June 12

Bulgarian literature must be one of the least-translated-into-English of all European literatures; in a lifetime of reading, I don't think I've got a Bulgarian novel under my belt. Chad Post of Three Percent is spending some time in Bulgaria, and reports on a new website meant to increase global awareness of Bulgarian writing:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2714

http://www.contemporarybulgarianwriters.com/

The Guardian Books Blog makes excellent, offbeat selections for its "Poem of the Week," such as the Scottish poet George MacBeth's "The God of Love." The language of the poem is wonderfully vivid and forceful, with words carefully chosen for their earthy Anglo-Saxon/Celtic tone; Latinate words are avoided. 

George MacBeth, who died prematurely of motor neurone disease in 1992, was a prolific poet, novelist, children's writer, anthologist and ambassador for poetry. Working-class and Oxford-educated, shaped by postwar and anti-Movement influences, a stylish and often experimental formalist, he was undoubtedly a poet of his time, but also ahead of it. His birds and beasts may not be subjected to such fierce psychic projection as those of his contemporary, Ted Hughes, but they are realised with sympathetic verbal energy, and a nice interplay of mannerism, metaphysics and muscularity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/07/poem-week-god-love-macbeth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacBeth 

A sympathetic expositor can make me re-consider material that I have never been inclined to pay attention to or take seriously. Perfect example, Jaime J. Weinman on Archie Comics:

http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2010/06/talking-owls-river-rats-and-wolf-named.html

J. Kingston Pierce at Killer Covers has a fun time with the subject of blonde bombshells in pulp fiction, with the usual selection of amazing paperback cover artwork.

http://killercoversoftheweek.blogspot.com/2010/06/whore-you-callin-yellow.html

I like this cover because, with its unusual-for-the-time shirtless guy, it offers something erotic for everyone:

This one has an interesting Menswear Moment, with the man's socks appearing to match his tie rather than trousers or shoes. Very cool:

Contemporary architecture books have gotten highly conceptual, which sometimes yields impenetrable results, but also stimulating ones such as this new book on architecture and weather:

http://www.archdaily.com/55734/arium-weather-architecture-jurgen-mayer-h-and-neeraj-bhatia/

Composer and music critic Kyle Gann, long a fixture at the Village Voice, writes an excellent blog called PostClassic. In this post he alerts us to an amazing group of YouTube videos covering the player piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), one of the greatest sets in 20th century music:

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/06/vicarious_pleasures_of_the_web.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow

Nancarrow worked in solitude in Mexico for many years, unrecognized and largely undiscussed, but his reputation has grown hugely, with no less an eminence than Gyorgy Ligeti saying "This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives...something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed, but at the same time emotional...for me it's the best music of any composer living today." Here is Study No. 29:



Souren Melikian at the New York Times describes our spotty knowledge of the important 18th century Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson (1714-1782):

...one of the artist’s earliest landscapes, “Caernarvon Castle” from 1744 or 1745, [reveals an extraordinarily sensitive] response to nature....No one in European art had yet brought this kind of exquisite attention to the reflections of a monument in the water, to the nuances of green, whether of the dark hue of the hedges in the distance or the soft yellowish green of a hill, nor to the faint trails of clouds in the sky melting into a delicate pale haze. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/arts/05iht-melik5.html

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/karlins/richard-wilson6-10-10.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilson_%28painter%29

A landscape artist in a different way is the great contemporary German photographer Thomas Struth, who can render scenes of modern cities as mysterious landscapes:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38589

http://www.kunsthaus.ch/de/ausstellungen/aktuell/?redirect_url=title%3DCommunique%3F%EF%BF%BDs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Struth

Among notables born on this date are diarist Anne Frank, novelists Charles Kingsley, Harriet Martineau, Djuna Barnes, and Brigid Brophy, children's writer Johanna Spyri, poet Sandro Penna, playwright Bill Naughton, jazz pianist Chick Corea, pop singer Vic Damone, rock singer Brad Delp, engineer John Roebling, painter Egon Schiele, photographer Weegee, cinematographer John Alonzo, television producer Irwin Allen, and actor Uta Hagen. We are lucky not only to have Anne Frank's diary, but also lucky in the fact that she was more than just a recorder of historic value. Frank was an ambitious and greatly gifted young writer who develops impressively over the course of the two years she wrote the diary. As Francine Prose aptly says, "The diary is beautifully orchestrated — the way she alternates dramatic scenes with reflections, the incredibly vivid characterizations of the eight people, how each one handles the problem of how to take a bath or peel potatoes. Her naturalness of tone, the sense of spontaneity, it's very hard to do. She was an artist, that's the bottom line."