One of the best movies ever: if you see it, watch for this line: "... the bank you want? Midland and MisTrust."
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The Literature Page
Of the many things I have really enjoyed in the blogosphere is a "literature-related" post some years ago regarding Virginia Woolf.
The post began:
In the summer of 2007, I was reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the second time. It was during that summer, that I realized that Mrs Dalloway was a prose poem. I did not know at the time that others were well aware of this and I was discovering nothing new. But for me, it was very, very exciting.But the reader had to "wade" through a lot to get to the highlight:
It is hard to read what is written at the original source (a PDF of the British Journal of Nursing, 1922), but the source references a "talented young Russian artist, Marie Baslcirtseff, buried at Passy, and references also this song, Allerseelen. "Baslcirtseff" is misspelled and is actually "Bashkirtseff." Marie Bashkirtseff (1858 - 1884) was a Russian artist famous for her published journal; her tomb is a recreaction of her studio and has been declared a historical monument by the government of France.I wrote all that to note this: right now my "go-to" book is Growing Up With The Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet, translated and edited by Jane Roberts, c. 2017.
It turns out that Julie Manet, the niece of Edourd Manet, the famous Parisian painter, in her diary written during her teen-age years mentions reading and enjoying Marie Bahkirsett's diary. From page 112 and following, dated September 15, 1897:
I read a few pages of Marie Bashkirtseff's diary this morning, as I didn't have time to finish it on the journey. It's really very interesting to read the diary of an intelligent young woman with an open mind; she is curious, not at all snooty as I had believed from what I had heard others say of her. Underneath it all, she isn't really big-headed, though she does tend to put on airs and graces a bit, and for this she undoubtedly has plenty of imagination. If she repeats over and over again that her painting is so good, it's to persuade herself that it is because she must be aware that she paints badly. She evidently had a natural aptitude for many things, perhaps too many talents, because, if she had been taught well, she would probably have done better.
But among bad painters, from a family who understood nothing about art, what could she do? What a sad life, without misfortune it is true, but sad because she had the sort of personality which created problems for herslef; she was far too precocious -- at age 12 she was already talking like an 18-year-old.With regard to Marie Bashkirseff, the editor writes, page 203, note 80:
What particularly infuriates me about her is that, living at a time when Manet and all the Impressionists were painting, she never mentions them at all. Her need to succeed young and her devouring ambition must be a sign she knew that her life was going to be short. What an interesting person; and so funny, too. Her correspondence with the famous A. in Rome when she was 15 is both very charming and terribly amusing.
Marie Bashkirtseff (1858 - 1884), young Russian painter and writer, who exhibited at the Salon and worked in a realist style close to that of Jules Bastien-Lepage, with whom she was romantically linked. Her outspoken Journal, which was published in 1887 after her death from consumption, was widely read and discussed by artists.And then this note, page 212, note 292:
Marie Bashkirtseff's naturalist paintings must have seemed appalling to Julie Manet, the daughter of [an accomplished landscape painter,] Berthe Morisot!
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