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editor
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 Posted: Fri Nov 23, 2007 2:49 pm Post subject: PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Writing - Master Class |
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| Quote: | WELCOME!
PokerPulse Gambler's Guide to Writing - Master Class
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READ. Start by reading as much of the stuff as you can hold. Writers are first and foremost readers.
Where There's a Will
Hardcover
By Sir Jack Falstaff Mortimer, Q.C.
| Quote: | If you feel stuck in any kind of a rut you might contemplate the chameleon life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jew who became a Catholic priest, the librettist of the three greatest operas ever written, the friend of Casanova, Mozzart (as he always spelled the composer's name) and two successive Austrian emperors, who married an English wife and ended up living in New York, owning an opera house and teaching Americans about Italian poetry.
In that great period of history which included the Age of Reason and the French Revolution, the world of Rousseau and Napoleon, Byron, Wellington, Shelley and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Da Ponte appears in flashes of light, enjoying extraordinarily different lives in various disguises. Even his name wasn't his. The child of a Jewish family which had converted to Catholicism because, in the province of Venice, Jews were not allowed to marry, the future librettist was given the name of the bishop who baptized him.
We get a glimpse of Da Ponte in the priests' seminary at Cenada, where, in six months, he learned most of Dante's Inferno by heart, as well as the best sonnets and songs of Petrarch and 'the most beautiful works of Tasso'. He was fluent in Latin and became a brilliant teacher. Now we see him taking holy orders, followed by a succession of unpriestly love affairs. An anonymous denunciation accused him of an 'evil life.' Someone had seen a woman put her hand in his breeches. He fled from Venice to avoid his trial by the Inquisition and was sentenced, in his absence, to seven years in a prison cell without light.
After a tender love affair with the wife of an innkeeper, and having renamed himself for a short while with the eccentric pseudonym of 'Lesbonico Pegasio,' he appears again in Vienna as 'poet' to the Burg theatre, and the favourite of Emperor Joseph II. So we find him writing libretti for three operas, one by Mozart, one by Salieri and one by Martini, feeling as he writes that 'I am reading the Inferno for Mozart, Tasso for Salieri and Petrarch for Martini.' He is working twelve hours at a stretch, assisted by a bottle of Tokay on his right, his inkwell in front of him and a box of Seville snuff on his left, with a beautiful young girl, the housekeeper's daughter, to bring him a biscuit, a cup of coffee or merely her smiling face.
Da Ponte's lasting fame rests on his writing the wrods for Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Cosi fan tutte. He was convinced, in these works, as in his life, that quick and complete changes of mood are essential. So, in Don Giovanni, scenes of farce (the changing of clothes between the Don and Leporello) are followed by moments of high comedy, tragedy and, finally, the refusal to repent, which has made Don Giovanni into an existentialist hero as he is dragged down to hell.
... We can't resist a look at Da Ponte in a country house party just before the first night of Don Giovani. The house was on the outskirts of Prague and the October weather was still warm and beautiful. 'People lingered happily in the open air, with the feeling that days like this were a blessing,' one of the guests wrote. It was at this party that Mozart was lured into an upstairs woom and the door was locked until he finished the yet unwritten overture. Da Ponte appears at this party with an aged librarian from the Castle of Dux. This was a man who may have been a model for the sensual Don, and who also had a rascally servant. 'Signor Casanova seems to be a worthy old man,' one of the guests is reported to have said to Da Pone, who replied, 'There you are making a terrible mistake. He's an adventurer who has spent his days playing cards, brewing elixirs and telling fortunes.'
... He travelled to England and then turned up unexpectedly in Boston, after a terrible crossing of the Atlantic without a mattress or regular meals, to teach and sell Italian books. And then he was in New York, opening his new opera house.
... Finally the opera house burnt down, but Da Ponte lived on until his ninetieth year, respected, grey-haired, still handsome and smiling through all life's changes. When he died, he had an elaborately theatrical funeral at the Roman Catholic Cathedral on 11th Street. His grave was, like Mozart's, unmarked, the cemetery has been built over and no trace of this extraordinary consumer of life exists except on the stage. (From Changing Your Life - and 'The Man in Sneakers,' pgs. 7-10) |
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| Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2007 12:50 pm Post subject: |
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There may be wisdom for some in literary scholarship and academic theory.
The Best Poems of the English Language
From Chaucer Through Frost
Selected and with Commentary by
Harold Bloom
Hardcover
| Quote: | ... Poetry is in the first place poetry, a high and ancient art. It raises your consciousness of glory and of grief, of woe or wonder, as Shakespeare phrased it. Shakespeare spoke of "wonder-wounded hearers": they are the readers this volume seeks to serve.
... There are 108 poets represented in this book (aside from Anonymous), with about 24 given in something like their full abundance. Essentially, this is the anthology I've always wanted to possess. It reflects sixty years of deep and passionate reading, going back to my love of William Blake and Hart Crane, of William Shakespeare and John Milton, that vitalized my life from my twelfth year onward.
... Ultimately, we seek out the best poems because something many, if not most, of us quests for the transcendental and extraordinary, however secular, however well within the realm of the natural. We long, as Wordsworth wrote, for "something evermore about to be." The marvelous comes to us, when it comes, in very different forms: ideally in another person, but sometimes by an otherness in the self. (From the Introduction) |
| Quote: | 1
Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language" is "metaphorical," but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal. Kenneth Burke, a profound student of rhetoric, or the language of figures, distringuished four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. ... We learn to wince when Hamlet says: "I humbly thank you" or its equivalent, since the prince generally is neither humble nor grateful.
... 2
Language, to a considerable extent, is concealed figuration: ironies and synecdoches, metonymies and metaphors that we recognize only when our awareness increases. Real poetry is aware of and exploits these ruined tropes, though it is both a burden and a resource, for later poets in a tradition, that language ages into this wealth of figuration. The major poets of the twentieth century, in Britain and America, were those who could best exploit this equivocal richness: Thomas Hardy, W. B Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane among them.
... 3
Greatness in poetry depends upon splendor of figurative language and on cognitive power, or what Emerson termed "meter-making argument." Shakespeare is first among poets at representing thought, which pragmatically does not differ from thinking in poetry, a process not yet fully adumbrated. Angus Fletcher's Colors of the Mind can be recommended for its "conjectures on thinking in literature," which is the book's subtitle.
Colors of the Mind
Conjectures on Thinking in Literature
Paperback
By Angus Fletcher
... One definition of poetic power is that it so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes. Can a poem, of authentic strength, be composed without remembering a prior poem, whether by the self or by another? Literary thinking relies upon literary memory, and the drama of recognition, in every writer, contains within it a moment of coming to terms with another writer, or with an earlier version of the self.
... 4
The art of reading poetry begins with mastering allusiveness in particular poems, from the simple to the very complex.
... At issue is how to determine the appropriateness of an allusion, and since great poetry is very nearly as allusive as it is figurative, the question of accuracy in tracing allusiveness is crucial.
... 5
... There is a benign haunting in poetic tradition, one that transcends the sorrows of influence, particularly the new poet's fear that there is little left for her or him to do. In truth, there is everything remaining to be thought and sung, provided an individual voice is attained.
... 6
What makes one poem better than another? The question, always central to the art of reading poetry, is more crucial today than every before, since extrapoetic considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and assorted ideologies increasingly constitute the grounds for judgment in the educational institutions and the media of the English-speaking world.
... The ancient idea of the Sublime, as set forth by the Hellenistic critic we call "Longinus," seems to me the origin of my expectation that great poetry will possess an inevitability of phrasing. Longinus tells us that in the experience of the Sublime we apprehend a greatness to which we respoond by a desire for identification, so that we will become what we behold. Loftiness is a quality that emanates from teh realm of aspiration, from what Wordsworth called a sense of something evermore about to be.
On the Sublime
Hardcover
Longinus
... 7
... As you read a poem, there should be several questions in your mind. What does it mean, and how is that meaning attained? Can I judge how good it is? Has it transcended the history of its own time and the events of the poets life, or is it now only a period piece?
... 8
... consciousness is to poetry what marble is sculpture: the material that is being worked.
... The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves. Even Shakespeare cannot make me into Falstaff or Hamlet, but all great poetry asks us to possessed by it. To possess it by memory is a start, and to augment our consiousness is the goal. The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. (From The Art of Reading Poetry, pgs. 1-20) |
| Quote: | | Note: Windy and one might not agree with all the selections and comments but a noble and useful work with an enthusiasm for its subject that's catching. Surely there are few better texts for explaining poetic devices - the nuts and bolts of the thing - and their effective application. At the very least, a wonderful anthology in the great Norton tradition, the cornerstone of every self-respecting survey course |
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The Northon Anthology of Literature
Volume I
8th Edition
The Norton Anthology of Literature
Volume II
8th Edition
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:42 am Post subject: |
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Cultivate humility and a thick skin.
On what poetry is NOT:
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
Hardcover
By Frostback Robertson Davies, alter ego of
humorist Samuel Marchbanks
| Quote: | OF UNIVERSITY VERSE
I received an undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like "harlot," "stench," "whore" and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:
DISSILUSION
Ugh!
Take it away!
Life - the thirty-cent breakfast
Offered to vomiting Man
In this vast Hangover -
The World.
Onward I reel
Till Fate - the old whore -
Loose or costive
Drops me in the latrine of Oblivion -
Plop!
(From Savoury at pgs. 356-357) |
Who is this Marchbanks?
| Quote: | "Let's talk about your life," I said. "Readers of our selection will expect to be given some information about your life. Come on, Sam; were you really born in a place called Skunk's Misery?"
"To doubt it is to doubt geography," said he. "You will find it only on the largest maps, but if you enquire of the right people , in the right place, they will tell you where it is. The old homestead has sunk rather far into the swamp, I understand, but some relics of it are still there. The weekly paper, The Skunk's Misery Trombone, on which I learned my craft; the barbershop where as a boy I had my ten-cent haircut, with the barber's stomach, warm and maternal, lolled over me like a duvet. You behold in me the descendant - unworthy perhaps, but probably not - of pioneers and Loyalists. I am a WASP, and nothing of the derision that is nowadays directed at that ethnic group touches me."
"But a WASP is a White Anglo-Saxon; you are always blowing about the purity of your Celtic descent."
"You surely don't suggest that I describe myself as a WC, do you? That would simply by playing into the hands of my detractors. No, no; for those loose thinkers who have no conception of a Celt, I must appear as a WASP." (From the Introduction, p. XII) |
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| Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:46 am Post subject: |
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On inspiration, the Muse and the iron discipline of committing the stuff to paper no matter what:
Wodehouse on Wodehouse
Hardcover
| Quote: | I remember you saying once how much you liked the men in your regiment in the last war. It was the same with me when I was an internee. I had friends at Tost in every imaginable walk of life, from Calais dock touts upward, and they were one and all the salt of the earth. A patrol of Boy Scouts couldn't have been kinder than they were to me. I was snowed under with obligations. I remember once when I broke the crystal of my watch and seemed likely to have to abandon the thing as a total loss, which would have been a devastating tragedy, one of the fellows gave up the whole afternoon to making a case for it, out of an old tube of tooth paste, while another gave me a bit of string, roughly equivalent in value in camp to a diamond necklace, which I could use as a chain; and a third donated a button, which he could ill spare, to string the string on.
Whenever my bed broke down, somebody always rallied round with wedges. (You drive the wedges in at the end of the planks. Then they don't suddenly shift in the night and let you down with a bump.) When I strained a tendon in my leg, along came Sergeant-Major Fletcher night after night, when he might have been playing darts, to give me massage.
I was so touched by this that I broke into verse on the subject. As follows:
I used to wobble in my walk
Like one who has a jag or bend on;
It caused, of course, a lot of talk,
But really I had strained a tendon.
And just as I was feeling I
Would need a crutch or else a stretcher.
A kindly friend said: 'Why not try
A course of rubs from J. J. Fletcher?'
He gave me massage day by day
Till I grew lissome, lithe and supple,
And no one now is heard to say,
'Avoid that man. He's had a couple.'
And so with gratitude profound
I shout 'Three cheers for good old Fletcher.
He is the man to have around
When legs get out of joint, you betcher.
Fletcher,
I'm glad I metcher'.
Silly, of course, but that's how it goes. (From Performing Flea, pgs. 352-353) |
Yes, and there's more:
*Performing Flea
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Money in the Bank
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
With Foreward and Note by Plum pal W. Townend
| Quote: | I'm so glad you liked Money in the Bank. The only novel, I should imagine, that has ever been written in an internment camp. I did it at a rate of about a page a day in a room with over fifty men playing cards and ping-pong and talking and singing. The first twelve chapters were written in a whirl of ping-pong balls. I suppose on an average morning I would get from fifteen to twenty on the side of the head just as I was searching for the mot juste.
As I was starting Chapter Thiorteen the Library was opened and I was made President. The President of a Camp Library must not be confused with the Librarian. The Librarian does the rough work like handing out books and entering them in a ledger. The President presides. He stimulates and encourages. I, for instance, used to look in once a day and say "Everything okay?" and go away again. It was amazing how it helped. Giving the Wodehouse Touch, I used to call it.
Being President of the Library, I became entitled to a padded cell all to myself, and I wrote the rest of the book in a peaceful seclusion disturbed only by the sound of musical gentlemen practising trombones, violoncellos, etc., next door, in the interests of the Entertainment Committee and somebody else lecturing on Chaucer or Beowulf (under the auspices of the Committee for Education). All that I know of Beowulf today I owe to these lectures.
After I had finished Money in the Bank, I started a Blandings Castle novel called Full Moon and had done about a third of it when I was released. Ethel then joined me i the country, bringing with her the Jeeves novel called Joy in the Morning, which I had written at Le Touquet during the occupation. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse from Berlin dated May 11/42, at pgs. 112-113) |
|
Oh, yes, and get this:
| Quote: | Uncle Dynamite
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | | I have been plugging away at Uncle Dynamite. I managed to get a hundred pages done while in the clinic, in spite of constant interruptions. I would start writing at nine in the morning and get a paragraph done when the nurse would come in and sluice water all over the floor. Then the concierge arrived with the morning paper, then the nurse with bread for lunch, then another nurse with wine, then a doctor and finally a couple of Inspecteurs. All the Inspecteurs were very interested in my writing. It was the same thing in camp, where I used to sit on my typewriter case with the machine balanced on a suitcase and work away with two German soldiers standing behind me with rifles, breathing down the back of my neck. They seemed fascinated by the glimpse into the life literary. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse at the Hotel Lincoln, Paris, dated Feb. 5/45, at pg. 120) |
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On the increasingly restrictive editorial policy of U.S. magazines:
| Quote: | It must be quite a job, though, writing anything for the American magazines these days. Here is a cautionary manifesto which one of them has sent out to its contributors. The editor says he won't consider any of the following:
Stories about gangsters, politics, regional problems. Stories with historical settings. Military stories, World War Two. Stories with a college background. Sex stories. Stories with smart-alec dialogue. Stories in which characters drink. Stories with a newspaper background. Dialiect stories. Stories about writers or editors or advertising men. radio stories. Stories about religion. Stories concerning insanity. Crime stories. Mistaken identity stories. Stories of the First World War. Stories about adolescent characters.
Apart from that, you're as free as the birds in the tree tops and can write anything you like. (Letter to Bill from Wodehouse Nov. 11, 1946 from Pavillon Henri Quatre, St. Germain-en-Laye, at pg. 142) |
* A note on the title:
| Quote: | | With **Sean O'Casey's statement that I am "English literature's performing flea," I scarcely know how to deal. Thinking it over, I believe he meant to be complimentary, for all the performing fleas I have met have impressed me with their sterling artistry and that indefinable something which makes the good trouper. (From the chapter entitled, Huy Day by Day, at p. 217) |
| Quote: | | **Editor's Note: That would be Sean O'Casey, an Irish playwright of comparatively little consequence, best remembered for romanticizing the co-dependent relationship between a mean-mouthed drunken pugilist and his abused wife too punch-drunk to leave in Juno and the Paycock. |
A fascinating glimpse into the life literary and the indomitable Wodehouse optimism that sweetens all he wrote. A must-read for anyone contemplating a writing career.
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2007 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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Don't expect much help from the competition.
Run With the Hunted
Audio Cassette
Masterfully edited by Buk's publisher, John Martin
Written and read by Charles Bukowski
| Quote: | Luck
Once we were young at this machine
drinking smoking typing
it was a most splendid
miraculous time
still is
Only now instead of
moving toward time it moves
toward us makes each word
drill into the paper
clear
fast
hard
feeding a closing space
Friendly Advice to A Lot of Young Men
Go to Tibet
Ride a camel
Read the Bible
Dye your shoes blue
Grow a beard
Circle the world in a paper canoe
Subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post
Chew on the left side of your mouth only
Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a
straight razor
and carve your name in her arm
Brush your teeth with gasoline
Sleep all day and climb trees at night
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer
Hold your head under water and play the violin
Do a belly dance before pink candles
Kill your dog
Run for mayor
Live in a barrel
Break your head with a hatchet
Plant tulips in the rain
but
Don't write poetry
(Both from Side One) |
| Quote: | To his publisher, John Martin (of Black Sparrow Press)
| Quote: | 8-12-86
Hello John:
Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place.
You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?
Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?"
They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:
"I put in 35 years . . . "
"It ain't right . . . "
"I don't know what to do . . . "
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?
I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. . .
I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!"
One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.
So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.
To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
yr boy,
Hank |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 4:20 pm Post subject: |
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One never knows where one might find fodder for the next piece.
The Book of Guys
Audio CD
Narrated wonderfully by the author,
Prairie Home Companion radio host, humorist and
then some, Garrsion Keillor
Listen to him read a poem each day
at the excellent Writer's Almanac
Audio CD
The Book of Guys
Hardcover
| Quote: | A few years ago in a poker game I won a membership in a club called The Sons of Bernie and last January, late one night, I drove my truck deep into the woods near River Falls to attend the annual Bernie campfire and drunken orgy of song and self-pity, standing arm in arm with other S.O.B.s around a bonfire under the birches, in a raw wind at twenty below zero, the snowbanks up to our waists, and there, under the Milky Way and a nearly full moon, we ate chili out of cans and drank bourbon whisky and sang mournful songs like Long Black Veil and Old Man River, and complained about women until six o'clock in the morning, when we retired to our homes to recuperate.
There were about thirty of us, and when I arrived and saw them, I said to myself, "Let's get out of here. You were had in that poker game. This membership isn't worth half the five hundred dollars you gave him for it, the big cheater." It was not my crowd. They were the sort of desperate low-lifes who will tell you a long story for a five-dollar loan, guys who everything unfortunate has happened to, cruel fathers, treacherous friends, abject poverty, rejection by women, dust storms, prison, tuberculosis, car wrecks, the boll weevil, and poor career choices, all the disasters familiar to fans of the great Johnny Cash. Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill, we know that, but, I tell you, they looked so much older and sadder than you want people your own age to look. One glance at those beat-up faces and you could not imagine women loving them at all and I was by far the soberest and the handsomest one in the bunch. "Well, perhaps I will stay for awhile," I thought, "and gather impressions of them so that I can someday write about these poor guys so that they will not be completely forgot."...
(From ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL FEDERATION OF ASSOCIATIONS CONVENTION, MINNEAPOLIS, June 12, 1993, Introduction, pgs. 1-2) |
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 4:54 pm Post subject: |
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Writers, likes villains, find a way to ply their trade and make it pay - even if it means learning a new language. Voltaire's ESL method - only 3 months with the bard!
Passionate Minds
The great love affair of the Englightenment, featuring the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | ... As he later admitted to the one to whom he was always honest, Nicolas Thieriot, "I was without a penny, sick to death of a violent flu, a stranger, alone, helpless, in the midst of a city (London), wherein I was known nobody. I could not make bold to see our ambassador in so wretched a condition."
It was at this point that Voltaire's luck turned. In Paris the year before, he had met a passing English trader, Everard Fawkener, back from several years in Syria trading silk garments between Europe and India. Most educated Frenchmen had snubbed Fawkener for being a mere tradesman, but not Voltaire. He'd chatted with Fawkener about his business, and the archaeological sites he'd poked around in Syria, and now, in England, seemingly by chance - or with a little help from Voltaire - they met again. Fawkener had a mansion in the bucolic wonderland of Wandsworth, a country town with its own windmills outside of London. Voltaire needed a place to stay. He knew that there were a number of French-speaking emigres in London, and with his literary reputation he could probably find one among them to stay with. If he did that, though, he wouldn't learn much of England: he'd stay immersed in emigre politics, and emigre arguments, and an emigre's ever more out-of-date language. He was too proud to do that, yet he was too proud to scurry back to Paris and beg to be accepted by the French authorities again.
Why couldn't he learn English well enough to become a great author in England instead?
Fawkener had no idea what he was letting himself in for. Voltaire invited himself over and stayed for a week, and then another week, and then another, and yet another: he was transforming into that horror of the English countryside: The Guest Who Never Leaves. But he had one goal - to learn English perfectly - and he'd found the ideal place to do it.
He began ("thirty and one of july a thousand seven hundred twenty and six") by keeping a journal, carefully noting down verb of interest. "Mr. Scuttlars history," he slowly printed in English,"... He cured his wife of the spleen with a good fucking." Then Voltaire struck out the word fuking and above it thoughtfully wrote the shorter variant fuk, to be sure he got the spelling right. When he needed help in pronunication he made his way to the theatre at Drury Lane, where the prompter loaned him a copy of that night's Shakespeare script, so he could mouth the words to himself while listening to the actor's speak them.
He kept on going to the theatre, and he kept up his journal, and just three months after moving in with Fawkener, the no longer indolent Voltaire had it cracked. By October he casually wrote a firend the following note, in English: "I intend to send you two or three poems of Mr. Pope, the best poet of England, and at present, of all the world. I hope you are acquainted enough with the English tongue, to be sensible of all the charms of his works." ... (From Exile and Return, pgs. 54-55) |
For the best of the bard:
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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Not even your fans will admire everything you do - nor should they.
Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack
Hardcover
By deceased Frostback literary noise,
Robertson Davies
| Quote: | To Mrs. Morrigan
My dear Mrs. Morrigan:
I went to Montreal this week to make a speech to a ladies club there, and while I held forth I noticed a woman in the second row of my audience who was fast asleep. I have written the following lines to her, which I offer for your inspection, as I know you dote on poetry:
TO A LADY WHO FELL ASLEEP
DURING MY ADDRESS
Lullaby lady,
Lullaby dame;
While I address ye,
Slumber caress ye:
Sleep without fear, madam,
Sleep without shame.
Speeches are boring;
Tend to thy snoring:
I, too, am bored
But my sleep is to come.
Restful and numbing,
I go on humming -
Why?
'Cause it brings me
A flattering sum.
Let my words weave thee
A tent dark and deep:
You've paid your fee, dame;
Sleep, madam, sleep.
Yours most devotedly,
Samuel Marchbanks.
(-- p. 36) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 31, 2007 4:30 pm Post subject: |
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Know your readers. Speak to them.
From Highroller Rootskies Росси́йская Федера́ция:
Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
Hardcover
By Orlando Figes
| Quote: | Yet, for all his Western inclinations, Pushkin was a poet with a Russian voice. Neglected by his parents, he was practically brought up by his peasant nurse, whose tales and songs became a lifelong inspiration for his verse. He loved folk tales and he often went to country fairs to pick up peasant stories and turns of phrase which he then incorporated in his poetry. Like the officers of 1812, he felt that the landowner's obligation as the guardian of his serfs was more important than his duty to the state.
He felt this obligation as a writer, too, and looked to shape a written language that could speak to everyone. The Decembrists made this a central part of their philosophy. They called for laws to be written in a language 'that every citizen can understand.' They attempted to create a Russian lexicon of politics to replace imported words. Glinka called for a history of the war of 1812 to be written in a language that was 'plain and clear and comprehensible by people of all classes, because people of all classes took part in the liberation of our motherland.' The creation of a national language seemed to the veterans of 1812 a means of fostering the spirit of the battlefield and of forging a new nation with the common man. 'To know our people,' wrote the Decembrist poet Alexander Bestuzhev, 'one has to live with them and talk with them in their language, one has to eat with them and celebrate with them on their feast days, go bear-hunting with them in the woods, or travel to the market on a peasant cart.' Pushkin's verse was the first to make this link. It spoke to the widest readership, to the literate peasant and the prince, in a common Russian tongue. It was Pushkin's towering achievement to create this national language through his verse. (Children of 1812, pgs. 82-83) |
The Queen of Spades
The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
Papberback
By Alexander Pushkin
| Quote: |
| Quote: | In the cold, rain, and sleet,
They together would meet
To play.
Lord, forgive them their sin:
Gambling, late to win
They'd stay.
They won and they lost,
And put down the cost in chalk.
So on cold autumn days
They wasted no time
In talk. |
| Quote: | They were playing cards a the house of Narumov, an officer in the Horse Guards. The long winter night passed imperceptibly; it was after four in the morning when they sat down to supper. Those who had won enjoyed their food; the others sat absent-mindedly with empty plates before them. But champagne appeared, the conversation grew livelier, and every one took part in it.
'How have you been doing, Surin?' Narumov asked.
'Losing, as usual. I must confess, I have no luck: I play cautiously, never get excited, never lose my head, and yet I go on losing.' (From the story's opening paragraphs) |
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Later, after hearing the story of the Countess's famous win at the card table:
| Quote: | | Hermann shuddered. The marvellous story came into his mind again. He walked up and down the street past the house, thinking of its owner and her wonderful faculty. It was late when he returned to his humble lodgings; he could not go to sleep for hours, and when at last sleep overpowered him he dreamt of cards, of a green-baize-covered table, bundles of notes, and piles of gold. He played card after card, resolutely turning down the corners and won all the time, raking in the gold and stuffing his pockets with notes. Waking up rather late, he sighed at the loss of his fantastic wealth, and, setting out once more to wander about the town, found himself opposite the Countess's house. It was as though some mysterious power drew him to it. He stopped and gazed at the windows. In one of them he saw a dark-haired girl's head, bent ov er a book or needlework. The head was raised. Hermann saw a rosy face and black eyes. That moment decided his fate. (From Chapter I, p. 130). |
Listen:
| Quote: | Great Russian Short Stories
Audio Cassette
Our only quarrel with Penguin Audio Books is that there aren't enough of them. This one features some of the best voices in contemporary theatre but, unfortunately, good actors are usually too busy at some posh West End venue to take on a crap job like reading a book on tape. Too bad, maybe. |
Watch:
The Queen of Spades
Opera and Ballet
Featuring music by Tchaikovsky, lyrics by his brother - yes! - and even a performance by the incomparable Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who followed an exquisite rendition of the Dying Swan at age 46 by ripping the phone from the wall of a plush suite at the Hotel Vancouver during an interview when it wouldn't stop ringing.
VHS
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jan 04, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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Be careful when imposing limits on characters.
Life at Blandings:
An Ombibus
GIANT Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | When this book was first published - fifty-three years ago - writers in America, where I had been living since 1909, were divided into two sharply defined classes - the Swells who contributed regularly to the Saturday Evening Post and the Cannnail or Dregs who thought themselves lucky if they landed an occasional story with Munsey's, the Popular or one of the other pulp magazines. I had been a chartered member of the latter section for five years when I typed the first words of Something Fresh.
... I have always had the idea that Lorimer must have been put in a receptive mood the moment he saw the title page. My pulp magazine stories had been by 'P.G. Wodehouse', but Something Fresh was the work of: PELHAM GRENVILLE WODEHOUSE, and I am convinced that that was what put it over.
A writer in America at that time who went about without three names was practically going around naked. Those were the days of Richard Harding Davies, of James Warner Bellah, of Margaret Culkin Baning, of Earl Derr Biggers, of Charles Francis Coe, Norman Reilly Raine, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Clarence Buddington Kelland, and Orison Swett - yes, really, I'm not kidding - Marden. Naturally a level-headed editor like Lorimer was not going to let a Pelham Grenville Wodehouse get away from him.
If you ask me to tell you frankly if I like the names Pelham Grenville, I must confess that I do not. I have my dark moods when they seem to me about as low as you can get. At the font I remember protesting vigorously when the clergyman uttered them, but he stuck to his point. 'Be that as it may,' he said firmly, having waited for a lull, 'I name thee Pelham Grenville.'
Apparently I was called that after a godfather, and not a thing to show for it except a small silver mug which I lost in 1897. I little knew how the frightful label was going to pay off thirty-four years later. (One could do a bit of moralizing about that if one wanted to, but better not for the moment. Some other time, perhaps.)
Something Fresh was the first of what I might call - in fact, I will call - the Blandings Castle Saga. Since then I have written nine novels and a number of short stories about that stately home of England. And I should like to give a warning to any young littérateur who is planning to go in for the Saga racket, and that is to be very careful in the early stages how he commits himself to dates and what is known as locale. When I wrote Something Fresh I rashly placed Blandings Castle in Shropshire because my happiest days as a boy were spent near Bridgnorth, overlooking the fact that to get to the heart of Shropshire by train takes four hours (or did in my time. No doubt British Ralways by now have cut it down a lot). This meant that my characters were barred from popping up to London and popping back the same afternoon, which is so essential to characters in the sort of stories I write. (From the Preface, pgs. 3-5) |
From The Horses:
| Quote: | Something Fresh
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Apart, however, from the fact that he was a younger son, and, as such a nuisance in any case, the Honourable Freddie had always annoyed his father in a variety of ways. The Earl of Emsworth was so constituted that no man or thing really had the power to trouble him deeply, but Freddie had come nearer to doing it than anybody else in the world. There had been a consistency, a perseverance, about his irritating performances which had acted on the placid peer as dripping water on a stone. Isolated acts of annoyance would have been powerless to ruffle his calm; but Freddie had been exploding bombs under his nose since he went to Eton.
He had been expelled from Eton for breaking out at night and roaming the streets of Windsor in a false moustache. He had been sent down from Oxford for pouring ink from a second-storey window on to the Junior Dean of his college. He had spent two years at an expensive London crammer's and failed to pass into the Army. He had also accumulated an almost record series of racing debts, besides as shady a gang of friends, for the most part vaguely connected with the turf, as any young man of his age ever contrived to collect.
These things try the most placid of parents, and finally Lord Emsworth had put his foot down. It was the only occasion in his life when he had acted with decision, and he did it with the accumulated energy of years. He stopped his son's allowance, haled him home to Blandings Castle, and kept him there so relentlessly that, until the previous night, when they had come up together by an afternoon train, Freddie had not seen London for nearly a year. (-- p. 26) |
|
| Quote: | Something Fresh
By P.G. Wodehouse
Audio Cassette
Narrated by Frederick Davidson (aka David Case)
Not our favorite Wodehouse narrator by any means but Davidson does enunciate quite clearly and achieve an inflection of the bemused British aristocrat. Fails to evoke the innocence and gullibility so necessary to Wodehouse protagonists, the poor well-meaning sods who are so easily undone by even the most perfunctory of visits to the country. |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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How to write like an English major:
| Quote: | The History of English Literature
CD Audio
By British author and English teacher since 1973, Perry Keenlyside
Read by celebrated British actor Derek Jacobi and Cast
A TREMENDOUSLY effective guide to English literary highlights according to a long-time teacher and highly-respected author who clearly enjoys his subject. An excellent first source for essays on literature. |
| Quote: | I have tried to convey here something of the texts - and contexts - of the major writers in the English literary canon, quoting enough to give a flavour of each author and attempting to show a little of how they represent or express the age in which they lived. Many of us (myself included) find it helpful to be reminded who was alive and writing at a certain time, and who were his or her contemporaries: the very speed of this survey may provide a clearer overview of changes and developments through the centuries.
A history like this inevitably begs the question: what is literature, and how does it differ from other kinds of writing? It is impossible to provide a satisfactory short answer, but here goes...Literature is writing which is born of a consciously artistic intent to creat something not only expresses a perceived truth about the human condition, but also tries to do so in a manner which is aesthetically satisfying and productive of pleasure. (From the liner note by Keenlyside, whose last sentence was rudely excised midway by the often careless publisher, Naxos, which nevertheless releases a good number of excellent audiobooks). |
... or come up with an excuse as charming as this one:
Making History
Hardcover
By Stephen Fry
| Quote: | …Had I the patience and the discipline I should have chosen literature. But, while I can read Middlemarch and The Dunciad or, I don’t know, Julian Barnes or Jay McInerney say, as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students posess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts, they will say) as others moight talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of Animal Farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at nothing more than the simple progressoion of sounds. But when it came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start. How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?
I remember that child in the Dickens novel, Hard Times, I think it is, the girl who had grown up with carnival people, spending her days with horses, tending them, feeding them, training them and loving them. There’s a scene where Gradgrind (it is Hard Times, I’ve just looked it up) is showing off his school to a visitor and asks this girl to define ‘horse’ and of course the poor scrap dries up completely, just stutters and fumbles and stares hopelessly in front of her like a mong.
‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ Gradgrind says and turns with a great sneer to the smart little weasel, Bitzer, a cocksure street kid who’s probably never dared so much as pat a horse in his life, gets a kick out of throwing stones at them I expect. This little runt stands up with smirk and comes out pat with ‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth …’ and so on, to wild applause and admiration.
‘Now girl number twenty you know what a horse is,’ says Gradgrind.
Well, each time I was asked to write an essay at school, with a title like ‘Wordsworth’s Prelude is the Egotism with the Sublime: Discuss’ I felt, when I got back my paper marked E or F or whatever, as if I were the stuttering horse-lover and the rest of the class, with their As and Bs were the smart-arsed parroting runts who had lost their souls. You could only write sucessfully about books and poems and plays if you didn’t care, really care, about them. Hysterical schoolboy wank, for sure, an attitude compounded of nothing but egotism, vanity and cowardice. But how deeply felt. I went through all my schooldays convinced of this, that ‘literary studies’ were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days. You can’t talk about movies now without a methodology. Once they start offering courses, you know the field is dead. (From the chapter entitled, Making Coffee, at pgs. 4-6) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 1:12 pm Post subject: |
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Improve your English the Lenin way at Speaker's Corner.
Vanity Fair
Magazine Subscription
England Made Them
Meet Garech Browne, the Guinness heir whose father raised pigs in their drawing room. And Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And the Marquis of Bath, with 64 mistresses he calls "wifelets." Tim Walker captures a cross-section of proud standard-bearers in Britain's long tradition of eccentricity as Christopher Hitchens explains why his native land often seems like one big one big Monty Python skit
January, 2008
| Quote: | You might well think that it is easy to write about eccentric English people. “An embarrassment of riches” is a phrase that leaps to mind. After all, “England is the paradise,” as George Santayana wrote, “of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humors.” But before making one’s selection, one has first to appreciate that the entire place has something batty, squiffy, potty, and loopy about it. For a start, Santayana’s remarks on the English appear in his work entitled “The British Character.” So, what is this country actually called? If you come from France or Sweden, you can say so when asked, and that’s it. But if you come from an odd-shaped and rain-lashed little archipelago in the North Sea, you can answer “England” (unless you are Scottish or Welsh) or “Britain” (unless you are from the six counties of Ulster). The actual title of the country is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is really the name not of a place but of a distinctly odd 17th-century political compromise.
... I used to go to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon (once or twice with my own soapbox on which to stand) and inhale the pure air of unfiltered British raving. There they all were: the group that could prove that the English were the lost tribe of Israel, and the rival sect that could explain the secrets of the middle pyramid. Of course there are nut-bags like this in every society, but rarely are they offered such a special piece of prime real estate—just by Marble Arch in this case, and not far from Buckingham Palace—specially dedicated to their soothing recreational needs. During his sojourn in London, Lenin would go there to help perfect his English: I’d give a lot to know how he sounded, having learned from this crew, when giving a speech in that language. |
| Quote: | The First World War
The Complete Series
DVD
| Quote: | "The Kaiser is paying for the journey," jeered rival Russian Socialists. "He'll be hanged as a German spy."
Lenin (who was travelling by train from Switzerland to Russia via Germany) stood listening and smiled. "Hiss as much as you like," he said. "We Bolsheviks will shuffle your cards and spoil your game." (From Revolution - 1917, Disc 3, Episode 8) |
Poor editing mars this series but rare footage makes it nevertheless worthwhile. |
More on Lenin and - gulp! - his successor.
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:19 am Post subject: |
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A writer is not a spokesman for anyone but the writer.
Soul Mountain
Paperback
By Nobel Prize winner 2000 Gao Xingjian
Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
| Quote: | On this side of the bridge you eventually find an inn on an old cobblestone street. The wooden floors have been mopped and it's clean enough. You are given a small single room which has a plank bed covered with a bamboo mat. The cotton blanket is a suspicious grey - either it hasn't been washed properly or that's the original colour. You throw aside the greasy pillow from under the bamboo mat and luckily it's hot so you can do without the bedding. What you need right now is to off-load your luggage which has become quite heavy, wash off the dust and sweat, strip and stretch yourself out on the bed.
There's shouting and yelling next door. They're gambling and you can hear them picking up and throwing down the cards. A timber partition separates you and, through the holes poked into the paper covering the cracks, you make out the blurred figures of some bare-chested men. You're not so tired that you can drop off to sleep just like that. You tap on the wall and instantly there's loud shouting next door. They're not shouting at you but amongst themselves - there are always winners and losers and it sounds as though the loser is trying to get out of paying. They're openly gambling in the inn despite the public security office notice on the wall prohibiting gambling and prostitution. You decide to see if the law works. You put on some clothes, go down the corridor and knock on the half-closed door. Your knocking makes no difference, they keep shouting and yelling inside and nobody takes any notice. So you push open the door and go in. The four men sitting around the bed in the middle of the room all turn to look at you. But it's you and not they who gets a rude shock. The men all have bits of paper stuck on their faces, on their foreheads, lips, noses and cheeks, and they look ugly and ridiculous. They aren't laughing and are glaring at you. You've butted in and they're clearly annoyed.
"Oh, you're playing cards," you say, putting on an apologetic look.
They go on playing. The long paper cards have red and black markings like mahjong and there's a Gate of Heaven and a Prison of Hell. The winner penalizes the loser by tearing off a strip of newspaper and sticking it on a designated spot. Whether this is a prank, a way of letting off steam, or a tally, is something agreed upon by the gamblers and there is no way for outsiders to know what it's all about. (From Part 1, pgs. 8-9) |
| Quote: | Label France
Magazine extraordinaire
but not for sale for reasons
known only to the French
Interview with Gao Xingjian
"Literature makes it possible to hold on to one's
awareness of oneself as human"
By Jean-Luc Douin of Le Monde
April, 2001
| Quote: | On October 12, 2000 Gao Xingjian became the first writer in Chinese to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature. A victim of the Cultural Revolution in China, this dissident of the Tian'anmen generation, a political refugee in France since 1988, became a naturalised French citizen in 1998.
Novelist and playwright, he lays claim to writing liberated from all the rules. In La Montagne de l'âme [Soul Mountain], his masterpiece, he retraces a ghostly journey through the interior of China in the footsteps of Lao Tseu, far from the "world of dust'. His narrators alternate "I," "you" and "it," depending on whether they are talking about everyday life, giving an introspective monologue or engaging in philosophical speculation; the use of "we" is banned, because it stands for the idea of mass thought against which the writer has been vaccinated.
... In your speech before the Swedish Academy, you stress the role of writing as an attempt to decipher Man.
I really wanted to remind them that the writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes and ode to a country, the standard of a nation , the voice of a party ... loses its nature - it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but know themselves. Although Kafka or Possoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world.
I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of lfight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something selse, it vanishes. (-- p. 34) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 10:13 am Post subject: |
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Walk the whole world, wheel with the stars and break loose on the wind.
From Impossible Odds:
Art & Love
An Illustrated Anthology of Love Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | OUR CHILD
Oh child, do you know, do you know
where you come from?
From a lake
with white and hungry sea gulls.
Besides the wintry water
she and I built
a red bonfire
wearing away our lips
from kissing each other's souls,
throwing everything into the fire,
burning up our life.
This is the way you arrived in the world.
But in order to see me
and in order to see you one day
she crossed over the seas
and in order to embrace
her small waist
I walked the whole earth,
with wars and mountains,
with sand and spines.
This is the way you arrived in the world.
From so many places you come,
from the water and from the earth,
from the fire and from the snow,
from so far away you walk
toward the two of us,
from the terrible love
that has enchained us,
so we want to know
what you are like, what you say to us,
because you know more about the world than we gave you.
Like a great storm
the two of us shake
the tree of life
down to the most hidden
fibers of its roots
and you appear now,
singing in the leaves,
on the highest branch
we reached with.
Pablo Neruda, Chilean, 1904-1973
(-- pgs. 20-21, adjacent to Hummingbird and Passionflowers.
Martin Johnson Heade, American, 1819-1904. Oil on canvas) |
Maestro Neruda on poetry:
Time's River
The Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | Poetry
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don;t know where
it came from, from winter or a river,
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,'abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure nonsense
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda, Chilean, 1904-1973
Translated by Alistair Reid)
(-- p. 34, adjacent to Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, early 1480s) |
Listen:
| Quote: | Il Postino
Audio CD
Featuring a stunning array of artists reading selections
of the maestro's finest to the gentle waves of a light-
handed bandoneon - a wonder!
Even the soulless Material Girl gives a good performance on this CD. |
Look:
| Quote: | Il Postino
DVD
Neruda in exile in Italy, spreading the magic of his poetry even to his love-struck postman. |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 11:10 am Post subject: |
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Hide in the bushes during games.
Time's River
The Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | Autobiographia Literaria
When I was a child
I played by myself in
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.
If ayone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
Frank O'Hara, American, 1926-1966
(-- p. 35, adjacent to Paul Klee, Persische Nachtiogallen (Persian Nightengales), 1917) |
| Quote: | Answers
If I envy anyone
it must be my grandmother
in a long ago green summer,
who hurried between
kitchen and orchard
on small uneducated feet,
and took easily
all shining fruits
into her eager hands.
That summer I hurried too,
wakened to books and music
and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen
sorting through
volumes of answers
that could not solve
the mystery of trees.
My grandmother stood among
her kettles and ladles,
smiling, in faulty grammar,
she praised my fortune
and urged my lofty career.
so to please her
I studied-but
I will remember always
how she poured confusion out,
how she cooled and labeled
all the wild sauces
of the brimming year.
Mary Oliver, American, b. 1935
(-- p. 97, adjacent to Camille Pisarro, The Artist's Garden at Eragny, 1898) |
| Quote: | Otherwise
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Jane Kenyon, American, b. 1947
(-- p. 101, adjacent to Edouard Manet, Still Life with Melon and Peaches, c. 1866) |
Link to this entry
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Last edited by editor on Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:22 am; edited 1 time in total |
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