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[photo challenge: Upper Rubber Boot's 100 Untimed Books] prompt 35: prescriptions for loneliness
Alfred A. Knopf's photo album came to mind when I was pondering this prompt, perhaps because it's where I store my copy of the program for the 1945 dinner in honor of Fred Melcher's fifty years in publishing (Melcher being a prominent Unitarian Universalist who, among many other roles, was a key player in establishing the Newbery and Caldecott medals).
In Victoria Glendinning's biography of Elizabeth Bowen, there's a photo of Elizabeth at the Knopf home in Purchase, New York. I find Glendinning's generalizations about sexuality and friendship irritating, but within the nonsense there are glimpses of a past generation's true moments of connection:
The clipping is from an October 4 edition of the New York Times, in which Penelope Green writes about interviewing Patti Smith:
Alfred A. Knopf's photo album came to mind when I was pondering this prompt, perhaps because it's where I store my copy of the program for the 1945 dinner in honor of Fred Melcher's fifty years in publishing (Melcher being a prominent Unitarian Universalist who, among many other roles, was a key player in establishing the Newbery and Caldecott medals).
In Victoria Glendinning's biography of Elizabeth Bowen, there's a photo of Elizabeth at the Knopf home in Purchase, New York. I find Glendinning's generalizations about sexuality and friendship irritating, but within the nonsense there are glimpses of a past generation's true moments of connection:
William Maxwell of The New Yorker/ observed that [Elizabeth] was at her best and most affectionate when she was with Blanche and Alfred Knopf -- "I always felt that they must have played together as children" -- and he remembered a dinner party with the Knopfs and Elizabeth as "a kind of blaze of happiness.
The clipping is from an October 4 edition of the New York Times, in which Penelope Green writes about interviewing Patti Smith:
"I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did," she said. "I'd like to write something as great as Pinocchio or Little Women. I won't say Moby-Dick because that's impossible. I'd like to write a book that everybody loves. I'd like to take a picture that someone wants to put above their desk so they can look at it while they're writing a letter or doing whatever they're doing while sitting at their desk. I'd like to do a painting that would astonish people."
But books are her deepest love, and writing them is clearly her keenest ambition. When she received her advance from Knopf, the publisher of M Train, she bought a bronze statue of a young boy who has caught a bird in his hands; she set it in her tangled front yard here.
"It was my dream to be with Knopf since I was 20," she said. "I wanted to have something solid to mark that. I bought him because he reminded me of Peter Pan."
