My friend and teacher Nancy Mack invited me to visit her seminar on Lev Vygotsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the social nature of language. When I took her course ten years ago, it was the most stimulating subject I encountered in graduate school. It tapped my long-standing interest in Russian literature and led eventually to the essay A Word Is The Search For It. I called on Bakhtin for theoretical support for Blowback, a talk about the Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision given last year at the Ohio State University Law School. Otherwise, I haven’t worked much with the Russians for several years. Like the swallows in Osip Mandelstam’s poem, the Russians return dependably in the seasonal cycle of my attention. Something as simple as an invitation to speak to a class can herald their arrival. There is an untold story that I need to tell about Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s influence on me when I first lost the ability to read books. And I’ve mused for along time about affinities between Mandelstam and Walter Benjamin and the totalitarian machines that sought to destroy them. So I’m adding Osip to this web site’s Dramatis Personae. Nadezhda Mandelstam, one of the greatest Russian prose writers of the 20th century, will join him there in due course. Thanks to Nancy for steering me again in this compelling direction.
About the Flaneur
![Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day (La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie). 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]](../wp-content/uploads/2009/02/gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day_1877_wiki.jpg "gustave_caillebotte_paris_street_rainy_day")
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Kiki: Man Ray’s Dada Muse
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s Le violin de Ingres (1924). See more from Imaging Paris.Lee Miller: Surrealist Muse
Lee Miller traced a meteoric trajectory from flapper fashionista to surrealist muse. She played the Statue in Jean Cocteau's first movie. Picasso painted her portrait. She apprenticed with Man Ray and later became a noted war photographer for British Vogue. Read more.Miss Tic: Paris Street Art
Poet and street artist Miss Tic isn't exactly a kid in a hoodie with a can of spray paint. Maybe she can still run like hell when the police show up, but can she sprint in high heels? Well-known in international avant-garde circles, her work is exhibited now at the Venice Biennale as well as the alleys of Paris. Read more. See Ethics of Love for a video montage of Miss Tic's provacative poetry. More Paris Street Art.
The Lake and the River
![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.
What is a village? A small place, yes, as wide as the world, layered with histories and stories, where you can walk wherever you want to go. My vision of that place is Yellow Springs 2.0.
Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Blind Photographers
In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in New York, the social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it. Paul Strand probably didn’t give her much credit for making culture, either. Read more: Curiosity & The Blind Photographer [MiT5 2007] See more on blind photographers.BottomFeeder U.S.A.
![Grant Wood. Parson Weem’s’ Fable. 1939. Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth.. Steven Biel describes the painting: “Parson Weems, imitating Charles Willson Peale’s pose in The Artist in His Museum (1822), opens a red velvet curtain on the legendary scene: Augustine Washington, elegant in crimson coat, white ruffle, tan breeches, silver-buckled pumps, and green tricornered hat, grasps in his right hand the slim trunk of the bent cherry tree. A row of cherries dangles from the perfectly rounded treetop, mirroring the very cherry-like fringe of the Parson’s curtain. Augustine’s outstretched left palm and furrowed brow signal a serious inquiry. His son George, boyish in stature and dress—coatless, with sky-blue breeches and petite buckled pumps—is manly in his expression. In fact, his white-wigged head is that of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait and the dollar bill. He points with his right hand to the hatchet in his left. Wood chips lie in the circle of soil at the base of the tree, its lower trunk smoothly incised and poised to split off. In the background, a well-dressed slave couple harvests the fruit of a second tree.” [Alt Text Source: Common-Place/ http://www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-04/biel/ ]](../wp-content/uploads/2011/08/grant_wood_parson_weems_fable_200px.jpg "grant_wood_parson_weems_fable_200px")
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I’ve read the word is the search for it and loved it. (aside: I’ve translated it and posted the translation in a Persian - my native tongue - weblog, naturally without permission from you. I’m not proud of it, but just hope you don’t mind. The article was too good and felt too close not to be transmitted. I made absolutely no money out of it, for what it’s worth.) Your blog is so full of dramatis personae I cannot be sure as to whether or not I’m addressing Mr. Mark Willis through this comment. So, sorry to have to ask, but have you already written on the way OM and Nadzhda influenced you? Because I should love to read what you may have written on this. Many thanks!
Mannoushka,
I am deeply honored and gratified to learn that you read my essay on Mandelstam and Vygotsky and translated it into Persian. You certainly have my permission and best wishes to publish it on your web site. I ask only that you publish it under a Creative Commons 3.0 license – attribution, non-commercial, share alike. Please send me a URL to the essay on your site. Even though I will not be able to read it in Persian, I want to document its publication.
I’ve planned to move the original essay to a blind flaneur, and when I do, I’ll let you know its new URL.
I have much more to write about Osip Mandelstam and look forward to having time in the future to give him the attention he deserves. Until then, your interest buoys my spirit (which, like the name of your blog, is a streetspirit). That you found, read, translated, and published my words confirms what Mandelstam wrote in 1921 about the renewal of language:
My ship is fortunate to have found you, Reader. Please keep in touch!
Best regards,
Mark
Translation of Part I: In the Shadow of Stalin’s Terror
Part II: The Work of Inner Speech
Part III: Subtext and Secret Writing
Part IV: The Living Word
Part V: The Renewal of Motive