framing, visual and verbal (sorry, frames not included)

I took it for granted [by which I meant, but clearly did not communicate, that "I assumed, inconsiderately"] that anyone reading this blog would already know how to read a photograph and thus would catch all the ironies, historical and otherwise, in the illustrations I excerpted from travis-hill-europa's already loaded excerpting from the books he has for sale.

I find the Czech (or perhaps Slovak) canoeist of immense interest because of the ironies that he himself incorporated into his photographs. The mere fact that he survived to participate in Olympic competition both in 1936 in Berlin and 1948 in London already implies a story we would like to know—so many athletes were either killed in battle or sought out and shot by the secret police of one country or another. I suppose canoeists were no threat to anybody, but being a threat was not a prior requirement for execution.

I'm puzzled by the photograph of the team, which is placed chronologically as though it were from the 1948 games (and the architecture looks British rather than German) but the right-hand flag above them appears to be that of Estonia, which in 1948 would have been impossible. The seeming half-staff position of the Czechoslovak flag must surely be accidental rather than a commentary on the February 1948 declaration of the People's Republic. But the framing of the canoeist's photograph of the crowd in 1936 giving the Nazi salute with varying degrees of competence is almost surely not accidental. (The flagpoles were perhaps for the countries of the athletes winning gold, silver and bronze...in which case I have no idea what the fourth flagpole is for, though closer observation suggests it is probably one of the flags ringing the stadium—a companion photo shows Olympic flags in that central position, with other flags on the periphery:)

A photograph of two African-American soldiers in US Army uniform (with US Olympic team badges) is suggestive, whether it was taken in 1936 or 1948...but if the photos were posted in chronological order, it's from 1936.

So this album is clearly a treasure trove for photographic analysts and it's a pity that it will most likely disappear into some private collection and never be consulted again.

I refrained from commenting too heavily on the ironies of the various propaganda documents scattered throughout the sale...though a tourist guide to the newly annexed German territories with an introduction praising tourist traffic as a key to world peace was too amazing to let slip by. I chose the GDR poster with conscious irony (the Foucault-panopticon gaze, obviously), but the other posters illustrated are astounding for other reasons. Most of them were quite innocent exhortations to brush your teeth and eat your vegetables if you want to stay healthy.

And I simply passed by in silence the "monarchical" part of the sale, a host of nineteenth century documents from Austria-Hungary and elsewhere with splendid illustrations. The British Empire Exhibition guide from 1924, though it is considerably later than the previously mentioned volumes, still features a splendiferous King George V alongside appropriate examples of exposition architecture:





The question of verbal framing had better wait for the next post.

forget verbal framing, here are more pictures: Pamela Colman Smith and the Waite Tarot centenary

April through October will be the centenary of the time in which Pamela Colman Smith designed the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, a fact I would have overlooked had I not brought up the unfinished Smith biography (see earlier entries from May 4 and 5, 2008, plus one on Counterforces) in my e-mail correspondence with Marjorie Jones re her Frances Yates biography (seemingly done in by the mistakes of others who edited copy after the manuscript left her possession, so I assume Yates' 17 December 1979 journal entry was in fact written in that potent month).



Anyway, I need to make another attempt to get in touch with Melinda Boyd Parsons, the author of that thirty-year project of a Smith biography. My one e-mail to a possible address received no reply, and I stopped searching for a more reliable address for her.



The current editions of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot are unsatisfactory in the extreme in terms of reproduction quality, though it looks as though one of them approaches the muted colors of the original. There is, as I wrote a year ago, a certain dispute as to whether the images are now in the public domain but since I am advertising the more satisfactory-looking of the packs in question I assume I won't get sued by anybody. (I am not mentioning which pack has impossibly saturated color, cf. the fairly accurate Ace of Cups illustrated above with the one illustrated below, which is not from the more muted-looking pack illustrated above it—which pack I have not seen except for the card partially visible in the illustration, so no guarantees on this provisional judgment.)

the No More of the god who has fled and the Not Yet of the god who is coming

I keep thinking that anybody who reads this journal either will already have bookmarked techgnosis.com or has no interest in reading it, but Erik Davis has just gotten round to reading and writing a review essay about Hölderlin (in what looks to be a splendid new translation by Nick Hoff, published by Wesleyan), and Davis goes on with an enthusiasm that brings back recollections of my days studying with Stanley Romaine Hopper (brief though they were) and my days of reading Stanley Romaine Hopper (a somewhat longer time frame) and the days when Rilke and Hölderlin and even old quasi-authoritarian windbag Martin Heidegger could seem like vessels of revelation alongside T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets. Here's Davis:

"In his introduction, Hoff argues that what makes Hölderlin so readable today is the modernity of his recognition that, as the poet expresses in many elegies, the gods are gone and we are left belated in a disenchanted world, with only our alternately joyous and broken hearts to serve as a half-assed portal back to an ensouled earth. That’s fine as far as it goes. Despite his earnest and even sometimes 'naive' lack of irony, Hölderlin reads like one of us. Many of his verses conjured up Rilke, for instance, that great grandchild of Hölderlin, and another sacred modern. Read the following lines, and you can almost see Rilke leaning in over the verse, ghosting it from the future:

But friend, we come too late. It’s true the gods live,
But they live above us in another world.
They move without end and it seems to matter little
To them if we live, that’s how much the gods want to spare us.
For a weak vessel is not always able to hold them,
Man can only bear heavenly fullness at times.
Life becomes then a dream of them.

But while I buy Hoff's argument in spirit, I can still feel the hot breath of the old gods moving through the less than weak vessels of these poets. No disenchanted trace about it, these guys are touched by spirit, Hölderlin and Rilke both." You tell 'em, Erik.

It all seems so long ago. I had meant to quote, on reading Marjorie Jones' account of Frances Yates' friendship with Elizabeth Sewell, Sewell's retort to Dan Noel and James Hillman at an American Academy of Religion meeting responding to David L. Miller's The New Polytheism. Hillman, answering someone's question, "Jim, just which gods do you think were present in our discussion today?" thundered "All of the gods were here. You can't keep them out." To which Elizabeth Sewell responded in clipped tones, "I think none of the gods were here. The gods do not attend speculative academic seminars." (She may have just said "academic discussion sessions," but the rest of the quote is verbatim.)