tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post3075394961231565434..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Shoe VanillaUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-76284755786757827452011-11-19T07:19:16.477-08:002011-11-19T07:19:16.477-08:00Tom,
Thank you, good to hear CLOUD / RIDGE has ar...Tom,<br /><br />Thank you, good to hear CLOUD / RIDGE has arrived, and thank you (twice again) for your words on back cover. Meanwhile, the clouds of yesterday have gone away (quel surprise), and without them a now gibbous moon is back, ever a bit eastward at first glimpse then moving along to the west. . .<br /><br />11.19<br /><br />light coming into sky above still black <br />ridge, white half moon next to branches<br />in foreground, wave sounding in channel<br /><br /> graphite on paper inscribed<br /> on left, another hand<br /><br /> lies there, something about<br /> it, which at the time<br /><br />grey white clouds to the left of point,<br />shadowed green of ridge across channelSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-68745887261529121822011-11-18T17:21:28.829-08:002011-11-18T17:21:28.829-08:00Thank very much, Martha.
Whenever I reach irrita...Thank very much, Martha. <br /><br />Whenever I reach irritably after fact and reason, anyway, I'm sure to catch something.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-74834812321878885722011-11-18T14:21:12.680-08:002011-11-18T14:21:12.680-08:00Without that irritable reaching after fact, o Tom,...Without that irritable reaching after fact, o Tom, keep Shoe Vanilla just as is, accompanied by those sexy photographs. What a lovely turn.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-4112518552065508052011-11-18T12:06:28.797-08:002011-11-18T12:06:28.797-08:00Steve,
And thank you... twice.
The second, for t...Steve,<br /><br />And thank you... twice.<br /><br />The second, for the beauteous Cloud/Ridge, just arrived.<br /><br />Otherwise --<br /><br />motionless grey clouds <br /><br />-- here, too, with rain falling from them ...onto the inexorable roaring-and-beeping behemoth road graders, obliviously bulldozing-away out front.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-91980385100300815722011-11-18T11:48:12.054-08:002011-11-18T11:48:12.054-08:00Tom,
"Redge-rick," "shoe vanilla,&...Tom,<br /><br />"Redge-rick," "shoe vanilla," and there's Tom in his old classroom with Keats looking over his shoulder -- thanks for this look back into the dark backward and abysm of time. . . .<br /><br />11.18<br /><br />motionless grey clouds against shadowed<br />ridge, shape of bird moving in branches<br />in foreground, sound of wave in channel<br /><br /> which appears for the first<br /> time, object physical<br /><br /> which suggests it refers to,<br /> then again, this time<br /><br />silver of sunlight reflected in channel,<br />line of cloud on horizon across from itSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-52794560883060857452011-11-18T09:24:49.823-08:002011-11-18T09:24:49.823-08:00Curtis,
Yes, he was evidently the all-time master...Curtis,<br /><br />Yes, he was evidently the all-time master of "multi-tasking".<br /><br />James Fox is also brilliant at playing Blunt in another BBC film "A Question of Attribution", which centers on Blunt's relations with the Queen, who is played wonderfully by the amazing Prunella Scales.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-60969189343592202342011-11-18T09:09:25.286-08:002011-11-18T09:09:25.286-08:00What has always impressed me (funny word, but you&...What has always impressed me (funny word, but you'll know what I mean) about Blunt is how a person could keep that many things in his mind and pursue such varying activities and identities (if that makes any sense). I try to juggle things, but get easily confused. My teacher, by the way, was the late Sir John Pope-Hennessy. He was a very difficult person (not just his weird, impossible locution), but I was lucky to study with him, even if the course mostly amounted to lectures in My Triumphs in Attribution. But he and his brother were very much members of the Burgess/Blunt crowd. As I recall, it was easy to see how the Donatello might have been transformed into an ashtray. I will check out the materials you suggest. Thank you. This is a subject that interests me a lot. CurtisACravanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00315707533118640284noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-3151570442826981642011-11-18T08:52:06.829-08:002011-11-18T08:52:06.829-08:00Curtis,
About Blunt, an engima wrapt inside a mys...Curtis,<br /><br />About Blunt, an engima wrapt inside a mystery, and a still very interesting mystery at that. There are however numerous clues.<br /><br />The BBC miniseries Cambridge Spies is worth checking out. The Beeb has managed to squeeze two discs out of the story by introducing some useful background stuff -- "special features". The best of the features, a 45-minute History Channel documentary entitled "Spy Web: The Cambridge Spies," is included on the second disc. This piece fills in many of the historical and cultural gaps left by the miniseries (though the documentary itself is not without its flaws: while adding a much-needed serious -- and at times necessarily negative -- perspective on the actions of the Cambridge five, it inexplicably grows oddly melodramatic and swells the evil-sounding string instruments whenever the narrator says words like "communist" and "homosexuals" ...this is both perplexing and stupid at the same time).<br /><br />Also included is "A Cambridge Spies Historical Scrapbook," a collage of incredible material including BBC news obituary broadcasts of the spies, an appearance from Kim Philby on Soviet television at the age of 75, footage of Anthony Blunt from 1965 taking us through Buckingham Palace on an art appreciation tour (totally absorbing!), and footage of Blunt's testimony in 1979, confessing his transgressions on camera. This material is nothing short of astonishing in its coolness, and though it barely amounts to half an hour of footage total, the collection of old archival material places the whole story in a real-life context so effectively, that without it, this DVD set would be a mere shadow of itself. A small but at some points essential touch, each of the supplementary features (including the previously mentioned History Channel biography) is helpfully subtitled. Nice.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-30259397559124948422011-11-18T08:48:17.483-08:002011-11-18T08:48:17.483-08:00Julia,
Poor Mr Hlavin was certainly underapprecia...Julia,<br /><br />Poor Mr Hlavin was certainly underappreciated by everybody but me, and as I've said I lacked the courage, then, to say so. Peer pressure, that undying monster, won the day.<br /><br />It's always touching to think (hope!) that underappreciated teachers are later appreciated.<br /><br />But alas, I fear there are left on this earth far too few latterday incarnations of Mr Chips (the truly dedicated teacher), and almost no student appreciators of anything but that ultimate mirror-mirror-on-the-wall of high school-cafeteria level popularity, Facebook.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-87150208230828028562011-11-18T08:46:49.443-08:002011-11-18T08:46:49.443-08:00gamefaced,
In my next lifetime (yeah, right) I am...gamefaced,<br /><br />In my next lifetime (yeah, right) I am going to make sure all my Shoe Vanilla goes naked and unpunctuated into the great world... of bacteria, or nematodes, or whatever sphere to which I am relegated.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-91502624314059582602011-11-18T08:45:28.032-08:002011-11-18T08:45:28.032-08:00Brad,
Always chastening yet useful to look back i...Brad,<br /><br />Always chastening yet useful to look back into the honest struggling articulations of one's youth. Well, I say that, but not really from experience. My own copious journals of all those forgotten aeons have long since gone with the wind. I mean quite literally, a closet full of writings left at my mother's home were, as I much later learnt, blithely incinerated. Then again, perhaps it's a mercy. The only thing I was sorry not to have been able to return to were five volumes of journals of sundry ragtag travels (hitchhiking, youth hostels & c) about the continents of Europe and Africa in the early to mid 1960s. Those I would like to have kept, but only because the details of all those wanderings are pretty much a blur to me now: vivid details shining out from a vast blurry thicket of memory loss, that fickle final friend.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-92200417297277032142011-11-18T08:43:47.300-08:002011-11-18T08:43:47.300-08:00Vassilis,
Affecting anecdote indeed. I was much m...Vassilis,<br /><br />Affecting anecdote indeed. I was much moved. Here is something dedicated to you, by way of roundabout response. (History, that endless round of circles with circles...)<br /><br /><a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/shoeshine.html" rel="nofollow">Shoeshine</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-45827672318690218532011-11-18T00:37:13.809-08:002011-11-18T00:37:13.809-08:00I loved it, Tom
How stupid adolescent are when th...I loved it, Tom<br /><br />How stupid adolescent are when they waste their opportunity with good teachers!<br />I did it once with a music teacher. But our class had its punishment: he became the dearest teacher for younger years and he formed and conducted many musical groups in our school. So we had what we deserved (and he had it as well)Juliahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419101761966668410noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72885011372090371042011-11-17T22:42:01.422-08:002011-11-17T22:42:01.422-08:00Tom—
This wonderful post really hit home for two ...Tom—<br /><br />This wonderful post really hit home for two reasons 1) I spent most of my adolescent years helping my father shine shoes in his shoeshine parlor in Raymond, Washington (Here’s <a href="http://vazambam.blogspot.com/2009/01/small-town-bootblack-vs-clunkers.html" rel="nofollow">a piece</a> written some time ago about our main competition) and 2) I also had such a sensitive cultured high school teacher who bore the brunt of many a verbal assault on his person; in fact, he was the only teacher who ever gave me the gift of a book—a first-edition hardback copy of Norman Mailer’s <i>The Naked and the Dead,</i> which I still have, by the way.vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-4886779685294460192011-11-17T14:13:45.106-08:002011-11-17T14:13:45.106-08:00pretty good shoe vanilla there. riddled with comma...pretty good shoe vanilla there. riddled with commas i'd rip them all out and fiddle the breaks<br />:)gamefacedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16562522181852339258noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72524965082210503562011-11-17T12:30:08.327-08:002011-11-17T12:30:08.327-08:00I enjoyed this a lot -- the story, the history, th...I enjoyed this a lot -- the story, the history, the pictures. I've always enjoyed the poem. In a happier and more productive and peaceful way, your story reminded me of an experience I had in art history graduate school when I was taught by a very famous English art historian/museum curator who had relocated to NYC and the Met. He was a vain and very nasty man (a terrible teacher too) with one of those Oxonian accents that was completely inpenetrable and unintelligible. I think a poet sitting in one of his lectures might have been able to free-associate a book a day based on the sounds he made (you couldn't really call them words) and the beautiful images on the screen behind him. He disliked me because I was a "hippie" and failed to appreciate how hard I was trying to understand what he was saying. The only thing I took away from the course was that he once discovered a small Donatello that was being used as an ashtray. This happened while he was attending a cocktail party in London and, of course, smoking. I'm sorry I never saw him after I left the school because I would definitely have approached him and asked him what Anthony Blunt was really like. He would have been a person who knew. CurtisACravanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00315707533118640284noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-6274427022605887832011-11-17T10:03:09.246-08:002011-11-17T10:03:09.246-08:00I have at home a dungish heap of old journals, mos...I have at home a dungish heap of old journals, most written while gripped more by adolescent anxiety than by actual angst. Almost all where filled before my flirtations with academia exhausted my curiosity. Two scoops of shoe vanilla, these -- the journals and diplomas -- the à la mode of my life in language. Embarrassed always; regretful, only rarely.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-1378642905093538422011-11-17T09:56:07.608-08:002011-11-17T09:56:07.608-08:00Thanks a lot, Nin. That's really nice. I can f...Thanks a lot, Nin. That's really nice. I can feel my redge-rick improving already.<br /><br />That would certainly have been a mystifying instruction from the Aussie tennis coach. Put TOO much power on the ball, and it will go all pear-shaped.<br /><br />To write a paragraph a night should be considered an opportunity and a privilege, a pleasure, not a punishment.<br /><br />After all, paragraphs can be quite short. Like this one.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-39347256171110280142011-11-17T09:45:28.128-08:002011-11-17T09:45:28.128-08:00I remember teachers like that, and the strange thi...I remember teachers like that, and the strange thing is how much, in spite of circumstances, they influenced us. <br />I had a tennis coach once who was from Australia who was always telling me to put more pear on the ball. Power, I figured out much later. <br />As to teachers, my son had a teacher, Mrs. Gargoline, who taught the year he went to a Catholic school, a miserable experience for him. Mrs. Gargoline was brought back from retirement, and she insisted the children learn to write. My son liked her but what struck me as peculiar was that many of the parents complained she was overworking their children, robbing them of childhood. They had to write a paragraph a night. This was for 7th grade. <br /><br />But I didn't intend to write about that so much as to say, shoe vanilla is a beautiful. I love the way you've depicted this experience, figured out what he was saying, and written on this subject.Nin Andrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12643167108589844026noreply@blogger.com