The Melting Pot

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2012-01-17T19:55:00.001-08:00

3 poems by Robert Graves (1895-1985)

2012-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

Down, Wanton, Down!

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love's name,
Or Beauty's, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?

Poor bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach--
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!

Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?

Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!

1933
.:::

The Face in the Mirror

Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring
From wide, uneven orbits; one brow drooping
Somewhat over the eye
Because of a missile fragment still inhering,
Skin-deep, as a foolish record of old-world fighting.

Crookedly broken nose — low tackling caused it;
Cheeks, furrowed; coarse grey hair, flying frenetic;
Forehead, wrinkled and high;
Jowls, prominent; ears, large; jaw, pugilistic;
Teeth, few; lips, full and ruddy; mouth, ascetic.

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision
At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,
And once more ask him why
He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,
To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

1958
.:::

The Frog and the Golden Ball

She let her golden ball fall down the well
And begged a cold frog to retrieve it;
For which she kissed his ugly, gaping mouth -
Indeed, he could scarce believe it.

And seeing him transformed to his princely shape,
Who had been by hags enchanted,
She knew she could never love another man
Nor by any fate be daunted.

But what would her royal father and mother say?
They had promised her in marriage
To a cousin whose wide kingdom marched with theirs,
Who rode in a jeweled carriage.

‘Our plight, dear heart, would appear past human hope
To all except you and me: to all
Who have never swum as a frog in a dark well
Or have lost a golden ball.’

‘What then shall we do now?’ she asked her lover.
He kissed her again, and said:
‘Is magic of love less powerful at your Court
Than at this green well-head?’

1965
.:::

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Wallace Stevens

2012-01-15T12:40:00.000-08:00

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

2
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

3
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

4
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

5
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

6
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

7
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

8
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

9
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

10
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

11
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

12
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

13
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

1923

Source: Upenn.Edu

Paul Valéry's Crisis of the Mind (1919)

2012-01-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

[ First Letter ]

We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

So -- as though in desperate defense of her own physiological being and resources -- all her memory confusedly returned. Her great men and her great books came back pell-mell. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion, as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have people prayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors, founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of their country, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked. . . .

And in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains -- singing in an undertone:

Et cum vorandi vicerit libidinem
Late triumphet imperator spiritus.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind. Hope suggests that any conclusion unfavorable to us must be an error of the mind. And yet the facts are clear and pitiless; thousands of young writers and artists have died; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications; idealism is barely surviving, deeply stricken, and called to account for its dreams; realism is hopeless, beaten, routed by its own crimes and errors; greed and abstinence are equally flouted; faiths are confused in their aim -- cross against cross, crescent against crescent; and even the skeptics, confounded by the sudden, violent, and moving events that play with our minds as a cat with a mouse . . . even the skeptics lose their doubts, recover, and lose them again, no longer master of the motions of their thought.

The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned. . . .

What gives this critical condition of the mind its depth and gravity is the patient's condition when she was overcome.

I have neither the time nor the ability to define the intellectual situation in Europe in 1914. And who could pretend to picture that situation? The subject is immense, requiring every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides, when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

For all I need is a vague general recollection of what was being thought just before the war, the kinds of intellectual pursuit then in progress, the works being published.

So if I disregard all detail and confine myself to a quick impression, to that natural whole given by a moment's perception, I see . . . nothing! Nothing . . . and yet an infinitely potential nothing.

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see . . . nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.

And what made that disorder in the mid of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate certain ways of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places in history to whichwe moderns could return without greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous . . . creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our entrance would create the least possible sensation, that is where we should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, would take us in more easily than many places less remote in time but more specialized in a single race, a single culture, and a single system of life.

Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was a crossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was an international exposition of thought. There were the works of the mind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencies was like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched.... How much material wealth, how much labor and planning it took, how many centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneous lives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and to set it up as the supreme wisdom and the triumph of humanity?

In a book of that era -- and not one of the most mediocre -- we should have no trouble in finding: the influence of the Russian ballet, a touch of Pascal's gloom, numerous impressions of the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, and sometimes the tone of a scientific publication...the whole flavored with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess! Let us notice, by the way, that within each of the components of this mixture other bodies could well be found. It would be useless to point them out: it would be merely to repeat what I have just said about modernism, and to give the whole history of the European mind.

Standing, now, on an immense sort of terrace of Elsinore that stretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone of Champagne, the granites of Alsace . . . our Hamlet of Europe is watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the life and death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects of our controversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses -- for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. This one was Leonardo. He invented the flying man, but the flying man has not exactly served his inventor's purposes. We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccello sopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our day than fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the hot season to scatter it on the streets of towns. And that other skull was Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant...and Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, and Marx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls. But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? His terribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war to peace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peace to war; all peoples are troubled by it. . . . "What about Me," he says, "what is to become of Me, the European intellect? ...And what is peace? Peace is perhaps that state of things in which the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation, rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative rivalry and the battle of production; but I am not tired of producing? Have I not exhausted my desire for radical experiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? ...Should I not perhaps lay aside my hard duties and transcendent ambitions? Perhaps follow the trend and do like Polonius who is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, who is something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing God knows what under a Russian name?

"Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you -- or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill."

[ Second Letter ]

I was saying the other day the peace is the kind of war that allows acts of love and creation in its course; it is, then, a more complex and obscure process than war properly so-called, as life is more obscure and more profound than death.

But the origin and early stages of peace are more obscure than peace itself, as the fecundation and beginnings of life are more mysterious than the functioning of a body once it is made and adapted.

Everyone today feels the presence of this mystery as an actual sensation; a few men must doubtless feel that their own inner being is positively a part of the mystery; and perhaps there is someone with a sensibility so clear, subtle, and rich that he senses in himself certain aspects of our destiny more advanced than our destiny itself.

I have not that ambition. The things of the world interest me only as they relate to the intellect; for me, everything relates to the intellect. Bacon would say that this notion of the intellect is an idol. I agree, but I have not found a better idol.

I am thinking then of the establishment of peace insofar as it involves the intellect and things of the intellect. This point of view is false, since it separates the mind from all other activities; but such abstract operations and falsifications are inevitable: every point of view is false.

A first thought dawns. The idea of culture, of intelligence, of great works, has for us a very ancient connection with the idea of Europe -- so ancient that we rarely go back so far.

Other parts of the world have had admirable civilizations, poets of the first order, builders, and even scientists. But no part of the world has possessed this singular physical property: the most intense power of radiation combined with an equally intense power of assimilation.

Everything came to Europe, and everything came from it. Or almost everything.

Now, the present day brings with it this important question: can Europe hold its pre-eminence in all fields?

Will Europe become what it is in reality -- that is, a little promontory on the continent of Asia?

Or will it remain what it seems -- that is, the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body?

In order to make clear the strict necessity of this alternative, let me develop here a kind of basic theorem.

Consider a map of the world. On this planisphere are all the habitable lands. The whole is divided into regions, and in each of these regions there is a certain density of population, a certain quality of men. In each of these regions, also, there are corresponding natural resources -- a more or less fertile soil, a more or less rich substratum, a more or less watered terrain, which may be more or less easily developed for transport, etc.

All these characteristics make it possible, at any period, to classify the regions we are speaking of, so that at any given time the situation on the earth may be defined by a formula showing the inequalities between the inhabited regions of its surface.

At each moment, the history of the next moment will depend on this given inequality.

Let us now examine, not our theoretical classification, but the one that actually prevailed in the world until recently. We notice a striking fact, which we take too much for granted:

Small though it be, Europe has for centuries figured at the head of the list. In spite of her limited extent -- and although the richness of her soil is not out of the ordinary -- she dominates the picture. By what miracle? Certainly the miracle must lie in the high quality of her population. That quality must compensate for the smaller number of men, of square miles, of tons or ore, found in Europe. In one scale put the empire of India and in the other the United Kingdom: the scale with the smaller weight tilts down!

That is an extraordinary upset in equilibrium. But its consequences are still more so: they will shortly allow us to foresee a gradual change in the opposite direction.

We suggested just now that the quality of her men must be the determining factor in Europe's superiority. I cannot analyze this quality in detail; but from a summary examination I would say that a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism...are the most specifically active characteristics of the European psyche.

A single example of that spirit, an example of the highest order and of the very first importance, is Greece -- since the whole Mediterranean littoral must be counted in Europe. Smyrna and Alexandria are as much a part of Europe as Athens and Marseilles. Greece founded geometry. It was a mad undertaking: we are still arguing about the possibility of such a folly.

What did it take to bring about that fantastic creation? Consider that neither the Egyptians nor the Chinese nor the Chaldeans nor the Hindus managed it. Consider what a fascinating adventure it was, a conquest a thousand times richer and actually far more poetic than that of the Golden Fleece. No sheepskin is worth the golden thigh of Pythagoras.

This was an enterprise requiring gifts that, when found together, are usually the most incompatible. It required argonauts of the mind, tough pilots who refused to be either lost in their thoughts or distracted by their impressions. Neither the frailty of the premises that supported them, nor the infinite number and subtlety of the inferences they explored could dismay them. They were as though equidistant from the inconsistent Negro and the indefinite fakir. They accomplished the extremely delicate and improbable feat of adapting common speech to precise reasoning; they analyzed the most complex combinations of motor and visual functions, and found that these corresponded to certain linguistic and grammatical properties; they trusted in words to lead them through space like far-seeing blind men. And space itself became, from century to century, a richer and more surprising creation, as thought gained possession of itself and had more confidence in the marvelous system of reason and in the original intuition which had endowed it with such incompatible instruments as definitions, axioms, lemmas, theorems, problems, porisms, etc.

I should need a whole book to treat the subject properly. I wanted merely to indicate in a few words one of the characteristic inventions of the European genius. This example brings me straight back to my thesis.

I have claimed that the imbalance maintained for so long in Europe's favor was, by its own reaction, bound to change by degrees into an imbalance in the opposite direction. That is what I called by the ambitious name of basic theorem.

How is this proposition to be proved? I take the same example, that of the geometry of the Greeks; and I ask the reader to consider the consequences of this discipline through the ages. We see it gradually, very slowly but very surely, assuming such authority that all research, all the ways of acquiring knowledge tend inevitably to borrow its rigorous procedure, its scrupulous economy of "matter," its automatic generalizations, its subtle methods, and that infinite discretion which authorizes the wildest audacity. Modern science was born of this education in the grand style.

But once born, once tested and proved by its practical applications, our science became a means of power, a means of physical domination, a creator of material wealth, an apparatus for exploiting the resources of the whole planet -- ceasing to be an "end in itself" and an artistic activity. Knowledge, which was a consumer value, became an exchange value. The utility of knowledge made knowledge a commodity, no longer desired by a few distinguished amateurs but by Everybody.

This commodity, then, was to be turned out in more and more manageable or consumable forms; it was to be distributed to a more and more numerous clientele; it was to become an article of commerce, an article, in short, that can be imitated and produced almost anywhere.

Result: the inequality that once existed between the regions of the world as regards the mechanical arts, the applied sciences, the scientific instruments of war or peace -- an inequality on which Europe's predominance was based -- is tending gradually to disappear.

So, the classification of the habitable regions of the world is becoming one in which gross material size, mere statistics and figures (e.g., population, area, raw materials) finally and alone determine the rating of the various sections of the globe.

And so the scales that used to tip in our favor, although we appeared the lighter, are beginning to lift us gently, as though we had stupidly shifted to the other side the mysterious excess that was ours. We have foolishly made force proportional to mass!

This coming phenomenon, moreover, may be connected with another to be found in every nation: I mean the diffusion of culture, and its acquisition by ever larger categories of individuals.

An attempt to predict the consequences of such diffusion, or to find whether it will or not inevitably bring on decadence, would be a delightfully complicated problem in intellectual physics.

The charm of the problem for the speculative mind proceeds, first, from its resemblance to the physical fact of diffusion and, next, from a sudden transformation into a profound difference when the thinker remembers that his primary object is men not molecules.

A drop of wine falling into water barely colors it, and tends to disappear after showing as a pink cloud. That is the physical fact. But suppose now that some time after it has vanished, gone back to limpidity, we should see, here and there in our glass -- which seemed once more to hold pure water -- drops of wine forming, dark and pure -- what a surprise!...

This phenomenon of Cana is not impossible in intellectual and social physics. We then speak of genius, and contrast it with diffusion.

Just now we are considering a curious balance that worked in inverse ratio to weight. Then we saw a liquid system pass as though spontaneously from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from intimate mingling to clear separation.... These paradoxical images give the simplest and most practical notion of the role played in the World by what -- for five or ten thousand years -- has been called Mind.

But can the European Mind -- or at least its most precious content -- be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general spread of technology, all of which presage a deminutio capitis for Europe...must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening conspiracy of things?

Perhaps in seeking that freedom we may create it. But in order to seek it, we must for a time give up considering groups, and study the thinking individual in his struggle for a personal life against his life in society.

[Source: "The Crisis of the Mind" was written at the request of John Middleton Murry. "La Crise de l'esprit" originally appeared in English, in two parts, in The Athenaeum (London), April 11 and May 2, 1919. The French text was published the same year in the August number of La Nouvelle Revue Française. (From History and Politics, translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, vol. 10, pp. 23-36.)]

---Taken from: The History Guide(c) Steven Kreis - 2000

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. By W.G. Sebald

2011-12-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001. By W.G. Sebald, translated by Iain Galbraith. Hamish Hamilton; 240 pages; £14.99. To be published in America in April by Random House; $25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk---

Source: The Economist (c)

W.G. Sebald’s poems

Placing words

Few know that the Britain-based German prose master was also a poet

---

SINCE W.G. Sebald’s sudden death in 2001, the cult of the Britain-based German writer has spread fast. Known for his exquisite prose works that, in their combination of the real with the fictional, push at the limits of what novels can be, he is considered one of the foremost German writers of his generation. He was also a poet.

“Across the Land and the Water” brings together a selection of the poems he never published in book form, if at all. Translated by Iain Galbraith, the volume sketches out a life on the move. Stretching over 37 years, the volume includes poems that Mr Galbraith found jotted down in Sebald’s archives on scraps of paper, others written on menus, theatre programmes or headed paper from hotels. They emerge on trains or at the “unmanned/station in Wolfenbüttel”, Sebald covertly observing fellow commuters as he evokes the differing landscapes shuttling past.

Unlike his epic, vertiginous prose, these poems are often condensed and sparse. And yet they contain many of the themes that would obsess Sebald throughout his writing life. The poet spent his later years in Britain, working at the Universities of Manchester and East Anglia. Preoccupied with memory, desire and the ghostliness of objects, Sebald can evoke in one poem the faded glamour of “a forgotten era/of fountains and chandeliers” or a “turn-of-the-century/frock-coat and taffeta bow” while in another he will speak of an “ugly/tower block” or “moribund supermarkets”. This shift between differing eras could seem forced or artificial. And yet Sebald manages such movement with a lightness of touch. Indeed, the driving force behind his work is a search for the past, for the forgotten or overlooked: “I wish to inquire/Into the whereabouts of the dead.”

As in “Austerlitz”, his 2001 work of prose fiction, this search for the dead circles around the occurrence that haunts Sebald’s writing, and which often prompts him to write in the first place—the Holocaust. In one short poem, “Somewhere”, for example, the opening line “behind Türkenfeld” becomes, with the help of Mr Galbraith’s introduction, a far more specific and terrifying location than Sebald’s title suggests. Along with being a town the then eight-year-old Sebald would frequently pass on his way to Munich in 1952, Türkenfeld was one of the 94 sub-camps of Dachau, and a train station on the notorious “Blutbahn” (blood track). Even in a seemingly simple six-line poem, the sudden weight of historical events can be felt.

This broad collection also shows Sebald’s writing in a less melancholy light. He may speak of “the pain my happy/memories bring” but can also, in one of the two poems originally written in English, write playfully of a young woman in New York describing how much she loves the air-conditioning in her office as opposed to the summer heat: “There,/she said, I am/happy like an/opened up oyster/on a bed of ice.” His poetry can refer to such heavyweights as Goethe or Freud, but it also takes inspiration from the Brothers Grimm or the films of Alain Resnais.

Mr Galbraith does a good job translating these shifting tones and influences. However, it is a shame that this volume does not include Sebald’s original poems in the German. Concerned with the transitory or the ghostly, it is easy to suspect that no one translation could pin Sebald down. Sebald himself seemed aware of this: “If you knew every cranny/of my heart/you would yet be ignorant.” And yet as these poems show, his talent lay in making the experience of such ignorance delightful.

Hovhaness Documentary from 1984

2011-12-25T16:03:00.000-08:00

A Documentary on American composer Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) from KTCS Seattle in 3 parts.

"All the young men want to be the Stravinsky of the next 50 years" "...why aren´t just yourself"...- Alan Hovhaness

Part 1

...
Part 2

...
Part 3

Interview by Michelle Simpson Alemán

2011-12-17T19:26:00.000-08:00

Talking about the things what “cannot beexpressed through science or religion”.

Interview with the Panamanian contemporarypoet, Edilberto Gonzalez-Trejos

At first sight, heappears to us smiling, enthusiastic, genuine...We imagine that it is part ofthe 'must be' of poets. His humble and sincere way to communicate and interactwith the 'great family of the letters' based in the Central American isthmus,has earned him the arduous responsibility of being a sort of 'axis' that heldtogether the literary and artistic movement in Panama.

'Baptized' by those whoappreciate and admire him with the affectionate nickname of 'Songo', thecontemporary artist, Edilberto Gonzalez-Trejos, is the kind of man who prefersto say the “(...) great truths (…)” that reach the soul; those which cannot be“(...) described in a novel or rationalized by the means of an essay (...)”through poetry.

We met the author of thecollection of poems entitled 'dioses de bolsillo' (pocket gods), during the recent “Ars Amandi” International PoetryFestival Panama 2011, and concerning to the presentation of his new book, weasked him to share with us his “(...) likes and dislikes (...)”.

Michelle Simpson Aleman:When and how was born Edilberto GonzalezTrejos, 'the poet'?

Edilberto Gonzalez Trejos: It has been said that poetry picks you, youdon´t pick it. Thus, being poetry rather a sensitivity towards life, a way ofseeing things and reacting to them -“there are no other worlds yet there areother eyes”- this concern has always been within my soul. I wrote my firstpoems in a conscious way when I was 12 years old. The rest has been a constantevolution.

M.S.A.: How would you describe your contribution (whichyou have made or wish to do) to contemporary Latin American poetry ingeneral, and Panamanian in particular?

E.G.T.: I just long to add my vision, my poetic voice, to the alreadyexisting choir of poetic voices, of which we are all legatees.

M.S.A.: Does your poetry have any political /ideological contents?

E.G.T.: Nothing lacks politics nor ideology. However, withinmy search I avoid the pamphlet as well as the easy slogans. Let the readersfind, according to their own prism, whatever catches their attention.

M.S.A.: As it was for the American poet Ezra Pound,is your poetic creation a reflection of the way that you question yourselfabout the reality around you?

E.G.T.: And I add, it is about observation, meditation, andsometimes -once in a while-, answer to the reality around and within me.

M.S.A.: Tell me about any poet (s) you admire andwhy?

E.G.T.: Because of their ethics and discourse, T.S. Eliot,Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, great truth tellers. Those who areable to express what cannot be expressed by the means science or religion,through poetry. Those who are able to put into words what cannot be describedin a novel or rationalized in a essay with their verses, for example, EdgarBailey, Octavio Paz, Enrique Lihn, just to name a few.

M.S.A.: What do you think of international poetryfestivals? Tell us about your experience in the “Ars Amandi” InternationalPoetry Festival 2011, held in Panama City.

E.G.T.: A poetry festival is a 'flame' that deserves to be'stoked' so the 'fire' keeps alive. I yearn for the day when the whole countrywill be 'set ablaze' in the 'flame of Poetry, Art and Culture', and never putout that 'fire'. It has been two consecutive years collaborating in a brotherlyway as a member of the organizing committee, and we have obtained an enrichingexperience.

M.S.A.: You are the president of a literaryfoundation (FIAT LUX), what is the objective of this kind of culturalorganizations?

E.G.T.: In my particular case, FIAT LUX is a motto of life(let there be light), very Franciscan, that means to be the light where thereis darkness, to give wherever there are needs. With this organization we aredeveloping two specific tasks: first, the San Francisco de la Montaña Festival,in the province of Veraguas, bringing education through arts and culture in aregion of extreme poverty of Panama (this province is located in thecentre-west of the country); at the same time we celebrate a Festival of Artsas well as a meeting between the 'telluric' and 'urban'. Afterwards, (but nofor it less important), to promote Panamanian literature in various book fairs,so far we have had two successful participations in the Buenos AiresInternational Book Fair (Argentina).

M.S.A.: Concerning of your new book: 'dioses debolsillo' (pocket gods), how do youthink will be welcomed by lovers of poetry?

EGT: If you love poetry, you will love 'dioses de bolsillo' (pocket gods).

M.S.A.: Talking about poetry it is almost impossibleto finalize, but, what would be your last phrase on the subject you are mostpassionate about?

E.G.T.: In the beginning there was the Word, and in the end,its echo in our ears.

On Thursday October 27^th,at 7:00 p.m., those attending the Multipurpose Room of the National LibraryErnesto J. Castillero, witnessed the 'mystical' ceremony through which 'Songo'(the poet) will try to fill pockets and hearts with something else than poetry.

2 poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

2011-12-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

Part Four: Time and Eternity
XLIX

They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars,
Like petals from a rose,
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers goes.

They perished in the seamless grass,--
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face.

---

The Only News I know

The only news I know
Is bulletins all day
From immortality:

The only shows I see
Tomorrow and today.
Perchance eternity.

The only one I meet
Is God, the only street
Existence; this traversed.

If other news there be
Or admirabler show,
I’ll tell it you.

2 poems by Seamus Heaney

2011-12-03T19:27:00.001-08:00

A Dog Was Crying To-Night In Wicklow Also
In memory of Donatus Nwoga

When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn't want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts
And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings each
morning.
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they'd be back in the house of life.
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).
But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted of the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.
And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who'd overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell. "Human beings,"
he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
"Human beings want death to last forever."
Then Chukwu saw the people's souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roosts nor trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

-===

A Kite for Aibhín
After "L'Aquilone" by Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912)

Air from another life and time and place,
Pale blue heavenly air is supporting
A white wing beating high against the breeze,
And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon
All of us there trooped out
Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,
I take my stand again, halt opposite
Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,
Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.
And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,
Lifts itself, goes with the wind until
It rises to loud cheers from us below.
Rises, and my hand is like a spindle
Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower
Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher
The longing in the breast and planted feet
And gazing face and heart of the kite flier
Until string breaks and—separate, elate—
The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

So long Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

2011-11-29T17:42:00.001-08:00

Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Ruth Stone in Vermont in September 2008. Ruth was almost blind already but knew many of her poems by heart, and recited (or sang) several poems in this short film (prompted occasionally by editor Neil Astley) from What Loves Comes To: 'In an Iridescent Time', 'Orchard', 'The Talking Fish', 'The Excuse', 'Advice', 'I Have Three Daughters' (which she sings), 'Metamorphosis', 'Bargain, 'Mantra' and 'The Season'.

Sources:
YouTube
Bloodaxe Books

For whom the bell tolls

2011-11-25T17:08:00.001-08:00

a poem (No man is an island) by John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

These famous words by John Donne were not originally written as a poem - the passage is taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and is prose. The words of the original passage are as follows:

John DonneMeditation 17Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

"No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee...."

Reginald Gibbons on Lezama Lima

2011-11-20T09:43:00.001-08:00

“THE MUSIC OF POETRY”Source: Center for the Writing Arts | Northwestern University---

My friend and former teacher, James Irby, provides an analysis of a poem by the Cuban poet and writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) at the web site La Habana Elegante (http://www.habanaelegante.com/Spring_Summer_2010/Dicha_Irby.html). The poem is Lezama Lima’s “Oda a Julián del Casal,” a Cuban poet (1863-1893) who for his poetic innovations must have appealed to Lezama Lima, himself one of the most original writers of post-revolutionary Cuba—and one who suffered for his dissent from the Cuban regime.

(The text of the poem and a recording of it by Lezama Lima himself are at the the audio and video archive site La Palabra Virtual, http://www.palabravirtual.com/index.php?ir=ver_voz1.php&wid=565&p=Jos%E9%20Lezama%20Lima&t=Oda%20a%20Juli%E1n%20del%20Casal&o=Jos%E9%20Lezama%20Lima

In Irby’s introductory paragraphs, he writes of the poem’s “use of certain verbal motifs that recur and undergo variations or recombinations, some of them to return in hauntingly musical patterns—either single words or whole phrases—that extend [...] over the entire poem. (By ‘musical’ here, I don’t mean ‘pleasant in sound’ but rather ‘rich in modulated semantic resonances.’) For example, the motif of the color green….”

The wonderfully compact phrase “rich in modulated semantic resonances” makes me think of T. S. Eliot’s definition of “the music of poetry” in his essay of that title (in On Poetry and Poets). Eliot writes that “the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning” (21); “it would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious” (24); he states that his “purpose here is to insist that a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it” (26); and “I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure” (32).

A crucial link between music and meaning is implied by Eliot this way: “the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist” (23). The sounds of language—the music of poetry—can produce a meaning of words that lies beyond the definitions of the words—not a specialized or technical meaning but a meaning that concerns the truth of our inner lives. The truth, insofar as we can grasp it, of both our lived experience and our imagination. So that we will not recur within ourselves to a ready-made truth or falsehood that is easier for us to make use of. And this is what makes the music of poetry most interesting—when it produces meaning, when it moves thought and feeling forward, when it isn’t simply making them “pleasant in sound.”

Eliot’s essay is dated 1942, and Lezama Lima’s poem was written in 1963; that is, the first in the midst of bitterest, destructive wartime and suffering—and the second in the early years of a revolution that would sweep out a corrupt regime, reform education, distribute social services, and all too soon would begin imprisoning dissenters and homosexuals and replacing capitalist economic social strata with Communist ones… Apart from the historical and temperamental and artistic differences between these two poets, there are the differences among poets who now, as in those times, for aesthetic reasons would disagree with Eliot or prefer to use a poetic manner very different from Lezama’s. Altogether, the variety of poetic approaches to language is enormous. Nevertheless it’s hard for me to find a more fruitful starting place than Eliot’s essay (even though it’s not a thorough consideration of the topic) if I want to think about what the “music” of poetry is and about how to read it and how to read for it, and how to write from inside, or alongside, or on the backs of, musical elements of language and poetry. (I can’t find the right metaphor for how this works; and only a metaphor is going to be able to suggest the idea). This is Eliot’s “frontier,” where the relationship of words and meaning is elusive and may be musical, or rather where the musicality of language is what brings the elusive meaning into view.) (Sorry—another metaphor.)

One of the ways in which language proliferates connotations and poetry proliferates meaning is through what Irby calls language that is “rich in modulated semantic resonances”—which is implied in Eliot’s comments about the music of structure and the music of the secondary meanings of words. The music of poetry—like music itself, which is “the art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, rhythm, and timbre” (American Heritage College Dictionary)—includes (among other things) repetition that adds meaning each time it occurs. Each time, the repetition is also a variation: of a sound (in which case two words containing similar sounds can also, at best, be linked in thought), of a linguistic rhythm, of a word-root, of a syntactic feature or gesture, and of a word itself. (Irby analyzes, among other things, Lezama’s use of particular repeated words that keep accumulating more and more meaning; everyone who reads poetry with poetic attention is used to noticing repetitions of this and other kinds—they’re part of the sheer pleasure of reading, of feeling one is being led with the richness of the poetic use of language into thoughts, emotions, perceptions, arguments, connections….)

But poets don’t all play the same instrument, nor have the same sense of melody or rhythm or harmony (all these are metaphors), or even the same musical (poetic) scales (and that’s another). So the music of poetry produces, like language itself, an infinite number of possibilities, of new relationships between words and ideas and feelings. This is true even of poetry of the past and the deep past, because this aspect of poetry is ancient and apparently universal, and also because every reader’s individual encounters with poems of any place or time are events in that reader’s experience and history as a reader, as someone who listens to language for the sake of everything that can be found there, and who then adds each such experience to his or her repertoire of response.

~~~

Recently a doctoral student in neurolinguistics wrote to ask me if I could suggest to her any readings about how, from a literary point of view, connotation works. (She is researching how beginning readers have trouble picking up the connotations of words, and why—so she can help design more effective ways of teaching literacy.) “Connotation” would be the same as, or a portion of, Eliot’s “secondary meanings of words.” In communicating with her, I was reminded for the thousandth time that what I take for granted in the experience of reading—because I have been reading poetry for so long—can remain hidden from, or rather, as yet undisclosed to (an important distinction!), those who are not used to reading for precisely the ways in which poetry, as opposed to more utilitarian utterances, makes meaning.

This is true even for those who are themselves highly educated in other ways of meaning-making that are almost entirely “representational” (or “referential” or “ideational”). And it’s a very old story—in the best sense, in that the poetic ways of making meaning are as old as language itself. But life since the industrial revolution has greatly changed our relationship to language, and continues to do so. It has drained away some of our experiential and mostly unconscious responsiveness to language, because as we grow up in a media culture like that of the U. S., we lack the experience of learning how to listen to “poetry” in the largest sense. And I am convinced that such experience depends on hearing living voices talk and sing and tell stories and recite poems, even bad ones, and on reading for oneself. Meanwhile, the experience of hearing the electronically transmitted voice often—maybe not always—can’t give us what we need if we are to hear language fully. There might even be some sort of disconnect in us, because of our evolution as linguistic beings, between our evolved abilities with language and our processing of language we receive through electronic media. Certainly there’s a marked failure in us of reality-testing with regard to mediated language—this seems proven by political talk and absurd entertainment.

Why should that be? Is it because in our formation there’s such a huge amount of forced language training that conditions our language abilities (which means a conditioning of our ability to think) by means of advertising, popular media, political discourse, and other saturations of our shared language-world? We get very little exposure to language that has been intuited and worked (really, it’s both) to utmost meaningfulness for the sake of thought and feeling; instead, it’s for the sake of persuasion and of the fashions in ready-made ideas and emotions.

We’re vulnerable to this. We experience a deep human necessity for the “interpersonal” function of language: the ways in which, simply by talking and listening, we simply are with each other. In everyday life, we are all affected by some of the potent but often unnoticed meaning-making techniques of rhetoric—techniques that poetry sometimes uses, too. We can’t help responding, most often unconsciously, to them. They are used against us—in commercial and political speech, and in all too much of the American genius for turning news into a sorry kind of entertainment for the sake of the pleasures, sad to say, of opinion, grievance, fear, gullibility, and harangues aimed at our impulse to submit; and to stimulate our need to belong to a group; we also have an ugly fascination with the suffering and death of others when it is presented as spectacle (whether the scale is intimate or the spectacle is elaborate). Film of murder, sex porn of bondage and pain, big-screen torture, “horror,” mayhem and death. (Does an appetite for film horror suggest that something’s wrong with the response to real horror?)

The argument for permitting all of that is free speech, which I take very seriously. But free speech is not in itself a path to freedom of mind, that is, freedom of thought and feeling. And I suppose I have been cataloging, above, the opposite of a kind of freedom of thought and feeling such as I chase after in the music of poetry.

Poetry, and certain kinds of fiction and drama, too—these are where the luxury of languageis: in a meaningfulness not only of human expression but also of the expressiveness itself, the “music of poetry,” and what I would dare to call a kind of human freedom in such complex meaningfulness. It’s the music of poetry that creates an opening amidst the rigidities of opinion, the hysteria of news “cycles,” the authority of fear and punishment, the mesmerizing spectacle of violence, the seductiveness of trend and fashion, the perennial danger of giving too much power to those who would like to limit ours, and who may say anything to get it.

The impulse to make art, and the impulse to respond to it, may have begun, millennia ago, in belief and submission, but also began in thanks, meditation, celebration, and mourning. (Something in the techniques of poetry allows it, like music, to be used sometimes in the service of horrible causes; but this is rare enough, and can be thought through.)

Poetry has always been one of the sources of linguistic invention; the antiquity of its inventiveness is precisely what brings us back inside the creative spaces of language and helps us move away from the distractions of language that works by narrowing our feelings and ideas.

It’s a measure, in me, of the intense political insanity of our times, the incessant whipping of ignorance toward anger at what it doesn’t want to believe, the free-form denial of fact, the flaunting of reason—it’s a measure, in me, of all that, that I hear myself thinking that I need to account for every kind of hateful use of language, even as I am trying to look at a use of language that is creative, pleasurable, complex, in which words may fail “though meanings still exist.”

Lezama Lima’s poem to Julián del Casal begins, “Déjenlo, verdeante, que se vuelva.”

It’s a musical line: the repeated sound of the consonant “v,” the repeated sounds of the vowel “e”, the two verbs neither of which is indicative (the imperative, “Déjenlo,” and the subjunctive “vuelva”). It is an intensely grammatical line, so to speak. And something in the repeated sounds and in the verbs enacts a great urgency. “Let him come back while greening” that is, while either becoming green (metaphorically, of course) or turning something else green, like plants in the spring. Let him come back as if bringing with him his own force of spring—perhaps a metaphor for his returning at the height of his creativity, or at the height of his personal charisma, or both. As if his force of green could be as renewable as a season. The ideas of “green” and “returning” are linked by the repeated “v” in the two words “verdeante” and “vuelva.” The line combines their meaning and thus transfers the unfailing return of spring to the unfailing return… not of a man who is dead (we wouldn’t accept that) but of the idea of poetry, the urgency of it, the meaning-making it accomplishes.

And as happens in poetry, which is a repository of thought about itself as well as about us and the world, the poem now enacts something it does not mention, which is that when the ode to Julián del Casal is read or heard, then Lezama Lima too comes back in his greenness. It’s important to listen to Casal—and to Lezama Lima’s words about Casal. Yes, let him come back! Let the Cuban poets be heard… making music that will outlive them and their worlds. Well, that’s a commonplace, I suppose. Yet for myself, I can’t measure how precious it is to be able to stand inside music of poetry, and how amazing it is that we can do so for centuries and millenia after a poet has died.

~ ~ ~

Footnote: James Irby, whose piece on Lezama Lima led me to write this little essay, long ago directed my undergraduate senior thesis on the great first novel of Miguel Ángel Asturias, El señor presidente(1933, but not published until 1946), which is a satire on dictatorship, in the form of a surrealist/anthropological/linguistic carnival of horror, dark humor, suffering and anger. (I just did a quick online check, and it seems that the only translation into English may be, even now, the horrifically bad one published many years ago by Frances Partridge. Don’t bother with it, if you can’t read Spanish. It ignores just about everything important about the language and vision of the book, and thus misrepresents the whole gesture of this work, which responds to indigenous culture and is a tremendously inventive way of responding to history. It too is filled, unlike most novels, with the music of poetry.)

Lacan and the Pre-Socratics - Alain Badiou

2011-11-20T09:32:00.001-08:00

Source: lacan.com----

It is always perilous to approach Lacan from a philosophical point of view. For he is an anti-philosopher, and no one is entitled to take this designation lightly.

Considering him in relation to the Pre-Socratics is a still more risky undertaking. References to these thinkers in Lacan's work are rare, scattered, and above all mediated by something other than themselves. There is, moreover, the risk of losing one's thought in a latent confrontation between Lacan and Heidegger, which has all the attractions of a rhetorical impasse.

Having arrived at this perspective on the scope of Lacan's texts, one should not lose sight of the fact that it is a localization, the disinterested examination of a symptom.

The revelatory power of Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics is secret - I would almost say encoded. Three thinkers are invoked: Empedocles, Heraclitus and Parmenides. The invocation is itself caught up in four principal problems. The first can be formulated as follows: to what originary impulse of thought is psychoanalysis the heir? The question reaches far beyond the point where, with Descartes, we enter the modern epoch of the subject, or what Lacan calls the subject of science. Of course, psychoanalysis could appear only within the element of this modernity. But as a general figure of the will to thought (vouloir-penser), it enigmatically bears a confrontation with what is most originary in our site. Here it is a question of knowing what is at stake when we determine the place of psychoanalysis in the strictly Western history of thought, in which psychoanalysis marks a rupture, and which is not at all constituted by but, rather, punctuated by philosophy.

The second problem concerns the relation - which is decisive for Lacan - between psychoanalysis and Plato. Driven by rivalry and contestation, this relation is unstable. Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics clarify the principle behind this instability.

The third problem is, of course, that of providing an exact delimitation of Lacan's relation to Heidegger. It is to Heidegger that we owe the reactivation of the Pre-Socratics as the forgotten source from which our destiny took flight. If it is not a matter here of 'comparing' Lacan to Heidegger - which would be meaningless - the theme of origins alone compels us to search for some measure of what led one to cite and translate the other.

Finally, the fourth problem concerns the polemical dimension of psychoanalysis. With respect to what primordial division of thought does psychoanalysis make its stand? Can one inscribe psychoanalysis within an insistent conflict that long preceded it? There is no doubt that Lacan here makes use of the canonical opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus. Lacan opts, quite explicitly, for the latter.

Freud's work was a new foundation, a rupture. But it was also the product of an orientation within thought that rests on divisions and territories that pre-existed it.

Lacan's references to the Pre-Socratics thus attest - and herein lies their difficulty - not so much to what is truly revolutionary in psychoanalysis as to what inscribes it within dialectical continuities of what we might call continental reach.

1

Those of Lacan's psychoanalytic discoveries that can be made to enter into resonance with the Pre-Socratics can be grouped around two themes: the primacy of discourse and the function of love in the truth-process.

On several occasions Lacan praises the innocent audacity of the Pre-Socratics, who identified the powers of discourse with the grasping of being [la prise sur l'être]. Thus, in the seminar on transference, he writes: 'Beyond Plato, in the background, we have this attempt, grandiose in its innocence -this hope residing in the first philosophers, called physicists - of finding an ultimate grasp on the real under the guarantee of discourse, which is in the end their instrument for gauging experience." [1]

How are we to characterize this peculiar balancing of the 'grandiose' and the 'innocent'? The grandiose aspect lies in the conviction that the question of the Real is commensurable with that of language; the innocence is in not having carried this conviction as far as its true principle, which is mathemati-zation. You will recall that Lacan holds mathematization to be the key to any thinkable relation to the Real. He never varied on this point. In the seminar Encore, he says, without the slightest note of caution: 'Mathematization alone reaches a real.' [2] Without mathematization, without the grasp of the letter (la prise de la lettre), the Real remains captive to a mundane reality driven by a phantasm.

Is this to say that the Pre-Socratic physicists remain within the bounds of the mythic narrative which delivers us the phantasm of the world? No, for they outline a genuine rupture with traditional knowledge, albeit one innocent with regard to the matheme.

The latter point is essential. Lacan does not conceive of the Pre-Socratics as the founders of a tradition, or as a lost tradition in themselves. A tradition is what 'tra-dicts' (fait tra-diction) the reality of the phantasm of the world. In placing their trust in the pure supremacy of discourse, the Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge.

This is why their writings prefigure mathematization, although the latter is not present in its literal form. The premonition appears in its paradoxical inversion, the use of poetic form. Far from opposing, as Heidegger did, the Pre-Socratic poem to Plato's matheme, Lacan has the powerful idea that poetry was the closest thing to mathematization available to the Pre-Socratics. Poetic form is the innocence of the grandiose. For Lacan, it even goes beyond the explicit content of statements, because it anticipates the regularity of the matheme. In Encore, he writes:

Fortunately, Parmenides actually wrote poems. Doesn't he use linguistic devices - the linguist's testimony takes precedence here - that closely resemble mathematical articulation, alternation after succession, framing after alternation? It is precisely because he was a poet that Parmenides says what he has to say to us in the least stupid of manners. Otherwise, the idea that being is and that nonbeing is not, I don't know what that means to you, but personally I find that stupid. [3]

This text indeed registers an innocence in its trace of stupidity. There is something unreal in Parmenides' proposition on being, in the sense of a still unthought attachment to phantasmatic reality. But the poetic form contains a grandiose anticipation of the matheme. Alternation, succession, framing: the figures of poetic rhetoric are branded, as if by an unconscious lightning flash, with the features of a mathematization to come; through poetry, Parmenides attests to the fact that the grasp of thought upon the Real can be established only by the regulated power of the letter. It is for this reason that the Pre-Socratics should be praised: they wished to free thought from any figure that involves the simple transmission of knowledge. They entrusted thought to the aleatory care of the letter, a letter that remains poetic for temporary lack of mathematics.

The Pre-Socratics' second foundational innovation was to pose the power of love as a relation of being wherein lies the function of truth. The seminar on transference is, of course, our guiding reference here. Take the following passage: "Phaedraos tells us that Love, the first of the gods imagined by the Goddess of Parmenides, and which Jean Beaufret in his book on Parmenides identifies more accurately, I believe, with truth than with any other function, truth in its radical structure..." [4] In fact, Lacan credits the Pre-Socratics with binding love to the question of the truth in two ways.

First of all, they were able to see that love, as Lacan himself says, is what brings being face to face with itself; this is expressed in Empedocles' description of love as the 'power of cohesion or harmony'. Secondly, and above all, the Pre-Socratics pointed out that it is in love that the Two is unleashed, the enigma of the difference between the sexes. Love is the appearance of a non-relation, the sexual non-relation, taken to the extent that any supreme relation is punctured or undone. This puncturing, this undoing of the One, is what aligns love with the question of the truth. The fact that we are dealing here with what brings into being a non-relation in place of a relation permits us also to say that knowledge is that part of the truth which is experienced in the figure of hate. Hate is, along with love and ignorance, the very passion of the truth, to the extent that it proceeds as non-relation imagined as relation.

Lacan emblematically ascribes to Empedocles this power of truth as the torsion that relates love to hate. Empedocles saw that the question of our being, and of what can be stated of its truth, presupposes the recognition of a non-relation, an original discord. If one ceases to misconstrue it according to some scheme of dialectical antagonisms, the love/hate tension is one of the possible names of this discord.

Freud, as Lacan emphasizes, had recognized in Empedocles something close to the antinomy of drives. In the 'Rome Report', Lacan mentions 'the express reference of (Freud's) new conception to the conflict of the two principles to which the alternation of universal life was subjected by Empedocles of Agrigentum in the fifth century BC'. [5] If we allow that what is at stake here is access to being in the shape of a truth, we can say that what Empedocles identifies in the pairing of love and hate, philia and neikos, is something akin to the excess of the passion of access.

Lacan, one suspects, recalibrates this reference in such a way as to put increasing emphasis on discord, on non-relation as the key to truth. To this end, he fleetingly pairs Empedocles and Heraclitus. Empedocles isolates the two terms through which the necessity of a non-relation is inscribed; Empedocles names the two passions of access, as deployed by a truth. Heraclitus sustains the primacy of discord; he is the thinker of non-relation's chronological priority over relation. Take, for example, the following lines on the death drive in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis": 'a vital dehiscence that is constitutive of man, and which makes unthinkable the idea of an environment that is preformed for him, a "negative" libido that enables the Heraclitean notion of Discord, which the Ephesian believed to be prior to harmony, to shine once more'. [6] In Lacan's work, the negative libido is constantly connected to Heraclitus. In short, the connections between love, hate, truth and knowledge were established by Empedocles and then radicalized by Heraclitus, the originary thinker of discord, of non-relation.

A further proof of the Pre-Socratics' anticipation of the death drive lies in the consequences that can be drawn from their writings regarding God. Since the God of Empedocles knows nothing of hate, and therefore nothing of the nodal point of excess for the passion of access, one would therefore expect such a God's access to truth to be correspondingly restricted. This is precisely what Lacan, adducing Aristotle's commentary in support, attributes to Empedocles in Encore:

There was someone named Empedocles - as if by chance, Freud uses him from time to time like a corkscrew - of whose work we know but three lines, but Aristotle draws the consequences of them very well when he enunciates that, in the end, God was the most ignorant of all beings according to Empedocles, because he knew nothing of hatred.... If God does not know hatred, according to Empedocles, it is clear that he knows less about it than mortals. [7]

For the startling consequences that can be drawn from these considerations of God's ignorance, I refer the reader to François Regnault's marvellous book Dieu est inconscient. [8]

What matters here, however, is that we observe that, after noting the poetic anticipation of the free functioning of the matheme, Lacan credits the Pre-Socratics with an intuition that has far-reaching implications for the resources of truth inherent in sexual discord.

2

Let us turn to the problem of stabilizing the relationship between psycho-analysis and Platonism.

In Heidegger's strategy, the Pre-Socratics were deployed largely in order to deconstruct Plato and, as a side-effect, to plot the emergence of the system of metaphysics. Does Lacan conduct a similar operation? The answer is complex.

Lacan never pursues purely philosophical objectives. His intention, then, is not to dissect Plato. Rather, Lacan maintains an ambiguous rivalry with Plato. For Plato and psychoanalysis have at least two conceptual undertakings in common: thinking love as transference, and exploring the sinuous trajectory of the One. On these two points, it matters a great deal to Lacan to establish that what he called the 'Freudian way' is different from the Platonic.

In the end, however, it remains the case that Lacan summons the Pre-Socratics to his aid while struggling to mark the boundary between psycho-analysis and Platonism. And it is also clear that the central wager in this attempt at demarcation once more concerns the theme of non-relation, of discord, of alterity without concept; and, consequently, concerns the delinking of knowledge and truth.

Lacan attributes to Plato a desire for being to be completed by knowledge, and therefore an identification (itself entirely a product of mastery) of knowledge with truth. The Idea, in Plato's sense, would be an equivocal point which is simultaneously a norm of knowledge and a reason d'être. For Lacan, such a point can only be imaginary. It is like a cork plugging the hiatus between knowledge and truth. It brings a fallacious peace to the original discord. Lacan holds that Plato's standing declines in the light of Empedocles' and Heraclitus' propositions on the primacy of discord over harmony.

It is therefore certain that, for Lacan as for Heidegger, something has been forgotten or lost between the Pre-Socratics and Plato. It is not, however, the meaning of being. It is, rather, the meaning of non-relation, of the first separation or gap. Indeed, what has been lost is thought's recognition of the difference between the sexes as such.

One could also say that between the Pre-Socratics and Plato, a change takes place in the way difference is thought. This is fundamental for Lacan, since the signifier is constituted by difference. Empedocles and Heraclitus posit that, in the thing itself, identity is saturated by difference. As soon as a thing is exposed to thought, it can be identified only by difference. Plato could be said to have lost sight of this line of argument, since he removed the possibility of identifying difference within the identity of the Idea. We could say that the Pre-Socratics differentiate identity, while Plato identifies difference. This is perhaps the source of Lacan's preference for Heraclitus.

Recalling, in his very first seminar, that the relation between the concept and the thing is founded on the pairing of identity and difference, Lacan adds: "Heraclitus tells us - if we introduce absolute mobility in the existence of things such that the flow of the world never comes to pass twice by the same situation, it is precisely because identity in difference is already saturated in the thing". [9] Here we see how Lacan contrasts the eternal identification of differences according to the fixed point of the Idea - as in Plato - with the absolute differential process constitutive of the thing itself. The Lacanian conception of the relation between identity and difference - and therefore, in the thing, between the one and the multiple - finds support, contra Plato, in the universal mobilism ofHeraclitus. This is what Lacan observes with regard to the God of President Schreber in the text 'On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis'. For Schreber, the Creator is "Unique in his Multiplicity, Multiple in his Unity (such are the attributes, reminiscent of Heraclitus, with which Schreber defines him)." [10]

In fact, what Heraclitus allows us to think - and what Plato, on the contrary, prohibits - is the death drive. The Platonic effort to identify difference through the Idea leaves no room for it; Heraclitean discord, on the other hand, anticipates its every effect. In Seminar VII, when he discusses Antigone's suicide in her tomb, and our ignorance of what is happening inside it, Lacan declares: 'No better reference than the aphorisms of Heraclitus.' Among these aphorisms, the most useful is the one which states the correlation of the Phallus and death, in the following, striking form: "Hades and Dionysus are one and the same". The authority of difference allows Heraclitus to perceive, in the identity of the god of the dead with the god of vital ecstasy, the double investment of the Phallus. Or, as Lacan notes of Bacchic processions: "And (Heraclitus) leads us up to the point where he says that if it weren't a reference to Hades or a ceremony of ecstasy, it would be nothing more than an odious phallic ceremony." [11] According to Lacan, the Platonic subordination of difference to identity is incapable of arriving at such a point.

The Pre-Socratics, then, provide ample material from which to reconstruct, from its origins, a far-reaching disorientation of Plato. In this sense, they form part of the polemical genealogy ofpsychoanalysis.

3

Turning to Heidegger, we should of course recall that Lacan translated his Logos, which deals in particular with Heraclitus. I believe that three principal connections can be drawn between Lacan and Heidegger. They involve repression, the One, and being-for-death (l'être-pour-la-mort), All three are mediated by the Pre-Socratics.

First, Lacan believes he can go so far as to say that there is at least a similarity between the Freudian theme of repression and the Heideggerian articulation of truth and forgetting. It is significant for Lacan that, as Heidegger remarks, the name of the river of forgetting, Lethe, can be heard in the word for truth, aletheia. The link is made explicit in the first seminar where, in his analysis of repression in the Freudian sense, we come across the following observation: 'In every entry of being into its habitation in words, there's a margin of forgetting, a lethe complementary to every aletheia." [12] Such a repression, then, can with good reason be called 'originary'. Its originary character accords with the correlation in origins Heidegger establishes between truth and veiling, a correlation constantly reinforced through etymological exegesis of the Pre-Socratics.

Secondly, Lacan takes from Heidegger's commentary on Heraclitus the notion of an intimate connection between the theme of the One and that of Logos. This, for Lacan, is an essential thesis. It will later be formulated in structural fashion: the aphorism "there is something of (the) One" (il y a de l'Un) is constitutive of the symbolic order. But starting in Seminar III, in a discussion of the Schreber case, Lacan confirms Heidegger's reading of Heraclitus. Commenting on the fact that Schreber only ever has one interlocutor, he adds:

This Einheit (oneness) is very amusing to consider, if we think of this text on 'Logos' by Heidegger I have translated, which is going to be published in the first issue of our new journal, La Psychanalyse, and which identifies the logos with Heraclitus's En (One). And in fact we shall see that Schreber's delusion is in its own way a mode of relationship between the subject and language as a whole. [13]

It is in the most intimate part of clinical practice - that which deals with psychoses - that the clarificatory power of Heraclitus' aphorisms, supported by Heidegger, now reappears.

Finally, Lacan believes he can also connect the Freudian concept of the death drive to Heidegger's existential analysis, which defines Dasein as being-for-death. The emblematic figure of Empedocles serves, in the "Rome Report", as the vector for this connection: "Empedocles, by throwing himself into Mount Etna, leaves forever present in the memory of men this symbolic act of his being-for-death". [14]

You will note that in all three occurrences of Heidegger - truth and forgetting, One and Logos, being-for-death - the Pre-Socratics are a required reference. Indeed, they are necessary to the extent that one cannot decide if the Pre-Socratics are a point of suture, or projection, between Lacan and Heidegger; or if, on the contrary, it is Heidegger who allows Lacan access to a more fundamental concern with the Pre-Socratic genealogy of psycho-analysis. I, for one, tend towards the second hypothesis.

4

For Lacan intends to inscribe psychoanalysis within a destiny of thought that is determined by oppositions and divisions originally informed by the Pre-Socratics. On this view there are two crucial oppositions: one, as we have seen, contrasting the Pre-Socratic sense of discord to the dominance of identity in the Platonic schema. But there is also an opposition, perhaps still more profound, within the ranks of the Pre-Socratics, that sets Heraclitus against Parmenides. The clearest text is in Seminar XX:

The fact that thought moves in the direction of science only by being attributed to thinking - in other words, the fact that being is presumed to think - is what founds the philosophical tradition starting from Parmenides. Parmenides was wrong and Heraclitus was right. That is clinched by the fact that, in fragment 93, Heraclitus enunciates oute legei oute kruptei alia semainei, "he neither avows nor hides, he signifies" - putting back in its place the discourse of the winning side itself - o anax ou to manteion este to en Delphoi, "the prince" - in other words, the winner - "who prophesies in Delphi'." [15]

It is interesting to note that Lacan attributes the foundation of the philosophical tradition not to Plato, but to Parmenides.

I said at the outset that the grandiose innocence of the Pre-Socratics was to have broken with the traditional forms of knowledge. But Parmenides himself is also the founder of a tradition. We need, then, to locate two ruptures. On the one hand, the Pre-Socratics break with the mythic enunciation, with the tradition of myth that 'tra-dicts' the imaginary reality of the world. But on the other, at least one of the Pre-Socratics founds a tradition with which Lacan in turn breaks: the philosophical tradition. For Lacan is an anti-philosopher. This anti-philosophy, however, is already manifested, in a certain sense, by Heraclitus. The philosophical idea is that being thinks, for want of a Real (l'être pense, an manque le réel). Against this idea, Heraclitus immediately puts forward the diagonal dimension of signification, which is neither revelation nor dissimulation, but an act. In the same way, the heart of the psychoanalytic procedure lies in the act itself. Heraclitus thus puts in its place the pretension of the master, of the oracle at Delphi, but also the pretension of the philosopher to be the one who listens to the voice of the being who is supposed to think.

Finally, Lacan has a dual, even duplicitous relation to the Pre-Socratics, as he does to the entire history of philosophy. It is embodied by the relationship between two proper names: Heraclitus and Parmenides. Parmenides covers the traditional institution of philosophy, while Heraclitus refers to components of the genealogy of psychoanalysis. Lacan will adopt the same procedure to stabilize his relationship to Plato, distributing it between two proper names: Socrates, the discourse of the analyst, and Plato, the discourse of the master.

But this duplicitous split is an operation carried out within the signifier. "Parmenides is wrong, Heraclitus is right," says Lacan. Should we not take this to mean that, as thought from the point of view of psychoanalysis, philosophy appears as a form of reason that stagnates within the element of this wrong? Or as a wrong which, within the maze of its illusion, none the less makes sufficient contact with the Real to then fail to recognize the reason behind it?

The Pre-Socratics, then, who remain for us little more than an assortment of proper names to whom scattered phrases are ascribed, serve for Lacan as a formal reservoir. These names - Empedocles, Heraclitus, Parmenides - have just enough literal weight, just enough aura of significance, to allow him to separate out, to draw together and, finally, to formalize the internal dialectics of anti-philosophy.

Notes:

[1] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VIII Le transfert, 1960-1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 98-9.

[2] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, 1999), p. 131.

[3] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, p. 22.

[4] Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VIII, pp. 66-7.

[5] Jacques Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis", in Écrits: A Selection (London, 2001), p. 112

[6] Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis", in Écrits, p. 24.

[7] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 89.

[8] François Regnault, Dieu est inconscient (Paris: Navarin, 1986).

[9] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, (Cambridge, 1988), p. 243.

[10] Jacques Lacan, "On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis", in Écrits, p. 225.

[11] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, (New York, 1992), p. 299.

[12] Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, p. 192.

[13] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, (New York, 1993), p. 124; translation modified.

[14] Jacques Lacan,"Function and Field", p. 114.

[15] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX, p. 114.

Alain Badiou's Bibliography

Tomas Transtörmer reads "Schubertiana"

2011-11-06T16:31:00.000-08:00

Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (born April 15, 1931, Stockholm) discusses and reads his poem "Schubertiana", in English translation (translation by Samuel Charters).

Source: mintwood

Was Avicenna a mystic?

2011-11-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

Was Avicenna a mystic? Some of his interpreters in Iran have answered in the positive, citing the lost work The Easterners that on the face of it has a superficial similarity to the notion of Ishraqi or Illuminationist, intuitive philosophy expounded by Suhrawardi (d. 1191) and the final section of Pointersthat deal with the terminology of mysticism and Sufism. The question does not directly impinge on his philosophy so much since The Easterners is mostly non-extant. But it is an argument relating to ideology and the ways in which modern commentators and scholars wish to study Islamic philosophy as a purely rational form of inquiry or as a supra-rational method of understanding reality. Gutas has been most vehement in his denial of any mysticism in Avicenna. For him, Avicennism is rooted in the rationalism of the Aristotelian tradition. Intuition does not entail mystical disclosure but is a mental act of conjunction with the active intellect. The notion of intuition is located itself by Gutas in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics89b10-11. While some of the mystical commentators of Avicenna have relied upon his pseudo-epigraphy (such as some sort of Persian Sufi treatises and the Mi‘rajnama), one ought not to throw the baby out with the bath water. The last sections of Pointers are significant evidence of Avicenna’s acceptance of some key epistemological possibilities that are present in mystical knowledge such as the possibility of non-discursive reason and simple knowledge. Although one can categorically deny that he was a Sufi (and indeed in his time the institutions of Sufism were not as established as they were a century later) and even raise questions about his adherence to some form of mysticism, it would be foolish to deny that he flirts with the possibilities of mystical knowledge in some of his later authentic works.

Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (c)

There was Earth inside them -Paul Celan

2011-10-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

by Paul Celan (1959)
translated from the German by John Felstiner

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.

There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too,
and the singing there says: They dig.

O one, O none, O no one, O you:
Where did it go, then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.

----

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was born in Romania to German-speaking parents. John Felstiner is the author of Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), and the editor and translator of Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, to be published by Norton.

Philip Glass & Ravi Shankar

2011-10-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

Ravi Shankar & Philip Glass from the Album "Passages" (1990). The collaboration between Philip Glass, one of the greatest composer of the 20th century, and Ravi Shankar, THE greatest Indian musician of the 20th century, has produced a stunning masterpiece with genius. An intuitive combination of styles and one of the best examples of what one deems music to be. Listen & Enjoy it.

Ragas In Minor Scale

Personnel includes:

Philip Glass
Ravi Shankar (vocals, sitar)
S.P. Balasubramanyam
Madras Choir
Jeannie Gagne (vocals)
Shubho Shankar (sitar)
Partha Sarady (sarod)
Barry Finclair (violin, viola)
Tim Baker, Mayuki Fukuhara (violin)
Al Brown (viola)
Seymour Barab (cello)
Theresa Norris, Ronus Mazumdar (flute)
Jon Gibson (soprano saxophone)
Richard Peck, Lenny Pickett (alto & tenor saxophones)
Peter Gordon (French horn)
Keith O'Quinn (trombone)
Joe Carver (bass)
Abhiman Kaushal (tabla)

Sapphire and Steel

2011-10-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

Principal Cast
Sapphire: Joanna Lumley
Steel: David McCallum

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Synopsis

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold; Lead; Copper; Jet; Diamond; Radium; Sapphire; Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned"

Sapphire and Steel ran from 1979 to 1982 and featured Joanna Lumley as Sapphire and David McCallum as Steel. This series featured stories spread out over several episodes. During the course of the series a total of 6 stories, spread out over 34 episodes were produced. The stories, while not having any titles per se, have been generally given the titles Adventure One through Adventure Six.

Adventure One helps establish the premise of the series by revealing that time is a corridor and that creatures from the beginning and ends of time are constantly looking for ways to break into the present and cause chaos. The creatures seek weak spots in the fabric of time often using anachronistic elements as triggers to break through. In the case of a the first adventure a centuries old farm house serves as the weak spot and the reciting of nursery rhymes acts as the trigger.

Sapphire and Steel are beings from another dimension assigned to prevent the fabric of time from being compromised. We learn they have special powers that are meant to assist them in their duties. Among Sapphire's abilities she can roll back time to a limited extent, as well as being able to tell the age of objects by touching them. She also demonstrates some telekinetic powers as she unlocks a door with her mind. Sapphire and Steel also appear to have a telepathic link with each other. Whether they possess this power individually or not is not clear in the first adventure.

By comparison, Steel is rather impoverished when it comes to special abilities. Steel is able to freeze objects to near absolute zero and thereby hold the advance of the creatures from the other dimension. He finds it physically exhausting and can only do it for a limited period of time. Steel's other ability, as suggested by his name is his immense strength which he does not display in the first adventure.

Joanna Lumley is perhaps best known for her role as Patsy in the British series Absolutely Fabulous (1992-1996). As Sapphire, Lumely is portrayed as the diplomatic one of the pair, befriending the humans and attempting to explain the situation to them. While recognizing the seriousness of the situation Sapphire is not above using her abilities for her own enjoyment. At one point she changes outfits in the blink of an eye, explaining that she is simply projecting images of clothing she has worn in the past.

Despite his extensive work in other television shows and in film, David McCallum will always be remembered for his role as Illya Kuryakin from the series Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968). As Steel, McCallum's cold intense performance suits his character's name as he cares little for the humans involved caught up in the situations and takes everything far too seriously.

Getting Around In Time

While not an out-and-out show about Time Travel, Sapphire and Steel incorporate may elements of time travel into the series. The manipulation of time appears to be at the heart of the show and preservation of the present appears to be the ultimate goal for the elements.

Review

While somewhat tedious at times, Sapphire and Steel manages to create and sustain an atmosphere of horror and suspense throughout the 6 or so episodes that make up Adventure One. Many people that had recommended Sapphire and Steel to me, had mentioned how the show had frightened them as young children. Viewing it for the first time as an adult I can easily imagine how frightening this series could be for a child.

In Adventure One the creatures Sapphire and Steel are trying to stop, break into the present and steal the parents of two young children. The children, stunned by the disappearance of their parents are left alone to cope with a seemingly haunted house. When Sapphire and Steel arrive the children are not sure whether to be comforted or frightened by Sapphire and Steel's sudden appearance. Throughout the course of the first story, a variety of "ghosts" are invoked through the reciting of the nursery rhymes, and at one point Sapphire is sucked into a painting by the creatures where she is about to be executed. All in all pretty terrifying stuff for a child to comprehend. During the later episodes of the story the creatures attempt to use the guise of the children's parents to trick the kids into assisting them. At the end of the story when the children are reunited with their parents, everything seems to have a happy ending, but I know as kid I would be freaked out wondering if they were really my parents. [As a complete aside, for a really frightening example of this read Philip K. Dick's short story The Father Thing]

The production budget of Sapphire and Steel leaves a lot to be desired. Sets are minimal and appear as if they were borrowed from other productions being filmed at the same time. The main villains of the story are circles of light seemingly projected by flashlights off camera. To the best of my knowledge even the British series Dr. Who, which was renown for its cheap rubber-suited monsters and villains, never stooped so low as to resort to flashlights for its characters.

There also seemed to be an absence of incidental music in the series. At least until the final couple of episodes of Adventure One. This may have been a contributing factor in my earlier comment that the story seemed tedious at times. Watching the first couple of episodes in the series I was reminded of watching video-taped stage productions of Shakespeare plays in high school. Just something about the production of Sapphire and Steel made it feel too dry to be television.

Despite its under-whelming production values Sapphire and Steel does deliver. The atmosphere of suspense and horror generated in Adventure One would put all but the best X-Files episodes to shame. Also contributing to the unique tone of the show is the fact that much of what occurs during the Adventure is left unexplained. Sapphire and Steel appear content to have halted this particular intrusion in time and the kids and parents are satisfied to have been reunited. The sinister plans of the creatures from the ends of time are left relatively unexplained as does the significance of the origins of the house that are hinted at during one of the abductions.

I understand from talking to fans of Sapphire and Steel that Adventure One is not the crowning jewel of the series by any stretch of the imagination. I'll reserve judgement on the series until I have had the opportunity to view more of the stories. I will admit that I enjoyed the premise of the series despite its obvious flaws, and that the atmosphere generated by the series definitely appealed to me.

Related Links

The Anorak Zone's Guide To Sapphire and Steel

This quirky little fan site has sections devoted to a number of British television series including Sapphire and Steel, Star Cops, Randall & Hopkirk [Deceased] and The Prisoner. The link above is a direct link to the Sapphire and Steel portion of the site.
The Sapphire and Steel section of the site does have an overview of the series, detailed synopsis of each of the adventures and some interesting links to mailing lists and other fan related sites.

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Source:
Andy's Anachronisms
Time Travel Television Reviews

From the House of Yemanjá. Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

2011-10-09T12:10:00.000-07:00

My mother had two faces and a frying pot
where she cooked up her daughters
into girls
before she fixed our dinner.
My mother had two faces
and a broken pot
where she hid out a perfect daughter
who was not me
I am the sun and moon and forever hungry
for her eyes.

I bear two women upon my back
one dark and rich and hidden
in the ivory hungers of the other
mother
pale as a witch
yet steady and familiar
brings me bread and terror
in my sleep
her breasts are huge exciting anchors
in the midnight storm.

All this has been
before
in my mother´s bed
time has no sense
I have no brothers
and my sisters are cruel.

Mother I need
mother I need
mother I need your blackness now
as the august earth needs rain.

I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

---

AUDRE LORDE. 1978.

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Image
Audre Lorde from Imagery: Women Writers
1996, © Jean Weisinger

Give me a break - Gorka Lasa

2011-10-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

"People understand me so poorly

that they don´t even understand my complaint

about them not understanding me."

Sören Kierkegaard

Come on babe, give me a break. Preaching pseudo-spiritual jingles on-line? Posting Facebook gullible quotes from a fifty foot yacht, a yuppie penthouse, a luxury sport car and a weekend palace to regurgitate your silly alcoholic whims?

What the fuck are you talking about? Don´t you know better?

True spiritual quest is one of the most courageous and bold tasks a man can undertake. It´s a serious and gutsy leap far beyond social relativism and human conformism. Following this perilous and forgotten path is a recipe for solitude, heartache, detachment, tribulations and widespread misunderstanding. Nothing less than the proud and brave journey of those few who dare to seek true wisdom and authentic enlightenment, in a pity world of sleepers.

Don´t confuse it with the short-sighted people, for the, spirituality is just a trend, a primitive religion, an effective dogmatic opiate, a stupid joke, a hobby, a bestselling book, another idiotic and temporary eclectic fashion full of expensive gadgets and plastic post-modern arguments.

Slaves of the image, chained by fear and status, socially baptized in the temples of vain materialism, only to self-praise their own puppet egos with the golden whip of triviality.

Consuming high-octane mediocrity well suited for their mind numbness; the bizarre kitsch of their pity simplicity, a comfortable posture to hide the void of their meaningless lives, the shame of their spiritual shallowness, the screaming tragedy of their gullible vanity.

I´m sorry honey, I almost forgot; of course I like your fake boobs, they perfectly match with your frivolous mind.

----

Taken from La Claridad (9 Signos Grupo Editorial, 2011), Gorka Lasa.

Bertrand Russell on Nietzsche

2011-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

The lucidity of Bertrand Russell, as he considers Nietzsche. A true jewel of the 20th Century -and of all times-

The Dr. Fox Lecture

2011-09-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

In 1970 three American researchers, John E. Ware, Donald H. Naftulin and Frank A. Donnelly, designed an experiment to find out whether a brilliant delivery technique of a talk could so completely bamboozle a group of experts that they overlooked the fact that the content was nonsense. The result was the hilarious Dr Fox Lecture and the answer was: yes! The experts didn't notice a thing. Read the full story here: http://www.weirdexperiments.com. More bizarre stories about unusual experiments in "Mad Science" by Reto U. Schneider (http://www.weirdexperiments.com/thebook.html).

This post is directly related to my post of March 29, 2009, titled "The Dr. Fox Effect".

Aldous Huxley and the threats to freedom in America

2011-09-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

Aldous Huxley, social critic and author of Brave New World, talks to Mike Wallace about threats to freedom in the United States, overpopulation, bureaucracy, propaganda, drugs, advertising, and television.

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2/3

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"Ars Amandi" International Poetry Festival, Panama, 2011.

2011-09-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

"On a quest for the human"
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From September 21 to 23, 2011, will take place the 2nd Version of the "ARS AMANDI" International Poetry Festival of Panama.

The Opening Ceremony will take place at the Anita Villalaz Theater (Plaza de Francia), located at the Old Quarter of Panama City, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 7.00 p.m.

There will be an "Open Mic Night" at the Hotel Suites Torres de Alba, on Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7.00 p.m.

(If you are interested send an e-mail to egtrejos@gmail.com).

And the Closing Ceremony will be held on Friday, Sept. 23, at 7.00 p.m., at the Lobby of INAC -Panama´s Institute of Culture- (Plaza de Francia), located at the Old Quarter of Panama City.

Poets from 6 countries, among them: Alma Karla Sandoval (Mexico), Javier Alvarado (Panama), Mia Gallegos (Costa Rica), Andira Watson (Nicaragua), Eyra Harbar (Panama), Pedro Ramos García (Spain), José A. Córdova (Panama), Neli Córdova Neli (Ecuador), Javier Romero (Panama), Amarilis Tavares (Puerto Rico), and many others.

Official Site of ARS AMANDI 2011: http://arsamandipanama2011.blogspot.com/

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Poster created by Panamanian Artist Martanoemí Noriega

Of Tyranny

2011-09-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

From John Locke´s "Of Civil Government"
---

As usurpation in the exercise of power which another has a right to , so tyranny is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to. And this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good use of those who are under it, but for his own private separate advantage -when the governor, however entitled, makes not the law, but his will, the rule, and his commands and actions are not directed to the preservation of the properties of his people, but the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any other irregular passion.

...

Wherever law ends tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another´s harm. And whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command to compass (1) that upon the subject which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate (2) and, acting without authority, may be opposed as any other man who by force invades the right of another. This is acknowledged in subordinate magistrates. He that has authority to seize my person in the street may be opposed as a thief and a robber if he endeavors to break into my house to execute a writ, notwithstanding that I know he has such a warrant and such a legal authority as will impower him to arrest me abroad. And why this should not hold in the highest as well as in the most inferior magistrate, I would gladly be informed. Is it reasonable that the eldest brother, because he has the greatest part of his father´s estate, should thereby have a right to take away any of his younger brother´s portions? Or that a rich man who possessed a whole country should from thence have a right to seize, when he pleased, the cottage and garden of his poor neighbor? The being rightfully possessed of great power and riches, exceedingly beyond the greatest part of the sons of Adam, is so far from being an excuse, much less a reason, for rapine (3) and opression, which the endamaging another without authority is, that it is a great aggravation of it; for the exceeding the bounds of authority is no more a right in a great than in a petty officer, no more justifiable in a king than a constable; (4) but is so much worse in him that he has more trust put in him, has already a muc greater share than the rest of his brethren , and is supposed, from the advantages of his education, employment, and counsellors, to be more knowing in the measures of right and wrong.

...

Notes:

(1) Enforce.

(2) A legitimate official.

(3) Plunder, pillage.

(4) A minor official, empowered to make arrests.

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

2011-09-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

by KENNETH KOCH (1925-2002)
---

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in the next summer.

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together

and then I sprayed the with lye.

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.

The man who asked for it was shabby

and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy, and

I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

1962

---

See "This is just to say" by William Carlos Williams.

Williams was a physician.

Bassam Hajjar (Lebanon, 1955-2009)

2011-09-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Part Two of - The second elegy

---

A few things I alone know
He said he was tired
that he had come to his final days,
so he found delight in nothing.
He said daylight hurt his eyes,
dust irritated his lungs,
and that he stayed in his room
sitting on the edge of his bed, his head bowed,
his hands on his hips to support himself.
He said he was tired
and not able to walk in the street
since breathing was a strain,
as if he'd grown used to a kind of suffocation
and was content with as much air
as would not keep the canary alive, dead from the cold.
He said spring
just about killed him,
and the dog days of summer,
and the winter, bitter cold and wet,
and autumn, season of wailing and lamentation,
and that he didn't know why the chill wouldn't leave
his limbs.
He said: "Take the ring
it is all I own,
that and the fountain pen.
Now wrap me up in woollen blankets,
give me your face to kiss
and your hands
for I might well not see you tomorrow."
He said he was tired and couldn't sleep;
that the night was a frightening wilderness.
These minutes or hours may be the last.
So he rises and walks in the hallway,
drinks a mouthful of water,
and the tumult of his heavy wheezing keeps him company,
as if his wheezes spoke to him
like the children or the neighbours or friends over drinks
or casual meetings during an evening stroll,
and he wouldn't pray
but said: "I loved whom I loved
and whoever loved me gave me happiness I did not deserve.
I was alive and the death in my lungs was
a pain and a cough,
and I lived with the smallest bit
of air and pleasure.
I watered the climbing plants until they reached
the ceiling.
I put the canary in its cage,
fed him seeds and water to drink
and he died despite me
and I cried for three days.
No one will inherit the hardship of living as I have,
asthma pains and the bare means.
I made time to wait for my final hour.
I told no one
but stayed to wait.
I told her when she came towards me
let me rest my tired head on your chest
and I didn't tell her I wanted to cry
but I cried.
A few things I alone know of
made me cry.
I was not afraid.
I was not miserable,
but I cried."

---

Another Man

Does everything really end?
They leave the cups and the chairs
and I remain here, alone
to turn off the light and go to sleep.
And if they are hidden behind the doors
or behind the walls,
waiting?
And if, after I close my eyes
night begins in my absence?

Terry Eagleton on the metaphysics of terror

2011-09-10T21:12:00.000-07:00

---

British literary and cultural theorist, Terry Eagleton, on The Metaphysics of Terror. This lecture was culled from TVO´s archives and first aired in 2004.

Thomas Stearns Eliot's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall

2011-09-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

Banquet Speech

Thomas Stearns Eliot's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1948When I began to think of what I should say to you this evening, I wished only to express very simply my appreciation of the high honour which the Swedish Academy has thought fit to confer upon me. But to do this adequately proved no simple task: my business is with words, yet the words were beyond my command. Merely to indicate that I was aware of having received the highest international honour that can be bestowed upon a man of letters, would be only to say what everyone knows already. To profess my own unworthiness would be to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the Academy; to praise the Academy might suggest that I, as a literary critic, approved the recognition given to myself as a poet. May I therefore ask that it be taken for granted, that I experienced, on learning of this award to myself, all the normal emotions of exaltation and vanity that any human being might be expected to feel at such a moment, with enjoyment of the flattery, and exasperation at the inconvenience, of being turned overnight into a public figure? Were the Nobel Award similar in kind to any other award, and merely higher in degree, I might still try to find words of appreciation: but since it is different in kind from any other, the expression of one's feelings calls for resources which language cannot supply.

I must therefore try to express myself in an indirect way, by putting before you my own interpretation of the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature. If this were simply the recognition of merit, or of the fact that an author's reputation has passed the boundaries of his own country and his own language, we could say that hardly any one of us at any time is, more than others, worthy of being so distinguished. But I find in the Nobel Award something more and something different from such recognition. It seems to me more the election of an individual, chosen from time to time from one nation or another, and selected by something like an act of grace, to fill a peculiar role and to become a peculiar symbol. A ceremony takes place, by which a man is suddenly endowed with some function which he did not fill before. So the question is not whether he was worthy to be so singled out, but whether he can perform the function which you have assigned to him: the function of serving as a representative, so far as any man can be of thing of far greater importance than the value of what he himself has written.

Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way. We may think also of the history of poetry in Europe, and of the great influence that the poetry of one language can exert on another; we must remember the immense debt of every considerable poet to poets of other languages than his own; we may reflect that the poetry of every country and every language would decline and perish, were it not nourished by poetry in foreign tongues. When a poet speaks to his own people, the voices of all the poets of other languages who have influenced him are speaking also. And at the same time he himself is speaking to younger poets of other languages, and these poets will convey something of his vision of life and something of the spirit of his people, to their own. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through translation, which must be also a kind of recreation of his poems by other poets, partly through readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute toward understanding between peoples.

In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a meaning to the phrase «the poetry of Europe», and even to the word «poetry» the world over. I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages - though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country - acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential. And I take the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, when it is given to a poet, to be primarily an assertion of the supra-national value of poetry. To make that affirmation, it is necessary from time to time to designate a poet: and I stand before you, not on my own merits, but as a symbol, for a time, of the significance of poetry.

Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy made these remarks: «Humility is also the characteristic which you, Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as man's virtue. ‹The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.› At first it did not appear that this would be the final result of your visions and your acuity of thought. Born in the Middle West, where the pioneer mentality was still alive, brought up in Boston, the stronghold of Puritan tradition, you came to Europe in your youth and were there confronted with the pre-war type of civilization in the Old World: the Europe of Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm, the Third Republic, andThe Merry Widow. This contact was a shock to you, the expression of which you brought to perfection in The Waste Land, in which the confusion and vulgarity of the civilization became the object of your scathing criticism. But beneath that criticism there lay profound and painful disillusionment, and out of this disillusionment there grew forth a feeling of sympathy, and out of that sympathy was born a growing urge to rescue from the ruins of the confusion the fragments from which order and stability might be restored. The position you have long held in modern literature provokes a comparison with that occupied by Sigmund Freud, a quarter of a century earlier, within the field of psychic medicine. If a comparison might be permitted, the novelty of the therapy which he introduced with psychoanalysis would match the revolutionary form in which you have clothed your message. But the path of comparison could be followed still further. For Freud the most profound cause of the confusion lay in the Unbehagen in der Kultur of modern man. In his opinion there must be sought a collective and individual balance, which should constantly take into account man's primitive instincts. You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion. For you the salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural tradition, which, in our more mature years, lives with greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and which we must preserve if chaos is to be avoided. Tradition is not a dead load which we drag along with us, and which in our youthful desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is the soil in which the seeds of coming harvests are to be sown, and from which future harvests will be garnered. As a poet you have, Mr. Eliot, for decades, exercised a greater influence on your contemporaries and younger fellow writers than perhaps anyone else of our time.»

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

9th Panama Jazz Festival - 2012

2011-08-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to Carlos Garnett

From the heart of America to the rest of the world, the Panama Jazz Festival celebrates its 9th edition with concerts, jam sessions and events for the entire family. Additionally, during the week of the festival some of the best music schools of the Americas audition students for admission and scholarships and the participating artists give master classes.

Guest artists:
Tito Puente Jr.
Teri Roigers
Luis Bonilla
John Scofield
Omara Portuondo
Chucho Valdés
Charlie Sepúlveda
Carlos Garnett

For more info:
http://www.panamajazzfestival.com/english/

Björk - Modern Minimalists

2011-08-21T15:44:00.000-07:00

Björk Narrates And Interviews Minimalist Musicians on a BBC Show, on 1997

---

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

2011-08-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

Letter to N.Y.

FOR LOUISE CRANE

In your next letter I wish you´d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you´re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly your´re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can´t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat,

-Wheat, not oats, dear. I´m afraid
if it´s wheat it´s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I´d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

1955

.:::

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!
-this little filling station,
oil-soaked. oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it´s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic bboks provide
the only note of color-
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in a daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO-SO-SO-SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

1965

.:::

The Armadillo

FOR ROBERT LOWELL

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it´s hard
to tell them from the stars -
planets, that is-the tinted ones:
Venus going down on Mars,

on the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it´s still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls´ nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! -a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

1965

---

Dvorak's “New World” Symphony

2011-08-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

Taken from Classical Notes

A bizarre aftermath of September 11 has been a resurgence of protest over how American influence has allegedly sullied the purity of other civilizations, depicting us as a sort of pernicious cultural kudzu overrunning and smothering the world's pristine artistic gardens. But unlike most of the other insidious and groundless propaganda claims that have burgeoned recently, to this one there's a kernel of truth.

After all, with its ready availability and massive appeal, American culture has dominated much of the last century, and its reign promises to continue. While foreign purists may have cowered before incursions of Franglais and Warhol soup cans, our threat to most arts hardly warranted fears of irreparable corruption. In music, though, the uniquely American developments of jazz, blues and rock truly have permanently transformed world culture. So perhaps it's worth recalling that our own roots originated overseas in the first place.

In the late 19th century, European art was roused by the same surge of nationalism that had already transformed Old World politics, as varied cultures found and proudly proclaimed their distinctive voices. But while American literature already had staked a formidable reputation, our serious music (along with painting and theatre) remained mired in Old World models.

That didn't sit well with a handful of American patrons who sought to develop and project our own national character. Among them was Jeanette Thurber, wife of a wealthy New York merchant, who had founded the National Conservatory of Music, a pioneering venture which opened its doors in 1888 to promising African-American musicians but needed strong leadership. She found it in Antonin Dvorak (1841 - 1904).

Influenced and inspired by his compatriot Bedrich Smetana, Dvorak had achieved great fame as an ardent champion of his beloved Czech music, fluently melding folk-tinged melodies into classical forms. But unlike Brahms, Liszt and other composers who studied folk music from an academic distance and used it as a fleeting exotic diversion, Dvorak's “Moravian Duets,” “Czech Suite,” “Slavonic Dances” and other cornerstones of his early fame were the very essence of his being.

Born and raised a Bohemian peasant, Dvorak never strayed far from his roots. Like the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. He loved simple pleasures, was enthralled by trains and far preferred a chat with manual laborers to learned discourse. This humble man brought Czech music to the world's attention by showcasing its intrinsic appeal. He often is compared to Schubert, with whom he shared effortless melodies, spontaneous harmonies and a relaxed ease, but Schubert's music wafted from Viennese taverns, while in Dvorak's you could feel the fresh rustic breeze and smell the hale country air.

Dvorak was lured to New York in 1892 with the promise of a fee twenty times his salary in Prague. Upon arrival, he enthusiastically grasped Mrs. Thurber's charge. He proclaimed:

I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.

True to his word, Dvorak immersed himself in African-American music. He was particularly drawn to one of his students, Henry Burleigh, who often sang for Dvorak in his home and who later recalled that Dvorak “saturated himself in the spirit of these old tunes.”

Much of his time in America was occupied by teaching and organizing performances. But above all else Dvorak was a composer and in his first winter in New York he began to write the symphony that would become his most cherished. (It was completed that summer on vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a colony of Czech immigrants who helped assuage Dvorak's intense homesickness.) Formally, the work fell solidly within European tradition, with a sonata-form opening, a meditative largo broken by restless outbursts, a lusty scherzo with bucolic trios and a vigorous, triumphant finish. In keeping with the emerging trend of cyclical form, its themes all germinated from a common seminal motif and returned in the finale. But beginning with its hugely successful premiere that December, its subtitle “From the New World” generated considerable confusion over its inspiration and thematic content.

Resemblance to the atmosphere of Dvorak's prior work suggested to some commentators that the work was most heavily influenced by nostalgia for his beloved Bohemia. But assuming that Dvorak had set out to practice what he preached, others seized upon the prevalence of the syncopated rhythms, pentatonic scales and flattened sevenths of our native music to find a closer tie to America. They noted Dvorak's fascination with the Hiawatha legend and traced the symphony's largo and scherzo to scenes of the funeral and celebratory feast from an opera he had sketched but never pursued. They found especially significant the resemblance of a principal theme of the first movement to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” reportedly one of Dvorak's favorite spirituals. But such speculation has its dangers - it's hard to find much meaning in the far more striking resemblance of a motif in the finale to “Three Blind Mice.” And subsequent critics who went so far as to assert that Dvorak copied his largo from a hymn, “Goin' Home,” were chagrined to realize that the song arose only decades later when lyrics were grafted onto Dvorak's original theme.

The composer himself derided as “nonsense” claims that he used actual Indian- or African-American tunes and insisted that he only wrote “in the spirit” of native American music. In a delightful 1956 lecture, Leonard Bernstein examined each of the themes, traced their origin to French, Scottish, German, Chinese and, of course, Czech sources, and concluded that the only accurate assessment was to consider the work multi-national. But as New York critic James Huneker pointed out in a discerning review of the premiere, the “New World” Symphony was distinctly American in the sense of being a composite, reflecting our melting-pot society. Indeed, much the same could be said for our culture generally - it's made of foreign ingredients but emerges from the cauldron with a clear American flavor.

When Dvorak returned home in 1895, he left behind a legacy even greater than Mrs. Thurber had dared to dream - the very first piece of serious music that, regardless of its traditional form and disputed sources, somehow managed to embody and convey the American spirit. Wildly popular, Dvorak's “New World” Symphony served as an ambassador to legitimize American music to the rest of a dubious world and paved the way to acceptance of our 20th Century cultural exports.

It seems altogether fitting that so many fine recorded performances of the “New World” were led by conductors raised in Dvorak's own Czech traditions, including Karel Ancerl, Istvan Kertesz, Raphael Kubilek, Vaclav Neumann, Libor Pesek, Joseph Suk, Vaclav Talich and Pavel Urbanek. Most of these tend to be smooth, patient and flowing, largely devoid of intensive interpretive touches and, by letting the piece speak for itself, serve to demonstrate just how fine a work it really is. Two of the greatest such “New Worlds” were led by Fritz Reiner and George Szell, who were born in Budapest but followed in Dvorak's footsteps and made careers in America. Both Reiner's reading with the Chicago Symphony (on RCA CD 62587) and Szell's with the Cleveland Orchestra (Sony MH2K 63151, coupled with splendid performances of Dvorak's two preceding symphonies) are played with precision and loving care, moderately paced, and brim with graceful detail.

In keeping with the character of the work, more distinctive and individual interpretations come from emigrants who contributed to the richness of our music. Paul Paray, hailing from France, led the Detroit Symphony in a lean, sharp and propulsive reading that's the fastest on record (Mercury 434 317). Arturo Toscanini (Italian) with the NBC Symphony was clean and classic in the studio (BMG 60279) and more emphatic in concert (Arkadia 417). Bruno Walter (German), with the Hollywood-based Columbia Symphony, radiates a tender warmth (Sony 64484). Leopold Stokowski (English, but among the most fervent advocates of our music), was impulsive and improvisatory (even adding climatic braying brass and cymbal crash “improvements”) in his six (!) recordings, of which the most unbuttoned and thrilling was with his hand-picked American Youth Orchestra in 1940 (Music and Arts 841).

It seems especially apt that the “New World” received two of its finest performances from the most influential American-born conductor. Leonard Bernstein's 1962 reading with the New York Philharmonic (Sony 47547 or 60563) pulses with the very type of brash idealistic enthusiasm that inspired Dvorák to have created it. (Incidentally, don't be misled by timings - Bernstein's 11-minute opening movement is every bit as swift as Toscanini's 8½; the difference lies in a repeat of the entire exposition rather than the tempo.) Bernstein's poignant largo and bounding scherzo lead to a massive finale, a deeply moving vision of a future filled with strength, resolve and dignity that seems especially timely. A 1986 remake (DG 427 346) is more deliberate and profoundly moving, played with great feeling by the Israel Philharmonic, an ensemble founded by Holocaust refugees who surely knew the meaning of freedom.

But analyses of art should never be so simple. Indeed, an even more striking performance generated mystery over its confusing origins and still raises intriguing qualms over its pedigree. When the records first surfaced from wartime archives, they were thought to comprise a 1941 Berlin Philharmonic concert by Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had programmed this work during the War and was known for irritating his Nazis overseers by championing music of “enemy” peoples. Its 1981 release on a Swiss LP bore authentication by three musicologists and one of Furtwängler's musicians, but further research concluded that it was by the Munich Philharmonic led by Oswald Kabasta in one of his very last performances from July 1944. With seething melodrama and blazing intensity, Kabasta internalized the “New World” and transformed it into a tortured and desperate cry for a freedom he would never taste - distraught by his wartime role, he killed himself in 1946. It's an emotional roller-coaster, festering in the dank air of repression, its hazy light filtered by skepticism, its deceptively smooth transitions teasingly sarcastic.

So - a Bohemian vision of a vital and free America potently conveyed by a conflicted Nazi. Ironic, to be sure, and yet compelling proof of the universality of great music.

Copyright 2001 by Peter Gutmann

Verdi, Puccini, Caruso. Funerals.

2011-08-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

Funeral of Giuseppe Verdi (born 1813), on 1901.

---

Funeral of Giacomo Puccini (born 1858), on 1924.

---

Scenes of the Funeral of Enrico Caruso (born 1873), on 1921.

Thomas Mann on Richard Wagner´s Lohengrin

2011-07-31T11:06:00.000-07:00

Radiosendung 1954 - Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and his evocation on Lohengrin by Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

-Subtitles in English-

Marshall McLuhan predicts the hypersociety

2011-07-25T19:06:00.000-07:00

On Marshall McLuhan´s Centennial (7/21/1911 - 12/31/1980)

McLuhan predicts how the return to an enhanced society, the interconnectiviy will change us (our education, work, ourselves).

McLuhan predicted in 1965 the birth, not just of internet or its applications, as a worldwide web, but of the social web, the importance of the interconnectivity, the connection of the individual to what we often define as something being "us each time wider”, his “global village”.

Pádraig J. Daly, Dungarvan, Eire, 1943

2011-07-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

Planter

from the Irish of Giolla Bríde Ó hEódhusa, 16th century

You who plant the tree,
Will you live to see the apple?
When the branches grow and spread,
That you will view them, is it certain?

You may be gone before it flowers
In the green and lovely orchard.
Consider as you fix the stake,
That that is often how things happen.

Should the fruit of those bright branches
Ripen; and your hand enclose it,
Will you eat it, sweet companion?
Death makes such an outcome doubtful.

You show little wisdom, Sir,
You who own the fragrant woodland,
To place your hope on paltry crop
And never make your soul your worry.

-==

Eucharist

A circle of bread,
Broken,
Lifted up
In the full glare of sun.

Scatter of crumbs
Floating to the plate.

How easy
In green meadows
To credit
A myth of love.

-==

Funeral

I could have spared myself the journey:
Wintery sunlight,
Roads dangerous with ice,
My presence of no consequence to the mourners.

But I was mourning too,
For you and for her;
And being here
Was all I had left to do forever.

In Our Own Words

2011-07-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

A Generation Defining Itself
Volume 8

After a whole year reading this book, I have taken the time to make a selection to share with you, out of this great Anthology brought to us by Marlow Peerse Weaver.

As for this 8th Volume, published in 2010, mpw tells us:

This generation is cynically aware that past attempts to remedy the world´s most significant problems have come unraveled, including the flowerchild/hippie/student revolution of the preceding generation. Perhaps this explains a lingering hesitancy to grasp an empty canvas to paint their own utopic visions, as if death and spiritual otherworlds offer more fascination, and distraction. This is perhaps the greatest tension welling within, asking whether this generation will drift along inconsequentially, in the grand scheme of things, or it will grasp control and attempt to redefine mankind and its social structures? These are chapters still to unfold, and as such the justification to publish future volumes of this series.

The so-called "X Generation" which has been under mpw ´s attention for the last 10 years, giving this Anthology a significant value and meaning in order to understand and study our day and the generation.

***
Next the selection. Hope you enjoy it.
***

when I was a little girl
my first poem resounded
in the ears of my neighbors
like a street vendor

everything useful
spreads out on the large and sharp
tongue of the afternoon

if there had been water to wash
the silky mane of the sun
the silver work that the desire
stationed on the square of a motionless
existence

ah thighs of stripped dunes
to cross the dense tapestry of the fog
that the palms impregnate
of an incomprehensible bothersome
industriousness

to blow up the moons

it is true

there was no water for a garden
the desert was that humanity

and the dust

that my mother shoves with a broom

from the collection Ludy D (editiones Flora Tristain)
translated by Karen Bernedo

Roxana Crisólogo (Lima, Perú / Helsinki, Finland)

.:::

Bewitched

Bewitched eyes in silent call
Them twin sparks regard me
Bearing truths, she´d rather hid
Veils of pain closed

Etched I am, hot lead profile
stamped on her mind´s wall,
Lending her study essence to shame
Picasso´s detailed study

Joints that would´ve swiveled
Locked, to hold bay knowledge
Lending scrutiny precious minutes
Within which, details looms real

Indecisions fights surmountable fear
That sprouts to drown reasn.
Erasing paths not trod
By feet devoid of hope´s light

Time flies before procrastinator´s face
Leaving gray streaks upon
My longing heart´s root
To lend words my soul fails to

Chiagozie F Nwonwu (Lagos, Nigeria)

.:::

Marking Time

You must intone the litany of bodies
those exposed in the glare of the headlights
those gatheres in the marble of the ossuaries

you must find your way through amorphous byways
among the shelves of stores in the mall
mark the time of days that are unequal

you must adapt to the rhythm of the sirens
leave the shelters, expose yourself to clashes
yield to the song of antitheft devices

be startled by the glimmer of the merchandise
be rocked by the gentle flow of the carts
dream animal and body parts

you must feed on organs and fetishes
border every crevice with lattice
pay the bill and clean up with care

recite the rosary of absent faces
empty the eyes, cut out the mouths
adhere to the flesh and crack your knuckles.

translated from Italian by Luigi Bonaffini from New Review of Literature, Spring 2008

Italo Testa (Milano, Italy)

.:::

Skyland Boulevard

Slip inside this house the road inside the road
Where the burdock & weevil seem a chattering
Of what is really here a dead ground, swollen
With the late sounds of war the religious right
The bridges to Babylon Tuscumbia & so many
Red lights set like Stations of the Cross a holy
Victual like "Holy smokes, Batman!!!" how far
We are from heaven It´s a manner of measure
A mere chattel of time, to us what difference?
Put a good foot forward & the highway opens
Up a little slip inside this house, this road this
Tiptoed through tulips & tell me what you see

previously published in Six Little Things

John Pursley III (Greenville, SC, USA)

.:::

Lost soul

Time was so busy
engraving lines
showing age on her face

That she forgot the memories
of the heart and soul
They wander now, lost.

translation by Libby Volke

Ester Leibbrand (Heerhugowaard, Holland)

Long Island Sounds: 2009

2011-07-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

An Anthology of Poetry
-From Maspeth to Montauk
and Beyond-

---

Next you will find a selection of this fine poetry anthology, edited by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan with Edmund Miller, Allen Planz and Peter Thabit-Jones.

This work includes 212 poets, 157 from Long Island, 4 from Upstate NY, 24 from NYC, 10 from other states in the Union and 17 from other countries: Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Ireland, Panama, Romania, and Wales.

As George Wallace states "When you consider the breadth and scope of the field of writers that represents, there´s good reasons to claim that pound for pound there is hardly a region of this country (USA) that has fone more for poetry and prose than Long Island."

***
Here´s the selection. Hope you enjoy it.
***
RUSTING - David B. Axelrod

Rust populates
those parts of things
that are not touched.

Others are oiled by
fingertips, or polished
by the brush of cloth.

Deeper crevices decay.
Even the thickest
iron will grow porous.

For ships there is
comfort in dry-dock,
welders´ arcs of light.

For me, waiting
and wasting. Unlike
love, entropy is slow

.:::

PERFECT PITCH - Byron Beynon

I´m reading the club manager´s letter
inside and intimate room
overlooking a bay
where colour change at a secret pace;
he once shared a space
with Dizzy Gillespie,
a story of perfect pitch and smoke-
filled notes, informing me of how
the jazz trumpeter
once listened to him shave,
the almost-contact of his face
in the cold mirror of light
as he told him something real,
shelled a musician´s car his way,
towards the sound he´d never forget,
that the electric razor
held him calmly in his right hand
was in E flat.

.:::

MUSIC - Kathaleen Donnelly

The low notes of a cello
settle in my solar plexus,
fill the air between beats,
cushion all other sounds;
make me want to lie
supine on the earth´s floor,
in the grass, on the sand,
look up
from the line along the bottom.

.:::

PHYSICS LESSON - Tom Romeo

How polite
The particle of light
It waves
as it goes by

.:::

MOUTHING GOD - Kausalya Venkateswaran & Pramila Venkateswaran

I love the word seed
in Sanskrit -beej.

I roll it in my mouth:
It travels from my pursed

lips to stop short
of the roof.

My tongue barely holds
it before it vanishes.

Seeds are magical;
how they sprout

an entire pantry
to feed a world

created from
an original.

This sound I
pronounce

is the first sound
that holds millions

of facsimiles,
multiverses, theories.

It feeds its singular syllable
to this frivolous verse.

Translation from the Tamil by Kausalya Venkateswaran

--

Žižek! -The documentary-

2011-07-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Žižek!" A Documentary exploring the work and personality of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, also revealing his curious mix of lacanian psychoanalysis, marxism and his critical attitude towards pop culture. He will theorize and realize the paradoxes in almost every subject: ideology, belief, revolution and love. He is not afraid either in looking inside himself, analyzing his private life and contemplating his conflictive relationship with his growing fame.

Why Darwin's idea is so dangerous: Daniel Dennett

2011-07-01T20:15:00.000-07:00

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.
~Daniel Dennett

Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (also known as Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief) is a 2005 documentary series conducted by Jonathan Miller for the BBC tracing the history of atheism. It was first shown on BBC Four and was repeated on BBC Two.A series of six supplementary programs was made from material that did not fit into the program; this was dubbed "The Atheism Tapes".

Open forms or free verse - Jon Stallworthy

2011-06-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

At the opposite end of the formal scale from the fixed forms (or, as they are sometimes called, closed forms) of sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, we come to what was long known as free verse, poetry that makes little or no use of traditional rhyme and meter. The term is misleading, however, suggesting to some less thoughtful champions of open forms (as free-verse structures are now increasingly called) a false analogy with political freedom as opposed to slavery, and suggesting to traditionalist opponents the disorder or anarchy implied by Frost´s in/famous remark that “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” There has been much unprofitable debate in this century over the relative merits and “relevance” of closed and open forms, unprofitable because, as will be clear to any reader … good poems continue to be written in both. It would be foolish to wish that Larking wrote like Whitman, or Atwood like Dickinson. Poets must find voices and forms appropriate to their voices. When, around 1760, Smart chose an open form for “Jubilate Agno”, the incantatory catalogue of the attributes of his cat Jeoffry proclaimed its descent from the King James translation of the Old Testament and, specifically, such parallel cadences as those of Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary:
praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him
according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise
him with the psaltery and harp.

These rhythms and rhetorical repetitions, audible also in Blake´s Prophetic Books, resurfaced in the work of the nineteenth-century founder of American poetry, as we know it today. Whitman´s elegy for an unknown soldier, “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night”, may end with a traditional image of the rising sun, like Milton´s “Lycidas”, but its cadences are those of the Old Testament be read as a boy:

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his
grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,
Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field
dim,
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth
responding,)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day
brighten´d,
I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his
blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

Whitman´s breakaway from the prevailing poetic forms of his time was truly revolutionary, but certain traditional technique he would use for special effect: the concealed well/fell rhyme that gives his elegy its closing chord, for example…

The poetic revolution that Whitman initiated was continued by Pound, who wrote of his predecessor:

It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.

Pound, the carver, unlike Whitman, the pioneer, came to open forms by way of closed forms, a progression reflected in the first four sections of Pound´s partly autobiographical portrait of the artist, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. Each section is less “literary,” less formal than the last, quatrains with two rhymes yielding to quatrains with one rhyme and, in section IV, to Whitmanesque free verse. A similar progression from the mastery of closed forms to the mastery of open forms can be seen in the development of such other poets as Lawrence, Eliot, Lowell, and Rich.

Pound may have called himself a carver, but he, too, proved a pioneer, opening up terrain that has been more profitably mined by his successors than the highlands, the rolling cadences explored by Smart, Blake, and Whitman. Pound recovered for poets territory then inhabited only by novelists, the low ground of everyday speech, a private rather than a public language. He was aided by Williams, who, in such a poem as “The Red Wheelbarrow”, used the simplest cadences of common speech to reveal the extraordinary nature of “ordinary” things:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Each line depends upon the next to complete it, indicating, the inter-dependence of things in the poem and, by extension, in the world, “The Red Wheelbarrow” bears out the truth of America´s statement that in free verse “you need an infallible ear to determine where the lines should end.”

Some poets have ventured even further into the no man´s land between prose and poetry with prose poems. Hill´s “Mercian Hymns” may look like prose, but the poet insists that his lines are to be printed exactly as they appear (on the book)… and the reader´s ear will detect musical cadences no less linked and flowing than in good free verse. Eye and ear together… are never more dramatically engaged than in the reading of such shaped poems as Herbert´s “Easter Wings” and Hollander´s “Swan and Shadow”.

---
JON STALLWORTHY.
An excerpt of his “Essay on Versification” (The Norton Poetry Anthology, 1983)

20th Century Poets

2011-06-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

THREE POETS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
---

ROBERT HASS (USA, 1941)

Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

-==

MICHAEL ONDAATJE (Sri Lanka, 1943). Canadian.

Gold and Black
At nigh the gold and black slashed bees come
pluck my head away. Vague thousands drift
leave brain naked stark as liver
each one carries atoms of flesh, they
walk my body in their fingers.
The mind stinks out.
In the black Kim is turning
a Geiger counter to this pillow.
She cracks me open like a lightbulb.

Love, the real,
terrifies
the dreamer in his riot cell.

-===

LESLIE MARMON SILKO (USA, 1948)

Prayer to the Pacific

I traveled to the ocean

distant
from my southwest land of sandrock
to the moving blue water
Big as the myth of origin.

Pale
pale water in the yellow-white light of

sun floating west
to China
where ocean herself was born.

Clouds that blow across the sand are wet.

Squat in the wet sand speak to the Ocean:

I return to you turquoise the red coral you sent us,
sister spirit of Earth.

Four round stones in my pocket I carry back the ocean

to suck and to taste.

Thirty thousand years ago

Indians came riding across the ocean
carried by giant sea turtles.

Waves were high that day

great sea turtles waded slowly out
from the grey sundown sea.

Grandfather Turtle rolled in the sand four times

and disappeared
swimming into the sun.

And so from that time

immemorial,
as the old people say,

rain clouds drift from the west

gift from the ocean.

Green leaves in the wind
Wet earth on my feet

Swallowing raindrops
Clear from China.

Bobby Bland - St James Infirmary

2011-06-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

Bertrand Russell

2011-06-04T15:23:00.000-07:00

On Philosophy and Science. Criticism and Evidence.

Philosophical knowledge, if what has been said above is true, does not differ essentially from scientific knowledge; there is no special source of wisdom which is open to philosophy but not to science, and the results obtained by philosophy are not radically different from those obtained from science. The essential characteristic of philosophy, which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life; it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.

BERTRAND RUSSELL: The Problems of Philosophy, 1912, chapter 14.

---

What is conventionally called "philosophy" consists of two very different elements. On the one hand, there are questions which are scientific or logical; these are amenable to methods as to which is there is general agreement. On the other hand, there are questions of passionate interest to large numbers of people, as to which there is no solid evidence either way. Among the latter are practical questions as to which it is impossible to remain aloof.

BERTRAND RUSSELL: History of Western Philosophy, 1946, Chapter XXVII.

---

Image - DESCONTEXTO

Allen Tate - The wolves

2011-05-27T18:26:00.000-07:00

The wolves

There are wolves in the next room waiting
With heads bent low, thrust out, breathing
At nothing in the dark; between them and me
A white door patched with light from the hall
Where it seems never (so still is the house)
A man has walked from the front door to the stair.
It has all been forever. Beasts claw the floor.
I have brooded on angels and archfiends
But no man has ever sat where the next room's
Crowded with wolves, and for the honor of man
I affirm that never have I before. Now while
I have looked for the evening star at a cold window
And whistled when Arcturus spilt his light,
I've heard the wolves scuffle, and said: So this
Is man; so--what better conclusion is there--
The day will not follow night, and the heart
Of man has a little dignity, but less patience
Than a wolf's, and a duller sense that cannot
Smell its own mortality. (This and other
Meditations will be suited to other times
After dog silence howls his epitaph.)
Now remember courage, go to the door,
Open it and see whether coiled on the bed
Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast
Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes
Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor
Will snarl--and man can never be alone.

1931

Photo: Corbis

[From Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, It must change]

2011-05-27T18:21:00.000-07:00

Wallace Stevens (Reading, Pennsylvania, 1879 - Hartford, Connecticut, 1955), "Transport to Summer", 1947, Collected Poetry & Prose, The Library of America, 1997

VII

After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready love
Are of our earthly birth and here and now
And where we live and everywhere we live,

As is the top-cloud of a May night-evening,
As in the courage of the ignorant man,
Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes

The book, hot for another accessible bliss:
The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degress of perception in the scholar's dark.

PenTales behind the story: May 6th, Panama

2011-05-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

PenTales co-founder Saskia Miller speaks with IP lawyer and PenTales Panama organizer Maria Arrocha about the current creative boom in her country.

Home away from home by Lissete E. Lanuza Saenz

2011-05-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

This tale is third runner up at the IT.AC.A Contest organized by Pen Tales

Getting on the plane is the easy part. It's the stepping out, the becoming someone else that comes with the conscious decision of living somewhere other than where she's always lived that she dreads. She does it anyway, only because she can't camp out in the plane forever, they won't let her.

She packs light, which is ironic, considering she's moving out for at least two years, maybe forever. She had no appropriate clothes, so she resigned herself to buying most of what she needed. Once she gets there she finds herself shivering all the way to the apartment she'd secured through an internet site and wasn't quite sure existed till she rang the doorbell and found herself face to face with her new roommate.

The first few weeks will be the best and worst. She'll get lost more times than she can count, till she final understands the complex and yet fairly simple metro/bus/tram system and how to jump from one to the other. She'll get overwhelmed by the smells and will eat too much in her eagerness to take it all in. Soon enough, she'll get better at doings things one at a time.

When she finally takes in the sights, she won't feel like a tourist anymore. She won't carry a map, or a single metro ticket, but a monthly one. She won't stand in line to see the Sagrada Familia, but will instead wait for another day, for she has time, and the line is too long.

By that time she will have already traded her clingy tank tops and flats for ballerinas and cardigans. It's not exactly cold outside, but for an LA girl like her, it's still a bit too chilly, so the ballerinas are the perfect choice. She never thought it would happen, but she's gotten used to walking everywhere, and she's sworn off high heels. Maybe because of all the walking, and the total absence of junk food in her life, she's lost those pesky five pounds she's been trying to lose for the past two years and is now the person she's always wanted to be.

She's reinvented herself to such an extent she's not surprised to see that her friends don't recognize her when they come to visit. She shows them the city, takes them shopping and smiles all through the visit, but when they're gone, she can't help but be a little relieved. She's now free to be herself again.

Humberto Vélez at Latin American Speakers in Canada

2011-05-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

LACAP Presents: LATIN AMERICAN SPEAKERS SERIES

Taken from Akimbo

The Latin American Speakers Series aims to contextualize Latin American art within Canada as well as enrich an understanding of Latin American art from both the continent and the Diaspora. Through lectures, audio-visual presentations and discussions, the series serves as an opportunity for cultural exchange. This year we bring together a diverse range of artists and local contributors who will reflect on a broad range of aesthetics and perspectives. Internationally renowned Alfredo Jaar, Tania Bruguera and Humberto Vélez share and discuss various projects where they explore the power of intervention on both public and private spaces while alluding to the possibilities of art as a source and inspiration for social change.

The Latin American Speakers Series is curated by Tamara Toledo and presented by Latin American Canadian Art Projects (LACAP).

HUMBERTO VÉLEZ
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Free, 2PM
Art Gallery of York University (AGYU)
4700 Keele Street, Accolade East Building,
First Floor, 116
* Free bus departs from OCAD,
100 McCaul Street at 1PM, returns at 5PM

HUMBERTO VÉLEZ: “Aesthetics of Collaboration”
Moderated by Guillermina Buzio

Humberto Veléz studied law and political sciences in the University of Panama and was awarded a scholarship from The Foundation of Latin American Cinema for studying Filmmaking and TV in the International School of Cinema of San Antonio de Los Baños, Cuba, funded by Gabriel García Márquez. He has been an artist in residence in Vienna (Ministry of Foreigner Affairs, 1998), London (Triangle Arts Trust-Gasworks, 2001), Sheffield (Yorkshire ArtSpace, 2007) and Toronto (Art Gallery of York University, 2009/2010). In 2010 he was invited to be artist in residence at METAL Art Foundation in London Southend.

Born in Panama in 1965, Humberto Vélez lives and works between London and Rio de Janeiro as an artist, art teacher, independent filmmaker, and a culture and arts projects producer. His present art projects include: an invitation to create public art projects for the Pompidou Centre in Paris; for the V Congress of the Spanish Language in Valparaiso; and for the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto. He has been commissioned for the DAROS-Latinamerica Foundation to create a performance for the opening of CASA DAROS, a new art centre for Latin American arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. A major exhibition of his works at the Art Gallery of York University opens in April 13-June 26, 2011 in conjunction with his Toronto participatory performance The Awakening in May 2011.

---

Guillermina Buzio is a Toronto-based artist and holds a BFA from the National University of Fine Arts P. Pueyrredon (Argentina), a Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, and an MFA from Ontario College of Art & Design. Her work focuses on human rights and identity and has been shown in Toronto, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, São Paulo and Havana. During the past few years, Buzio has programmed for the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Experimental Media Congress, and Planet in Focus Environmental Film and Video Festival in Toronto. Buzio was the programming coordinator and co-artistic director of aluCine Toronto Latin Media Festival for several years where she also co-created and facilitated self-representation video workshops for youth and queer Latinos in Canada, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico.

Presented by Latin American Canadian Art Projects and the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU) www.theAGYUisOutThere.org

About the Curator:
Tamara Toledo is a Toronto-based visual artist and curator. Toledo is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design and holds an MFA from York University. Toledo is co-founder of the Allende Arts Festival, Executive Director of the Latin American Art Projects and Public Programs Manager at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art. She is recipient of several grants and awards and has contributed her research at various academic conferences. Toledo’s essays on Latin American art have been published in ARM Journal, C Magazine and Fuse Magazine.

For more information:
www.lacap.ca
lacap@bellnet.ca
416-656-5687
LACAP
601 Christie Street, Suite 255
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6G 4C7

LACAP gratefully acknowledges the support of its staff, volunteers, sponsors and patrons, as well as its partners and funders: Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), InterContinental Toronto Centre Hotel, Consulate General of Chile and See Through Web. LACAP also acknowledges the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Tips for Selecting Your Story´s Narrative Style

2011-05-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

Tips for Selecting Your Story’s Narrative Style
by Mark Nichol

Taken from "Daily Writing Tips"

Before writers can share their stories, they have to decide what type of storyteller they’re going to hire for a particular gig. Here are the job candidates:

First Person
For this narrator, it’s all “Me,” “Me,” “Me.” (Or, more precisely, “I,” “I,” “I.”) But it’s not that simple. The first-person narrator can be integral to the story, in which case they know only what they observe or discover. Alternatively, they can be a minor character, which may actually free them up to know more than the major players. The first person might also be once or twice removed from the story: They heard it from a friend or a friend of a friend (or some other indirect source).

But keep in mind before you hire this applicant that it’s a challenge to keep the first-person narrator from telling too much, and that such a person is subjective and therefore unreliable. (Actually, that can be a good thing, dramatically speaking.)

First person is an effective device especially for action-oriented genre fiction: detective stories, thrillers, and the like, because this type of narration keeps the reader close to the action and privy to the cogitations of the protagonist, who is usually trying to solve a mystery or foil a plot.

Second Person
The second person (“You”) doesn’t get much work. You might think second person is the most engaging type of narrative, because it puts the reader in the thick of the action, but the device gets old quickly. However, it can be used incidentally, in a prologue or in one or more asides, cued by the first-person or third-person narrator.

Third Person
This narrative device (“He,” “She,” “They”) is the most common, for good reason(s): The third-person narrator is an objective observer who describes and interprets the characters and their actions, thoughts and feelings, and motivations without direct knowledge. (That objectively doesn’t always prevent the narrator from making satirical or otherwise judgmental observations, however.)
But before you leap up and cast this role, there’s one more decision to make: Is this narrator omniscient, meaning they know all, or are they, like the characters, limited in their knowledge? Beyond that, is the third person partisan about the proceedings, or neutral? Consider, too, that just like a first-person narrator, the third person might be unreliable: An observer, whether they have limited or unlimited access to knowing what the heck’s going on, may have a mischievous streak and decide to deceive the reader.

Tense
Regardless of who you hire, one more issue needs to be resolved: tense. Will the narrator describe occurrences in the present (“I steal over to the sofa and make sure the gun appears to have fallen out of her hand”), or in the past (“I stole over to the sofa and made sure the gun appeared to have fallen out of her hand.”)? Just as with second person, a little present-tense narration goes a long way, but a short short story can be effective in that form, or you can introduce present tense in digestible morsels in a longer work, such as when a character is recalling an incident.

Choose tense and narration form carefully, and may the best person win.

Emil Cioran & Petre Ţuţea interview w/ Gabriel Liiceanu

2011-04-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

Prominent members of the Romanian Generation of the 1930's, Emil Cioran (1911-1995) and Petre Ţuţea (1902-1991), talk about each other in this interview by Gabriel Liiceanu.

Cioran comments on Ţuţea's marxist past before converting to Christianity, while imprisoned. Ţuţea, on the other hand, analyzes Cioran's struggle to find God and believe in Him -- although never fulfilling his religious quest -- and refutes his characterization as an atheist. Ţuţea brings forward Cioran's fierce pessimism and his Schopenhauerian influences.

Translation credits:

http://www.youtube.com/user/wotanstod
http://www.youtube.com/user/Valahia2008

-----------------------------------------------------------

"I would not want to live in a world drained of all religious feeling. I am not thinking of faith but of that inner vibration which, independent of any belief in particular, projects you into, and sometimes above God..." (CIORAN, Drawn and Quartered)

"'I shall take the liberty of praying for you'. - 'Glad to heart it. But who will listen to you?'" (CIORAN, Drawn and Quartered)

"'When the soul is in a state of grace, its beauty is so high and so admirable that it far surpasses all that is beautiful in nature, and delights the eyes of God and the Angels' - Ignatius Loyola.
I have sought to settle in an ordinary grace; I have tried to liquidate all interrogations and vanish in an ignorant light, in any light disdainful of the intellect. But how to attain to the sigh of felicity superior to problems, when no 'beauty' illuminates you, and when God and Angels are blind?
[...]
By what peculiarity of fate do certain beings, having reached the point where they might coincide with a faith, retreat to follow a path which leads only to themselves - and hence anywhere? It is out of fear that once installed in grace they might lose there their distinct virtues? Each man develops at the expense of his depths, each man is a mystic who denies himself: the earth is inhabited by various forms of grace manqué, by trampled mysteries.
[...]
One cannot will faith; like a disease, it insinuates itself in you or strikes you down; no one can command it; and it is absurd to long for it if you are not predestined to it. You are a believer or you are not, the way you are crazy or normal. I can neither believe nor want to believe; faith, a form of madness to which I am not at all subject The unbelievers position is quite as impenetrable as the believers. I devote myself to the pleasure of being disappointed: this is the very essence of the world; above Doubt, I rank only the delight which derives from it"

(CIORAN, A Short History of Decay)

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T.S. Eliot - The hollow men

2011-04-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Poems by John Ashbery (b.1927)

2011-04-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don´t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What´s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren´t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

1981

.:::

Everyman´s Library

...the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself...
-PSALM 84

In the outlying districts where we know something
The sparrows don´t and each house
Is noticeably a little nicer than the rest, the "package"
Is ready to be performed now. It comes

As a sheaf of papyruslike, idle imaginings
And identifyings, and stays put like that.
It´s beginning to get darker. You send someone
Down the flight of stairs to ask after

The true course of events and the answer always
Comes back evasive yet polite: you have only to step down...
Oops, the light went out. That is the paper-thin
But very firm dimension of ordinary education. And when a thief

Is out there, in the dark somewhere, it also applies.
There is no freedom, and no freedom from freedom.
The only possible act is to pick up the book, caress it
And open it in my face. You knew that.

1981

.:::

Faust

If only the phantom would stop reappering!
Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.
The heroine is no longer appeared in Faust.
The crowds strolled sadly away. The phantom
Watched them from the roof, not guessing the hungers
That must be stirred before disappointment can begin.

One day as morning was about to begin
A man in brown with a white shirt reappearing
At the bottom of his yellow vest, was talking hungers
With the silver-haired director of the opera.
On the green-carpeted floor no phantom
Appeared, except yellow squares of sunlight, like those in Faust.

That night as the musicians for Faust
Were about to go on strike, lest darkness begin
In the corridors, and through then the phantom
Glide unobstructed, the vision reappearing
Of blonde Marguerite practicing a new opera
At her window awoke terrible new hungers

In the already starving tenor. But hungers
Are just another topic, like the new Faust
Drifting through the tunnels of the opera
(In search of lost old age? For they begin
To notice a twinkle in his eye. It is cold daylight reappearing
At the window behind him, itself a phantom

Window, painted by the phantom
Scene painters, sick of not getting paid, of hungers
For a scene below of tiny, reappearing,
Dancers, with a sandbag falling like a note in Faust
Through purple air. And the spectators begin
To understand the bleeding tenor star of the opera.)

That night the opera
Was crowded to the rafters. The phantom
Took twenty-nine courtain calls. "Begin!
Begin!" In the wings the tenor hungers
For the heroine´s convulsive kiss, and Faust
Moves forward, no longer young, reappearing

And reappearing for the last time. The opera
Faust would no longer need its phantom.
On the bare, sunlit stage the hungers could begin.

1962

---
John Ashbery

Isaac Asimov predicts the impact of internet

2011-04-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

ISAAC ASIMOV predicts in an impressive, lucid way -back in 1988- interviewed by BILL MOYERS, the future impact of internet.

Something to think about 23 years later.

City of books for children's home from El Crucero, Managua.

2011-04-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

"City of books" is a recital organized by the writers Hector Avellan, Erick Aguirre, Jimmy Javier Obando, Ernesto Salmerón, Enrique Rimbaud and Eunice Shade with the purpose of collecting books to build a library for the orphanage "Siervas del Divino Rostro".

The Children´s home is located in El Crucero, Managua.

The orphanage "Siervas del Divino Rostro" was founded in San Fernando, Nueva Segovia in 1985 serving 87 children and teenagers in the mountains of Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua, as a consequence of war, "we began to provide care and protection for girls in risk at that moment", says Sister Griselda Diaz, the current mother superior and head of the orphanage.

Since 1993 "Siervas del Divino Rostro" was moved to El Crucero serving children and young street orphans, abandoned by their parents. Since its foundation "Siervas del Divino Rostro" has been serving to over seven hundred children in El Crucero, every twenty-four hours of a day and 365 days of every year.

Also Sister Delia highlights that they are a private Children´s Home. So they live out of donations that the good hearts of others want to provide: "Everything we need here, since a bag of salt until a book."

Thus, within the framework of the World Book Day, writers Hector Avellan, Erick Aguirre, Jimmy Javier Obando, Ernesto Salmerón, Enrique Rimbaud and Eunice Shade, along with singer Mario Montenegro come together to offer a cultural activity called "City of Books: Literature and Music", whose objective is to collect as many books as possible and donate them to the Children´s Home "Siervas del Divino Rostro". The idea is motivates children into reading and give them hope to continue learning.

This is the first part of this initiative. Afterwards the authors plan to conduct reading activities saturdays or sundays to teach the children how to use and enjoy a library.

This activity has no funds, so if you want to help you can contact the number (505) 89139072.

"City of books" is a verse from the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. The verse belongs to its famous "A poem of gifts" in which he expresses his deep love and respect for books.

With this motto, these Nicaraguan writers will be reciting poetry, reading stories and sharing with people this next Thursday April 28 at 5:00 pm at the Central Bank of Nicaragua.

Admission is a book; "We want books in good condition and appropriate readings for children from 5 to 15 years. Useful books are important but also fun books are necessary. Magazines, learning games, everything that a library needs", said the writers.

Do not forget: April 28, 5:00 pm, Central Bank of Nicaragua. You can help us to make a change. Do not miss it!

Prokofiev plays and talks about his music

2011-03-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

Rare footage of the composer Sergei Prokofiev playing his own music and being interviewed about the activities he was engaged with at the time.

The Russian translates thus:

Prokofiev is being asked: "Sergei Sergeevich, maybe you will tell our viewers about your work?"

He replies:

"Well, right now I am working on a symphonic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cinderella, two waltzes from the War and Peace, and one waltz from the movie score "Lermontov." [The War and Peace] has just been brilliantly produced in Leningrad, where the composer Cheshko (?) made an especially noteworthy appearance as a tenor, giving a superb performance in the role of Pierre Bezukhoff. Besides this suite, I am working on a sonata for violin and piano [no.1 in f minor], upon completion of which I will resume work on the sixth symphony, which I had started last year. I have just completed three suites from the Cinderella ballet and I am now turning the score over to copyists for writing the parts, so that most likely the suites will already be performed at the beginning of the fall season."

Hermann Hesse reads "Stufen" (Steps)

2011-03-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

-==

STEPS

Like ev'ry flower wilts, like youth is fading
and turns to age, so also one's achieving:
Each virtue and each wisdom needs parading
in one's own time, and must not last forever.
The heart must be, at each new call for leaving,
prepared to part and start without the tragic,
without the grief - with courage to endeavor
a novel bond, a disparate connection:
for each beginning bears a special magic
that nurtures living and bestows protection.

We'll walk from space to space in glad progression
and should not cling to one as homestead for us.
The cosmic spirit will not bind nor bore us;
it lifts and widens us in ev'ry session:
for hardly set in one of life's expanses
we make it home, and apathy commences.
But only he, who travels and takes chances,
can break the habits' paralyzing stances.

It might be, even, that the last of hours
will make us once again a youthful lover:
The call of life to us forever flowers...
Anon, my heart: Say farewell and recover!

.:::

STUFEN
Wie jede Blüte welkt und jede Jugend
Dem Alter weicht, blüht jede Lebensstufe,
Blüht jede Weisheit auch und jede Tugend
Zu ihrer Zeit und darf nicht ewig dauern.
Es muß das Herz bei jedem Lebensrufe
Bereit zum Abschied sein und Neubeginne,
Um sich in Tapferkeit und ohne Trauern
In andre, neue Bindungen zu geben.
Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne,
Der uns beschützt und der uns hilft, zu leben.

Wir sollen heiter Raum um Raum durchschreiten,
An keinem wie an einer Heimat hängen,
Der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen,
Er will uns Stuf' um Stufe heben, weiten.
Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise
Und traulich eingewohnt, so droht Erschlaffen,
Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise,
Mag lähmender Gewöhnung sich entraffen.

Es wird vielleicht auch noch die Todesstunde
Uns neuen Räumen jung entgegen senden,
Des Lebens Ruf an uns wird niemals enden...
Wohlan denn, Herz, nimm Abschied und gesunde!

Celebrating The Poetic Voice of Puerto Rican Women

2011-03-22T08:58:00.000-07:00

Ejército de rosas

Celebrating The Poetic Voice of Puerto Rican Women

Mujer e Isla, an Anthology of 56 living Puerto Rican women which breaks with countries’ frontiers and gathers their poetic voice wherever they have made her home.

A lyrical and transgressive voice, rebel and indomitable we are proud to present

Friday, April 8, 2011
from 6 to 8 PM
Hunter College
The Conference Room of The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños
Room 1442, 14th Floor
(East Building, Hunter College
at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue,
Manhattan, N.Y.)
The City University of New York

Will be reading:

María Arrillaga
María Juliana Villafañe
Carmen Valle
Myrna Nieves
Betsy DJ Rosario
Marithelma Costa
Sheila Candelario
Nancy Mercado
Johanny Vázquez Paz
Madeline Millán
Maribel Sánchez-Pagán
Mairym Cruz-Bernal
Tanya Torres
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
Mariposa
Karen Sevilla

Info
787 645 9533
mairym

yolanda.arroyo@gmail.com
787 568 3445

The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños can be easily reached by taking the #6 train to 68 St./Hunter College station, or by taking the cross-town bus M29 or any other bus that stops close to East 68th street.

Death of Louis Armstrong

2011-03-22T08:54:00.000-07:00

Report of jazz immortal LOUIS ARMSTRONG, circa 1971.
Video by RealAgentOfSHIELD