ah ...
nasturtiums ... finally achieve their moment in the sun ...
posted at 3:11 PM
one example of iris's ... uh ... range
...
Adelman
Letters and Documents Collection - I | Special Collections | Bryn
Mawr College LibraryIris,
(Federico) Scharmel, 1889-1967. Bread and Hyacinths
: with
a preface attributed to Woodrow Wilson
1 item (79 p. on 79 leaves) ; 29 x 22 cm
TMs.
Bound into the original typewritten manuscript is a typewritten
preface purportedly signed by Woodrow Wilson and dictated by him
to Maurice Francis Egan. Wilson preface declares 'I would rather
have written 'After the Martyrdom' than to have been the President
of the United States.' But, see Abbott, Craig, S. 'The Case of
Scharmel Iris,' Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America
77 (1983): 15-34, which discusses the large number of forgeries
of letters of recommendation associated with Iris's publications.
With a typewritten letter from Egan to Iris discussing
Wilson's admiration of Iris's poetry.posted
at 10:59 AM
you never know what the tide will carry
in ... last week i had a brief, interesting exchange with a fellow
who was doing research for the biography of a character named
Scharmel Iris ... he stumbled upon
a page from my high school journal in which i
mention Iris and present one of his poems ... i told him what
i knew - or thought i knew - about Iris ... and he replied ...
Years ago I wrote an article
exposing some of Iris's plagiarism, forgery, and so on. It appeared
in 1983, in the quarterly Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America.
Since then, I've gotten access to Iris's papers
at Lewis University (where he lived for many years) and have discovered
much more.
But your memory
is not so out of whack as you might suppose. He did hang out at
the Printer's Ink. The purple book was the Judgment Seat
(1965). It did have a dust jacket blurb attributed (falsely) to
Pound. It was published with the help of Joliet-area "sponsors."
Its introduction, although attributed to Dame Edith Sitwell, is
at least in part Iris's work--just as was the Yeats preface to
his Bread Out of Stone
(1954).
But Iris (born Federico Scaramella in Italy in 1889)
did have a bit of contact with some great modernists. He did hang
out at the offices of Harriet Monroe's Poetry
magazine
at about the time of its founding in 1912. He attended, in Chicago,
the magazine's banquet for Yeats. He corresponded (often under
false pretenses and under several names) with Pound and others.
His portrait was drawn by Augustus John and by Diego Rivera. He
also told tall tales about his life and contacts.
He also manipulated Bishop Sheil and Archbishop
Stritch, who evidently got him the money for a trip to Europe
and for publication of some religious verse (Seven Hills of the
Dove). Sheil got him the place to stay at Lewis.
He had some talent as a poet. Most of his work,
though, seems written in imitation of others. In fact, some is
plagiarized.
Craig Abbott
Professor Emeritus
Northern Illinois
Universityquite a tale
... i wonder where that old purple book might be ... buried in
a box at mom's ... or long gone ...
posted
at 10:46 AM
sure i know from recent adventures with
the right leg that ... one thing leads to another ... but it's
not always ... or even mostly ... a malicious principle ... take
for instance ... this: i've got this large double-paned window
that's been all fogged for as long as i've known it ... dom decided
it was time to take action ... so the glass guys showed up the
other day ... only to say that my windows are not only "the
cheapest windows we've ever seen" but also some really irregular
size ... so they'll be back ... but before they can install, i've
got to move all these books and piles of stuff out of their way
... and i've been thinking i need to transfer some/many of said
books over to my classroom ... and so today i've begun that tricky
moving-sorting-shifting-dusting job i've promised me all summer
long ... three big boxes so far ... but it's hardly noticeable
... barely a scratch ... if yr a book-accumulator like me, you
understand ... not even a nick ... like trying to lower lake michigan
one coffee-cup at a time ... but ... it's all good
posted at 2:39 PM
some notion to mix coffee with the hives
cranked to twenty-one up close in my ears ... get a different
kind of life ... not Life but one kind of it ... full of caffeine
and big beats ... you wouldn't want this forever but it's not
too shabby now and then ... especially now ... thinking of poor
souls who ... got no hives ... or coffee
posted
at 9:44 AM
at this very moment i'm playing hookie
from our first pep rally ... not because there's no oxygen in
the small gym (though there's not much) but because my calf and
knee started talking to my brain ... sit ... go sit ... so here
i am ... and it's the first real friday of the school year ...
which is just ... special
posted at 2:38 PM
sixty-one years ago today ... my mom
and dad got married ... the rest is history
posted at 7:58 AM
fifty-five years ago my mother had a
baby ... it turned out to be me ... imagine that!
THANKS, MOM!!posted
at 8:25 AM
