Tag Archives: Balzac

secret agent cult: balzac undercover

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Dave

…It was Balzac finally, who put his unerring finger on one of the basic motivations of the secret agent in every age, one of the essential sources of his imaginative appeal: “The trade of a spy is a very fine … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Allan Pinkerton, Balzac, Honore de Balzac, James Fenimore Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper The Spy, John Lukacs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Roger Caillois literary sociologist, Rose Greenhow spy, Wilhelm Stieber | Leave a comment

secret agent cult: vautrin to the rescue?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Dave

The cult of the secret agent. That he could be hazardous to the open society… …There is unquestionably a moral element, a kind of stoic idealism, in the myth of the covert hero that is embedded in the modern image … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Balzac, Hannah Adams Summary History of New England, Honore de Balzac, Jams Fenimore Cooper, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Nathan Hale spy, Roger Calois sociologist | Leave a comment

dark street notes

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Dave

In Edward Adler’s Notes From a Dark Street the materials of common contemporary existence on the Lower East Side – circa late 1950′s- have been ordered and transmuted into a terrible cosmography far transcending its naturalistic events. The novel’s aesthetic … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged Balzac, Ed De Blasio, Edward Adler, Edward Adler writer, Flaubert, Helen Levitt photography, Henry Roth author, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Nathaniel West, Robert Frost, Stanley kauffman, T.S. Eliot | Leave a comment

SAINT SIMON SAYS: FIND THE FEMALE MESSIAH

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Dave

In the nineteenth century, when the Saint-Simonians took to mysticism under the leadership of Bathelemy Prosper Enfantin, they began to talk up “the rehabilitation of the flesh” , a principle which inderlay the growing advocacy of free-love in the movement. … Continue reading →

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous | Tagged Angus McClaren, Armand Bazard, Balzac, Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, Ben Hardman, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Bonnie S. Anderson, Claire Goldberg Moses, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, Dominique R. Poirier, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Franz Liszt, Frederick Engels, Georges Sorel, Hector Berlioz, Hugh Chisholm, James Burke, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Le Pere Enfantin, Louis Blanc, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Manfred Hauke, Nancy Locke, Olinde Rodrigues, Saint Simon, Thomas Carlyle, William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Leave a comment

CASE OF THE ABSENT BRIDEGROOM

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Dave

The painting shows a variety of country folk celbrating a wedding by having a midday meal. Most of it is clear enough. One one level it is straightforward, amusing, sympathetic and easy to understand. For instance, right in the foreground, … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Miscellaneous, Visual Art/Sculpture/etc. | Tagged Balzac, Baron Joseph van der Elst, Bruegel Peasant Wedding, Bruegel Peasant Wedding feast, C.G. Stridbeck, Carl Goldmark, Dorothy Koppelman, Eli Siegel, Gustav Gluck, Honore de Balzac, K.C. Lindsay, Norman Rockwell, Pieter Bruegel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Ruth Oron, Voltaire, Walter Gibson, William Carlos Williams | Leave a comment

ELUSIVE FORTY-FIRST SEAT

Posted on January 23, 2010 by Dave

A language police and literary garbage removal squad.Painful protocol for a poet to swallow.The Academie Francaise was created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 as the official agency of linguistic formalism. It began as a reaction against female domination of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Literature/poetry/spoken word, Miscellaneous | Tagged Allen Ginsberg, Balzac, Beaumarchais, Camus, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles Baudelaire, David, Diderot, Flaubert, Gregory Corso, Herman Melville, Jack Kerouac, James Redfield, Jean Cocteau, L'Academie Francaise, Leon Vincent, Leon Vincent The French Academy, Proust, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Valentin Contrart, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, William Burroughs | 3 Comments

LOOK AT NOTHING BUT SEE EVERYTHING

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Dave

Andre Gide, a minor novelist, once called the “Comedie Humaine” of Balzac a great fresco crumbling to pieces a little more all the time. Given that he is not entirely wrong, it could be extrapolated today that the novel as … Continue reading →