What Polish Can You Use With Konad

Anne-Marie Garat / James Agee Agnes

Mr. President,

J ' have chosen to send Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .
Just the title is exhilarating: we love that tells us the history of great men ...
James Agee died in a taxi 45 years, May 16, the day of the death of his father. From these coincidences which we say they do not result only from competition for the occasion. Novelists do not dare to put things in their fiction of reality that are unbelievable, unbelievable, yet life exceed in extravagance, cruelty and beauty of all that human imagination can conceive. Agee thinks so, after spending six weeks in Alabama in the wretched tenants.

In 1936, the magazine Time-Life New York sends to a report on the effects of the Great Depression in the wilds of South America. It starts with Walker Evans, one of the greatest American photographers, yet poorly understood at the time. At the beginning of the book, you'll see some of his photos. One might ask these buildings, these men, women, children, these cotton fields, the kitchen table, these pitiful objects on a mantel, this well-worn pair of shoes if they are to photograph, s' they affect the look. If they have something to teach us. How to see, what is a document? That is the terrible question: What are we seeing if our life is not only blind to cross into our surroundings?

here I would tell you about another book, a French novel by Victor Hugo: Les Miserables . Just an incision on the fiction that takes liberties with reality, they say. In this novel of genius, where sewer literary rush all genres, Hugo undermines the imposture of realism. His dark novel told where all humanity deprived of itself, held at the lowland hellish misery. Read the chapters: The mine and the miners. The shoal. Read Champmathieu senseless argument, the man without speaking to say himself, stuttering his crippled tragic history, triggering laughter from the court.

Dreamer, Hugo? Extra lucid news, our contemporary sense.

Agee wrote his book, standing face to the invisible reality. He notes. He describes. A house tenants. Each man's body, woman, child, and their clothes. Bare foot, nail horn. One bedroom, one by one the objects, the chimney, above the fireplace, calendar, lamp, cabinet and everything in it, dishes, utensils, tools. The boater corn, little mirrors, beds. The smell rancid, musty, sweat, vermin. The oilcloth, forks, bread crumbs in the cracks, mismatched cups, two plates each. The work shirts, shoes, mules. Tenant farming and sharecropping, dust, mud and grass puny, school, inaccessible Negroes neighbors, festering wound in the shoulder, the seam of blue overalls, the blue "changed in unison through perspiration, the sun, laundry, the constant tension of use and age ... you could stare at such a garment, and even touch, study, eyes, fingers, lips subtle, and length of time, and never learn it perfectly and I have not seen a combination reached that point of wear, the texture and color will make up a world to them, delight. "

Beware the rapture of Agee. It is made of anger and despair.

Read the litany of inventories, his rage and distress to identify, and name, which is about the unfathomable, the unthinkable indignity, the criminal offense there is to wear eye on the man assigned to this state. And there, do fear or lyrical or pathetic or sentimental in these pages. That consciousness of a desecration of the imposture of the document as fiction, art operations to such a subject. And he reaches however the artwork, by the effort of knowledge. For the delicate surgery and a cruel act he performs in fear and honor, along with the cold, reverence, pity, guilt developed acute heart ... "I'm just myself , a young man standing in the sweat of my clothes at the back porch of a separate certain house, collapsed in the depths of rural Alabama as a rock in the sea, in the torpid heat of a white morning ... "

This book anticipates the command from Roosevelt to the Farm Security Administration between 1935 and 1938: to illustrate the effects of New Deal, it sent Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans photographed the people of the South American crisis-hit ... Their work is a record of working memory. At the same time, Steinbeck describes the misery agricultural exodus of the unemployed in Grapes of Wrath , mice and men ...

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , Agee n'esthétise n'héroïse or poverty. In political writer, he seeks the form of language that is shared human experience, and his book, published to great evil, is one of the most sublime testimony of literature.

Mr. President, read wastes no time, he wins. Read gives added value to our human capital. The books we know, they read us and we think that long after we have closed. They praise the great men that we can be.

Yours.


Anne-Marie Garat



* * Latest published novel: In the hand of the devil , Actes-Sud, 2006