Marilyn and James

Isn't this a beautiful image? I think it deserves a few more internet pixels, despite the millions of internet pixels already dedicated to it. I'm uploading it today, of all days, as I'm right now spending a happy afternoon in the British Library, working on a piece about this image, and Marilyn Monroe and James Joyce, and what sort of interesting things might be going on in this image, and why it's such an enduring image, and why people go on about it so much. Evidently, from the syntax of that sentence, I'm very much in the thinking and reading section of my project. But let it be known that this is something that I'm working on.

The photograph was taken by Eve Arnold. At the time, Marilyn was filming The Misfits. And here are a few words from Arnold about the image:

We worked on a beach on Long Island…I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.

And here's what Jeanette Winterson thinks, and I'm inclined to agree:

This is so sexy, precisely because it’s Marilyn reading James Joyce’sUlysses. She doesn’t have to pose, we don’t even need to see her face, what comes off the photo is absolute concentration, and nothing is sexier than absolute concentration. There she is, the goddess, not needing to please her audience or her man, just living inside the book. The vulnerability is there, but also something we don’t often see in the blonde bombshell; a sense of belonging to herself. It’s not some playboy combination of brains and boobs that is so perfect about this picture; it is that reading is always a private act, is intimate, is lover’s talk, is a place of whispers and sighs, unregulated and usually unobserved. We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.