Thomas J. Kitson
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thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Thomas J. Kitson
@thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
2.2K followers 4.2K following 3.8K 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
I had another goal in mind, but found myself one day wandering around what I'm thinking of as PoMoParis. Here's Jardin Atlantique, above the Gare Montparnasse.
Looking at the frames on the backsides of silhouetted "rocks" or "cliffs" (?) in the Jardin Atlantique, set among walkways through varied vegetation. Here you can see a row of pines in the near distance, some different species of pine and spruce in the foreground and at the edges of the frame. Large modern steel and glass apartment buildings are visible at the borders of the garden.
November 24, 2025 at 7:59 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
The end of all my thinking is
The goal you have in mind:
An amiably winking phiz
And no child left behind.

Les très riches heures could put a stop
To what the present knows:
Increasing spam, abundant slop,
And vaunting Ortho Bros.
The end of all my thinking is The goal you have in mind: An amiably winking phiz And no child left behind. Les très riches heures could put a stop To what the present knows: Increasing spam, abundant slop, And vaunting Ortho Bros.
November 24, 2025 at 11:33 AM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Was passing by Gertrude Stein a little more than a week ago.
27 rue de Fleurus, with a plaque next to the iron and glass entry: Gertrude STEIN 1874-1946 écrivain americain Vécu ici avec son frére LEO STEIN puis avec Alice B. TOKLAS elle y recut de nombreux artistes et écrivains de 1903 a 1938
November 23, 2025 at 7:45 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Everyone's been here in Paris, right?
Plaque on a wall: En cet immeuble, alors hotel Orfila, l'écrivain suédois August STRINDBERG (1849-1912) a vécu en février-juillet 1896 une phase décisive de sa vie. "Orfila et Swedenborg, mes amis, me protegent, m'encouragent et me punissent. Je ne les vois pas, mais je sense leur présence ils ne se montrent pas a mon esprit, ni par des visions, ni par des hallucinations, mail les petits événements quotidiens que je recueille manifestent leur intervention dans les vicissitudes de mon existence." "Inferno". Mercure de France. Paris 1898.
November 23, 2025 at 7:36 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
One of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's pair of 1787 toll houses at the Barrière d'Enfer, and a portion of the frieze by Jean Guillaume Moitte.
Neo-Classical toll gate house with three large arched portals on the ground level and figures of the sculptural frieze visible through plane trees under the roofline. Dancing figures draped in classical style under the eaves of one of the toll gate houses at Barriere d'Enfer.
November 21, 2025 at 6:36 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Yesterday at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris.
Valentina Izmirlieva standing it a tripod lectern in front of a screen with a proskynetarion, a 19th-century canvas Jerusalem icon that features sites in the Holy City, icons of saints and events in sacred history, and a rubric for entering the name of the pilgrim who purchased it during pilgrimage.
November 21, 2025 at 6:20 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Wandering west of the Luxembourg Gardens Friday evening.
Looking down a wet street reflecting the headlights of an oncoming vehicle towards an elaborate Belle Epoque apartment building with balconies and a few tall windows lit for the early evening. The sky above has patches of blue dusk between clouds glowing pink and orange from the sunset.
November 19, 2025 at 9:13 AM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
I like to see how extensive translation programs into French are. Spotted @jstheater.bsky.social 's _Punks_ in a local store window today.
Bookstore window display featuring John Keene's Punks and Mykhaile Semenko's En premiere ligne.
November 18, 2025 at 7:08 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Speaking of Better Books, this shows up a bit later, copied into Frederica's notebook. I assume, again, Byatt's using a real document of the time. @ginsbergpoem.bsky.social @citylightsbooks.bsky.social
World declaration hot peace shower! Earth's grass is free! Cosmic poetry Visitation accidentally happening carnally! Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental Cosmonaut poet-epiphany, immaculate supranational Poesy insemination! Skullbody love-congress Annunciation, duende concordium,, effendi tovarisch illumination, Now! Sigmatic New Departures Residu of Better Books & Moving Times in obscenely New Directions! Soul revolution City Lights Olympian lamb-blast! Castalia centrum new consciousness hungry generation Movement roundhouse 42 beat apocalypse energy-triumph! You are not alone! Miraculous assumption! O Sacred Heart invisible insurrection! Albion! awake! awake! awake! O shameless bandwagon! Self-evident for real naked come the Words! Global synthesis habitual for this Eternity! Nobody's Crazy Immortals Forever! Esam, Fainlight, Ferlinghetti, Fernandez, Ginsberg, Paolo Lionni, Daniel Richter, Trocchi, Simon Vinkendog, Horovitz. Invocation to First International Poetry Incarnation at Albert Hall.
November 18, 2025 at 7:01 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Murals at Place Jacques Demy.
Intersection in the foreground with crosswalks and several bicycles parked along the curb. On the walls of a school and schoolyard across the street are murals in bright primary colors. One is for the film "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," with red, yellow, blue, white, and light blue umbrellas (open and closed) and an embracing couple on a pink background. The middle mural is dedicated to "The Young Girls of Rochefort, with five different depictions of Gene Kelly and Françoise Dorléac dancing against a blue background. On the right is a yellow panel with blue lettering explaining the "Hommage au cinéaste Jacques Demy."
November 11, 2025 at 8:35 PM
thatiliazdguy.bsky.social
Thomas Lovell Beddoes quoted in A.S. Byatt's _Babel Tower_ in a way that suggests we ought to have met it back in the first volume, _The Virgin in the Garden_, since Frederica brings it up as a kind of teenage talisman for imagining what love will be like.
"Love, do I love? I walk Within the brilliance of another's thought As in a glory. I was dark before As Venus' chapel in the black of night: But there was something holy in the darkness Softer and not so thick as otherwhere And as rich moonlight may be to the blind Unconsciously consoling. Then love came Like the out-bursting of a trodden star..."
November 11, 2025 at 8:22 PM
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