Remembering Raymond Queneau on his birthday 🎂
📷 Robert Doisneau, 1956
"Queneau’s thinking did not always follow the ways of his century, but his writing unmistakably *belongs* to that century, & indeed often seems to anticipate it."
- Jordan Stump
Raymond Queneau was called by Le Monde "the most universal mind of our time." He was apparently an accomplished painter!
Here's a self-portrait from 1947.
Raymond Queneau by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1963
"True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love."
Robert Doisneau's contact sheet for his portrait session with Raymond Queneau, May 31, 1956, near rue Reuilly. The best shot is at the top of this thread.
Two of my heroes!
Raymond Queneau
Untitled
"The world is not what it seems - but it isn't anything else, either."
Raymond Queneau
Terrain vague, c.1948, gouache
"One can only draw curved lines on the terrestrial sphere which, as they extend, forever meet with themselves. At such intersections we always encounter what we have already seen."
The Eiffel Tower is losing its hair
this is a spinster's filamentary issue
Christ is also the filial issue of a spinster
go translate that into French for me!
- Raymond Queneau, The Translatory Tower
📷 André Kertész, 1929
Raymond Queneau by Boris Lipnitzki, Paris, 1954
"Queneau was one of those writers who knew pretty much everything there was to know about literature, but he also loved word games, and the language of the streets."
- Nicholas Lezard
Raymond Queneau by Jacques Haillot
One of the words that Queneau added to the French language, half-borrowed from English: "le queneau-coutte" (the blow that horizontalises heavyweights).
Raymond Queneau by David Levine
Raymond Queneau collaborated with Jean Tinguely in the 7th of his Metamatics, utilizing the Méta-Matic Drawing Machine, 1967
Raymond Queneau & François Le Lionnais created Oulipo, an experimental writing group that still exists today. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
I've never seen a key for this photo, but I recognize Italo Calvino & Harry Mathews on the left, & Georges Perec behind Queneau.
In the late 1960s I read Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro in Barbara Wright's translation, published by Bodley Head in 1960, & it's always been hugely important to me. One of the funniest of the great novels. amzn.to/2RJPxIf
Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro was made into a wonderful film by Louis Malle. I watch this regularly, recently on @criterionchannl
"Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears." - Raymond Queneau
I've often wondered if Louis Malle knew these photo-booth shots of Queneau from 1928 ("photomaton" in French).
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Remembering Alan Rickman on his birthday 🎂
📷 Annie Leibovitz
"Die Hard made Bruce Willis a movie star, but it earned Rickman a different kind of designation, as the prototypical, and at the same time impossible-to-replicate, action-movie villain."
- @iancrouch
Another Annie Leibovitz portrait of Alan Rickman, as Severus Snape, from 2001
Remembering Nina Simone on her birthday 🎂
📷 David Redfern, 1966
"Every generation has to discover Nina Simone. She is evidence that female genius is real."
- Germaine Greer
One of my favourite Nina Simone portraits, by Bob Willoughby, from c. 1960
For Nina Simone's birthday, this spectacular photograph by Guy Le Querrec
From the 1er Festival Culturel Panafricain, Théâtre de l'Atlas, Alger, July 30, 1969
Remembering W. H. Auden on his birthday 🎂
📷 George Platt Lynes @BeineckeLibrary
"Given poetry’s almost total isolation from public discourse today, there’s something deeply appealing about Auden’s quest to establish a poetry of public intimacy."
- Meghan O'Rourke
W. H. Auden by Yousuf Karsh, 1972
Karsh remembered this last session with Auden, in Stephen Spender's garden:
"Come soon, come soon," he invited, but I knew I would never see him again.
W. H. Auden at El Teatro Cafe in Venice
📷 Ruth Orkin, 1951
Remembering Anaïs Nin on her birthday 🎂
📷 Inge Morath, Hollywood, 1959
"The rehabilitation of Nin is taking place not because her work has changed, but because the world has changed to make room for her work."
- @sadydoyle
Coffee with Anaïs Nin ☕️
📷 Inge Morath,Schwab's Drugstore, Los Angeles, 1959
Anaïs Nin by Annette Lederer, 1969
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
Remembering Andrés Segovia on his birthday 🎂
📷 Erich Auerbach, 1963
"Unable to find a teacher, he guided himself and would say in later years with a smile, 'To this day, teacher & pupil have never had a serious quarrel'."
- Donal Henahan
Andres Segovia by Nickolas Muray
Vanity Fair, 1928
Watch Christopher Nupen's film of Segovia's concert at the Alhambra, from 1976
Heitor Villa-Lobos & Andres Segovia sign the guestbook at the Centro Guitarristico in Montevideo.
Remembering Walter Becker on his birthday 🎂
On the left in this photo by Henry Diltz, with his Steely Dan partner Donald Fagen, 1978
"We took ourselves more seriously than anyone else took us."
Steely Dan by Ed Caraeff.
This is one of my all-time favourite rock group studio shots. Jim Hodder, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, Denny Dias, Donald Fagen & Walter Becker.
ABC Recording Studio in Los Angeles, May 1973
Walter Becker & Donald Fagen by Lynn Goldsmith, 1995
"As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars."