“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist.” Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” March 23, 1918 “Literature is news that stays news.” Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) Serge Diaghilev, at the composer’s studio, on hearing the first few minutes of Igor Stravinsky’s The […]
Eating Poetry (XXVI) – “A Contribution to Statistics”
A Contribution to Statistics Out of a hundred people those who always know better -fifty-two doubting every step -nearly all the rest, glad to lend a hand if it doesn’t take too long -as high as forty-nine, always good because they can’t be otherwise -four, well maybe five, able to admire without envy -eighteen, suffering […]
Eating Poetry (XXIII) – The “Ode To Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone
The famous line of Alfred North Whitehead is “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” I am increasingly persuaded that over two thousand years of contemplating and expressing the human condition is a series of footnotes to the Greeks. Here, from The […]
Eating Poetry (XXII) – my cold mad feary father
The conclusion of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as Anna Livia Plurabelle, the lady of the river, returns in her flow to the sea… I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad […]
How We Lived on It (21) – Kerouac “On the Road”
Jack Kerouac in a public reading of the the last page of On the Road, with pictures of Keourac and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarity). Video: mojo4mojo the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all […]