Annie Dillard, author. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Ms. Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a best-selling autobiography and another best seller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.
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Unlike Thoreau, Ms. Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.
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Forty-two years later, in a sweeping appraisal of her work, the author and critic William Deresiewicz noted in The Atlantic that “Dillard, like Thoreau, is never shy about pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the way her fellows live.” He thought that the alternative she represented smacked of spiritual snobbery and hypocrisy — a mystical way of life for the few who could afford it; like, for instance, the daughter of a wealthy family who became a success before she turned 30.
I have several of her books, but haven’t really dipped into them. I feel like I need to be in the right place and right frame of mind for this kind of work. But I do find this quote (from For the Time Being) quite striking:
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: A people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time– or even knew selflessness or courage or literature– but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
While we were driving home on Monday, Mike mentioned a headline on his phone about the death of a “legendary” designer, and asked if any designer was truly “legendary”.
Bob Mackie. Even I have heard of Bob Mackie. Among his credits: Carol Burnett’s curtain dress.
Over the show’s 11 seasons, he created an average of 60 costumes a week for Ms. Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway and Lyle Waggoner, as well as the show’s guest stars and supporting performers.
Jay Maisel, photographer.
Mr. Maisel’s picture of Mr. Davis reveals him in a splash of light and shows his fingers moving in a blur on his trumpet. Mr. Maisel had taken it for himself; months later, Columbia Records asked if he had any photos of Mr. Davis that could be used for “Kind of Blue,” which the music historian Ashley Kahn, writing in The New York Times in 1999, said “floats above jazz history in an ether all its own.”
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For a dozen years, Mr. Maisel worked out of a studio at 122 Second Avenue. Then his rent went up, prompting him to buy the abandoned Germania Bank building at 190 Bowery for $102,000 in 1966. Forty-nine years later, he sold it to a developer for $55 million.
The “On Taking Pictures” podcast devoted much of an episode to Mr. Maisel. I think he was also featured prominently in the OTP drinking game, but I seem to have lost my copy of that.
Peter Max, 1960s “counterculture” artist.
His simple graphic images, brightly colored and infectiously happy, lent themselves to a long list of licensed commercial products, from sheets and glassware and shower curtains to airplanes and, on one occasion, a stamp for the Postal Service.
Incorporating Art Nouveau, Op Art and psychedelic motifs, Mr. Max’s designs offered instant visual gratification and a cheery endorsement of the generational politics of love, joy and universal consciousness. His “panopticon” images repeated visual elements in tight formation, producing a kaleidoscope effect that recalled Easter mandalas.