pop culture like gumdrops

A couple of my favorite celebrity photographs:


This confectionary little Eve Arnold shot just happens to grace the cover of this month's Summer Reading issue of Poets& Writers Magazine. Mary Gannon, the magazine's editor, comments thusly:

Along with a certain irony (blonde bombshell tackles her century's most baffling book), the photo--everything about it-- has nostalgic appeal.

Interestingly, the narrative behind this photo suggests that it is not posed at all. She really was lugging that fat bastard of a book around in her car and struggling through it-- as so many of us have-- in whatever spare moments she could capture. Beyond nostalgia, too, I find the earnestness of her gaze and the slack of her jaw to be kind of touching. You can see it in her face, can't you? This palpable grappling with tough literature. It's active in her-- that process of seeking and responding to text. I think it's an inspired snapshot, really.


[UPDATE] -- On my small laptop screen, you can't really tell what Marilyn's reading in the photo above. And that "baffling book" would, of course, be Joyce's Ulysses. (In my opinion, Pound's Cantos beat out Ulysses in the Modernist Lit Bafflement Pageant any day, but that is neither here nor there. Poetry doesn't really count, does it?)

And this one was printed in Julia's memoir, My Life in France. Apparently, it appeared on a Valentine's Day card with a caption: "Wish you were here. Happy Valentine's Day, from the heart of old downtown Plittersdorf on the Rhine." The dude is Paul Child, her husband.

I'd blow this one up to poster-size and hang it on my wall if I could. I love the incongruity: the world's largest culinary television personality having a little soak. I'm also a little curious as to where their hands are. And who the photographer allowed access to such intimacy was.

So cute. Cute as puppies.