Paul Bowles Life's Final Draft

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image from here (asshole.org)

 Celebrating 100 years this year of Paul Bowles life.
easy to celebrate and impossible to cover & besides,  there is an entire site devoted to referencing and reverencing him and his work. When speaking with interviewer Daniel Halpren- Bowles declared 'the first draft is the final draft.' He followed this linear path thorough out his unquantifiable life.

Jane and Paul Bowles photographed by Cecil Beaton

This from his haunting novel Sheltering Sky: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

movies, manuscripts, their lives and love for each other endured turbulence, liaisons, Jane's death.

 Bowles said the day his wife Jane died- "all the fun was over."

Luring many acolytes Bowles to Tangier- he was a connoisseur of people.Something Paul knew about-he called himself a "connoisseur of  odors. He was the "scent" that drew and scent is powerful. It lures. Something Paul knew about-he  said he collected incense and perfume. I imagine him as drawing people to him, collecting them just as he did his strange perfumes, incense, teas.  He "had 28 kinds of incense and knew them all blindfolded raw or burning. Then I mixed them and got some interesting results." He remembered a tea oil that he found one year. "One drop on a cigarette end and the whole house smelled of fresh hot tea. Very strong. Marvelous odor. Like mint Tea. I never found any again. The next year I came back looking for it all through the perfume soukhs of Fez and Marrakech. Never found any more. I smelled hundreds of bottles and they would say, this is it. But No."

Henry Ossawa Tanner.Street in Tangier, 1912. 

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Paul Bowles never found that special tea oil again. It forever eluded him, but he never forgot it permeating scent.
Something very much like a Love that is Lost, Remembered for moment in perfect clarity, but never Regained, nor Forgotten.

Jane Sydney Auer

image here

He must have felt this strong marvelous odor much like he thought of Jane- never again.





Resources-
a terrific site asshole here with interviews
an interview here written by Daniel Halpern
other resources-
Conversations with Paul Bowles,Paul Bowles and Gena Dagel Caponi
In Touch:The Letters of Paul Bowles, Paul Bowles, with Jeffrey Miller

 ( "the Cherifa Plant" is a plant Cherifa-Jane's Bowles Moroccan housekeeper and lover used-Bowles believed Cherifa used to control Jane.)




 read them

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the Un read

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they're stacking up.

this was last week.

& after a week of reading emails, blogs I mentally see the stack increasing-
granted some remain from last year. some are being read again. some have to be referred to-here and close by.

now reading Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey. just what I was looking for. I am hooked on the first few pages.
ongoing- Diana Cooper's Autobiography.


what do you really think of the Stieg Larsson books? Having read the first very recently, I thought not to read the second. Since a friend read it and loaned me a copy- I will go forward with the series. It is disturbing. Yes, I know that is the intended reaction, but still.

Have you read BLEAK HOUSE? No light Dickens- that.
If you have read any in my stack-tell me if it's worth it.

how are yours stacking up?

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religiously

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Frederick Childe Hassam The Room of Flowers

My usual day- amongst my books reading,
at the moment- Off on a jaunt to New York.

reading
The Rainbow Comes and Goes, The Light of Common Day, and Trumpets from the Steep. the three volumes compiled in Autobiography by Lady Diana Cooper

 Wish her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar


read religiously everyday- a few favourite blogs, read them for me while I am away-

IT'S ABOUT TIME 

enlightening everyday

Art & Beauty

Klimt

Childe Hassam

Van Gogh

Christen Købke

 IVAN TERESTCHENKO

visually stunning- 

Photography & An Artist's Soul

St Tropez

Helga da Silvia Blow

Lapo Elkann

Lacroix

THE STYLE SALONISTE

the most indepth articles- People, Places

Paris

Jean-Louis Deniot

Dodie Rosekrans

Tatiana Sorokko

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weekly reader

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how I love a good book.
do you remember summer reading? the weekly reader?
what are you reading this summer?

granddaughters, Amaryllis & Henrietta, 1951

Vanessa Bell

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Summer Reading, the Temptress: Alice

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Paul Spicer has written The Temptress for your summer reading pleasure, You should thank him.

Raymond de Trafford, Frédéric de Janzé, our ALICE, and Lord Delamare
image from wiki

Countess Alice de Janze and the unsolved murder of her lover Lord Erroll, is the topic of the "deliciously salacious" (non fictional) Spicer book. Toss in the wilds of Africa and the Twenties era and The Temptress: Passion and Murder in Kenya's Happy Valley is not to be left languishing on the shelf. It won't be on mine long.

from Publisher's Weekly:
The 1941 fatal shooting of British earl Joss Erroll in Kenya made headlines worldwide (and was the subject of the book and movie White Mischief). A cuckolded husband was acquitted, and now Kenyan-born former oil executive Spicer intriguingly fingers his late mother's friend, Countess Alice de Janzé, Joss discarded mistress. Alice complicated and violent love life was possibly attributable to bipolar disorder and to abandonment by her father, a self-made American millionaire, when Alice was 13. Alice married a French count, Frédéric de Janzé, and to escape the stuffy confines of French society, the couple spent much of their time in Kenya. There Alice had two love affairs that, according to Spicer, goaded Alice to violence: she made a botched murder-suicide attempt in 1927 when English aristocrat Raymund de Trafford rejected her, yet they married in 1932 (Alice had already left her husband). Alice had also begun a two-decade-long liaison with Joss. Though Joss had many enemies, Spicer posits that Alice killed Joss, and months later, at age 42, committed suicide, hoping they would be reunited in the afterlife. The author's depiction of the unstable heiress and her milieu of wealthy expatriates cavorting in the Kenyan highlands is engrossing. 8 pages of b&w photos.

ALICE

 LORD ERROLL

If all the sounds familiar- You have just finished The Bolter, by Frances Osborne or seen White Mischief, by James Fox. Lord Erroll-Joss, had been married to The Bolter- Idina Sackville.






All the Players are the same. release date July 20, 2010- a bit of a wait. 
 or here- post haste.



READ:
a wonderful in depth post by The Esoteric Curiosa here
White Mischief James Fox
The Bolter Frances Osborne.
& there is the White Mischief movie.
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Look Homeward Angel: Summer Reading

“Loneliness is and always has been the central 

and inevitable experience of every man.”

 

WOLFE THE DREAMER

"In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, 

in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, 

and we are strange and beautiful asleep; 

for we are dying the darkness and we know no death."
 

Michael Deas portrait here

from 1930 Vogue on Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL:
this appears to be less a book that a torrent of impassioned prose telling everything about the life of a boy growing into young manhood, his family-including a patient, hard-working, avaricious mother, a drunken father, and a yellow brother-his school days, and his first love affair, which ends in heartbreak. All through the book there is a hungry appreciation of the beauty of the world and fierce detestation of its injustice, misery ad squalor. Here is a passionately earnest view of the universe. The writer seems to have flung it casually into the form of a novel.

WOLFE THE POLITICO

"A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested."

by 1930 standards at Vogue it wasn't there yet. How time changes things- Faulkner said Wolfe was his generation's best writer. The format Wolfe used would be adopted by Jack Kerouac, poetry, prose, stream of consciousness- A modern novel,  Vogue was not quite ready for Wolfe. 

WOLFE THE PROPHET

"We are now in the Me Decade - 

seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history."

 

As to the ME DECADE, In this he was off- rather than DECADE, he should have written CENTURY.

But then, He was a Modern Man.
Best read today.

You will not be disappointed.

alternate post title: More good things about North Carolina: Thomas Wolfe

READ this book review from the NYTIMES Paper Cuts Blog here by Steve Coates

the thomas wolfe society here

about TW here at the UNC Collection

the TW web site here