March 10, 2004
Year of George Sand
Well, I'm a month late in announcing this bit of George Sand-related news -- as February 4, 2004 launched the Year of George Sand!
For more details, there's these articles:
'Year of George Sand' Celebrated and France celebrates "Year of George Sand".
September 15, 2003
Panthéonization of George Sand
The Guardian UK's book section has a piece about the controversy over the proposed panthéonization of George Sand. (link via Arts & Letters Daily.)
I've been sort of loosely following this story since I first heard about it (here's an old reference to the story I had meant to post here but never got that post out of draft form ....)
My interest in the story is just that I am a big George Sand fan and -- well -- c'mon. It's an amusing sort of celebrity controversy to follow. At least to me. It's certainly much more interesting than following the gossip on Ben & J-Lo or the usual melodramas that one can't avoid hearing about no matter how much one really tries. However, I realize I'm a freak of cultural literacy references and I'm in the minority here. So, that means that unlike followers of Ben & J and other stories about related famous flavors of the day, I just won't get to see references to the George story every single day on the front page of news sources or running in the ticker on the bottom of news shows on TV.
Well, since George was once the famous flavor of her day, I figure (perhaps anachronistically) that the well-being and whereabouts of her corpse deserves to be in a news ticker and in more news gossip & dish rags. So. Guess I'll just have to do it myself in a rudimentary fashion. So, I think I'm going to try to post links to any juicy future stories I see about the fate of George's remains here.
You are all thrilled to hear it, aren't you? Half of you, no doubt, are saying "George Sand? Who's he?" Um. Sigh.
June 27, 2003
Disjointed Literary Bits
Stumbled upon this lovely web site called Literary Locales. It's a collection of more than a thousand picture links of places mentioned in famous literature or that are associated or notable in various authors' lives.
Speaking of authors, shall segue into a little calendar trivia now and mention that today is the birthday of Frank O'Hara (1926-1966).
George Sand (1804-1876) has her birthday coming up this Tuesday (July 1st). Wrote up a short piece on George Sand a couple of years ago that's tucked away on my defunct Dead Authors section.
The Dead Authors section was one of those weird ideas I got one day some years ago that sounded like it'd be an absorbing side project to tinker on but I realized that the idea I had would really be far too unwieldy and time-consuming to undertake if I wanted to try to do it right. So I decided to scrap it as a project to attempt, as I had (and still have) quite enough half-finished project experiments already, indeed. Left the pieces I initially wrote up, though, for what they're worth and just because they contained a few possibly noteworthy tidbits that might be of use to someone sometime.
One of those pieces was this page that goes a little bit into George Sand and has an interesting graphic of an old fan of hers that had been painted by Charpentier, illustrating Sand's "salon."
Always meant to do a little piece on Frank O'Hara for that Dead Authors section, too, but never got around to it.
And I can tell you exactly why. Because I just now did what I always did when I attempted to write my mini-profiles and pieces. Would go look up a little bit on an author to get a quote right, a factoid confirmed and instead end up on a mini-celebratory rereading of the author's work. Sometimes, for DAYS. Heh.
Yup. And this is what just happened penning this. I thought to go find a simple little quote from one of Frank O'Hara's poems to maybe end this entry with. Now, an hour and some minutes later, after collapsing happily into Frank O'Hara's poetry, rereading and rereading many of my favorites of his -- I have a lot of favorites with him --I emerge reluctantly to just finish off this entry so I can go reread him some more ....
So. No quick quote will suffice because I want to quote all of his lines. I have been a fervent admirer of O'Hara ever since a friend pressed a book of his poetry into my hands about twenty years ago and said "Read this. He's great." And I did. And he was.
So, I guess I'll just close out this somewhat disjointed entry by doing like that old friend did. Please allow me to press into the (virtual) hands of those unfamiliar with this poet a link or two and say: "Go read him. He's great."
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A Frank O'Hara site (where you can find some links to some of his poems online; same one I recently mentioned, incidentally, when I quoted an O'Hara poem.)
Frank O'Hara books from Amazon
Also filed under: calendar trivia ; george sand
