive about us, running away,   

Between the worker and the millionaire   

Number provides all distances,   

It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,   

Many great dears are taken away,   

What will become of you and me

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

Besides the photo and the memory?

(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn ...)   

What is the self amid this blaze?

What am I now that I was then

Which I shall suffer and act again,

The theodicy I wrote in my high school days   

Restored all life from infancy,

The children shouting are bright as they run   

(This is the school in which they learn ...)   

Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,   

But what they were then?

                                     No more? No more?

From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,   

Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume

Not where they are now (where are they now?)   

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,   

The great globe reels in the solar fire,   

Spinning the trivial and unique away.

(How all things flash! How all things flare!)   

What am I now that I was then?   

May memory restore again and again   

The smallest color of the smallest day:   

Time is the school in which we learn,   

Time is the fire in which we burn.

-- Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day" 1937

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Poet Delmore Schwartz, New York City Uncredited and Undated Photograph

Tired and unhappy, you think of houses Soft-carpeted and warm in the December evening, While snow's white pieces fall past the window, And the orange firelight leaps. A young girl sings That song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death; Her elders watch, nodding their happiness To see time fresh again in her self-conscious eyes: The servants bring in the coffee, the children go to bed, Elder and younger yawn and go to bed, The coals fade and glow, rose and ashen, It is time to shake yourself! and break this Banal dream, and turn your head Where the underground is charged, where the weight Of the lean building is seen, Where close in the subway rush, anonymous In the audience, well-dressed or mean, So many surround you, ringing your fate, Caught in an anger exact as a machine!

-- Delmore Schwartz, "Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses" 1937