December 10, 2004
-
Gray Particular
in Hartford
From Wallace Stevens,“The Rock, Part III:
Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn” –The rock is
the gray particular of man’s life,
The stone from which
he rises, up–and–ho,
The step to
the bleaker depths of his descents…From this morning’s
New York Times obituaries–
leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful
and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in
Hartford. He was 86.The cause was a massive subdural hematoma
suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his
home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix
Gray.*******************************
Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work
reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to
carefully calibrated chance, died on Wednesday….… in 1999 [he] received the
Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy
of American Poets.A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:I. From a page linked to in
Tuesday’s entry White Christmas:“A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be,
otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger
ventured that das Nichts nichtet — ‘the nothing nothings’ — evidently still sensing a problem.”
– W. V. Quine in QuidditiesII. “As if nothingness
contained a métier…”
— Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”III. “Massive subdural hematoma”
— Three-word poem
performed on Tuesday
in ConnecticutIV. mé·tier n.
- An occupation, a trade, or a profession.
- Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one’s specialty.
[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
V. “ho”
— Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”
VI. Francine du Plessix Gray…
From the
Archives of the
New York Review of Books:July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of
Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan
La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler
Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer
Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson
VII. From an entry of April 29, 2004:
– Wallace Stevens
as quoted by Michael Bryson
(p. 227, The Palm
at the End of the Mind:
Selected Poems and a Play.
Ed. Holly Stevens.
New York: Vintage Books, 1990)
