Paris/Texas

August 14, 2016July 4, 2016 by Eddie Arning

Eddie Arning (1898–1993) was born in a farming town in Texas. He was placed in a mental institution after he committed violent acts as a teenager. In 1964, after a half-century of life inside, this quintessential outsider artist was introduced to drawing by a hospital worker. Arning began making pictures with Crayolas, before switching in 1969 to oil pastels (or “Cray-pas”). Over ten years, he produced over 2000 images. He stopped drawing suddenly in 1974 after he was forced to leave his nursing home due to “bad conduct” (per Wikipedia).

The drawings below are all in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The full Arning archive is available online here. First would like to thank individuals who have donated Arning’s drawings to the Smithsonian, as well as those who have facilitated the purchase of his art. If only they’d got a chance to throw Arning a party like the famous one Picasso hosted in Paris for the Douanier Rousseau! B.D.

RED BOAT ON BLUE: 1964, Gift of Bernard & Estelle Sobue

HIKERS IN THE FOREST: 1972, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Saxton

THE FOREST: 1964, Gift of Bernard & Estelle Sobue

THREE MEN IN A CIRCLE: 1969, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Saxton

INTERIOR WITH FIGURES: 1969, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson

HUNTER WTIH DOG AND FOUR BIRDS: 1972, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Saxton

TWO ARTISTS PAINTING: 1970, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Saxton

WINDMILL: 1966, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Saxton

BIRDS: 1969, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson

BLUE CHURN ON YELLOW: 1964, Gift of Bernard & Estelle Sobue

Order from Dottir Press here.

“Laurie Stone’s Streaming Now is a book of journal-like entries, scraps of critical pieces, bits of memoir, and it is a delight. She calls these fragments postcards, which is charming and accurate up to a point, but the writing is better than any postcard you ever got unless you got one from Laurie Stone and she wrote it really small so all the wit and all the passing contemplations could fit. She writes about life during COVID, at home with ‘the man I live with’; about old friends and glancing love affairs; about books and films and television shows, with a deeply appealing combination of spitfire skepticism and a constant openness to pleasure and joy. One is reminded in multiple ways during the reading that Stone came of age and was politically, intellectually and emotionally shaped by the struggles and commitments of second wave feminism, and we’re further reminded that for feminists like Stone the movement was not only about rights, and not at all about protections for women, but about freedom for women, a much more dangerous thing, for women and for society at large. Freedom is a long lost idea. It had a specific erotic push and was battled back as eroticism always is. Autocracies are always puritanical. Everything about Stone’s writing is oriented toward freedom and much of her linguistic and literary sensibility specifically evokes erotic and intellectual freedom–the very sound of the sentences, their surprises, the quick adoption of new positions in relation to the thing looked at and engaged with. So, one recognizes that a simple seeming book of pensées is really the exploration of a distinct and valuable cultural point of view. We are lucky to have it.” –Vince Passaro, author of the novels Crazy Sorrow, and Violence, Nudity, Adult Content

Alison Stone’s New Book Available for Pre-Order!

From immigrants to insurrectionists, from Demeter to David Bowie, Stone gives us searing, moving poems filled with powerful imagery and an original music.

Order your copy at www.stonepoetry.org

Order from Bloomsbury here.

Expeditions to Kafka
Selected Essays
Stanley Corngold (Author)

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka’s work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther; Nietzsche’s conception of aphoristic form; bureaucratic organization; accident and risk; the logic of possession and inheritance; and myth, among others.Even as Corngold explores Kafka’s work across different fields and tangents, he does so in vivid, readable prose, free of jargon, and with an eye to Kafka’s ongoing relevance to the concerns of his day and ours. Taken together these linked essays reveal Kafka in his astonishing many-sidedness.

Read an extract here.

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Reviews

With superb erudition and his inimitable flair, Stanley Corngold’s Expeditions offer a magisterial guide through the intricate and ambiguous terrain of Kafka’s texts. Insights abound, providing a comprehensive and consistently profound investigation that strikes the perfect balance between drawing interpretive conclusions and maintaining hermeneutic openness-a culminating accomplishment by Kafka’s most inspired and most inspiring reader.

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA

You are not being introduced to Kafka – you fall into his stories as you fall into a trap, the bait emerging in the interstices between his words and your mind. That said, Corngold’s Expeditions are by far the best introduction to Kafka I have seen. He invites you to join him on his ventures into Continent Kafka, and he inspires you to stray off from his expeditions on your own terms, and risk.

Benno Wagner, Professor in German Studies, Siegen University, Germany

Stanley Corngold has been reading, reflecting, and commenting on Kafka and his writings for more than half a century. He has become our most penetrating and luminous guide to Kafka’s labyrinthine world. These essays, the distillate of a lifetime, manage both to reveal and to preserve the mystery of Kafka’s genius.

Robert Norton, Professor of German, University of Notre Dame, USA