Harry's Place Arts

This is a guest post by de Bent-Vueghels

“I walked into the forest [...] until I came to a small glade that opened onto a sandy path. I narrowed the world down to the span of a few metres. Again I tried to compose the mental set – call it the naturalist’s trance, the hunter’s trance – by which biologists locate more elusive organisms. [...]

In a twist my mind came free and I was aware of the hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention. [...] It seemed to me that something extraordinary in the forest was very close to where I stood, moving to the surface and discovery.” Edward Osborne Wilson

a) “Swollen red eyes, their cavities spreading out through the flesh as if under an order not to sleep. Pupils dilated to the point where they seem to transmit rather than to receive perceptions, like a knowing gaze of a fish long dead. The redness of these eyes marks a painful and ghastly emanation out of what seems to have once been a person. This face is being reclaimed, its features giving way to the miasma with which it is stricken. If there is any victory here it is only one of recognition. Arnold Schoenberg: The Red Gaze of May 1910.”

Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance, 1996.

b) On 26 July 1910 the Dingbat cat is hit on the head by what may have been a piece of brick. Thus is born the Krazy

Kat comic strip in the humble confines of the Dingbat family home’s basement, to cease only with the death of its creator, George Herriman, on 25 April 1944. Time Magazine USA obituary, ‘Among the Unlimitless Etha,’ of 4 May 1944 here:

c) “Virginia Woolf’s famous remark that in or or about December 1910 human nature changed, in part, it seems, because Lytton Strachey said the word “semen” at a party.”

Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: reflections at sixty and beyond, 1999.

A stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress led to Strachey asking if it was semen: the previously unthinkable suddenly became sayable.

Next week: Episode Two: Action Dead Mouse