Daily Painting

Karel Appel
LITTLE GIRL (1947)

Playing

Charlie Parker
A STUDIO CHRONICLE 1940-1948

Disc One - 1940-1941
Witchita, Dallas, New York, Kansas

Disc Five - 1947-1948
New York, Detroit

Playing

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
DIZ 'N BIRD AT CARNEGIE HALL

Reading

Jean Giono
A KING ALONE

Daily Painting

Frida Kahlo
THE SUN AND LIFE (1947)

Daily Painting

Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval
LAVA AT BESSASTADIR (1947-54)

Daily Painting

Robert Motherwell
PERSONAGE WITH YELLOW, OCHRE, AND WHITE (1947)

Watching

THE WEB
Michael Gordon
USA, 1947

Watching

DARK PASSAGE
Delmer Daves
USA, 1947

Daily Painting

Salvador Dali
Illustration from Essays of Michel de Montaigne (1947)

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

"With a people like ours,” I said, “the psychological is always the primary and really motivating factor; political action is of the second order, reflex, expression, instrument."

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

It is only annoying - if you don't want to call it pleasant - that in music - at least in music - there are things for which, even with the best will in the world, no truly characterizing adjective, or combination of adjectives, can be found in the whole realm of language. I have been struggling with this for a few days - you cannot find an adequate term for the spirit, the attitude, the gesture of this theme. Because there is a lot of gesture in it. Tragically bold? Defiant, emphatic, the spirit driven to the sublime? All of this is not good. And 'splendid'! Of course, that is just a silly capitulation. In the end you end up with the factual prescription, the name: Allegro appassionato, that is the best.

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

It seems to me, however, that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of human reason and dignity I would not exactly want to put my hand in the fire. That I am nevertheless devoted to it with all my heart is one of those contradictions which, whether a cause for joy or regret, are inseparable from human nature.

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants.

If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

This was in fact the book's crude and intriguing prophecy: that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle of political action--fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing whatever to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive nonetheless, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities.

It made it possible to understand that truth's fate was closely related to that of the individual, indeed identical with it--and that fate was devaluation. The book opened a sardonic rift between truth and power, truth and life, truth and community. Its implicit message was that community deserved far greater precedence, that truth's goal was community, and that whoever wished to be part of the community must be prepared to jettison major portions of truth and science, to make the sacrificium intellectus.

Reading

Thomas Mann
DOCTOR FAUSTUS
The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told By a Friend

THOMAS MANN

Doctor Faustus

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.

THOMAS MANN
Doctor Faustus

A man of tender sensitivities finds disruption unpleasant; he finds it unpleasant to break in on a well-constructed train of thought with his own logical or historical objections culled from memory, and even in the anti-intellectual he will honor and respect the intellect.

Today we can see clearly enough that it was the mistake of our civilization to have been all too generous in exercising such forbearance and respect—since on the opposing side we were indeed dealing with naked insolence and the most determined intolerance.

Daily Painting

Karel Appel
PERSONAGE (1947)

Daily Painting

Victor Brauner
THE SURREALIST (1947)