“Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.”
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA, Spanish poet, dramatist, and priest (1600-1681)
Archives for posts with tag: world
STYLE (excerpt)
by Charles Bukowski
Style is the answer to everything
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous
thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable
to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what
I call art…
Photo: Hans Silvester, from his book Natural Fashion (see description from on the book’s Amazon page).
On the first birthday of the Silver Birch Press blog — June 24, 2013 — we’d like to thank our visitors for spending time with us. A sincere thank you to our valued guests from 144 geographic designations around the world (listed in order of number of visits):
United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Italy, India, Brazil, Poland, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Philippines, Greece, Japan, Czech Republic, Taiwan, Republic of Korea, Argentina, Ireland, Finland, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Singapore, Switzerland, Romania, Indonesia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Norway, Hungary, Croatia, Austria, Colombia, Denmark, Malaysia, Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, Thailand, Bulgaria, Chile, United Arab Emirates, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Peru, Egypt, Ukraine, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cyprus, Puerto Rico, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Luxembourg, Albania, Viet Nam, Latvia, Jordan, Estonia, Uruguay, Kuwait, Qatar, Morocco, Panama, Macedonia, the Former Yugoslav Republic, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Malta, American Samoa, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Moldova, Guatemala, Nigeria, Belarus, United Republic of Tanzania, Bahrain, Mauritius, Algeria, Iraq, Mongolia, Paraguay, Montenegro, Palestinian Territory–Occupied, Honduras, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, El Salvador, China, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Guam, Iceland, Cayman Islands, Greenland, Mozambique, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Bermuda, Saint Lucia, Uganda, Bahamas, Maldives, Libya, Réunion, Oman, Sudan, Jersey, Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Barbados, Macao, Micronesia, Federated States of Martinique, Namibia, Burkina Faso, Guyana, Cambodia, Mayotte, Congo, Botswana, Zambia, Senegal, Grenada, Aruba, Guernsey, Ghana
We share a slice of birthday cake with each of you!
We continue our tribute to The Great Gatsby — our favorite novel and the reason we started this blog in June 2012 — with the cover from a Swedish edition of the book. In Sweden, F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s novel is called En Man Utan Skrupler, which translates as A Man Without Scruples.
I’m guessing that people in Sweden like to know something about a book before deciding to read it — and, I’ll admit, The Great Gatsby isn’t a descriptive title like, say, the Swedish blockbuster The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Set in 1922, The Great Gatsby tells the story of post-WWI America, the Roaring Twenties, when Prohibition — a national ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcohol, in effect from 1920-1933 — was the law of the land, setting the stage for gangsters, bootleggers, and other nefarious types who were ready, willing, and able to give the people what they wanted.
While Jay Gatsby made his money through the illegal sale and transportation of alcohol, I’ve never thought of him as “a man without scruples.” That’s the point of the novel, isn’t it? In the end, it was Daisy and Tom — the rich — who really had no scruples.
I did a search for quotes about “scruples” and found the following, which speaks to to Gatsby’s approximate time and place.
“The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece.
Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization.
Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else – and this was a frequent solution – they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.”
MALCOLM COWLEY, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s.
“Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.”
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA, Spanish poet, dramatist, and priest (1600-1681)
On August 31, 2012, look up into the sky and catch a glimpse of the last blue moon until July 2015! As lovers of lunar trivia know, a blue moon is the second full moon in the same calendar month. (The month’s other full moon occurred on August 2nd.)
Let’s celebrate by featuring a favorite tune about the moon. (Lyrics listed below — just sing along in your mind. I know you know this tune — first published in 1934.)
BLUE MOON
by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart
Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own.
Blue moon,
you knew just what I was there for
you heard me saying a prayer for
somebody I realy could care for.
And then there suddenly appeared before me,
the only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper, “Please adore me.”
and when I looked,
the moon had turned to gold.
Blue moon,
now I’m no longer alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love of my own.
Photo: Marius G. Mihalache, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Tonight (or should I say this morning) I’ve been looking at images from Natural Fashion, a book of photographs by Hans Silvester — and can say without reservation that these are some of the most beautiful, surprising photographs I’ve ever seen.
Here is the description from the Amazon page:
In this stunning collection of photographs, Hans Silvester celebrates the unique art of the Surma and Mursi tribes of the Omo Valley, on the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. These nomadic people have no architecture or crafts with which to express their innate artistic sense. Instead, they use their bodies as canvases, painting their skin with pigments made from powdered volcanic rock and adorning themselves with materials obtained from the world around them—such as flowers, leaves, grasses, shells and animal horns. The adolescents of the tribes are especially adept at this art, and Silvester’s superb photographs show many youths who, imbued with an exquisite sense of color and form, have painted their beautiful bodies with colorful dots, stripes and circles, and encased themselves in elaborate arrangements of vegetation and found objects. This art is endlessly inventive, magical and, above all, fun. In his brief text, Sylvester worries that as civilization encroaches on this largely unexplored region, these people will lose their delightful tradition. 160 color photographs.
Silver Birch Press 