Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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Indeed he was a poor angry sot but I fail to see how his work promoted hate.

Immigration to the US in Poe's time was practially non-existent.

Poe had opportunity in life a wealthy foster father, he studied abroad in Scotland and London he served in the US military attaining the rank of Sergeant Major and attained an appointment to West Point which he duly cast aside in pursuit of his "career" in publishing.


Please explain how it is possible to cobble together elaborate tales (an oxymoron if I've ever read one)?

Additionally please explain how Poe used his work to promote hate?

Poe: A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This poem was published in 1849 the year of his death.

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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But does that lessen his works?

Indeed I wish I were able to "cobble together" such poetry and literature.

Mind you we had our own poet occasionally accused of some racism who slung together a few decent plays including Hamlet an Macbeth.

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Originally Posted by Jericho

But does that lessen his works?

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Yeah, exactly. No artist is perfectly politically correct by our modern standards.

HP Lovecraft was pathologically fixated on miscegenation, desperately feared being overrun by the "lower orders" and likely had serious issues with his sexuality as well. None of that diminishes his work...though in a way it does make it more interesting. But without Lovecraft, there would have been no Richard Matheson, Stephen King or Thomas Ligotti.

I have admired Poe for years, he was a pioneer of the short story and has few equals in the genre. In a way he was a modernist before modernism, creating a literature of displacement and anxiety, of threat and despair wrapped up in the surroundings of enormous houses crammed with furniture, antiques curios and odd people unable to connect to the outside world. Perhaps that is why he was so popular among Baudelaire, Mallarme and other modernists and symbolists. Poe himself was born in New England and when his acting parents died he was displaced to slave-state Virginia and then England and then Virginia again, perhaps he never felt truly at home anywhere and was always searching for the balance, the peace of mind he never achieved. He described democracy as 'mobocracy' and saw universal suffrage as a con whereby the rich and powerful got the poor and powerless to maintain them in office year after year. But as far as I know he never endorsed slavery.

THE FALL

Parallel rills
Of rain
Ripple through the sheet of water slipping down
My pane
And shimmy downward toward the rotten sill
To cascade over the drop and spill
Loudly into the chill
And shimmering pools
That leak into the pores and crevices
Of the hollow ground.

Were these heavenly inhabitants thrilled
To trade their potential
For the wild kinetic plummet
To their splashing success?
Or would they have preferred
To fall onto the soft green grass,
Miles away from my peering eyes,
Absorbed unobserved by the thirsty dirt?

__yours truly

Very nice Trish

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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Poe was a rascist?

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Originally Posted by Birgitta

Poe was a rascist?

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It was the 19th Century.

There weren't many who weren't racist--or at least white supremacist, which is almost the same thing--by modern standards.

There is a discussion of this and other myths on Poe here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthe..._b_334742.html
There were racists in the 19th century -and the 20th and still today, at least provide some evidence if you have it, on Poe.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

There is a discussion of this and other myths on Poe here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthe..._b_334742.html
There were racists in the 19th century -and the 20th and still today, at least provide some evidence if you have it, on Poe.

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I saw that link on HuffPo last night and blew it off. You should have dug a little deeper. Yes, his stories are filled with a few racist stereotypes. I'll explain that away as being a product of the time.

It's also unclear whether Poe inherited that slave or whether he was acting as the agent for his aunt in the sale, so I'll set that aside as an example. I'll also set aside the question of whether the mere possession of slaves presupposes racism, and highlight the fact that he did write (or so thoroughly re-edit the work as to effectively make it his own) a non-satirical, non-ironic, well-known defense of the institution of slavery. He also went far out of his way to support and defend those who also championed the rightness of the institution (which was most commonly justified on the basis of white supremacy). So yes, I think my original claim stands.

well-known defense of the institution of slavery

Many thanks for this reference. This certaintly gives a different, more accurate, and more negative perspective on Poe as a man, I think like many others I am not familiar with the journalism even if it is not always 'signed'' although Edmund Wilson suggests the French symoblists knew his essays as well as his stories. I suspect that we are in a situation not unlike that encountered with Wagner -do you throw out the music-dramas because of Wagner's anti-Jewish rants and writings? One can sense in Poe's writings a deep resentment of the rich and the privileged, forcing us, as it were, to 'look up' with Poe from his disadvantaged position -yet though he owned no property he lived in households which owned slaves. And clearly it was not enough for him; it underlines the unhappiness of the man, it doesn't mean he did not write powerful stories either, but doesn't let him off politically.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

well-known defense of the institution of slavery

Many thanks for this reference. This certaintly gives a different, more accurate, and more negative perspective on Poe as a man, I think like many others I am not familiar with the journalism even if it is not always 'signed'' although Edmund Wilson suggests the French symoblists knew his essays as well as his stories. I suspect that we are in a situation not unlike that encountered with Wagner -do you throw out the music-dramas because of Wagner's anti-Jewish rants and writings? One can sense in Poe's writings a deep resentment of the rich and the privileged, forcing us, as it were, to 'look up' with Poe from his disadvantaged position -yet though he owned no property he lived in households which owned slaves. And clearly it was not enough for him; it underlines the unhappiness of the man, it doesn't mean he did not write powerful stories either, but doesn't let him off politically.

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Sure.

That link is a pretty good starting point for doing your investigation, so I didn't dig too deeper than the first few primary sources. The Paulding-Drayton review and the speech endorsing Nathaniel Tucker are quite damning on their own.

I'm not really in that lit-crit school of trashing the work of artists who might have had a few insensitive and ridiculous beliefs. Not unless they're still living, anyway, in which case I try very hard not to give them any money.

Unless they hold particularly hateful and ignorant views, I tend to give historical figures a pass and evaluate only their body of work itself. Poe is dead, and the dead cannot hurt the living...so I'll go right on enjoying his excellent proto-detective fiction. (Other than "The Raven" and "Ulalume," I'm not too acquainted with his poetry.)

....American superhero and horror/fantasy comics are my primary source of art appreciation these days anyway. I'm really into that "Comics as Modern Myth" thesis. ;) In fact, I've been thinking of posting an examination of Grant Morrison's work to this thread....

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Anyone else here go into absolute waves of emotional spasms when listening to Sibelius?

In a word, yes! Especially Symphony No 2, and Finlandia, one of the most arousing pieces of orchestral showing off I can think of.

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Add to that the final movement of the Fifth Symphony with its remarkable series of trumpet blasts for the finale and for me the whole of the Seventh, especially in the Ashkenazy version. For a man who claimed, in his famous exchange with Mahler, that the symphony was nothing if not rational and minimalist, he certainly has the ability to bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat.

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Originally Posted by nicebrn

It was the 19th Century.

There weren't many who weren't racist--or at least white supremacist, which is almost the same thing--by modern standards.

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Just as Lincoln was. He was morally and philosophically opposed to slavery both at the institutional and individual levels, but thought that the long-term solution for America's black population was repatriation to Africa and that the white man was much the superior of his black counterpart.

But his views were both conventional and highly representative of the time, and it doesn't prevent me as a Brit for having him as one of my heroes.

Last night I watched the film New York, I Love You The film was inspired by the film Paris, Je t'aime - both films are comprised of shorts which are shot in different parts of the city by different directors, on the the theme of love. The French film, released in 2006 was originally to be made up of 20 shorts, one each for the 20 arrondissement that comprise metro Paris within the Boulevard Peripherique -two directors pulled out so in fact there are only 18, but each one is distinct and has its own flavour, and at the end some loose ends are tied. Love in the French film is the conventional boy-meets-girl-falls-in-love; it can be parental love; love of place; fantasy-love; and so on: it benefits from the photogenic qualities of Paris, the quality of the writing acting and directing: New York, I Love You, fails on all these levels.

To begin with, it isn't always clear where the film is being shot, other than than Manhattan is New York -with one exception the last segment of ten is shot in Brighton Beach. There are obligatory New York Jews, Italian-Americans, and one segment is shot in Chinatown. There is an English musician trying to develop a career; a sardonic hooker; a businessman whose role-play with his wife is a mimic of the Bob Hoskins scene in Paris, and so on. A couple of Indians, in front of and behind the camera, but no Black people, other than one cab driver who is from Haiti, and Carlos Acosta who is Cuban and lives in London (as far as I know).

I thought this was a missed opportunity to emulate Paris; I don't know what other city could stand in, although I suppose places like San Francisco and LA -cities with distinct sectors and multiple identities- could do it. Anyway here are the imdb links:

Paris, Je T'Aime (2006) - IMDb@@AMEPARAM@@http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTc1MDgwNDE4MF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTQzMzc0MQ@@._ V1._SX93_SY140_.jpg@@AMEPARAM@@BMTc1MDgwNDE4MF5BMl 5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTQzMzc0MQ@@@@AMEPARAM@@SX93@@AMEPAR AM@@SY140 (Paris)
New York, I Love You (2009) - IMDb@@AMEPARAM@@http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTI3NDYxOTM4OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTEwNTI4Mg@@._ V1._SX94_SY140_.jpg@@AMEPARAM@@BMTI3NDYxOTM4OF5BMl 5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTEwNTI4Mg@@@@AMEPARAM@@SX94@@AMEPAR AM@@SY140 (New York)

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Originally Posted by robertlouis

Add to that the final movement of the Fifth Symphony with its remarkable series of trumpet blasts for the finale and for me the whole of the Seventh, especially in the Ashkenazy version. For a man who claimed, in his famous exchange with Mahler, that the symphony was nothing if not rational and minimalist, he certainly has the ability to bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat.

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You should check out "Dark Waters" by the modern composer Ingram Marshall.

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Originally Posted by trish

You should check out "Dark Waters" by the modern composer Ingram Marshall.

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Thank you Trish. I'll certainly check that out.

Ingram Marshall -not a name I had previously heard of, I am ashamed to say; however I checked it out on YouTube and it indicates the options that composers have been able to explore outside the dreary, lifeless legacy of Schoenberg and Stravinsky- there is so much music out there from which to draw inspiration. It also has some kind of congruence with what Klaus Schulze has been working with, vide Irrlicht:

YouTube - ‪Klaus Schulze. Irrlicht, I, Satz; Ebene‬‏

I don't know if there are any David Mamet fans here; I have disliked his work since I first encountered it through Glengarry Glen Ross, and the film House of Games, I don't like his use of language, that brittle soul-less repetition that you get in the empty books by Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy -anyway I always assumed he was a macho right-wing Republican like the film-maker David Lynch so I was surprised to see this review by Christopher Hitchens of some kind of confessional book in which Mamet declares his allegiance to the 'no-nonsense' politically incorrect strata of society who consider all forms of government an assault on freedom. As Hitchens points out Mamet can't even get simple facts right (Beaverbrook was Presbyterian not Jewish), and rants with all the spooky perfection of a convert -but from what, to what? Its an acid review, and I don't usually think of Hitchens as anything other than a self-important windbag, but its worth reading anyway. It is from today's New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/bo....html?_r=1&hpw

David Mamet’s Right-Wing Conversion

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE


On the Dismantling of American Culture


By David Mamet
241 pp. Sentinel. $27.95.




This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:
“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”
Or this:
“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”
Some of David Mamet’s unqualified declarations are made even more tersely. On one page affirmative action is described as being “as injust as chattel slavery”; on another as being comparable to the Japanese internment and the Dred Scott decision. We learn that 1973 was the year the United States “won” the Vietnam War, and that Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin — “never worked a day in his life.” Slackness or confusion might explain his reference to the *Scottish-Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook as a Jewish courtier in the tradition of Disraeli and Kissinger, but it is more than ignorant to say of Bertrand Russell — author of one of the first reports from Moscow to analyze and excoriate Lenin — that he was a fellow-traveling dupe and tourist of the Jane Fonda style.
Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in “The Secret Knowledge” that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.
On the epigraph page, and again on the closing one, Mamet purports to explain the title of his book. He cites the anthropologist Anna Simons on rites of initiation, to the effect that the big secret is very often that there is no big secret. In his own voice, he states: “There is no secret knowledge. The federal government is merely the zoning board writ large.” Again, it is hard to know with whom he is contending. Believers in arcane or esoteric or occult power are distributed all across the spectrum and would, I think, include Glenn Beck. Mr. Beck is among those thanked in Mamet’s acknowledgments for helping free him from “the bemused and sad paternalism” of the liberal airwaves. Would that this were the only sign of the deep confusion that is all that alleviates Mamet’s commitment to the one-dimensional or the flat-out partisan.
I am writing this review in the same week as I am conducting a rather exhausting exchange with Noam Chomsky in the pages of a small magazine. I have no difficulty in understanding why it is that former liberals and radicals become exasperated with the pieties of the left. I have taught at Berkeley and the New School, and I know what Mamet is on about when he evokes the dull atmosphere of campus correctness. Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case. But then he writes: “The BP gulf oil leak . . . was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks was good. Why?” This is merely lame, fails to compare like with like, appears unintentionally to be unsure why the gulf leak was “bad” and attempts an irony where none exists.
Irony is one of the elements of tragedy, a subject with which Mamet is much occupied. He has read — perhaps before Glenn Beck’s promotion of it on the air — Friedrich von Hayek’s classic defense of the market, “The Road to Serfdom.” (I would guess he has not read Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”) Briefly, Hayek identified what he called “the Tragic View” of the free market: the necessity of making difficult choices between competing goods. Classical economics had already defined this as “opportunity cost,” which is just as accurate but less tear-jerking. We have long known it under other maxims — “to govern is to choose” — or even under folkloric proverbs about having cakes and consuming them. But to Mamet, Hayek is the brilliant corrective to the evil of Franklin Roosevelt, who “dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy,” and shares this dismal record with Nazis, Stalinists and other “Socialists.” More recent collapses and crimes in the private capital sector, and the Bush-Obama rescue that followed, strike him as large steps in the same direction.
Mamet began the book more promisingly, by undertaking to review political disagreements between conservatives and liberals in the light of his own craft: “This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.”
That was certainly Hegel’s definition of what constituted a tragedy. From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise. This would have allowed Mamet to make excursions into the fields of irony and unintended consequences, which is precisely where many of the best critiques of utopianism have originated. Unfortunately, though, he shows himself tone-deaf to irony and unable to render a fair picture of what his opponents (and, sometimes, his preferred authorities, like Hayek) really believe. Quoting Deepak Chopra, of all people, as saying, “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based,” he seizes the chance to ask, “Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of liberalism, ‘Stop Thinking’?” On that evidence, yes, it would be a bit much.
Eschewing irony, Mamet prefers his precepts to be literal and traditional. In case by any chance we haven’t read it before, he twice offers Rabbi Hillel’s definition of the golden rule and the essence of Torah: “What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor.” As with Hayek’s imperative of choice, the apparent obviousness of this does not entirely redeem it from contradiction. To Colonel Qaddafi and Charles Manson and Bernard Madoff, I want things to happen that would be hateful to me. Of what use is a principle that is only as good as the person uttering it? About as much use as the (unnamed) “doyenne” of the American left who, according to Mamet, recommends always finding out what MoveOn.org thinks and does, and then thinking and doing it. That, I suspect, was a straw antagonist — with no chance at all of being, “arguably, in the right” — and this is a straw book, which looks for tragedy in all the wrong places.


Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His memoir, “Hitch-22,” is now available in paperback.

I generally enjoy Christopher Hitchens' writing, whether I agree with him or not. I do agree with his (and apparently your) assessment of David Mamet. I find Mamet's theater cold and unbelievable. (My first encounter was Oleanna, which I found to be stilted, preachy, robotic and shallow in spite of the intellectual pryrotechnics.) His plays are intended as sermons and display as much intellectual integrity as one. I haven't been following Mamet's career and was unaware of his new book and his "conversion." Thanks for posting the Hitchens review.

P.S. We (Stavros and I) disagree on Cormac McCarthy. As far as Hemingway goes, I like the short, simple prose. Brief flashes of light. An illuminated face. An undeveloped idea. Then darkness. But like Mamet, Hemingway sometimes constructs his characters to illustrate a moral. Rather than being true to themselves and reality, his characters are reduced to symbols in an allegory.

I 'm really, really glad somebody started this -there's not a law saying TGirls have to be incurably dumb (=interested only in pop stuff), or if there is, i haven't been told. A lot of hot-as-hell GGirls are much more interested in Mozart & F.S. Fitzgerald than in Lady GaGa, etc. etc. No reason TGs can't be too. One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive, but it's like buying medicine, only better. Paige. PS-Stavros-that is a super post, i hate politics, but i'll look Mamet up.

I agree with Paige completely. This thread is such a breath of fresh air in the forum. So bravo fortissimo to the intrepid souls who decided to hijack it and create a small oasis of cuture and sociability in the wild and wacky world of Hungangels.

Now . . . anyone care to discuss the lyric qualities of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine? Anyone . . .? Anyone remember Swinburne (hint - he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1903 to 1907).

P.S. We (Stavros and I) disagree on Cormac McCarthy. As far as Hemingway goes, I like the short, simple prose. Brief flashes of light. An illuminated face. An undeveloped idea. Then darkness.
Its obviously a matter of taste, and it doesn't always mean that intricate prose is superior -Conrad, Woolf, Joyce and Proust to me are at the summit of modern writing, Nabokov is a worthless fraud. I think it took me 4 hours to read The Road, and it was a waste of four hours of my life. I then watched the film after a cup of tea, so I guess I wasted half a day of my waking life. Its more like typing than writing. Modernism intrigues me with its paradoxes, subtleties, anxieties -its just more enjoyable to read.

One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive
Paige, I adore Uchida, I have her Schubert set but the HMV shop in London had a special offer on Barenboim's complete set of Mozart a few years ago -no contest! and I am not disappointed...

Anyone remember Swinburne..
Swinburne is the forgotten romantic of English poetry, as with AE Housman his poetry went out of fashion in the 20thc under the onslaught of modernism and after, Auden and the 'Life Studies' type movement pioneered by Lowell. Its a bit odd because Yeats is a late romantic -I think it was Edmund Wilson or someone who called Yeats the last 19thc poet, but on the whole a better poety than AS. Swinburne's poetry has musicality, lush phrasing, and though dense can be rewarding if you stick with it. He himself like Rilke was a sickly, neurotic individual needing constant care and attention. Maybe that style will come back into fashion, but I doubt it in present times.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

[/I]
Its obviously a matter of taste, and it doesn't always mean that intricate prose is superior -Conrad, Woolf, Joyce and Proust to me are at the summit of modern writing, Nabokov is a worthless fraud.

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It saddens me that of the four authors you named, Stavros, Conrad is the least read these days. I remember being enthralled as a youngster by his maritime novels and only realised on returning to them in adulthood that it was the quality of the prose and his talent for characterisation that had pulled me in in the first place. Most people know that Heart of Darkness was the template for Coppola's masterful Apocalypse Now, but I wonder how many have read it. The opening chapter, in which he describes the civilisation of London as the thinnest and most fragile of veneers sets the tone for one of the 20th century's finest novels. Add in Nostromo - his masterpiece imho - The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Typhoon.....

A lost genius.

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Originally Posted by Paige

I 'm really, really glad somebody started this -there's not a law saying TGirls have to be incurably dumb (=interested only in pop stuff), or if there is, i haven't been told. A lot of hot-as-hell GGirls are much more interested in Mozart & F.S. Fitzgerald than in Lady GaGa, etc. etc. No reason TGs can't be too. One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive, but it's like buying medicine, only better. Paige. PS-Stavros-that is a super post, i hate politics, but i'll look Mamet up.

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As the OP, thank you, Paige. Well, it's nice to get away from the metal freaks for a while! :)

If you're into piano concertos, I picked up the full set of Beethoven concertos in a 2 cd set from Amazon uk for £6 (about $10) last month, with Alfred Brendel in his prime, excellent quality 1983 recording, on Decca. Strongly recommended.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Ingram Marshall -not a name I had previously heard of, I am ashamed to say; however I checked it out on YouTube and it indicates the options that composers have been able to explore outside the dreary, lifeless legacy of Schoenberg and Stravinsky- there is so much music out there from which to draw inspiration. It also has some kind of congruence with what Klaus Schulze has been working with, vide Irrlicht:

YouTube - ‪Klaus Schulze. Irrlicht, I, Satz; Ebene‬‏

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On Trish's recommendation I did a search for the Marshall and downloaded it from Amazon. Excellent. Challenging, but very lyrical in its own highly idiosyncratic way.

In my other musical strand I've been on a serious Paul Simon kick this month, so the Marshall made for an intriguing counterpoint!

Add in Nostromo - his masterpiece imho - The Secret Agent

It takes time to read and understand Conrad, as is also the case with other modernists, like Faulkner for example, and if you believe people 'don't have time' these days and expect everything to take place within 3 minutes its never going to happen. On the other hand I notice how many histories and biographies are rarely less than 500-600 pages long, so some people must be spending a lot of time reading.

I was not impressed by Apocalypse Now, and repeated viewings confirm it is a mess of a film; it doesn't have much to do with Heart of Darkness, which is surely one of the most misunderstood pieces of 20thc fiction -either Coppola doesn't understand it or realised he couldn't film a story that is a narrative within a narrative that simultaneously takes place in London and Africa...

Nostromo is without doubt one of the finest creations in English literature, I used to read it every summer when I went on holiday, and decided I only really understood it after the fourth reading -to which someone I know responded if it took that long then what was the point of reading it? Under Western Eyes may be his most under-rated book, it has been criticised for giving voice to Conrad's issues with the Russians, but for a book published in 1911 is remarkably perceptive on the mind-set of 'revolutionaries' and particularly the expats, in this book cuddled together in Geneva. Victory is also a book I have read several times, I also saw Richard Rodney-Bennet's opera years ago although I didn't enjoy it; and most of these books have been filmed, but never successfully, although Hitchcock's version of The Secret Agent (called Sabotage, he made another flm called The Secret Agent but its not Conrad); is not bad. I also read The Shadow-Line in tandem with the BBC2 drama, but Blick who wrote it has only taken the kernel of that story, most of which takes place on board a ship in the Gulf of Siam.

I fully agree with the judgement of Mamet's ignorance and of his poor quality as a playwright in recent years. However I personally found Glengarry Glen Ross to be a wonderfully powerful piece of theatre and then cinema brining forther a performance of near brilliance from Jack Lemmon. The rot set in fully with Oleanna.


Conrad is a quite astonishing writers made more remarkable by swift mastery of English and then dramatic achievement in it - rivalled and perhaps surpassed by Nabokov. Apocalypse Now was a ragged film with some brilliant moments. But as a cinematic approach to Conrad it was a failure. I suspect Lord jim filmed many years earlier with peter O'Toole was a better piece but i saw it so long ago I've forgotten it (and read the book many years later).

Ingram Marshall I have heard but one piece by - a very interesting work called, Fog Tropes utilising found sound (ships sirens in the fog). A wonderfully atmospheric piece It was including in an album some years back that also awoke me to Quiet City by Copland - a piece unlike most of his output.

This is fun

http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-...lts-in-history


11. Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway (1972)

“As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”

The BBC made a heroic attempt at serialising Nostromo back in the 90s. A noble effort, undermined by the leading actor's lack of charisma. Just checked and it doesn't seem to be available on DVD.

The problem with modernism in literature with its subtle changes of time, place, and mood is that to film the book the purely literary quality is thrown overboard and the narrative thread is taken out -it is precisely the shifts in time that make Nostomo so mesmerising, and yes, difficult, but rewarding. Thus, the expensive BBC film replaced complexity with a linear narrative, Nostromo was not tall enough did not have a moustache and couldn't act, in fact it was a catastrophe although the geography seemed the only accurate thing in it. Lord Jim too, which I have on dvd, dispenses with most of the first half of the book to become a redemptive adventure story. I always thought if one director was a natural for Conrad, it would be Nicolas Roeg, whose editing skills are phenomenal. David Lean planned Nostromo with a screenplay by Robert Bolt, but my guess is that the heart of the story would have been replaced by fabulous long shots of the coast and the mountains...

I wonder what people think about John Fowles these days-if you want some lovely, subtle writing, set mostly in the French country-side, read "Ebony Tower." He also did "The French Lieutenant's Woman," which is Meryl Streep's best movie, for me, anyway. Just for the record-if anybody thinks one of the requirements for being a sexy GGirl or TGirl is dumbness-I work in the Summer at a pretty well known Music camp. There are many, many staggeringly beautiful HS, college-age, post-college age ladies here-much more beautiful than the "pro" beauties- who play Bach, act in Shakespeare, and read Camus in French.

Paige...Asheville NC - what a great city that is. I love it and know it somewhat. A great old fashioned soda fountain on the main street I recall and a great gallery nearby where i bought an art watch a few years ago. Some of my best friends live nearby in Tryon.

I for sure never thought dumbness was a qualification. Just the opposite. The brighter the better for me.
And on the subject of john Fowles The Magus (which he re-wrote later in life) is for me one of his interesting. Daniel Martin, on the other hand, is a work of phallocentric fantasy and self regard. Also his first published work The Collector is fine - with a remarkable film performance by Samantha Eggar.

I don't like John Fowles, I find him arrogant in tone, and borderline misogynist (vide The Collector); similar to Salman Rushdie. The Magus is an example of clever storytelling, but is let down at the end by a latin epigraph which is meaningless if you don't know latin, but typical of Fowles superior view of himself -I didn't know he re-wrote it so I don't know if he changed the ending, it was also a poor film with Anthony Quinn some years ago. I loathed both the book and the film of The French Lieutenant's Woman, but the location, Lyme Regis in Dorset is worth visiting, but not in the height of summer when it gets too crowded.

Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady which comes out next January I think, Richard E Grant plays Michael Heseltine (with blonde hair?) Jim Broadbent Denis. Streep has made some great films, and some dire ones too (eg Mamma Mia), but is one of the best actresses to come out of American films in the last 40 years.

I loved Fowles' The Magus, and then tried a bunch of other novels by him and never made it all the way through any of them.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Prospero

This is fun
http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-...lts-in-history

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Very nice.


17. Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes
“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady which comes out next January I think, Richard E Grant plays Michael Heseltine (with blonde hair?) Jim Broadbent Denis.

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I hope it shows him doing her rough, fucking her up the arse...
MARGARET...THIS...IS...WHAT..yOU'RE...DOING...TO.. .THE...COUNTRY!

Probably some revisionist bullshit, painting her as our saviour...CUNT!