On Facebook today, a Vadim Temkin gay male homage to the Belgian artist René Magritte and his 1937 painting La Reproduction Interdite (Not to be Reproduced):
(#1)
Whew!
The original:
(#2)
From the MoMA site on the painting:
Edward James, a British poet and patron of Surrealism, commissioned Magritte to make this portrait in 1937, titled Not to be Reproduced.
On the mantel is Edgar Allan Poe’s novel, The Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym.
The choice of the Poe novel (which Vadim has reproduced) is intriguing. Well, it’s Poe, so it’s strange. (I admit to not having read it; a whole Poe novel would be just too much.) From Wikipedia:
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds and referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on the potential autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work.
Yes, Hollow Earth. And then there’s the South Pole, the end of the world.
October 14, 2020 at 10:35 pm |
On FB 10/13: first from a reader:
And Vadim’s response: