Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

[Lovecox]

I love Emily Dickinson.
I love how frugal she is.
Frugal but so deep.
Example:

The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee
A Clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy

I carry her poems with me through life. They often explain, comfort and guide.

[danthepoetman]

This is a great thread indeed! Great idea, runningdownthatdream!
Stavros, great analysis of Cloud Atlas. Thank you.

[runningdownthatdream]

By Pablo Neruda. Seems especially appropriate for this forum.

Ode To A Naked Beauty

With chaste heart, and pure
eyes
I celebrate you, my beauty,
restraining my blood
so that the line
surges and follows
your contour,
and you bed yourself in my verse,
as in woodland, or wave-spume:
earth's perfume,
sea's music.

Nakedly beautiful,
whether it is your feet, arching
at a primal touch
of sound or breeze,
or your ears,
tiny spiral shells
from the splendour of America's oceans.
Your breasts also,
of equal fullness, overflowing
with the living light
and, yes,
winged
your eyelids of silken corn
that disclose
or enclose
the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back
separating you
falls away into paler regions
then surges
to the smooth hemispheres
of an apple,
and goes splitting
your loveliness
into two pillars
of burnt gold, pure alabaster,
to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,
from which, once more, lifts and takes fire
the double tree of your symmetry:
flower of fire, open circle of candles,
swollen fruit raised
over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body - from what substances
agate, quartz, ears of wheat,
did it flow, was it gathered,
rising like bread
in the warmth,
and signalling hills
silvered,
valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses
of velvet depth,
until the pure, fine, form of woman
thickened
and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls
over the world
extended by your body
its suffocating snow,
as brightness, pouring itself out of you,
as if you were
burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive.

[Stavros]

Falling Out of Time, David Grossman (2014).

There have not been many achievements in fiction in the last 50 years or so, one thinks of the melancholy but seductive fictions of WG Sebald as a high point in a limited field where most of the best writing (Modiano, Morazzoni) has been in miniature. David Grossman, by contrast, has established himself as a writer of sensitivity and insight, seeming to write from within Israel and outside it at the same time.

Grossman's latest work of fiction follows on from his previous novel To The End of the Land (2010) in which the main character, Ora, chooses to walk from Jerusalem to Galilee to avoid being notified of her son's death on active service with the Israel Defence Force (IDF). In fact the literal translation of the previous book is A Woman Escaping News. Towards the end of writing the book, Grossman's son Uwi was killed during Israel's campaign in Lebanon in 2006 and he re-wrote part of To The End of the Land as a result, but Falling Out of Time is a more direct attempt to express grief, and is done so through the medium of poetry or more properly recitation, rather than conventional prose. This also gives the book an en-chanting hold on the reader, but does not overdo any religious symbolism, bringing in a few occasional motifs -fire, walls, burial grounds, but without detracting from the core emotional driver of the book.

The principal motif in Falling Out of Time -as was the case with Ora in the previous book- is walking, but where Ora attempts to walk away from bad news, the unnamed 'man' in this book suddenly gets up from the kitchen table to walk towards it, or as he puts it, to 'go there', and in a sort-of magical realist setting meets other parents on his walk whose children have died before them and with whose death they are not reconciled. Although, ultimately, it is about 'letting go', the condensed emotions of the book produce a lyrical searching for a place that does not exist, a condition that cannot be reached, but which, inevitably lies within.

The prose is concise in its treatment of someone young dying -'falling out of time'. The refusal of the parent to accept the finality of death as complete obliteration is configured in a sense of a space yet to be identified:

It has one final place,
a window opened
just a crack
where still the absence breathes, still loosened,
palpitating, where one can still touch the here,
still almost feel
the warming hand that touches there.

later he describes the burden of his son's death as 'a coldness tax' and ultimately resolves to lift the burden in an imaginary conversation with his son

I asked if I could make one more request.
I'd like to learn to separate
memory from the pain.

[Prospero]

"There have not been many achievements in fiction in the last 50 years or so," I agree that Grossman is great but beg to differ otherwise ... so from the mid sixties onwards here are a few who come to mind....Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, Vasily Grossman (in the or-so bit),James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov,J D Salinger,William Saroyan, Orhan Pamuk, Heinrich Boll, Anthony Powell, Kenzaburo Oe, Chinua Achebe, Gao Xingjian, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Hilary Mantel, Nadine Gordimer, Italo Calvino, Toni orrison, Patrick White, J M Coetzee, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Naguib Mahfouz, Yasunari Kawabata, Hisham Matar, Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, Nawal al Sadaawi, Vikram Seth, William Goding, Georges Perec, Michel Houellebecq, V S Naipaul, Gabriele Garcia Marquez, J M G Le Clezio, Gunter Grass, Doris Lessing,Anthony Burgess, Maria Vargas Llosa, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie

[Stavros]

I did not say there have not been any achievements in the last 50 years, just 'not many', and all your list of well-known writers proves is that you can write a list of well known writers. I would rather pare a list down to say, five, than cram in as many as I can.

I don't know what criteria you use to judge someone's work, if you have any. I was also thinking of literary fiction rather than specific genres such as crime, science fiction/fantasy, romance, etc, which is not to downgrade them for that reason; and value a combination of things: the craft of writing, imagination, structure, emotion (not always essential) and content. I also think that if you set yourself the task of choosing one writer, or one book above all the rest to save for posterity, it concentrates the mind. I also separate books I enjoy reading from those I think are serious contenders for posterity.

On that basis, while I have admired Patrick Modiano and Marta Morazzoni for years, I concede they are personal favourites whose broad appeal is limited, and who are therefore not likely to figure in anyone's list of writers for posterity. I also put 50 years as a convenient figure, hardly set in cement, although one notes regarding two of the great writers on your list that the best work of Heinrich Boll was published between 1949 and 1959, and Grass will be best remembered for The Tin Drum and Dog Years rather than anything published after 1965.

On your list, we can safely discard all of them except possibly Orhan Pamuk whose books I have not read. The rest are for the most part writers unable to produce work that is worthy of retention, or in some cases -Golding, Lessing, Naipaul, White, Nabokov and Achebe you have writers so politically offensive it makes one wonder why anyone would be attracted to them.

A particularly nasty figure is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a politically deluded, anti-Jewish, Russian nationalist whose claim to fame is based on non-fiction rather than fiction, even if there are doubts about the sources used in The Gulag Archipelago. To claim Solzhenitsyn as a great writer does not suggest the application of critical faculties to either the man or his work for a simple reason: he is not very good at writing.

I would be inclined to include Thomas Pynchon if I could get through ten pages of his work without being confused and disinterested. I assume the appearance on that list of Michel Houellebecq is a sarcastic joke at literature's expense, you might as well include Martin Amis on that basis.

Personal taste will always be a factor, my preference is for the modernism of Joyce, Woolf, Conrad and the early Faulkner even though, or because it has so many challenges; but there must also be standards, and an ability write must be fundamental to the assessment of a reputation, as well as the ability to communicate -what it is that writer is saying cannot therefore be ignored just because, for example, they have an elaborate style -a problem that arises with Danielewski's House of Leaves. Again, producing a list of writers, such as those on your list who have produced for the most part tedious, mediocre books doesn't encourage me to take it seriously.

You might want to think more intensely about what books you would want to save from a fire. And then you might decide not to bother.

[Prospero]

it was a scurry through the first names that came to mind - addressing your assertion that there were not many achievements. Your judgement of certain names on the list is so utterly out of key with the general canon i frankly don't understand them... Naipaul, Nabokov and Lessing for instance.

And your dismissal of all as writers whose work is not worthy or retention is, frankly, ludicrous.

Solzhenitsyn's politics are hardly relevant - otherwise we should utterly banish Journey To The End of The Night from any discussion of literature in the light of Celine's viscious anti-semitism. I included the Russian him on the strength of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward.

I do wonder i you have actually read many of the names on my list or are simply being a controversialist...

[Stavros]

it was a scurry through the first names that came to mind - addressing your assertion that there were not many achievements. Your judgement of certain names on the list is so utterly out of key with the general canon i frankly don't understand them... Naipaul, Nabokov and Lessing for instance.

And your dismissal of all as writers whose work is not worthy or retention is, frankly, ludicrous.

Solzhenitsyn's politics are hardly relevant - otherwise we should utterly banish Journey To The End of The Night from any discussion of literature in the light of Celine's viscious anti-semitism. I included the Russian him on the strength of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward.

I do wonder i you have actually read many of the names on my list or are simply being a controversialist...

I have strong opinions, I think that it what you find difficult to cope with -you have not attempted to provide any criteria for what makes great literature, you just list well-known writers on the assumption that they are worthy of inclusion.

If I don't have space on my desert island bookshelf for say, Toni Morrison, it is because I find her work of little interest, and don't consider her a stylist of any note, in fact in a book like Beloved, I think she takes magical realism to places it doesn't need to go to cover up an inadequacy in her writing, the same is true of Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, a book whose most notable feature is its tedious misogyny. I compare these writers to the ones I have returned to again and again over many years and the gap between them is huge, it is a gap caused by a failure of the imagination, a failure to use writing to create something unique, a message that has been heard so many times it is boring, and so on -you only need to enter the complex world of Conrad to see the difference in both narrative structure and motive as well as the quality of the writing -few writers in his own day matched his skills, none have since then.

Solzhenitsyn is a political writer, and his politics stinks. Anyone could write a diatribe on the USSR, and Orwell did it brilliantly in both Animal Farm and 1984, books far apart from the miserable, asthmatic prose of the Russian -he was a courageous man, that is true, but when you peel away the hype and look closely, I don't think you will like what you see. I think he would have welcomed any law discriminating against homosexuals, and that is just one example.

The issue around Celine I agree could be complex -Edith Wharton was a rampant Jew-hater, as were Wagner and Chopin; Edgar Degas took sides against Dreyfus; yet people read Wharton and listen to the music and admire the paintings -but Celine did actually denigrate Jews in his work, so one has to be more cautious with someone so explicit in his views, it is not as if he can hide behind C Major or a petite danseuse.

If you are familiar with the 'canon war' that broke out in the 1980s with Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind you will understand how the inclusion in the study of literature of previously neglected books -in the US in particular works by Black and Women authors -you will find courses in some American universities that dropped Faulker in favour of someone frankly obscure because they couldn't write as well as Faulkner but was Black, or Gay (Djuna Barnes is an example) -but who could delete Faulkner from a list of great American writers? There is a useful article on it here -
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all

The Canon in this country is established, and runs from Beowulf through Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales, through Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare through Milton, Pope and Dryden to Byron, Keats, Shelley and Wordworth, progressing through the 19th century novels of Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, James and then the moderns- Wells, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Conrad, Huxley, Auden, Orwell -and then falls apart because in our contemporary world we cannot decide who is important after 1950. Kingsley Amis? CP Snow? The canon exists because it is recognised that some works have been well written, others influential, sometimes both, but it clearly doesn't cover all genres -is Agatha Christie a great writer? Where do you place Conan Doyle?

I detest the work of William Golding; his crabbed writing style cannot mask his dreary English, Burkean Conservatism, you need only read Lord of the Flies to understand the meaning of despair, a despair created by an intense fear of change, as if change did not make the modern world in which he lived -or maybe that was the problem. Lessing's work is more diverse, but having to wade through the series of books in Canopus in Argos was worse than being given a lecture in anthropology by a first year student, all wrong, all stupid, an embarrassing farago of one-dimensional drive.

In English, I think there has been a major falling off of talent in the novel since say the death of Orwell. That doesn't mean there haven't been some good books or good writers, but I think in the end every century produces only a few writers whose work stands the test of time. Who should be on that list makes for entertaining reading, because few people agree on who should be on it.

[buttslinger]

Somebody should chronicle the classic tiffs between Stavros and Prospero.

[Prospero]

Re Lessing. Why judge her by her worst work, rather than the Golden Notebook, for instance?