Today’s birthdays:
Jennifer Jones,
film star and arts patron;
Tom Wolfe, author of
The Painted Word.
“Hunt for the best.”
— Norton Simon
Cover detail,
soundtrack recording
of the Jennifer Jones film
“Angel, Angel, Down We Go”
The girl’s left eye in the above
portrait illustrates a remark
in yesterday’s New York Times
on a figure in a painting:
“His head recedes into shadow, so you barely see his face. But a tiny fleck of white in his eye, a light that kindles his reawakening, brings him to life. It’s what Roland Barthes, the French critic, liked to call a punctum, the spot, marking time, that burns an image into memory.”
(This remark, by Michael Kimmelman,
comes with a headline–
Lights! Darks! Action! Cut!
Maestro of Mise-en-Scène
— that seems to have been inspired
by Tom Wolfe’s prose style.)
For further details, see
Barthes’s Punctum,
by Michael Fried.
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