BERNEVAL

OMG. My pal tweeted about an entry where I referenced an article by journalist Cynthia Macdonald (A Shift in Perception). He used the hashtag #cynthiamacdonald along with that of #heidegger. Upon seeing the two hashtags in close proximity, I conducted a web search with the name Cynthia Macdonald plus that of Heidegger and found the philosopher. And then a search through Wikipedia netted the poet. Many people, one name. And as luck would have it one of them contemplated changing names:

For my father, Leonard Lee; his father Leonard C. Lee; and his grandfather Leonard C. Levy. I have wanted for some time to take back my great-grandfather’s name; had I not been cautioned about the confusion caused by authors’ name changes, this book would have listed the author as Cynthia Levy-Macdonald. In the invisible writing of families, that is how it reads.

That is from the dedication of Alternate Means of Transport.

A well-known search engine produces a reference to “Amiri Baraka” if you go looking for “Leroi Jones”. Some name changes become the sole name that people remember: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. And sometimes librarians and search engines lag behind in recording the biographic details of a name change: the author of The fat woman measures up Donald, C.M. (Christine M.) changed her name to Clare [surname], Hilary. Source: Queer CanLit: Canadian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Literature in English. An Exhibition Curated by Scott Rayter, Donald W. McLeod, and Maureen FitzGerald — none of whom to my knowledge have changed their names. The exhibition was displayed at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto from 9 June to 29 August 2008 and the catalogue is available for download free of charge. For the portrait of C.M. Donald now known as Hilary Clare that appeared in the exhibit see the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives site http://www.clga.ca/npc/DonaldCM-2005087-01.shtml [Link now defunct – the Arquives now rotate through the portraits without easy access to the whole collection]

Hilary Clare aka C.M. Donald, author

And so for day 850
11.04.2009

What is amazing is the lack of over-lap in these words and worlds apart in what some version of Microsoft Word produced as a thesaurus search:

Organisation – with an “s”

system of government
government
administration
civil service
officialdom
establishment

Organization – with a “z”

association
group
club
institute
union
party
business

I suspect that two different thesauri are behind these results. Results also vary depending upon which version of the word-processing software is used.

And so for day 843
04.04.2009

In 2010, HBO airs Public Speaking, directed by Martin Scorsese the documentary takes the form of an extended interview with Fran Lebowitz interspersed with public engagements. In the extended interview, one of her observations is that the level of connoisseurship in New York City was severely damaged by the AIDS epidemic. It devastated homosexual audiences.

Conducting a World Wide Web search of the term “homosexual audience” I come across a Wikipedia entry on a film by Derek Jarman Sebastiane (1976) which entry ends with a quotation from Margaret Walters, author of The Nude Male (1978) to the effect that

Sebastiane, “where male nudes in various stages of ecstacy positively littered the screen”, was “successfully aimed at a very specialized homosexual audience.”

No connection with the elite New York City Ballet set that Lebowitz is commenting upon. Except to distinguish a “homosexual audience” from a “gay audience”. Of course this is a point that Ms. Lebowitz makes with more panache.

Connoisseurship may be making a come back (if it ever really did leave). It may no longer inhabit merely the metropolis. Nor be the monopoly of a peculiar sexual orientation.

Please note that Ms. Lebowitz’s remarks as she contextualizes them pertain to a specific time and place — it’s my paraphrase that pluralizes “audiences” and broadens where she would specify. But it’s that wide angle that permits me to bring in a reference to a film by Jarman whose 1993 Blue provided some lessons on styles of departure with its closing words:

In time,
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble. I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave

Of course if you garden and know plants you have a sense of how fragile a plant delphinium can be. There are many sorts of connoisseurship: ballet, film, gardening. And many amazing ways their discourses intersect. (And yes, there is a connoisseurship of intersections).

And so for day 842
03.04.2009