Swan’s Way

Blazon

For the Countess of Peralta

 
 

The snow-white Olympic swan,
with beak of rose-red agate,
preens his Eucharistic wing,
which he opens to the sun like a fan.

 

His shining neck is curved
like the arm of a lyre,
like the handle of a Greek amphora,
like the prow of a ship.

 

He is the swan of divine origin
whose kiss mounted through fields
of silk to the rosy peaks
of Leda’s sweet hills.

 

White king of of Castalia’s fount,
his triumph illumines the Danube;
Da Vinci was his baron in Italy;
Lohengrin is his blond prince.

 

His whiteness is akin to linen,
to the buds of the white roses,
to the diamantine white
of the fleece of an Easter lamb.

 

He is the poet of perfect verses,
and his lyric cloak is of ermine;
he is the magic, the regal bird
who, dying, rhymes the soul in his song.

 

This winged aristocrat displays
white lilies on a blue field;
and Pompadour, gracious and lovely,
has stroked his feathers.

 

He rows and rows on the lake
Where a golden gondola waits
For the sweetheart of Louis of Bavaria.

 

Countess, give the swans your love,
for they are gods of an alluring land
and are made of perfume and ermine,
of white light, of silk, and of dreams.

Ruben Darío

 
 

Photo: Bruce Weber

 
 

Carmen Dell’Orefice by Norman Parkinson, 1980

 
 

Swaroski logo

 
 

Bathyllus in the swan dance, Aubrey Beardsley

 
 

Henri Matisse making a study of a swan in the Bois de Boulogne, c. 1930

 
 

Advertisement illustrated by René Gruau

 
 

Illustration to Garcia Márquez’s short story Bon Voyage Mr. President, by Josie Portillo

 
 

Still from The Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

 
 

Anna Pavlova

 
 

Still from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Bill Condon, 2011)

 
 

Helena Bonham Carter

 
 

Laetita Casta. Photo: Mario Testino

 
 

Uma Thurman and Mikahil Baryshnikov as The Swan Prince. Photo: Arthur Elgort

 
 

Truman Capote styled his beautiful and wealthy female friends “swans”

 
 

Accompained by Lee Radziwill and Jane Haward

 
 

With socialité Babe Paley in Paris

 
 

Escorting CZ Guest

 
 

Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt Lumet arrive at New York’s 54th Street Theatre for the opening performance of Caligula., 16 Feb 1960

 
 

Gloria Vanderbilt ad campaigns

 
 

Ludwig II (Luchino Visconti, 1972). He was sometimes called the Swan King

 
 

Mirror, Mirror (Tarsem Singh, 2012)

 
 

Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974)

 
 

Leonardo di Caprio. Photo: Annie Leibovitz

 
 

Madonna. Photo: David LaChapelle

 
 

David Bowie

 
 

Ad campaign featured in Vogue, January 1997

 
 

Tory Burch swan-print wedge sandalias

 
 

Swan Evening dress by Charles James, 1951

 
 

Kate Moss wearing a Givenchy gown by Ricardo Tisci, Spring-Summer collection 2011

 
 

Giles Deacon Spring-Summer 2012 collection

 
 

Erin O’Connor wearing a gown by Alexander McQueen. Photo: Tim Walker

 
 

Eglingham Children and Swan on Beach, Tim Walker, 2002

“Punctuation is: Pretty Much Everything”

“The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev’ry clause.
At ev’ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree”

Cecil Hartley

 
 

“On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.”

Lynn Truss

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

 
 

Punctuation is historically an aid to reading aloud (vis George Bernard Shaw). Quite so, punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud. The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register and time and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the author’s (or editor’s) choice.

 

In 2010, photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin collaborated with artists M/M Paris (an art and design partnership consisting of Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag) on a series of collages featuring various celebrities as punctuation marks as part of their Pretty Much Everything retrospective.

 
 

Asterisk ( * )

 
 

From Greek: ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, “little star”. The asterisk  is a typographical symbol or glyph derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times for a symbol to indicate date of birth. This symbol is used to call out a footnote, especially when there is only one on the page. Less commonly, multiple asterisks are used to denote different footnotes on a page (i.e., *, **, ***). Typically, an asterisk is positioned after a word or phrase and preceding its accompanying footnote. Asterisks are sometimes used as an alternative to typographical bullets to indicate items of a list. Asterisks are sometimes used as an alternative to typographical bullets to indicate items of a list.

 
 

Lewis Carroll‘s looking-glass world is divided into sections by brooks or streams, with the crossing of each brook usually signifying a notable change in the scene and action of the story: the brooks represent the divisions between squares on the chessboard, and Alice’s crossing of them signifies advancing of her piece one square. Most editions of the book visually represent the crossings by breaking the text with several lines of asterisks ( * * * ).

 
 

Björk

 
 

Slash ( / )

 
 

The slash goes back to the days of ancient Rome. In the early modern period, in the Fraktur script, which was widespread through Europe in the Middle Ages, one slash (/) represented a comma, while two slashes (//) represented a dash. The two slashes eventually evolved into a sign similar to the equals sign (=), then being further simplified to a single dash or hyphen (–). Is a sign used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes. It is often called a forward slash (a retronym used to distinguish the slash from the backslash, “\”), and many other alternative names. The slash is most commonly used as the word substitute for “or” which indicates a choice (often mutually-exclusive) is present. The slash is also used to indicate a line break when quoting multiple lines from a poem, play, or headline; or in an ordinary prose quotation, the start of a new paragraph.

 
 

Vanessa Redgrave

 
 

Period ( . )

 
 

A full stop (British English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, and New Zealand English) or period (American English and Canadian English) is the punctuation mark placed to indicate the end of sentences. In the context of web addresses and computing in general, it is typically called a dot. In conversation, as opposed to linguistics, the term is often used to mean “the end of the matter” (for example, “We are calling a full stop to discussions on this subject” or “We will not do it. Period!”).

 

The full stop symbol derives from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented the system of punctuation where the height of placement of a dot on the line determined its meaning. The high dot (˙) was called a “periodos” and indicated a finished thought or sentence, the middle dot (·) was called a “kolon” and indicated part of a complete thought, while the low dot (.) was called a “telia” and also indicated part of a complete thought.

 
 

Mickey Rourke

 
 

Comma ( , )

 
 

Is used in many contexts and languages, principally for separating things. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight but inclined from the vertical, or with the appearance of a small, filled-in number 9. It is used to separate parts of a sentence such as clauses and lists of three or more things.

 
 

In the 3rd century BC, Aristophanes of Byzantium invented a system of single dots (distinctiones) that separated verses (colometry), and indicated the amount of breath needed to complete each fragment of text, when reading aloud.

 
 

Jim Jarmusch

 
 

Open bracket ( (  )

 
 

Close bracket ( ) )

 
 

Brackets are tall punctuation marks used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. Used unqualified, brackets refer to different types of brackets in different parts of the world and in different contexts. Erasmus of Rotterdam coined the term lunula to refer to the rounded parentheses (), recalling the round shape of the moon.

 
 

Bill Murray

 
 

Open guillemets ( « )

 
 

Also called angle quotes or French quotation marks, are polylines, pointed as if arrows (« or »), sometimes forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark. They are used in a number of languages to indicate speech. They resemble (but are not the same as) the symbols for lesser than (<), greater than (>), and for left and right bit shifts in some programming languages, as well as rewind and fast forward on various media players, such as VCRs, DVD players, and MP3 players. The word is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume (the equivalent of which in English is William), after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume Le Bé (1525–98).

 
 

Daniel Day-Lewis

 
 

Colon ( : )

 
 

The colon is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.English colon is from Latin colon (plural cola), itself from Greek κῶλον “limb, member, portion”, in rhetoric or prosody especially a part or section of a sentence or a rhythmical period of an utterance. In palaeography, a colon is a clause or group of clauses written as a line. Use of the : symbol to mark the discontinuity of a grammatical construction, or a pause of a length intermediate between that of a semicolon and that of a period, was introduced in English orthography around 1600.

 
 

Mia Farrow photographed for a Gap Ad

 
 

Semicolon ( ; )

 
 

It is a punctuation mark with several uses. The Italian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to indicate interdependent statements. Modern uses of the semicolon relate either to the listing of items or to the linking of related clauses. A semicolon is used when a sentence could have been ended, but it wasn’t.

 
 

Juliette Binoche

 
 

Exclamation ( ! )

 
 

The exclamation mark is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume (shouting), and often marks the end of a sentence. One theory of its origin is that it was a Latin exclamation of joy (io), written with the I above the o. The exclamation mark was first introduced into English printing in the 15th century, and was called the “sign of admiration or exclamation” or the “note of admiration” until the mid-17th century;  admiration referred to its Latin sense of wonderment.

 
 

Clint Eastwood

 
 

Question mark ( ? )

 
 

Also known as an interrogation point, interrogation mark, question point, query, or eroteme), is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop (period) at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark character is also often used in place of missing or unknown data.

 

The symbol is sometimes thought to originate from the Latin quaestiō (that is, qvaestio), meaning “question”, which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages to qo. The lowercase q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. However, evidence of the actual use of the Q-over-o notation in medieval manuscripts is lacking; if anything, medieval forms of the upper component seem to be evolving towards the q-shape rather than away from it.

 
 

Natalie Portman

 
 

Ampersand ( & )

 
 

It’s a logogram representing the conjunction word “and”. This symbol is a ligature of the letters et, Latin for “and”. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase “and (&) per se and”, meaning “and (the symbol &) intrinsically (is the word) and”. In film credits for stories, screenplays, etc., & indicates a closer collaboration than and.

Brief Treatise of Elegance

Theoni Aldredge won the Academy Award for Best Costume design in 1974, beating out 3 other Paramount movies.

 
 

In The Great Gatsby fashion is almost another protagonist of the story. Francis Scott Fitzgerald depicts every garment worn by Nick Carraway, his cousin Daisy Buchanan, Tom, Daisy’s husband, Jordan Baker, the titular Jay Gatsby and so on the secondary characters. In Fitzgerald’s own words, all the people who attended Gatsby’s parties were always “well dressed”.
 
Myrtle, the woman who cheated on George Wilson with Tom Buchanan, tells how disappointed she was when discovered Mr. Wilson borrowed “somebody’s best suit” to get married to her in. Later, Myrtle tells why she felt attracted to Tom and started the affair with him: “It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head.”
 
In this short story every detail in the deco and in fashion counts, it’s almost an essay about style and about the importance of good appearance. It helped Gatsby to get social ascension and wealth. “I saw right away he was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man”, said Mr. Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s mentor when he remembered the first time he saw him.
 
It’s not very distant from Nick Carraway’s first impression about Gatsby: “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him.”
 
The origin of the word elegance (from Latin elego, to choose) is strongly interrelated not only with our appearance, but our decisions. That’s why the clue that is given by Gatsby’s father about how his son started his determination of getting success is so important.
 
“On the last fly-leaf was printed the word Schedule, and the date September 12, 1906, and underneath:
Rise from bed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.00 a.m.
Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling. . . . .. 6.15-6.30 ”
Study electricity, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15 ”
Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30 p.m.
Baseball and sports. . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.30-5.00 ”
Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00 ”
Study needed inventions. . . . . . . . . . . 7.00-9.00 ”
 
General Resolves
 
No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable] No more smokeing or chewing Bath every other day Read one improving book or magazine per week Save $5.00 {crossed out} $3.00 per week Be better to parents”
 
This story is told from a relativist point of view by the narrator, Nick Carraway, a trait he inherited from his father: “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

 
 

In the novel, we know through Jordan Baker that Daisy used to dress in white when she was younger. Aldredge added  ivory and pale tones and even black into the palette of colors worn by Mia Farrow.

 
 

Bruce Dern (as Tom Buchanan), Sam Waterson (as Nick Carraway) and Robert Redford (as Gatsby) in the movie directed by Jack Clayton.

 
 

“His bedroom was the simplest room of all — except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold.”

 
 

“Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie”, according to Fitzgerald describes the scene when Gatsby met Daisy again five years after.

 
 

 
 

“Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.”
 
-“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall”, said Gatsby.
 
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
 
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such —such beautiful shirts before.”

 
 

 
 

“At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing-suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be taken out under any circumstances — and this was strange, because the front right fender needed repair.
Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool.”

Gatsby in Vogue

Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, leading actors from the third filmed version of the novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, 1974). Photos: Duane Michals for Vogue USA, December 1973