Valerie Harms has been kind enough to send on a few postcards from the Celebration weekend.

If you would like a postcard, please send a S.A.S.E. to Anaïs Nin Web Site, PO Box 412 Beverly Shores, IN 46301.
Attention: MC Griffin

Or if you are overseas just send us your name and address on a postcard! We’ll send one back even if you are not in the US.

First fifteen responses will benefit from Valerie’s generosity.

Valerie Harms Five Star Review

(picture of Valerie with Anaïs, cf Valerie’s Memory on our Memories Page)

Valerie Harms reviews Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts by Benjamin Franklin V, published by Sky Blue Press, 2009. This publishing event deserves 5 stars.

We owe premier Nin scholar Dr. Franklin and publisher Paul Herron a huge debt of gratitude for this book. Benjamin Franklin is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Carolina. The author of many books about American authors, plus jazz greats, and several books about Anaïs Nin, Professor Franklin now gives us an invaluable reference book.

I wish I’d had it when I was reading all of Nin’s diaries and fiction. Even though I tried to sort out characters myself, especially as I read Nin’s early stories and novel in Northwestern University’s Special Collections Department and eventually compiled Waste of Timelessness and Other Stories as a rare edition. But now the book is available for longterm fans of Nin’s work as well as newcomers.

The character dictionary scrupulously tells who is who and where they are written about. I was especially interested in frequent characters—e.g. Djuna, Jay, Lillith, Lillian, and Sabina. Surprising to me were the frequent references to God and on p.36 the reference for “Don Juan” as “man who hates Dona Juana.”

Part Two gives a list of all Nin’s published fiction as well as a list of the characters who appear in each work. Very helpful.

The final part of the book indexes the diary excerpts that were not indexed in the published Diary of Anaïs Nin. Thus, many of these come from volumes of the Anaïs: An International Journal. Here one can trace the references to Hugh Guiler, Otto Rank, and many others.

This book belongs in the personal library of all those who love Nin’s work and to university and public libraries around the world. This 162 page paperback costs $19.95. Order from your bookstore or visit http://www.skybluepress.com/.

Quotes from reviewers:
This book will help readers more easily understand the origin of the repetitions, continuities and discontinuities within Nin’s oeuvre and to distinguish the intentional from the accidental. – Tristine Rainier, Director, Center for Autobiographic Studies.

Once again, Benjamin Franklin V has meticulously explored the domain into which too few Nin scholars have entered: the domain of facts. His achievement is a major gift to Nin scholars and to the future of Nin criticism. – Philip K. Jason, author of Anaïs Nin and Her Critics.

Additional note: A Café in Space, The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal, Vol. 6, 2009, edited by Paul Herron, is also available from Sky Blue Press. This issue features excerpts from a newly found trove of letters from Anaïs’ father, Joaquin Nin y Castellanos, to Anaïs. It’s fascinating the material available on the Internet now. I recommend viewing the interview with the elderly Bebe Barron at www.youtube.com/user/TheStevenReigns.

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. “
—Anaïs Nin

This is Anaïs Nin’s birthday weekend (she was born February 21, 1903) In her honor, fly a kite, start a new career, make a new friend or make plans to travel to a new country.

The official release date for Sky Blue Press’s latest was on her actual birthday. We await a review from Valerie Harms and will link to it when it’s posted.

Other news on her birthday weekend are notes from Jan- Christine Johnson who tell us about Annette Nancarrow who explains:

The beautiful and lively artist Annette Nancarrow comes to life in her memories and never to be seen photographs in “ANNETTE’S MEMORIES”

The correspondence with Dr. Juergen Hocker was from May through August 1991. Nancarrow speaks of her relationship with Anaïs Nin, Hugh Guiler, and Rupert Pole in Acapulco, Mexico and New York City.

There are a few surprises for your anaisnin.org readers.

Nin painted an attractive portrait of Nancarrow in her writings – the lovely Lisa in “Collages” and the Diary.

New from Sky Blue Press foremost Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V has written the book book Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index of Diary Excerpts

“Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts by Benjamin Franklin V is an alphabetical list of the name and description of every character Anaïs Nin used in her published fiction cross-referenced with the title(s) in which the character appears. Includes an index of persons, titles, and places included in every excerpt from Nin’s diary which has appeared elsewhere before publication in book form, including the remaining unpublished diary. A must for anyone studying Nin’s work, and a source of learning and fascination for even the most casual of readers

Franklin is the author of : Recollections of Anaïs Nin: By Her Contemporaries.

By clicking on this Look Inside Link you can access a recollection or two.

Valerie Harms sent us an article from the NY Times on the second day in January. It hasn’t been posted until now as this writer has been in Guatemala.

NY REGION January 02, 2009 City Room: Gotham Book Mart Holdings Are Given to Penn By Sewell Chan The University of Pennsylvania Libraries are now home to about 200,000 items from New York’s landmark Gotham Book Mart, which closed in 2007.

About 200,000 items from the Gotham Book Mart, which closed in 2007 after 87 years as a New York literary haven of international stature, have been donated to the University of Pennsylvania.

Readers of the Diaries will be familiar with Anaïs’s descriptions of the Gotham Mart along with her friend, the amazing Frances Steloff who lived in an apartment above the store even after it was sold in 1967. She died in 1989 at the age of 101. The photo above is taken by Adele Aldridge who has this memory of Steloff on her website

You can read Frances’s reminiscences about Gotham in Celebration by Valerie Harms and Adele Aldridge which is on our site. You can also try to find an original copy on Abe.com. Listed in order of price, the last book shown is signed by Nin and is $80.

This photo of Anaïs’s brother is taken from the UC Berkley press release on January 20. 2004 announcing his death. Photo credits and a print quality image link are available below, or link directly through the press release by Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations

Joaquin Nin-Culmell (UC Berkeley photo)
Print-quality image available for download

Thanks to Jan Johnson for this link.

You can find the Nin poetic warmth and gentleness in Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations of a Theme by Luis Milan” on YouTube. Leo Brouwer is the guitarist. There are a number of photographs of Professor Nin-Culmell that I have never seen. The You Tube site is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG0zmn7iOH0 . It is a new gem of a posting. Many thanks to “grenouilleGG” of Espana.

This image was taken from a blog on myspace, we grabbed the image from Google Images, and wanted to attribute the beautiful artwork and encourage visiting such a creative site. We post it because this is the quote the site is most asked attribution for…

we don’t know if it’s apocryphal if might have been a line in a lecture, many of these lectures were transcribed by Evelyn Hines whose book The Sensitive Man and Other Essays published by Swallow Press had “summarized” many of the lectures Nin gave in the last years of her life. It’s really a marvelous little book and we’d encourage everyone to try and grab a copy on a site like abe.com. To our knowledge, the quote is not in the Diaries or the fiction…but like any urban legend, it’s true even if it never happened!

Apologies for linking to a fabulous interview in an earlier post which was posted on you tube and taken down because of copyright infringement. Perhaps those of you that are French speaking can find it from the above note (taken from a great web site on Miller which notes:

Le sel de la semaine TV show interviewed Anaïs Nin ten months later, in 1970. You can view the full hour interview (in French) for free on your computer by visiting the Radio-Canada (CBC) Archives website

Happy Hunting! in the Les Archives of Radio-Canada. We’d love it if someone would volunteer to translate the below for the site.

It looks like you might be able to link to it (juin 18, 1970) here

and this photo speaking of copyright issues is from brittanica.com Anaïs Nin, c. 1972.

© Bettmann/Corbis

Jan-Christine Johnson wrote us about a new book of poems entitled Dear Anaïs (with a preface by Tristine Rainer)it’s available on Amazon. This is what the author, Diana Raab wrote about her recent work on her very nice WordPress blog Diana’s Notebook in the post Poetry and Journals,

“Excuses are made by those who make mistakes. Apologies are made by those who did something wrong. I did neither, but I do want to explain my lapse in writing. My new poetry collection DEAR ANAIS: MY LIFE IN POEMS FOR YOU (preface by Tristine Rainer), was released this week and I have been busy with the preliminary publicity.

I hope my readers buy this book not only because I admire Nin and her wise words about writing, love and life, but the collection is a good example of how poems can be culled from journals. All the poems in the book were born on the pages of my journal. (BTW, if you read the book and enjoy it, please consider posting a review on Amazon…it will help other readers and me of course!)Many of the poems were inspired by a famous quotation, a compelling line or an observation. These all serve as good launching points. Poetry is all about observations and the more you see, the stronger your poetry will be.

Until next time—happy reading and happy writing!”

This Photo of Anaïs Nin in 1932 was lifted from an early Nin web site now defunct. However, in honor of Google’s tenth anniversary, they opened a window to the old search engine…and we found the entire site on the wayback machine an entire site with lots and lots of very fine academic stuff (from Leipzig) the pages were maintained byAnja Beckmann. Thanks Way Back Machine…and don’t lose this link. We hope it works for a long time as the original URL is no longer functioning.

Check out this link. It is an amazing resource….as a starter…

Anaïs Nin’s mother, Rosa Culmell y Vaurigaud, was born in 1871, the eldest daughter of the Danish consul to Havana, Thorvald Culmell Christensen, who was born in Denmark, and his wife Anaïs Vaurigaud y Bourdin, of French descent but born in Cuba. Thorvald was a successful businessman and they lived in a big house on the Malecon beachfront, a fashionable area of Havana. The couple eventually had 9 children, 5 daughters and 4 sons, and were of the highest social standing in Havana. Anaïs Vaurigaud, the grandmother of Anaïs Nin, left her husband and her children and moved into her own house in Havana where she lived as she pleased. As Rosa was now the oldest daughter it fell to her to organise the household, a task for which she was well prepared during her education in the exclusive Brentwood catholic convent school in Long Island, New York, where she also learned perfect English. Due to her important role in the Culmell household she was still single at the age of 30. She had singing lessons and was said to have a beautiful voice.

Anaïs Nin’s father, José Joaquin Nin y Castellanos was born in Havana in 1879, the first son of a Spanish Cavalry officer, Joaquin Nin y Tudo, and his Cuban wife Angela Castellanos y Perdomo. The family moved to Barcelona in 1880 and Joaquin Nin stayed there until he was 21. He studied the piano and eventually became a concert pianist, he departed for Havana in 1901 and gave his first concert there in february, he had to live with money from relatives, though, as he had not yet made a name for himself.

Joaquin and Rosa met in a music store in Havana. She was independent, much older and more mature than him but they shared a love for music. She fell for the romantic image that he cultivated and he sensed that she would help him to further his career. Her father was against a marriage with the poor musician from Barcelona but allowed Rosa to have singing lessons with him and they soon gave their first joint concert. They married on April 8, 1902, and Rosa’s father paid fro them to go to Paris and live there until Joaquin could look after the family with his own income.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010801160612/stinfwww.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~beckmann/nin.html

Happy Birthday Google! and hey thanks for these oldies but goodies and reminding us of the Wayback Machine.