Rudy Burckhardt and Edwin Denby, CH2-5097

The photographer Rudy Burckhardt and the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby moved into 145 W. 21st (a warehouse building) in 1935. Willem de Kooning lived nearby. Denby lived at this address until his death in 1983. These listings come from the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory, available at Direct Me NYC 1940.

Related reading and viewing
“[A]s Edwin Denby would / write” (on lines in a Frank O’Hara poem)
“The Climate of New York” (Burckhardt–Denby collaboration)
Feature: Edwin Denby (Jacket 21)

Helen Cornell, FL7-7653-J

Mrs. Helen S. Cornell: the mother of the artist Joseph Cornell. Cornell lived for most of his life at 37-08 Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens. This listing comes from the 1940 Queens telephone directory, available at Direct Me NYC 1940.

[If I had an address on Utopia Parkway, I wouldn’t move either. If I had a J at the end of my number, I would wonder what it meant.]

Coleman Hawkins, ED4-2697

St. Nicholas Place, once the home of the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, is up on Sugar Hill in Hamilton Heights in Harlem. Number 80 was and is an apartment building. This listing comes from the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory, available at Direct Me NYC 1940.

Dwight Macdonald, GR3-0835

Yes, it’s “the” Dwight Macdonald who lived at this address. This listing comes from the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory, available at Direct Me NYC 1940.

Thomas Merton, CH2-0476

Looking for musicians and writers in 1940 New York City telephone directories, I have had almost no luck. Did these people not have telephones?

But I have made one find. In 1939 and 1940, Thomas Merton, then a graduate student, lived in Greenwich Village at 35 Perry Street. And he had a phone. By September 1940 he was living at St. Bonaventure University. In December 1941 he left for the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

A related post
Thomas Merton and a snapshot

[The Perry Street address is well known to readers of Merton’s work. By the way: you don’t have to be Catholic or Christian or even a theist to love Thomas Merton.]

Billy Wilder in an Eames chair

[“Multiple exposure of film director Billy Wilder sitting in chair designed by Charles Eames made of plastic; one can easily jump around while watching television.” Photograph by Peter Stackpole. United States, August 1950. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All Eames-related posts (via Pinboard)
Elizabeth Taylor (a Peter Stackpole photograph)
Olivetti showroom (a Peter Stackpole photograph)

No longer avoiding CAPTCHA

I’ve had to turn word-verification for comments again: too many spam comments, and just looking at them reminds me of vast stretches of the Internets I’d rather avoid.

If a CAPTCHA is difficult to work out, enlarging it with Command-+ or Control-+ can make it more readable. I think though that Blogger’s new CAPTCHAs have become more readable than they were at first. (Tell me if I’m right, or wrong.)

A related post
Avoiding CAPTCHA

Welcome to college

Or some people’s idea of college: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses (Rolling Stone).

[Don’t read it on a full stomach.]

Blackwing Q. and A.

The best friend the Blackwing pencil has ever had considers facts, fiction, and the “Blackwing Experience.”

National Poetry Month

[Poster by Chin-Yee Lai.]

Hey, everybody, it’s April, National Poetry Month. The Academy of American Poets’ FAQ explains that April was chosen because it “seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry.” I wish there were more to it than that, but the choice of April appears to be unrelated to Geoffrey Chaucer (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote”) or T.S. Eliot (“the cruellest month”). To choose April without even acknowledging these poets’ contrary representations of the month (which after all might remind us of the great variety of perspectives on reality that poems afford) seems an odd gesture indeed.

I also wish that the representation of Poetry on this poster were less — what? precious? sentimental? greeting-card-like? If you cannot make the words out, they read: “. . . wait on the wind, catch a sense of salt, call it our life.” Okay, I will do that. You can find the words in context here, forming the last line of Philip Levine’s poem “Our Valley.”

This post is for my friend Sara, who too will be exasperated.

[“The best time within the year”: within as opposed to what? Why not “the best time of year”? I saw a signboard outside a thrift store yesterday proclaiming March National Poetry Month, but that must have been an April Fools’ joke.]