And today I'm posting a song by the late great Bert Jansch and a track by Donovan recorded some 40 years ago which was a sort of tribute to Jansch.
Bert Jansch - Fresh as s Sweet Sunday - YouTube
Donovan - House Of Jansch - YouTube
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And today I'm posting a song by the late great Bert Jansch and a track by Donovan recorded some 40 years ago which was a sort of tribute to Jansch.
Bert Jansch - Fresh as s Sweet Sunday - YouTube
Donovan - House Of Jansch - YouTube
As I read posts on other sections of this forum I'd like someone explain something to me. What the hell is a topic about classical music, poetry doing on this type of forum?
Yvonne -to prove that even people who lust after transexuals and want to discuss who, when, where, how much, at what time, in what position, wearing what?, how old?, with or without, high or low, black or white, Hispanic or Asian?, large or small?
are also interested in the fall-out from Heidegger's capitulation and moral collapse...the violin..the orchestra...la voix humaine...Ibsen or O'Neill? (Ibsen), themes and symbols in Moby-Dick...aka The Brains Trust.
Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome...
And indeed if you find this strand odd on this forum what about all the political arguments? The sports strand? What about the what are you listening to now strand? And the what films have you seen? etc etc. Sure this forum could just be about transexuals and sex and hookers and the like. But everyone - and not least you Yvonne - re interested in millions of other things. So why not. There is room for it all.
I agree, I am not saying that this topic shouldn't talked about. I just find the dual nature of posts in other sections and these cultural posts kinda bizarre.Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
I mean, posts about how big is this guys dick included with posts about Mozart, ya gotta admit, it is kinda strange.
All part of life's rich tapestry
Yes, life is strangeQuote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yvonne183
Mozart did have a big 'un! :shrug
As the guy who started the thread in the first place, I threw it out there to find out if there were other people on here who had a cultural hinterland that went further back than hiphop and Hollywood blockbusters. Thankfully it took, and I've learned and experimented with music and literature that was new to me as a result, although I draw the line at Stavros' championing Bela Tarr's seven-hour Hungarian epic about farming lol. :hide-1:Quote:
Originally Posted by Yvonne183
I don't know what other regular contributors feel, but for me it's also become something of a refuge in those increasingly frequent times when the noise and hate elsewhere on the forum gets a bit too much to bear.
I love it! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
Thankfully it took, and I've learned and experimented with music and literature that was new to me as a result, although I draw the line at Stavros' championing Bela Tarr's seven-hour Hungarian epic about farming...
The decline of a collective farm -think about it, RobertLouis, its the decline of a way of life that dominated a large part of Europe and the USSR -what Satantango does is expose the willingness of people to submit to a crushing system out of some mistaken belief that it will be worth it, one day...by subjecting the audience to, for example, a one-hour sequence in which a doctor does more or less nothing except drink plum brandy and write observations of his neighbours in a scrap book, he is presenting you with the tedium of everyday life; and yet through this challenge to sustainability in cinema, there is an accumulation of knowledge through fine details that by the conclusion is devastating; you wonder how anyone put up with communism for so long, while realising, oddly, how easy it was. The english translation of the book is out soon I think.
If Satantango is too much of a challenge, try Werckmeister Harmonies.
I was joking, Stavros. I certainly enjoyed the Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation, which I have on the two disc DVD set.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
While no director can be said to be entirely unique, Tarr explores the possibilities of the camera in a unique way and yes, you do find yourself challenging long-held beliefs and prejudices as his films wash over you.
You kept that a secret all this time? I am waiting for the Turin Horse to come out. But yes, an acquired taste -
I forgot to mention that Finlandia is one of my favourite Sibelius pieces, it is surely even more rousing than the 5th...?
I can't remember life without both Finlandia and the Karelia Suite, always there from my childhood, but I only came upon the symphonies in my 30s, via arguably the most immediately accessible, the 2nd. The 5th, however, with the first rumblings of assonance between the strings and the brass and the triumphal congregation of the third and final movement surpasses anything else in his oeuvre for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
If you'll forgive me, the two pieces mentioned earlier demand relatively direct appeals to the emotions. All the symphonies, on the other hand, lack that immediacy and require a degree of dedication and effort from the listener; the single-movement 7th also has a special place in my heart, especially as conducted by Ashkenazy, but the 5th remains the pinnacle.
He's hardly overlooked as a symphonist, but he's certainly not as well-known as his work deserves. The sheer variety on display and the adventurous and daring approach for me prefigure the work of those who followed him into the rest of the 20th century. And because they are challenging rather than wilfully difficult, I simply love his work.
I've had a DVD of The Turin Horse at home for a couple of weeks. It's shortlisted for a European Film Academy Award. Not watched it yet but hadn't realised it was the same director that Stavros has been lauding so it's now on the viewing list for this weekend.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011...-changed-music
The BBC is going to broadcast a series of programmes on the Symphony, but I am puzzled by the selection. I am not sure what the criteria are but I would have assumed the work of Johann Christian Bach was as important as Haydn whose work has to be in any programme on the symphony even though I find Haydn relentlessly boring.
I only agree with the Eroica on the BBC list, if it was me, and it was about selecting the symphony which I think had an impact on the form maybe on music more widely, the list would have only three works:
Beethoven Symphony No 3, Eroica: the 3rd is hugely important because of the tonal development of the first subject, which subverts the conventional form that had existed up until then, just through the sudden conclusion of the line when it falls into a minor chord. This opened up new possibilities in the expansion of the relatively simple musical subjects perfected by Mozart, and above all introduced complexity into music.
Beethoven Symphony No 9: if the 3rd marked the onset of a tonal revolution in music, the 9th split form asunder, the radical 4th movement almost sounds as if it is indeed falling apart from its outset -not just the use of a chorus as an addition to the orchestral writing, but the way in which the use of variations, which Beethoven had also used in the last movement of the 3rd, give the symphony a completely new perspective on music -hardly surprising that it opens the Bayreuth festival every year and that Wagner idolised LvB.
Berlioz, Symphony Fantastique. I think this was the first 'programmatic' symphony in which each part of the work was given a specific story; most of Berlioz's music sounds to me like hysterical slop, but this is a work of genius, and one of the most thrilling experiences when heard live. The key point is that each movement does sound like its theme/story, which is another reason why it works, and also because it doesn't become a patronising exercise by a composer desperate to impress his audience.
I think that once Beethoven and Berlioz had shown what a symphony could do, what happened after took these existing formats, in some cases it repeated them, in other cases it stretched them but never offered something completely new: in effect, the Symphony, like the Concerto, has become a dead form: literally in the case of Stravinsky's Symphony in C, in which the vacuous, insipid, pseudo-musical junk notes concocted by this occasional fraud die as soon as they are played. None of this should diminish the work of Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky or Mahler- but in the context of the history of the symphony I don't know what it is that is original about them. Mahler, after all, followed Beethoven by introducing choral movements in his symphonies. Some may want to put Shostakovich in the context of his times, fair enough, but the format of the symphony, even the 13th and 14th, was taken over from pre-existing examples (Mahler's 4th, Zemlinsky's Lyrisches Symphonie).
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are to arrive today.
Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?
Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.
Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the greatest gate of the city,
on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed
many titles and names of honor.
Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?
Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.
Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?
Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
I have managed to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004). I wanted to read this book before seeing the film which opens in the UK at the end of February.
Cloud Atlas is made up of six episodes/narratives, five are in two parts, with one central section. The episodes/narratives begin in the 19th century and work their way through 1,500 years at the central section, before returning in sequence to the 19th century at the end. The book was inspired by the piano work, Cloud Atlas by the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (see link below) and thus may be thought of as a Theme and Variations novel: there are themes such as -depending on your point of view- the nightmare/myth of Nietzsche's Eternal Return- or the simple/naive view that human nature does not change and that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes from one millenium to another. The variations come in the literary form of each episode/narrative, which is a pastiche of an existing form: thus the fist narrative is derived from Melville's Benito Cereno; the second the 'confessional' novel which tends to use the diary or letters as a vehicle; the third is pulp fiction; the fourth a possibly deliberately badly written pastiche of the drivel one associates with Hunter S. Thompson and Martin Amis; the fifth derived from sci-fi futurist novels and films of which 1984, Brave New World, and Blade Runner are the most obvious. At the heart of the book is the far off future, written in pidgin English in which a Margaret Mead-style anthropologist explains to the Hawaiian native that her ancestors believed their people had survived 'the fall' but all they ever found on their travels was dead-rubble cities, jungle-choked cities, plague-rotted cities...half the world/most of the world? has been destroyed by nuclear radiation in the previous section set approx 500 years before, and here we end up in the distant future with a collapsed world and Hawaiian society riven by greed and brutality. Indeed, this is but the repetition of the fate visited on Adam Ewing in the 19th centry who saves the life of a stowaway (read: savage)who ultimately turns against him, with the central message of this novel:
He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!
Cloud Atlas is a hymn to nihilism, a belief that however hard you try to change things, everything remains the same. So why bother? In each of the episodes birth-marks, music, books, images recur, because we are doomed to repeat ourselves. As with other examples of nihilism in art -notably the films of Antonionio and Stanley Kubrick- there is no room in this human experience for love or laughter, love has no healing or liberating properties, indeed it does not appear to exist at all.
The book is twice as long as it needs to be, and is written with a verve which belies its essentially pessimistic message. The author acknowledges the grants he received to conduct research on Melville and Delius, a confession of his lack of imagination. When the blind composer accepts an interloper into his house as an amanuensis, and you discover his wife is called Jocasta, you know what will follow, as it does a few pages later. The local music shop is called Flagstad, rather than say, Nilsson's or Schwarzkop's; just as in other parts of the novel Mitchell refers to his own brilliance as a writer, citing the letters from the amanuensis as examples of 'vivid' writing. This narcissistic rubbish has been encountered before, Nabokov does it in Pale Fire and Rushdie does it in The Satanic Verses.
In sum, the film might be worth watching, the novel is garbage.
The link to an excerpt from the original Cloud Atlas:
Cloud Atlas I & III - YouTube
I enjoyed this thread in the past so thought I'd resurrect to give Stavros, Prospero, Robert, et al the chance to post more goodness.
Not sure whether the performance below would be considered classical. It's an interpretation of a medieval Norse song that I like a lot with Sax by Jan Garbarek and vocals by a traditional norse singer by the name of Agnes Buen Garnas. If you like to escape from modern music a bit, give it a listen.
Agnes Buen GarnĂ¥s / Jan Garbarek - Margjit og Targjei Risvollo - YouTube
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.
This is a great thread indeed! Great idea, runningdownthatdream!
Stavros, great analysis of Cloud Atlas. Thank you.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
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.
Somebody should chronicle the classic tiffs between Stavros and Prospero.
Re Lessing. Why judge her by her worst work, rather than the Golden Notebook, for instance?
If I had been able to read it I would tell you, but it is to my mind the kind of writing that alienates the reader by not letting them into the narrative. That doesn't mean writing has to be simple and accessible, you could hardly say that of Joyce, for example, but Lessing to me writes rather like Irish Murdoch, with cement rather than ink. A friend of mine, an English graduate and feminist can't stand Lessing and has nothing good to say about The Golden Notebook. But we both used to know another woman who did like it and Lessing in general, which only proves that the reputations of contemporary authors are harder to manage than dead ones, although Lessing has now gone that way, as do we all.
Dead reckoning takes over, eh...
The Door, by Magda Szabo.
First published in 1987 in Hungarian when the writer was 70 years old, I was recommended this book by an Hungarian I met, and I was not disappointed (by either). It is a complex story of a writer who hires a caretaker who more or less takes over her life while trying to conceal the truth of her own. The truths that do emerge about the life of the caretaker (Emerence, who hides her life behind a door), present a tragic figure whose survival through the ages of Hungarian history since the 1930s has relied on her making her indispensable to others, and apparrently never refusing to do anything for them. The style, in English, is not complex, but the story is brilliantly told, and I discovered after reading this that the controversial director, Istvan Szabo (no relation) made a film of The Door in English, with Helen Mirren as Emerence, although the DVD is only available on Amazon in a German edition (as Hinter den Tur).
My knowledge of Hungarian literature is limited to Lukacs, Krasznahorkai and a poor novel also recommended called Embers, by Sandor Morai. I understand Magda Szabo is highly thought of in Hungary.
i wrote a poem just now i wish to share with the community:
my penis
floating in the sky
straight into your mouth
my penis flies
open your mouth wide
let my penis inside
into your mouth
the penis will lie
penis: why do you love me so?
penis: what have i done to deserve you so?
thank you penis. thank you for coming home
where you will stay
in my mouth, forever
because that is where you call home
inside my mouth
http://i.imgur.com/uc8n0o8.jpg
this is poetic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWVb5I6JzFs
Your talent is clearly wasted on this thread, had you written this on a brick wall you might even now be cashing in your cheque and ordering that two-door Ford Tango. Banksy better watch out!Quote:
Originally Posted by bluesoul
Do you love the Bard? I never knew your username to be a word inspired by Shakespeare until I saw it was today's word of the day: http://wordsmith.org/words/today.htmlQuote:
Originally Posted by Prospero
thank you stavros. here is another great piece of classical music. first published in the early 2000 when the artist was in his 50s. i was recommended the youtube link by another artist and i was not disappointed. i don't think you will either. lend him your ear
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PetMOOBCAgg
The first time I ran into Stavros, he shot down a post I made on the movie thread about John Holmes. Whatever Stavros thinks about a book or film, I generally think the opposite. In fact, I think the opposite of Stavros on pretty much everything! Since that time I have come to appreciate Stav as a bit of a classic himself. I picture him at the Diogenes Club reading a book in complete silence.
Here's my addition to the thread, it's a picture of my face photoshopped into a lovely young lady I named TORPEDOES and posted on Alt.com years back, when women got everything free there. I posted the most hideous creature I could imagine, there was a guy from Pennsylvania who kept offering me money, and there were SEVERAL English Gentlemen who came a' courtin me.
From her Twitter page:
https://twitter.com/tgrlxluvr/status...904256/photo/1