Thomas J. Kitson
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thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Thomas J. Kitson
@thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
2.2K followers 4.2K following 3.5K posts
Translator from Russian to English. Iliazd, _Rapture_. 2019 NEA Translation Fellowship for Iliazd, _PhiloSophia_ (excerpts from Rab-Rab Press). Iliazd's _Speechless Sentence_ and excerpts from _parisites_ and _dUnkee fərEnt_ in _TYPO_ #7.
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thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
A party at Frederica Potter's in A.S. Byatt's _Babel Tower_. Thinking @robertsheppard.bsky.social must know this mention of the British Poetry Revival?
It is a good party. The voices mix, mingle and oppose. "Did you get to the poetry festival at the Albert Hall? "No, but some friends did. They said it was wild." "The audience holed and hooted. And bayed. It was pandemonium." "It was Nüremberg at times. I was there." "Jeff Nuttall and John Latham were painted blue. They were dressed as books, which they destroyed. Everyone danced." "They were all high, they were all spaced out. Adrian Mitchell read a poem about Vietnam." "It was full of enthusiasm and incredibly tedious."
November 10, 2025 at 9:06 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
On our walk yesterday, V. and I were desperately looking for some open space to catch the low sun's rays and wound up walking through the Montrouge Cemetery, where I was drawn to this overgrown grave. (May go back to look for Nicolas de Stael and Jurgis Baltrushaitis.)
Graves in Montrouge Cemetery. The grave in the middle is covered with ivy that has turned red. An alley of autumn-colored trees is visible in the background beyond many more rows of graves under a blue sky.
October 28, 2025 at 7:09 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I've been taking different paths to my French classes. Today I rediscovered Villa Vassilieff, which I had happened on 7 years ago (it was in bad shape) and never been able to find again (it's been revived in the meantime).
www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...
A pedestrian passage between artists' studios with lots of greenery in pots along the edges and vines on the facades.
October 28, 2025 at 7:03 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Omnia Sol Temperat
On a peeling facade, a sundial declares "OMNIA SOL TEMPERAT" and "MIDI VRAIS DE PARIS" next to a window with some begonias (?). The upper left corner of a neon pharmacist's cross juts from the building in the lower right of the photo.
October 28, 2025 at 6:51 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
The former site of Bal Bullier, where so many artists' balls, including many organized by #Iliazd and the Union of Russian Artists during the 1920s, were held.
The Bullier Centre CROUS (student residence and activities center) undergoing renovation. It sits on the site of Bal Bullier at the southern end of the Luxembourg gardens just north of the Observatory at the beginning of Boulevard Montparnasse. La Closerie des Lilas is just to the left oustide the frame. Entrance to Bal Bullier c. 1930 from a postcard. Above the gate are reliefs of figures dancing, strolling in the gardens, couples sitting together.
October 26, 2025 at 6:50 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
As I understand, the modest exhibition concerns primarily Poésie de mots inconnus (1949) and the 1958 Series C of Marcel #Duchamp 's La Boîte-en-valise, which was produced and assembled by #Iliazd, but it looks like there's much more.
Airmail letters (on that old light blue airmail onionskin) from Marcel Duchamp to Iliazd (including envelope) concerning Iliazd's work on Series C of La Boite-en-valise. Pages from Iliazd's Poésie de mots inconnus anthology displayed in hinged frames along a gallery wall.
October 23, 2025 at 10:23 AM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I received from François Mairé some photos by Jürgen Eheim of the TOUTITÉ exhibition at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano. #Iliazd
Gallery installation: a white-walled room with four white girder columns and a light-colored hardwood floor. In the center is a printer's cabinet (?) in darker wood with flat drawers and colored labels, as well as a shallow glass display case on top. There are tables of a much more modern design set between the columns on three sides. Drawers have been removed from the cabinet and laid on top of the tables. Images are visible mounted on the walls in groupings that leave lots of white space. There are strips of lighting overhead, and a blurred figure passes through the gallery. Drawers in the central cabinet pulled open to display their contents. What's plainly visible is Iliazd's design for a loom to produce jersey that holds its shape for Chanel in one, a graphed fabric design (perhaps for Sonia Delaunay?) and a page design announcing a drawing of Iliazde (sic) by Robert Delaunay in another, and in the extreme upper left, a glimpse of lidantIU fAram, Iliazd's final dra, in another. One white wall of the installation featuring Iliazd's groundplan drawings of churches.
October 23, 2025 at 10:12 AM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
And the conversation between Lady Dedlock and Mr. Tulkinghorn seems a model for late Henry James, although James would not sum it up by spelling out the effect of simultaneous communication and miscommunication for readers. #APSTogether #BleakHouse #APublicSpace
But whether each evermore watches and suspects the other, evermore mistrustful of some great reservation; whether each is evermore prepared at all points for the other, and never to be taken unawares; what each would give to know how much the other knows--all this is hidden, for the time, in their own hearts.
October 22, 2025 at 3:39 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Mr. Tulkinghorn has a room permanently reserved in Lady Dedlock's home, just as the Prophet Elisha had in the house of the Shunammite woman (another wealthy woman who also "has no son, and her husband is old"). #APSTogether #BleakHouse #APublicSpace
One day Elisha went on to Shunem, where a wealthy woman lived, who urged him to eat some food. So whenever he passed that way, he would turn in there to eat food. And she said to her husband, "Behold now, I know that this is a holy man of God who is continually passing our way. Let us make a small room on the roof with walls and put there for him a bed, a table, a chair, and a lamp, so that whenever he comes to us, he can go in there."
October 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
OK, now I'm really curious: Who's stocking my local Little Free Library?
Copy of the Summer 1997 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, with features on Wilson Harris and Alan Burns, held over a leaf-strewn dirt path at the edge of a still green lawn.
October 22, 2025 at 12:47 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Wonderful paragraph on the superficial ridiculousness of a dandyism the current fashion believes it has outgrown without ceasing to impose ridiculous rules. #APublicSpace #APSTogether #BleakHouse
Dandyism? There is no King George the Fourth now (more the pity) to set the dandy fashion; there are no clear-starched jack-towel neckcloths, no short-waisted coats, no false calves, no stays. There are no caricatures, now, of effeminate exquisites so arrayed, swooning in opera boxes with excess of delight and being revived by other dainty creatures poking long-necked scent-bottles at their noses. There is no beau whom it takes four men at once to shake into his buckskins, or sho goes to see all the executions, or who is troubled with the self-reproach of having once consumed a pea. But is there dandyism in the brilliant and distinguished circle notwithstanding,, dandyism of a more mischievous sort, that has got below the surface and is doing less harmless things than jack-towelling itself and stopping its own digestion, to which no rational person need particularly object?
October 22, 2025 at 12:44 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I'm not normally a cute dog photo guy, but this doggy on his cushion patiently watching foot traffic (not much, when I passed) from the window of an antique shop was irresistible.
An antique shop storefront, painted forest green: the upper window has oil paintings and some old painted wooden sculptures in it; the lower window, at ground level, has an old painting, some old books, and a cushion with a (live) white dog patiently watching foot traffic pass. The upper window reflects the buildings opposite and a patch of blue sky.
October 21, 2025 at 7:34 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
The sky was fairly dramatic over Paris through much of the afternoon, although I never encountered any precipitation even worthy of being called a sprinkle--just occasional fine mist. Thinking of those Constable cloud studies.
An expanse of gravel walk, with some iron chairs scattered on it, stretches from the foreground, next to flowerbed borders and a lawn on the right and a parapet with planters on the left. The walk leads to the beginning of pruned chestnut alleys. A dramatically dark and towering cloud hovers in the distance while the sun bleeds through thinner cloud cover in the upper right corner.
October 21, 2025 at 7:01 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
The brightness of Sacré Coeur in the distance surprised me (at the extreme southern end of the Luxembourg Garden, with all the brown pruned chestnuts).
In the foreground, the pool of a fountain. Allegorical statues range through the middle between two rows of pruned, boxy chestnuts with brown leaves. The row on the right is lit by sun, on the left is in shadow. Dramatic clouds fill the sky, but with a primarily bluish tint. In the distance, beyond the glimpse of the Luxembourg Palace, a white mass, Sacré Coeur, juts up from the horizon.
October 21, 2025 at 6:55 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I feel seen (to use a phrase I don't think I've ever used before and which I feel may, just possibly, have passed enough out of common use to permit me safely to adopt it). (from A.S. Byatt, _Babel Tower_)
The young Gerard Wijnnobel listened and watched. He listened, watched, was revolted, and revolted. The lesson he drew, quite clearly from his father's Bible commentaries, and more reluctantly--for aesthetic reasons--from the speculations of his grandfather, was that it is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense. And not only that, but that perhaps also there was a trap, a quirk, a temptation in the nature of language itself that led people, that induced them, to spend the whole of their lived on nonsense. He discovered Nietzsche, who preached against Christianity and its forms with all the delicious fervour and energy of a Christian hell-fire preacher converted, and Nietzsche said, "I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar." Theo-logy, the language of God, grammar, the forms of theology.
October 19, 2025 at 12:51 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I've been slowly making my way through A.S. Byatt's Frederica Potter tetralogy over the past year and a half or so, but have posted almost nothing about it, which is no indication as to the degree of my pleasure and admiration. This is from _Babel Tower_.
A line of division, a set of terms, are set up. The committee will divide, will see its own divisions, in terms of Eros and Wille zur Macht, the buddy and the boss. Alexander is fascinated.
October 19, 2025 at 12:45 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Just happened on her grave as I was passing through Montparnasse Cemetery on Friday.
Grave of photographer Giselle Freund, with a small rectangular planter of grass (with some fallen leaves) near the front of the horizontal slab and some dried flowers placed in front of the upright portion. Her "device" (I assume--her entwined initials in a very modern font) is carved into the upright slab.
October 19, 2025 at 12:36 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
The grape vines at Columbia's Reid Hall in Montparnasse have turned lovely colors.
Grape vines climbing under and between windows on a white wall above a lantern and a bell. A few leaves are still green, but most have changed to various shades of yellow, orange, and red, with some spectacularly veined in contrasts.
October 18, 2025 at 3:54 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I had been to the Gallimard store some time back for an event with Georgi Gospodinov and the legendary BG-->FR translator Marie Vrinat-Nikolov.
Poster for an event with Georgi Gospodinov at Gallimard bookstore on release of the French translation of Death and the Gardener. Georgi Gospodinov sitting at a table backed by a mirror next to his French translator, Marie Vrinat-Nikolov, who is speaking in front of a crowd in the Gallimard bookstore.
October 15, 2025 at 3:44 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Passing some time before French class yesterday, stopped to look at the Gallimard windows on Boulevard Raspail, and noticed that a translator can have a whole *event* here in France. Rare in US?
Book display, mostly copies of a new French translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, mixed in with other books translated by Sophie Benech. A poster above announces an event featuring the translator.
October 15, 2025 at 3:34 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Happened on Square Saint Lambert the other afternoon, where quite obviously the whole park and its surrounding apartment buildings had been designed around 1930. Turns out the area was freed for development by removal of an old gasworks.
View across a park bench and a gravel path to a stone and iron parapet and the crown of a palm tree looking over a dry pool, more gravel paths, and a green lawn to a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower between apartment blocks. Entry gate to Square Saint Lambert, with its name inscribed in the blue-painted ironwork in an Art Deco font.
October 12, 2025 at 4:00 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Fall color coming in on the islands in the Bois de Vincennes.
A long green lawn sprinkled with fallen leaves. In the distance are maples turning orange and red.
October 12, 2025 at 3:51 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Old plane trees on the islands in the Bois de Vincennes.
Tall plane trees shading a lawn under a blue sky.
October 12, 2025 at 3:48 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
An apartment building with flair just off the southeast corner of Montparnasse Cemetery.
Apartment building facade with extensive mosaic ornament combined on the balconies with relief sculpture. The mosaic motifs repeat on the door.
October 12, 2025 at 3:46 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
In my local little free library.
A somewhat warped copy of the French translation of William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own (Le dernier acte) in the bright red cabinet of a little free library.
October 4, 2025 at 7:18 PM