Weekend Words: Sweat
On Tuesday, Hyperallergic's Benjamin Sutton reported that a civil court in Antwerp has convicted Luc Tuymans of copyright infringement for appropriating an image by photojournalist Katrijn Van Giel for his painting, “A Belgian Politician” (2011).
On Tuesday, Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Sutton reported that a civil court in Antwerp has convicted Luc Tuymans of copyright infringement for appropriating an image by photojournalist Katrijn Van Giel for his painting, “A Belgian Politician” (2011):
Tuymans admitted that he had used Van Giel’s image as inspiration — his painting reproduces the photo’s high angle, the tight cropping that omits the lower half of the politician’s face, and the light reflected off his sweaty forehead — but that he considered his work to be a parody, and thus not subject to copyright law.
The artist plans to appeal.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Song of Myself
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
—Thom Gunn, “The Man with Night Sweats”
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The rattler of keys?
—Sylvia Plath, “The Jailer”
But I am in the gambling business, for good or ill; it is the business I have chosen, and the only governing rule that we all recognize is: always sit close to an exit and never trust a man who doesn’t sweat.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Songs Of The Doomed: More Notes On The Death Of The American Dream
But a man who doesn’t dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.
—Truman Capote, The Grass Harp
One half the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
—Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
