Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Yes, let's.
In 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evens went to the deep, poverty-stricken south to document the severely oppressive lives of tenement framers in rural Alabama. They were on assignment from Fortune magazine, but upon their return the editors refused to run the story.
In 2003 I was attending college and was blown away by the images Walker Evans produced while he was there, however was unable to read the accompanying book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that James Agee produced after the rejection of the article. I guess there were just too many other books to be read.
What a fool.
So now, after making sure I've gotten such luminary volumes as The Goddess Rules, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, and The Davinci Code out of the way I've finally gotten around to it. I now know why the publishers refused to publish Agee (however the rejection of the photos remains a mystery): James Agee was an angry, bitter man that liked to slap people in the face with his writing. Picture Ross Perot but really, fiercely, intensely intelligent.
My dad says that he doesn't like to read Hemingway because he feels like he's being yelled at. Well as it turns out I love James Agee for that very same reason.
My point of this post though is to put a quote out here that I came across in Agee's very own introduction to his own book (ballsy, that one). The book I finished before this was Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Among other things, it's one of the most touching and bona fide accounts of someone's quest to find God and themselves I've come across...and not in that sour, evangelical, born-again way, but just a journey within and without to find that peace and love that can only come from surrender.
It was beautiful and had me in tears most of the time. I looked like a complete lunatic on the subway.
Ms. Gilbert was fortunate enough to have a year to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia in order to carry out this quest. Shouldn't we all be so lucky...Well, I can count myself among those who are not. BUT she still inspired me to go after that peace as well, as she puts it, "like a man searches for water whose head is on fire". But what's a girl to do if she can't hide out in an Ashram contemplating heaven, practicing yoga, and ingesting nothing but pure mountain air and vegetarian cuisine for 4 months? Well my first reaction was to have a panic attack that I'll never be able to reach any semblance of peace no matter how hard I meditate if I'm to be stuck in a hole in Brooklyn.
But then James came along and verbalized for me what I could not. Put down on paper the mantra that I needed to help me to see that peace (or inspiration as it were) can come from anywhere at anytime because, as it happens, it's with us always.
Of course here he's talking about his hesitation and doubts about whether he will be able to accurately reconstruct, upon returning home, the everyday life and struggle of the three sharecropper families he lived with. But there was something about the way he put it that really hit home.
"No doubt I shall worry myself that I am taking too long getting started, and shall seriously distress myself over my inability to create an organic, mutually-sustaining, and dependent, and as it were musical, form: but I must remind myself that I started with the first word I wrote, and that the centers of my subject are shifty; and, again, that I'm no better an "artist" than I'm capable of being, under these circumstances, perhaps under any other; and that this again will find its measurement in the facts as they are, and will contribute its own measure, whatever it may be, to the pattern of the effort and truth as a whole."
I'm especially fond of "but I must remind myself that I started with the first word I wrote..."
At first I took this as "we all start out small", which in itself is still encouraging. But thinking about it more I realized he must've meant that we start any project the second it's conceived: Agee didn't begin to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men when he returned to his desk, with a fresh pen and a shower; Liz Gilbert didn't start her spirit's journey when she stepped off the plane in Italy; and I don't have to wait for the right time, place, circumstance, etc to start anything. In fact, maybe we start nothing. Perhaps it's the knowledge or experience or memory or love or cause that finds us.
Yes, let's.
In 1936, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evens went to the deep, poverty-stricken south to document the severely oppressive lives of tenement framers in rural Alabama. They were on assignment from Fortune magazine, but upon their return the editors refused to run the story.
In 2003 I was attending college and was blown away by the images Walker Evans produced while he was there, however was unable to read the accompanying book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that James Agee produced after the rejection of the article. I guess there were just too many other books to be read.
What a fool.
So now, after making sure I've gotten such luminary volumes as The Goddess Rules, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, and The Davinci Code out of the way I've finally gotten around to it. I now know why the publishers refused to publish Agee (however the rejection of the photos remains a mystery): James Agee was an angry, bitter man that liked to slap people in the face with his writing. Picture Ross Perot but really, fiercely, intensely intelligent.
My dad says that he doesn't like to read Hemingway because he feels like he's being yelled at. Well as it turns out I love James Agee for that very same reason.
My point of this post though is to put a quote out here that I came across in Agee's very own introduction to his own book (ballsy, that one). The book I finished before this was Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Among other things, it's one of the most touching and bona fide accounts of someone's quest to find God and themselves I've come across...and not in that sour, evangelical, born-again way, but just a journey within and without to find that peace and love that can only come from surrender.
It was beautiful and had me in tears most of the time. I looked like a complete lunatic on the subway.
Ms. Gilbert was fortunate enough to have a year to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia in order to carry out this quest. Shouldn't we all be so lucky...Well, I can count myself among those who are not. BUT she still inspired me to go after that peace as well, as she puts it, "like a man searches for water whose head is on fire". But what's a girl to do if she can't hide out in an Ashram contemplating heaven, practicing yoga, and ingesting nothing but pure mountain air and vegetarian cuisine for 4 months? Well my first reaction was to have a panic attack that I'll never be able to reach any semblance of peace no matter how hard I meditate if I'm to be stuck in a hole in Brooklyn.
But then James came along and verbalized for me what I could not. Put down on paper the mantra that I needed to help me to see that peace (or inspiration as it were) can come from anywhere at anytime because, as it happens, it's with us always.
Of course here he's talking about his hesitation and doubts about whether he will be able to accurately reconstruct, upon returning home, the everyday life and struggle of the three sharecropper families he lived with. But there was something about the way he put it that really hit home.
"No doubt I shall worry myself that I am taking too long getting started, and shall seriously distress myself over my inability to create an organic, mutually-sustaining, and dependent, and as it were musical, form: but I must remind myself that I started with the first word I wrote, and that the centers of my subject are shifty; and, again, that I'm no better an "artist" than I'm capable of being, under these circumstances, perhaps under any other; and that this again will find its measurement in the facts as they are, and will contribute its own measure, whatever it may be, to the pattern of the effort and truth as a whole."
I'm especially fond of "but I must remind myself that I started with the first word I wrote..."
At first I took this as "we all start out small", which in itself is still encouraging. But thinking about it more I realized he must've meant that we start any project the second it's conceived: Agee didn't begin to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men when he returned to his desk, with a fresh pen and a shower; Liz Gilbert didn't start her spirit's journey when she stepped off the plane in Italy; and I don't have to wait for the right time, place, circumstance, etc to start anything. In fact, maybe we start nothing. Perhaps it's the knowledge or experience or memory or love or cause that finds us.
posted by hi at 9:50 AM
3 Comments:
Nice one, Just finished reading 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' by Milan Kundera
I sort of felt the same way about it.. like why hadn't I picked it up before..
I liked the quote about writing too! Makes sense, it will happen when it needs to happen.
-R
ps. nice to see you at traders today!
hooray for literacy, i say.
if you enjoyed eat, pray, love - have a looksie at holy cow: an indian adventure by sarah macdonald
i recently reread rilke's letters and thought of this because of your posting:
"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it."
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