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Posted on the New York
Times page for Klonsky and Schwartz
Objection: Klonsky was no one's
protege, December 24, 2005 Reviewer: marharrell Regarding "Klonsky and Schwartz," I give the low rating not as
theatre but because the Klonsky portrayal bears no resemblance to
Milton Klonsky. Immensely profound and informed, he had "an IQ
that could stutter your butter" (Seymour Krim, "Views of a
Near-sighted Cannoneer," 1961). Klonsky was a prodigy, a genius.
Factually speaking, he first met Delmore with Allen Tate, at 20,
residing at a writer's colony, Cummingham School. His first
publication had nothing to do with Schwartz, in "Chimera." Klonsky
was good friends with Anatole Broyard, Seymour Krim, W. H. Auden.
Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonld, Rip Torn, Terry Southern ("Dr.
Strangelove"), etc. Besides witnessing much of this first-hand, I
point to "A Discourse on Hip." Broyard in his NYT obituary, March
7, 1982, called Klonsky "my closest friend for many years: "There
are writers, admittedly only a few, who are so entirely themselves
that any utterance one might presume to make about them must seem
barbarous." Krim wrote, "the heavyweight pillar of his imagination
stood upright in a galactic night all its own without any of the
consolations that lesser dreamers could comfort themselves with. .
. . possessed a spirital life so grave and proportionate that only
the superbest adult utterance could do it justice" (ibid.)He
talked about Delmore with affection. Sincerely, Margaret A.
Harrell 
In
true Underground and time-worn fashion, the Klonsky books are
selling, for the growing number who know of him, at prices
two-to-four times their original value, as rare and collectibles. On
the other hand, one can find some titles and editions, mostly
paperback, at very low give-away prices. But for the most part, a
Klonsky book is surviving like an art object, with rising value—a
real investment. Below is the high side of what some books are
selling for. (Remembering that, mostly in paperback, one can find
the opposite trend, even to an extreme, while the copies last.) As
many samples of the collected-writings anthology (brought out
posthumously) were never sold, as they had no advertising or
promotion but waited whimsically and confidently to be sought out by
word of mouth from the publisher (!), there are numerous of those
copies around. But not so, the Blake volumes, as the prices below
indicate.
Prices, Blake books on the web. William Blake: the Seer and His Visions. There were at
least 368 copies of this title available at one time. Now
there are relatively few copies. Across the web the book,
originally priced at $12.95 hard-cover, is selling from low
ranges up to $68.82. At one point on the web there was a very
good hard-cover copy on sale for $125. Blake's Dante: the Complete Illustrations to the Divine
Comedy. Prices on the Barnes and Noble
limited-availability extended search range to as high as
$79.41; original first-edition price was $30. A used copy
without dustjacket now costs more than that. However, the
number of this and other Klonsky books on the web is affected
by the fact that they are out of print. With this clear, see
the print on demand listing below.
Print on Demand. A Discourse on Hip:
Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky. Introduction By Mark Shechner. Author: Klonsky, Milton. Condition: Edited by Ted Solotaroff. Detroit, MI
c. 1991 Softcover Print On Demand: 2001 black and white
facsimile of original book. Charts and graphics may be
obscured or resized to fit pages. No cover art (generic
softcover binding). pp. 337. Format: Paperback Associated Dealer: Pondview Books Our Price: $141.08 * However, hard-cover as-new copies are
also selling from $35 to $14 on the same listing. 20 copies
available.
Blake.
Hecate ... the supernatural. W .M. Merchant, Milton Klonsky and David Bindman
relate the scene to sources in Blake's poetry, but the immediate
allusion is to Shakespeare. ...
American
Dante Bibliography for 1980 ... Angeles, 1980, 377 p. Blake, William. Blake's Dante:
The Compete Illustrations to the "Divine Comedy." [Edited] by
Milton Klonsky. New York: Harmony Books. 172 ... More Results From: www.brandeis.edu
The New York
Review of Books: John Hollander ... New York City December 8, 1977 : Talkies Speaking Pictures edited by Milton Klonsky. The Renaissance Imagination: Essays
and Lectures by DJ Gordon, edited by ...
Speaking Pictures edited by Milton Klonsky Harmony Books, 333 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Renaissance Imagination: Essays
and Lectures by D.J. Gordon, edited by Stephen Orgel University of California Press, 338, 75 illus pp., $22.50
Poems are like pictures. But some poems are more like pictures
than others. Milton Klonsky's delightful, provocative, but somewhat
confusing book is an annotated anthology of what he calls "pictorial
poetry," mostly in English, from the sixteenth century to the present.
By pictorial poems he means very different sorts of texts. The first
and most important of these is the Renaissance emblem poem. Indeed
Klonsky's own concept of the pictorial and its role in linguistic
texts derives from the emblem poem, which probably partly accounts
for his beginning his selection in the sixteenth century, instead
of in Hellenistic times.
The full text of this piece is only available to subscribers of
the Review's electronic edition. Articles can also be purchased singly; if
you would like to purchase just this article, please press the button
below. More Results From: www.nybooks.com
MOTCO
Image Database ... Milton Klonsky, in Blake's Dante, The Complete Illustrations
to the Divine Comedy, reports that Linnell claimed the drawings
and the seven engraved plates ...
89.02.06:
Putting Poetry on It’s Feet ... Klonsky, Milton. Shake the Kaleidoscope. New York: Pocket
Books, 1973. Lee, Al. The Major Young Poets. New York: World
Publishing Company, 1971. ...
"Along
the Midways of Mass Culture"; review
2002 O’Neill
Playwrights Conference : Summer Schedule
Klonsky and Schwartz by Romulus Linney, July 12 at
8:00 p.m. & July 13 at 2:30 p.m., Barn. In the hot and sultry New
York summer of 1966, poet Milton Klonsky struggles to help his
friend, the more celebrated writer Delmore Schwartz, come to terms
with his demons.
http://www.oneilltheatercenter.org/news/0522.5.02.htm
MA Cultural and Critical Studies :
Modernism and Vulgarity
Course Convenor:
Dr Esther Leslie
Birkbeck, University of London:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/macc/vulgar.htm
In the
1850s the poet Baudelaire bathed in city slipstreams, abandoning
himself to Paris crowds, urban stimulations and the market. Some
twenty-five years later in the same city, Huysmans’ novel Against
Nature told of an aesthete swaddled in his monument to high
taste, hiding from the vulgarity of everyday life. These differing
responses to the advent of mass industrial society are elaborated in
the cultural debates and practices of subsequent years. One strand
insists on the autonomy of art, its separation from daily concerns
and its pursuit only of its own laws and logic. Art here marks the
place of utopia or the idea, or it offers an escape from the grind
of the mundane. Another strand of criticism and practice dissolves
art into everyday life, enthusiastically propounding anti-art or
making culture quite literally out of the debris and kitsch of
industrial modernity, or drawing on popular resources (circus,
music-hall, boxing, cinema, advertising, magazines, ephemera) in
order to furnish an art of the moment.
Indicative Reading (abridged):
Charles Baudelaire, Prose Poems (esp, ‘Crowds’, ‘Let’s Beat
Up the Poor’, ‘The Generous Gamester’, ‘Loss of a Halo’) (1860s)
J.K. Huysman, Against Nature (A Rebours) (1884) Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901)
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) (main text) Walter Benjamin: Charles Baudelaire; a Lyric Poet in
the Era of High Capitalism (1935-9), Verso ‘The Eccentric Manifesto’ (1922) in Richard Taylor & Ian Christie
(editors), The Film Factory; Russian and Soviet Cinema in
Documents 1896-1939, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1988
Leon Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life (1920s) Siegfried Kracauer ‘The Little Shopgirls go to the Movies’ (1927) in
The Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays, Harvard University Press
1994 Siegfried Kracauer The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in
Weimar Germany (1930), Verso, London 1998 ‘Introduction’ and ‘Critical Dictionary’ in Encyclopaedia
Acephalica, edited by Georges Bataille Walter Benjamin: ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ (1935-39) in Illuminations, Fontana, London
1992 [Ellipsis. Includes]: Milton Klonsky, ‘Along the Midway of Mass Culture’ (Partisan Review
16:4, April 1949), reprinted in Milton Klonsky, A Discourse on
Hip: Selected Writings of Milton Klonsky, Wayne State University
Press, Detroit 1991
MCLUHAN Pro and Con Edited and With an Introduction by Raymond Rosenthal.
"Another essay that provides a balanced critical perspective on
McLuhan's works is by Hugh Kenner, who persuasively suggests that
there are three souls dwelling within McLuhan's breast: a pop artist
and thinker of considerable genius, a wildly irresponsible funny-man
addicted to inaccurate generalization, and an ultimately sinister
oracle whose prophecies may hasten the arrival of the millenial
nirvana he contemplates. At this point in his career McLuhan the
genius can look after himself; the other two, however, demand radical
debunking, for they corrupt us in important ways, and pleasurably.
In this volume the genius has to look after himself, for none of
the attempts to identify him are very distinguished. Although cautiously
favorable essays by Tom Nairn and Richard Kostelanetz are frequently
suggestive, one is exasperated by Father John Culkin's cracker-barrel
folksiness (a rebarbative parody of the master's) and it is neither
pleasant nor edifying to hear a triumphant professor of communications,
Irving J. Weiss, proclaiming that "What is ridiculous about any
hope of increasing 'good' programing on TV is that turning the screw
of its art tighter nearly always results in the embolism of hallowed
triteness."
"McLuhan the charlatan on the other hand is relentlessly pummeled
in several essays, the best of which to my mind are John Simon,
Christopher Ricks, Milton Klonsky, Geoffrey Wagner, and Theodore
Roszak. In the light of these (and a few not in this volume, notably
Benjamin DeMott's "Against McLuhan," which appeared in an earlier
collection of essays, "McLuhan: Hot and Cool") one feels that the
citadel of intellectual respectability has now successfully repulsed
this barbarian attacker, and though he's still roaming free in suburbia,
the center of town is quiet once more.
"The achievement of these defenders of reason and conscience should
not be underestimated, for McLuhan's mask is a complex affair, not
easily penetrated by the demystifying pen. . . ."
BA Essay ... In his book, The Fabulous Ego: Absolute Power in History,
Milton Klonsky treats monarchs as individuals, but views them from
the perspective of the outsider, looking in; his emphasis is on
how both modern readers and contemporaries viewed these monarchs,
rather than on how the monarchs chose to view themselves and on
how this affected their reigns. He presents a series of portraits
of absolute monarchs, from Sardanapalus to Napoleon, based exclusively
on first-hand accounts. His aim is to sweep away the dust of centuries
of historiography grounded on over-arching theories, and to leave
a closer, more psychologically-oriented picture of individuals who
played extraordinary roles on the world's stage. The rulers he chooses,
however, are deliberately products of the times when monarchs were
superhuman, gods on earth (he includes Catherine the Great and Ivan
the Terrible).
The immortal soul of the divine king Osiris becomes the immortal
soul of each and every Egyptian, even as Christ the Savior becomes
the Christ-soul of every Christian, the self within us. In the
same way the function of the chief, which is to will and decide,
becomes the model for all subsequent acts of free will in the
ego of the individual; and the law-making function, originally
attributed to God...has in modern man become the inner court of
conscience. From a BA Essay at Columbia University, online link no longer available
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