The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Superman artist, 91, seeks return of JFK comic-book drawings Posted: 21 Nov 2013 07:25 PM PST Earlier this week, Al Plastino, 91, asked a New York state court to order Heritage Auctions to name the person who hired the Dallas-based business to sell the original artwork, "Superman's Mission for President Kennedy", so he could seek its return. Plastino believed the artwork was supposed to have been donated to the planned Kennedy Library in Boston 50 years ago, the same year Kennedy was assassinated, according to court documents. Plastino was surprised to learn recently that it was scheduled for auction today in Beverly Hills, California. Heritage Auctions has since pulled the artwork from this week's sale, said Heritage spokesman Noah Fleisher. Plastino, of Shirley, New York, is among the most acclaimed and prolific Superman artists from the heyday of comics in the mid-20th century, according to court papers. Plastino wants the artwork returned to him so that it can be "displayed in its rightful place" at the Kennedy Library, and be "his public and lasting legacy to the interested public", the documents said. "Due to Mr. Plastino's advanced age and ill-health, time is of the essence so that this issue may be resolved during his lifetime," the court papers said. Neither Plastino nor the lawyer handling the case for free, Dale Cendali, a specialist in intellectual property with the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, were immediately available to comment yesterday. Heritage Auctions has declined to name the person who sought to include the work in this week's auction, called a consignor, unless the court orders it to do so, he said. "Heritage policy is not to publicly discuss pending litigation," Fleisher said in a prepared statement. "I can tell you, though, that our consignor bought the artwork at a Sotheby's auction and we withdrew the artwork weeks ago as soon as we learned of the dispute and have returned the item to the consignor." According to Plastino's court papers, the artwork depicts Superman and Kennedy as part of a promotion of the president's national physical fitness program. National Comics was set to publish the comic book in November 1963, but held off after the president's assassination. It was published several weeks later at the request of President Lyndon B. Johnson, "as a tribute to his predecessor", according to an excerpt from the book's commemorative title page, which was included in the court papers. Plastino thought the donation to the Kennedy Library had been made, but at a comic convention in New York this year he learned of the proposed auction, according to the documents. - Reuters, November 20, 2013. |
| Late Nobel poet Heaney toasted at literary “wake” Posted: 21 Nov 2013 05:40 PM PST Poets Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley and Bernard O'Donoghue, all longtime friends of Heaney, who died in Dublin on August 30 at the age of 74, read some of his most famous works at the event late on Wednesday. Among them were the harrowing early poem "Mid-Term Break" in which Heaney described coming home from school at the age of 14 for the funeral of his younger brother who had been hit by a car and was buried in "a four foot box, a foot for every year". The Chieftains, joined by harpist Dianne Marshall and Sean-nós - old-style - singer Alyth McCormack, performed a "Lullaby for the Dead", as well as rousing jigs and reels. Irish novelist Edna O'Brien and Irish poet Paula Meehan, who holds the title of Ireland Professor of Poetry, also gave readings. With Heaney's widow Marie and his children attending the sold-out event at the 2,500-seat Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall, novelist and literary critic Andrew O'Hagan, who often travelled with Heaney around Ireland and elsewhere, described him as "a representative of poets' power to replenish the imagination and affirm the interior life. "His poems from the very beginning were reports from the heart and, sure enough, they were voicings of a human spirit issuing tolerance and empathy in desperate times," O'Hagan, who served as the anchor for the two-hour poetry reading and musical offering, said. O'Hagan said that in his poems Heaney, who was the eldest of nine children of a cattle dealer and grew up on a farm in County Derry, west of Belfast, "was a voice of the pasture and the inner ear, the bramble patch and lost time". One of Heaney's most famous collections was "Death of a Naturalist", the eponymous poem from which, read by Muldoon, vividly describes a mass of frogs sitting in a pond "poised like mud grenades... "The great slime kings were gathered there for vengeance and I knew that if I dipped my hand the spawn could clutch it". Heaney grew up during the peak of what is known in Ireland as "the Troubles", the three-decade-long sectarian conflict between Roman Catholic Republicans fighting for Northern Ireland's independence from Britain and Protestant Loyalists that left some 3,500 people dead. Heaney was a staunch Republican but opposed the violent tactics of the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups. His abhorrence of bloodshed came through in readings that provided graphic images of violence and abuse of power. Playwright Simon Armitage read a passage from Heaney's adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon classic "Beowulf" describing the man-beast Grendel slaughtering dozens of men for revenge. Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga read from his "Burial at Thebes" based on Sophocles's fifth century BC tragedy, in which Antigone bemoans Creon's edict barring her from burying her brother. After an evening that also featured a performance of Heaney's translation of Czech composer Leos Janacek's song cycle "Diary of One Who Vanished", sung by English tenor Ian Bostridge with Julius Drake on the piano, O'Hagan said he thought his late friend would have approved. "At the end he would be embarrassed by it, of course, but secretly pleased," O'Hagan said. - Reuters, November 22, 2013. |
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