Tell us something weird about yourself that involves music. I don't just mean the normal weird things, like that you're a closet Barry Manilow fan or you lost your virginity at an Alice Cooper concert. Tell us the really bizarre stuff.
Two lovers kissing at the scream of midnight;
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude.
Earlier this week, a handful of right-wingers demonstrated against plans to bury Milosz, who died on Aug. 14 aged 93, in the Crypt of Honour at a monastery in Krakow, saying he had betrayed Poland with his liberal views and a brief flirtation with communism.
The protests, supported by fringe nationalist media, had embarrassed Polish authorities and delayed the decision on where the poet would be buried.
The protests were muzzled hours before the ceremony, when newspapers published a letter from Polish-born Pope John Paul II saying he shared the same spiritual goals as the poet.
His opponents criticise him for having served as a diplomat for communist Poland between 1946 and 1950, for having described himself as Lithuanian — he was born in what is now Lithuania in 1911 — and for criticising some aspects of Polish Catholicism.
According to the newspaper Milosz had said that the Bible was a "cruel and depressing book".
The Pope composed a prayer to the Mother of God of Kazan, read in Russian, in which he implored the Virgin to "return in the midst of brothers and sisters of holy Russia as a messenger of communion and peace."
The first time the miraculous icon displayed its power was in 1612 in the struggle with Poles who, taking advantage of the Time of Troubles, tried not only to seize Moscow but also to install Catholicism. In a word, the Kazan icon is not simply an icon but a great symbol of Russian history and the Russian state.
It was after the attempt by the Turk Ali Agca upon the life of John Paul II that the Kazan icon was transferred to Rome and, according to the pontiff, helped him recover from his wounds.
Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder. Many of us have trouble sleeping and lie awake at night, worrying about something catastrophic befalling someone we love. We rise in the morning with no plans to convert anyone via beating, humiliation, or invasion. To tell the truth, we are tired. We work. We would just like some peace and quiet.
But science fiction is more than just pulp fiction; at its core is the desire to understand humanity's place in the universe.
Science fiction not only reflects science but is also an inspiration for it.
Fiction has certainly pushed the envelope for scientists. "It helps you to think the impossible and see if it is possible."
"Asimov was not a stylish writer in the way that say, Philip K Dick was, but he was very rigorous scientifically, and thoughtful about how he projects scientific ideas into the future," says Philip Ball, a writer of popular science books.
I am at work on my computer, typing, typing, typing on an academic article that is due at the end of this month, but I am only partly here. I try to focus, to concentrate, to get this done so I can go back to my daughter. I keep being drawn back to her image, her smell, her touch, as I imagine she does with me.
I must do this work, but I have to call it as I see it in my own life. I won't pretend that Sarah is not suffering. I won't pretend that her pain doesn't matter. I won't try to justify it in terms of her well being, as in claiming that "she is learning to be more independent" or "a happy mother makes a happy home." I won't be pacified by the nanny's comment that "she stops crying the minute you are out of sight." Does my pain at a loss hurt any less because I can reconcile myself to it? No, of course not. Then, should I disregard her pain because she is learning to deal with it? Because it is short-lived? Is my child's pain less important than mine? Even though she won't consciously remember this later, if therapy has taught me anything, it's that the unconscious forgets nothing.
I won't deny the obvious truth: I am rebuilding my career on the back of her grief.
With the Olympics kicking off in Athens, the connection to the ancient Greeks has made every Bud-swilling couch potato feel somehow related to the Apollonian ideal. But we pallid, bespectacled book lovers shouldn't miss out on all the nostalgia. The world has forgotten that literary "happenings" were once an essential ingredient of all ancient athletic festivals; for those well-rounded Greek crowds, the 90-pound-weakling writers could be as compelling an attraction as the beefcake that paraded stark naked around the stadium. In fact, we should thank the first Olympics for several crucial breakthroughs in the Western literary tradition — including the pioneering act of self-promotion by a celebrity-hungry author.
Debuting at the Olympics, it turned out, was antiquity's equivalent of appearing on Oprah.
For the ancient Greeks, there was no separation between the idea of culture and the Olympic Games. The Games were the manifestation of a full civilization, and all aspects of culture were honored. Fine arts were elements of the ideal of the ‘all around man’ as citizen, soldier, and athlete. This concept of the ‘ideal’ was celebrated in various ways, including sculptural representations of winning athletes, often with idealization of the proportions of their physical form.
From 1912 to 1948, rules of the art competition have varied, but the core of the rules remained the same. All of the entered works had to be inspired by sport, and had to be original (that is, not be published before the competition).
Art competitions have been held in the five areas of architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. At one time or another, there were suggestions to also include dancing, film, photography or theatre, but neither of these art forms was ever included in the Olympic Games as a medal event.
From the first page, her use of the present tense bugged me. . . I get that she might have been trying to make some interesting comment on how the past stays with us by writing a lengthy family saga over a long period of years in the present tense, but while that’s an interesting intellectual exercise, it didn’t work for me as a reader.
For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy — a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.
Dla mnie był antytezą Gombrowicza, najważniejszą w polskiej literaturze. O ile Gombrowiczowi zależało na obronie indywidualności, to Miłosz, który był człowiekiem o silnym "ja", bardziej niż Gombrowicz miał poczucie misji i powinności, która czasami prowadziła do sytuacji niewygodnych, zmuszających do dramatycznych posunięć — takich jak wyjazd z Polski w 1951 r. i zmierzenie się z polską nieprzychylną emigracją. Miłosza stosunek do wartości był inny: był czymś, co wymaga nieustannej ochrony, dyskutowania na nowo, bo poeta, pisarz to ktoś, kto nieustannie musi się nad tymi wartościami zastanawiać. Przede wszystkim Miłosz był kimś, kto próbował nawiązywać dialog między kulturami, budować kulturę uniwersalną, która łączy wyznania i narody, co dla Gombrowicza walczącego o indywiduum było mniej ważne. Trudno zajmować się Gombrowiczem nie pamiętając o Miłoszu, a Miłoszem — o Gombrowiczu; to dwa filary, na których stoi kultura polska.
He provoked vilification from the Polish authorities and Polish intellectuals, as well as from the Stalin-infatuated French left.
Throughout those years Milosz remained bitter and unrelenting, convinced that his life was riddled with misfortunes brought about by the malice of his countrymen. He could never understand that by choosing a life of high exposure and ideological manoeuvring, he was bound to provoke hostile reactions, as well as fierce loyalties.
Lithuania, united with Poland in 1386, is viewed by Poles with affection as an enigmatic, romantic borderland which produced Mickiewicz and Pilsudski; it therefore obviously suited Milosz to stress his ties with that region to the point of denying any links with Poland.
Neither then nor subsequently did Milosz attempt to push his poetry beyond 18th-century decorum. He cherished a profound distaste for what he termed the 20th-century avant-garde, and his poetry therefore lacks flexibility and adaptability. On the other hand, his refusal ever to abandon his lonely tower enabled him in later years to create magisterial poetic meditations out of a rich and varied mixture of philosophical, quasi philosophical and religious material, and from sharply focused descriptions of historical events and the natural world.
The twists of fate, the plots that double back on themselves, the trickiness, the mysteries that recede as they're approached, the bleak cities, the night prowling, the sense of identity loss, the protagonist in exile — these are vintage Pamuk, but they're also part of the modern literary landscape. A case could be made for a genre called the Male Labyrinth Novel, which would trace its ancestry through De Quincey and Dostoyevsky and Conrad, and would include Kafka, Borges, Garcia Marquez, DeLillo and Auster, with the Hammett-and-Chandler noir thriller thrown in for good measure. It's mostly men who write such novels and feature as their rootless heroes, and there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.
Forgotten rooms full of fecund weedy rot, culs-de-sac choked with rampant weeds and trash, "astral dough," unmade beds that are a kind of dough, bedclothes in which a character swells like dough or that suck him in as if he had fallen in dough — images like these, of a clandestine yet boundless (and finally uncontrollable and menacing) fertility, are everywhere in Schulz. Unseen space mushrooms, empty drawers pulled open one last time now have objects in them. It's in these freak limbs of time and space, in these forgotten but never finally vacant drawers, where Bruno Schulz operates, where his sly fantasy and profuse idiosyncrasy are at home. A small and hunched, guarded, depressive (he had reason to be depressed), solitary man, obedient to his small-town family duties and to the exigencies of making a living, eventually bearing the whole load of support of his sickly family, anxiously polite and much given to apologies in the letters through which he carried on his brief career, he nevertheless had to find space and time for the force and strange fertility of his imagination, and this he did, being the least confrontational of men, by interpolating liberties of space and time into unused, unseen angles of the conventional order of things. He filled invisible rifts in space and time with a richness — cheap and doughy, perhaps, frankly false, if you insist, but still, a richness — at once novel and somehow native to the real world that so lately had looked complete without it.
Marek Hlasko burst on the scene in 1954 at age 20 and, by way of a stream of miraculous short stories and his work as reviewer of both books and film, soon came to dominate Polish literary life. He was a superstar, an idol, an image. Not only does he look like the newly created film star James Dean in the most prevalent photo we have of him, but he also, like Dean's character, was a born rebel. Forced to work at menial labor from early childhood, lacking formal education, he knew intimately that shadowy, violent world close to society's ground. "The road that led me to literature," he noted, "was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland. . . . I came to it from below. And when I began to write, I'd already seen so much that it was absolutely impossible for me to believe in official truth."
Of all Europe's war-torn countries, Poland had it perhaps the worst, surviving Hitler's war only to be set upon by Stalin's brigades. "My generation time and again had to face the possibility of their lives being threatened," novelist Tadeusz Konwicki states. "Traditional narrative structure could not express the psychological insight of the situations we found ourselves in."
Born to that aftermath, Hlasko possessed as well, at least initially, a hard strain of postwar hopefulness. Bleak and sere as might be the lives of his characters, all of them outsiders, the disavowed, the deracinated, those lives were invested also with rebelliousness, with a struggle for authentic feeling and for love that would not be put down.
The Strunk-and-White people privilege readers, viewing them as delicate invalids, likely to scurry off to their bedchambers when faced with any sentence diverging in the slightest from the plain style. . . At the other extreme, the Goldberg group coddles the writer the way an overindulgent parent would a sensitive child: Are you sure you've shared everything that's on your mind or in your heart?
Style is not the man, nor the woman. It is, rather, the manifestation or symptom of core trends or truths, next to which the personal projects of individual authors are puny and irrelevant.
The premise that in many cases writers entertain, move, and inspire us less by what they say (their matter) than by how they say it (their manner) would seem irrefutable. To name some obvious examples, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Dave Barry are read and honored hardly at all for their profound insights about the human condition, much more for their intoxicating and immediately identifiable ways of expressing themselves — their styles.
Everyone understands that the content is constant, frequently ordinary, and sometimes banal; that the (wide) variation, the arena for expression and excellence, the fun, the art — are all in the individual style.
The radical notion behind the newer stroller is that its munchkin passenger seats are elevated several feet above the ground, at least 30 percent higher than any other stroller on the market. Kids perch above the tailpipe-level exhaust fumes of city streets, away from canine butts and face-whapping tails, not to mention the dust-kicking shoes of pedestrian traffic.
It's not a Lexus, it's a stroller. The suspension and shock-absorption is lovely, but are we at risk of raising a bunch of overprotected wusses who wince when their dirt bikes hit gravel and don't like to be touched? Or kids who think that nothing has to be uncomfortable or distasteful if you throw enough money at it? The Bugaboo and Xplory fall into the category of products that make life so easy for newborns that it seems downright wrong.
the most typical of the genre in that it overtly uses the language of self-help. Each story ends with a list of 'affirmations, to help draw out the story's deeper meaning, address issues such as shyness, separation, loneliness, gently help to instil qualities such as confidence, love, sharing, courage and patience'. Designed to be read by parents, children are supposed to close their eyes and concentrate on visualisation techniques.
There is some inscrutable factor at work which is visible in its manifestations but not at its source, and the world behaves as if it has fallen prey to a malignant cancer which through metastases attacks one area of life after another.
"We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
His need for love, for any sort of human connection, is at war with his desire for stasis, for an "utter motionless life" that will keep the clamouring world well beyond arm's length.
Martin's tone never falters. When he describes Daniel it is through the fun-house lens of his character's weird and wonderful eye: "I can be physically appealing," Daniel tells us. "Plus I'm clean. Clean like I've just been car-washed and then scrubbed with a scouring pad and then wrapped in palm fronds infused with ginger."
His love for Elizabeth Warner, a rental agent who works Daniel's Santa Monica turf, gives new meaning to "unrequited." He is patient and hopeful, reminding us that "there was a time when Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had never met, yet it doesn't mean they weren't, in some metaphysical place, already in love."
Gombrowicz raged against what he saw as the aristocratic conservatism of Polish culture, the formality of men bowing and kissing ladies’ hands in greeting, the general insistence on how Poland’s grand destiny had been sidetracked by a century of partition and occupation, and perhaps most of all the uncritical reverence for such cultural heroes as Copernicus (of questionable nationality), Mickiewicz (the national poet, actually born in Lithuania), and Chopin (half-Polish, who spent most of his life in France).
As Gombrowicz sees it, man is torn between submitting to the will of society, which robs him of all freedom, and following his own will, which entails breaking with society altogether. Neither extreme is attainable, so we are stuck murkily in between.
Inky and tentacled.
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