22

"I'd love to have a photograph of you. It's a longing that has suddenly taken hold of me, but I fear it isn't possible now. I'd have to be there, for you don't know anything about such matters. There is, I know, an excellent photographer at Le Havre, but all photographers, even the best, have stupid prejudices, and they consider a good likeness one in which every wort, every wrinkle, every blemish in the face is clearly visible, or even exaggerated. The harder and clearer the image is the better pleased they are. It's only in Paris that they'd be able to do what I want - that's to say, a true picture, but with the soft outline of a drawing"

Baudelaire - Starkie-Pelican paper p. 582.

The cloth cover of this book is faded on the top and foredge sides. The result of Calcutta sun for 4 months though it was in a shady part of the room.

23

... what he likes about cities ... is their "cool seething incompletion" in which he can discover "grotesqueries of the everyday" and their

Endless potentiality

The crowded, broken and unfinished

I would not have the risk diminished.

"to fight Abstraction," Camus said in the Plague, "you must have something of it in your own make-up"

New York Review of Books March 20,1980

Richard Murphy review of selected Poems.

by Thom Gunn 1950-1975

3.6.80

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. - D.H. Lawrence

..."is all pink candy with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive."

on Gorki - Nabokov