existential-celestial: Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930, Paramount Pictures); Some of Marlene’s mar
existential-celestial: Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930, Paramount Pictures); Some of Marlene’s marginilia (The American Library) In the last ten years of her life, renowned actress Marie Magdalene “Marlene” Dietrich (born on this day, 27 December in 1901) surrounded herself with books: poetry, philosophy, novels, biographies, and thrillers in English, French, and German–and they are all filled with marginalia. Marlene ‘noted passages of interest with small “X”s and with sheets torn from a notepad with a stamped red directive: Don’t Forget,’ which is especially true for her revered copies of Goethe’s works. According to The New Yorker, here are some of her sassy commentaries scrawled in red ink: “Inside a copy of “Love Scene,” a paperback recounting the story of Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, she writes, “this is without a doubt the worst writing I ever laid eyes on.” In the P. D. James novel “Innocent Blood,” she has stuffed another Don’t Forget note, this time writing beneath that phrase, “a bore.” She took her pen to the pages of a book on the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann: “Who cares anyway?” On the first page of Anthony Burgess’s 1980 novel, “Earthly Powers,” above its notorious first sentence (“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me”), she wrote, “That’s when I stopped reading.”” Happy birthday, Marlene! You can read more about Marlene’s marginalia in this article by The New Yorker. -- source link