Evelyn J.Hinz, the creative critic, appears in the following pages of Celebration, Chapter Seven.

She also has a beautiful preface, entitled Women Reconstructing the World

She was the guest editor of Mosaic,XI/2 entitled

The World of Anaïs Nin: Critical and Cultural Perspectives.

Her assistant editor was Wayne Fraser.

Printed in 1978 by The University of Manitoba Press, our site recently purchased an additional copy.

With essays by Duane Schneider, Ian Hugo, Philip Jason, Benjamin Franklin V, and Anna Balakian among others, its a valuable addition to any collection/

Anna Balakian was also present at the Celebration Weekend, along with Evelyn.

Her words can be found in Chapter Eleven of Celebration.

Our site has always been most grateful to Valerie Harms editor of Celebration and one of the creatorsWeekend for giving us permission to provide the book online.

https://anaisnin.org/book-tastings/celebration/

You can easily pick up a copy on abe.com. This link might work for a day or two!

Although Hinz and Balakian, like Nin are no longer with us, their words and connection to

Anaïs live on, reconstructing the world.

And your behind the scenes editor of this blog and former “celebrant” at that Magic Circles weekend so many years ago, continues with this site as homage to Anaïs, who inspired it all.

In conjunction with Coagula Curatorial Gallery’s Lust Letters exhibition , the Gallery is presenting an evening of performance and readings March7, 2013, 7:30 p.m.

The exhibition features Tim Youd’s Delta of Venus – a 30-foot piece of art inspired by Anaïs Nin’s erotic writings. Youd will perform his rendition of selections from Nin’s Delta of Venus.

Curator Joan Aarestad will address Eroticism in Art: A Woman’s View and writer Barbara Kraft will read from her newly published EBook Anaïs Nin: The Last Days.

Coagula Curatorial is part of the Chung King Road Gallery Row located in historic Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles at 977 Chung King Road.

Made in celebration of Anaïs Nin’s 110th birthday, this piece is available on Etsy

Order soon! The earlier edition (shown below) is now sold out.

The second in a series of illustrated insights on love culled from four decades of Anaïs Nin’s diaries and letters, edited by Maria Popova and illustrated by creative polymath Debbie Millman.

This particular piece, a full-color 9×12″ print, was made in celebration of Nin’s 110th birthday on February 21, 2013.

100% of the proceeds benefit A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists.

Background and context

Happy Birthday, Anaïs Nin; On Real Love

Anaïs Nin on Love: Hand Lettered by Deborah Millman

“Nothing makes the world so spacious as friends at a distance. They make up the longitudes and the latitudes.”

Today is Anaïs’s birthday. She would have loved this Thoreau quote as she perhaps more than most, counted time not with a clock but a compass. So today in honor of her birthday we are celebrating writers in Italy and Los Angeles. The photo of Anaïs above appears in Anaïs Nin e lo Spirito di Bali by Emanuela Riverso which appeared in Dietro Le Quinte last August.

Recently Riverso has written a piece about Anaïs’s cherished friend and author of the memoir Anaïs Nin: The Last Days, Barbara Kraft.

Besides her friendship with Anaïs, Kraft became close to Henry Miller and Eugene Ionesco. It is this magical extension of the longitudes and latitudes of friendship (think Tropic of Cancer!) that has Riverso now outlining these fascinating friendships in Eugène Ionesco e Barbara Kraft: A Conversation. If you aren’t fluent in Italian hit Translate! in your browser…

There is a project in the works to make Kraft’s brilliant and unprecedented conversation into a chap book.

Till then, turn off your clocks, and pick up a compass, and today, call or write or see a friend at a distance.

I have a writer friend from LA who is now on a mini-sabbatical in New Orleans. And he is the first person I will write a note to today on my little pink mini-ipad, using of course that awesome app Penultimate! I think of him first as he envisioned, created, organized and then produced the sold out Anaïs Nin@ 105 at the Hammer Gallery at UCLA in 2008.

After that, compass and Americano in hand (not for nothing have I been dubbed the tall Americano) I will be wending my way from Chicago up north to interview my friend Judith Citrin. Citrin, like Kraft was a close friend of Nin.

So happy birthday to Anaïs. She would have been 110 today (Gasp!) But as Auden wrote so many years ago to a pal “So we’re a little older, friendship never ages” Rochelle Holt, Valerie Harms, Sas Colby, Donna Ippolito, Adele Aldridge, and I have enjoyed lovely years of friendship because of our Nin connection.

An exhibition exploring the juncture where literature and fine art meet with the longings of the flesh with works by Tim Youd, Gajin Fujita, Ericka Rawlings and Bruce Richards

LOS ANGELES, CA – Coagula Curatorial presents LUST LETTERS, a four-artist group exhibition reveling at the juncture where literature and fine art meet with longings of the flesh. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 16, 2013, 7 p.m-11 p.m. Coagula Curatorial is part of the Chung King Road Gallery Row located in historic Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles at 977 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12 noon to 5 PM. The telephone is: (323) 480-

Co-curated by Joan Aarestad and Mat Gleason, the four artists featured in Lust Letters include:

Tim Youd works in various forms and much of his work has been inspired by writers such as Philip Roth, Celine, and Henry Miller. Recently he has turned to Anaïs Nin’s evocative Delta of Venus for inspiration. His 33-foot long diptych, based on Nin’s Delta of Venus, is derived from the stories found in the antique pages of Nin’s erotica and retyped by the artist himself; in subordinating the actual pages of Nin’s text to his own

creative process, Youd frees literature from the lofty perch of literary pretense and sets it free in the decadence of its own raw and physical context.

The exhibition includes work by Gajin Fujita, the ground breaking Los Angeles artist famous for merging the iconography of erotic Edo-era Japanese woodblock prints with contemporary graffiti subcultures in vibrant paintings. In his paintings, Fujita blends a rich diversity of cultural influences that range from traditional Japanese ukiyo-e to contemporary manga; from American pop culture, to East L.A. Street-life iconography and graffiti. Fujita also combines a variety of process techniques and media.

Underground artist Ericka Rawlings’ installation for the gallery is comprised of hundreds of handmade lace Valentine hearts sewn by the artist as a poetic evocation of the neuroses of a billion failed relationships.

The nationally celebrated, allegorical painter Bruce Richards, uses semiotics in his precise and masterful paintings to guide viewers on a clue-filled journey of passion and intrigue.

About Coagula Curatorial:
To celebrate twenty years of publishing Coagula Art Journal, acclaimed editor, art critic and curator Mat Gleason opened Coagula Curatorial as a premiere exhibition space of contemporary art. Located in downtown Los Angeles’ historic Chung King Road of contemporary art galleries, Coagula Curatorial affirms downtown as a viable location for the creative industries that drive the Los Angeles economy.

Coagula Art Journal was first published in April, 1992, brainchild of Los Angeles writer Mat Gleason. The bimonthly print journal quickly gained notoriety as a no-holds critique of contemporary art and the art world. Championing Los Angeles and mocking New York when the notion of the Big Apple playing second fiddle to “LaLa Land” was considered delusional, the art world as it now exists was envisioned as self-evident on the pages of Coagula a generation ago. With over 100 published issues, it is the autonomous companion to the rise of the Los Angeles art scene. The publication continues now as a regular catalogue of Coagula Curatorial shows with Gleason helming publisher and curator duties.

Coagula Curatorial is part of the Chung King Road Gallery Row located in downtown Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 12 noon – 5 PM. Coagula Curatorial 977 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012; (323) 480-7852; www.coagulacuratorial.com.

THE SUITCASE OPERA PROJECT In Workshop

Chicago Opera Vanguard and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural
Affairs and Special Events  present a workshop presentation of

A new opera
THE SUITCASE OPERA PROJECT
Music by Eric Reda
Libretto by David Kodeski

Thursday, November 8 at 7:30PM
Friday, November 9 at 7:30PM
Saturday, November 10 at 7:30PM

On stage of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park
201 East Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60601

“People tell me in 10 years I will be in the gutter. I’m almost looking forward to the prospect,” Jimmy writes to his friend Howard in 1948. Jimmy is eighteen, gay, dishonorably discharged from the Marines, and living in New York. Documenting his artist’s life, Jimmy cruises  the bars and streets, parties with his friends Gore Vidal, Anaïs Nin, and Truman Capote, while rhapsodizing on art, love, and sexuality. Sixty years later, monologist David Kodeski wins a “curious box of letters” in an online auction and discovers Jimmy’s lost world.

THE SUITCASE OPERA PROJECT, a new non-fiction opera by David Kodeski and composer Eric Reda, excavates Jimmy’s 49 letters, revealing a history of post-Kinsey / pre-Stonewall queer America and creating a moving portrait of a hungry, young soul.

For more information, visit www.chicagovanguard.org.

In an earlier post we spoke about a Chicago Reader article Yours Jimmy:

Written 60 years ago and rediscovered on eBay, a young gay man’s personal letters become fodder for a new opera..and includes letters from Anais….

After we wrote about the opera (which is being done here in Chicago on November 8, 9th and 10th and which we will write more about in a later blog nearer the date) —

— we received this nice email from David Kodeski about the two letters from Nin that were in the suitcase.

Hi Moira –

Yes, absolutely- feel free to share the letters. I got to sit down with Judith Malina in March and she told me that Anaïs and Jimmy were quite close – and I would bet that Anaïs’ mothering instinct was in full force when she was writing those two letters to Jimmy in the late forties – she seemed unhappy that he was in the Marines. That it wasn’t a good place for him-

Their relationship continued for years and years as I understand it.

Anything that any of the Nin scholars can uncover regarding Jimmy would be terrific – he was apparently one of those people who really promoted others – who essentially became an artist by being the support of and doing promotion for artists … interesting guy that left this planet too early.

A brief but important audio interview with Barbara Kraft Kraft can be can be found in this short but significant piece on Kraft and her double whammy of friendships with two literary lion (& lioness!) lovers! from Which Way LA!

Kraft’s most recent book is Anaïs Nin: The Last Days, available from Amazon and published by Sky Blue Press.

For the record, despite the unattractive nature of URL’s (and you thought that they were mountains in the steppes of central Asia!) here is the actual URL for the Which Way LA piece, for posterity and to always be able to easily click on it.

http://curious.kcrw.com/2012/03/anais-nin-and-henry-miller-at-the-end

Thanks again to Steven Reigns, who produced the celebration of Anais@105 at the Hammer Museum for sending this on.

Thanks to Steven Reigns for sending on these charming shots from The Beginners. What a keen eye!

Here they are in sequence. Paradise!

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

Recently in posting information on Barbara Kraft’s memoir Last Days, we realized that any readers who want more information on their storied connection should visit the following “official Anaïs Nin blog” hosted on Sky Blue Press’s web site, the publishers of Kraft’s book. Our little blog exists, solely to update info and it must be self evident, that it’s done really in the form of a letter to a friend. We wrote about Barbara Kraft because we had admired the author and knowing our love of her book, Steven Reigns who was at a reading, helpfully sent the write ups and also his photos which I forgot to even acknowledge.

So check out the book if you haven’t bought it yet, and write a review on Amazon. If you purchase Last Days on Amazon when you write your review you will be credited with having actually bought the book. Alas, that won’t happen if you purchase it from Sky Blue Press However, we never wish an author not to reap financial profit, so if you aren’t the type to write a review, buy your copy from Sky Blue Press! We are quite sure that if you buy from the publisher, that you will buy a second copy to write a fan note on amazon. We made the decision on starting this site in 1995, to not promote books we felt didn’t honor Nin. Since the author we assiduously avoided mentioning when our site was started has appeared on the pages of the aforementioned blog this notion now seems somewhat quaint. Particularly since we never then mentioned Nin’s first biography by award winning biographer Noël Riley Fitch ( ask her publishers to make it available on a Kindle here) I thought of this omission with much regret again when I saw Riley’s thoughtful appraisal of Kraft’s memoir and feel I must mention it, and drop the royal “we” of this letter to Nin friends.

As Donne wrote:

More than Kisses, Letters Mingle Souls, for thus friends absent speak.

http://brianlokker.hubpages.com/hub/artworks-on-united-states-stamps-1974-universal-postal-union-commemoratives