Currently Playing
Josef Holbrooke
CLARINET CHAMBER MUSIC
Robert Plane, Lucy Gould, Mia Cooper, Scott Dickinson, David Adams, Alice Neary, Sophia Rahman
- Clarinet Quintet No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 27 "Ligeia"
- Cyrene, Op. 88b
- Phryne, Op. 98b
- Cavatina and Variations, Op. 15b "Clarinet Quintet No. 1"
- Nocturne, Op. 57 "Fairyland"
- Eilean Shona, Op. 74
Currently Watching
[101 Shorts Edition]
50. SOMNIPHOBIA
Dillon Vibbart
USA, 2021
49. WOODS
Sean van Leijenhorst
Netherlands/Czech Republic, 2016
48. CHILDREN
Takuya Okada
Japan, 2011
47. LESS THAN HUMAN
Steffen Bang Lindholm
Denmark, 2017
46. FISHWIFE
Beth Park
Wales, 2022
45. THE CHAIR
Curry Barker
USA, 2022
44. ENIGMA
Curry Barker
USA, 2023
PABLO NERUDA
"Friends on the Road"
Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding
in an ugly smell of gas, coffee, and bricks.
I walked among the students without understanding,
pulling the walls inside me, searching
each day into my poor poetry for the branches,
the drops of rain, and the moon, that had been lost.
I went deep into it for help, sinking
each evening into its waters, grasping
energies I could not touch, the seagulls of a deserted sea,
until I closed my eyes and was shipwrecked in the middle
of my own body.
Were these things dark shadows,
were they only hidden damp leaves stirred up from the soil?
What was the wounded substance from which death was pouring out
until it touched my arms and legs, controlled my smile,
and dug a well of pain in the streets?
I went out into life: I grew and was hardened,
I walked through the hideous back-alleys
without compassion, singing out on the frontiers
of delirium. The walls filled with faces:
eyes that did not look at light, twisted waters
lit up by a crime, legacies
of solitary pride, holes
filled with hearts that had been condemned and torn down.
I walked with them: it was only in that chorus
that my voice refound the solitudes
where it was born.
I finally became a man
singing among the flames, accepted
by friends who find their place in the night,
who sang with me in the taverns,
and who gave me more than a single kindness,
something they had defended with their fighting hands,
which was more than a spring,
a fire unknown elsewhere, the natural foliage
of the places slowly falling down at the city’s edge.
—Translated by James Wright and Robert Bly
Currently Playing
Georg Philipp Telemann
CONCERTI PER MOLTI STROMENTI
Akademie für Alte Musik
- Concerto in D Major for 3 Trumpets and Timpani, TWV 54:D3
- Concerto in B minor for 2 Flutes and Calchedon, TWV 53:h1
- Concerto in B-Flat Major for 3 Oboes, 3 Violins, and Continuo, TWV 44:43
- Sonata in F Minor for 2 Violins, 2 Violas, cello and Continuo, TWV 44:32
- Concerto in F Major for Mandolin, Hammered Dulcimer, Harp and Continuo, TWV 53:F1
- Concerto in D minor for 2 Oboes, Bass, and Continuo, TWV 53:d1
- Concerto in D Major for 3 Horns, Violin, Strings, and Continuo, TWV 54:D2
- Quartet in G Major for Flute, Violin, Viola, and Continuo, TWV 43:G5
GABRIELLE GLANCY
"The Way the World Appears"
The water tower poses a challenge. Against
the shadows of the sky are planes of light.
There seems to be no touching, but actually
opening before him there’s a narrowing,
the way the world appears. He thinks he sees a bridge—
cables, a dusty light crossing back and forth
between them. A great geometric pine, silver green,
stretched until its needles are as thin as mist,
millions of tiny dotted lines, connecting
the continents between them. Even the dimmest
contrast of this against that, a page turning,
i. s as sharp as clouds against the sky. But
how can clouds be sharp against the sky since
the sky falls infinitely backwards and clouds are
only the center of an edgeless thought? Still,
through their slow drifting, he can see, like the hour
hand on a clock, the movement of lips in waking,
what he wants always to get himself through.
F. KEITH WAHLE
"Sonnet"
You realize, even as you start this
that it won’t end up as a sonnet—
and by “sonnet” I don’t mean just a poem
in fourteen lines—or all right, fourteen lines, if
you insist, and iambic pentameter,
with a couplet at the end, but that’s not
all it takes to make a sonnet;
a real sonnet has a certain movement
of ideas, a special way the argument
reveals itself, with a shift in the point
of view at the middle of the poem,
or just past the middle, at the end
of the eighth line. This goes for either the
Italian or Elizabethan form.
And at the library you can get those
anthologies from the twenties and thirties
of local poets, meaning amateurs,
and they all seem to be writing sonnets,
or what they thought were sonnets; sonnets
on every imaginable subject:
Abraham Lincoln, Dante, Italy,
the months, the holidays, Lake Erie, death
and the death of children, larks, cardinals,
seashells, insomnia, Elizabeth
Tudor, and Mary Stuart, everything.
They even wrote sonnets about writing
sonnets. I found one about why
Shakespearean sonnets are better than
Italian sonnets. But none of these sonnets
are any good. The rhymes are all in the
right place, but the people who wrote them
had no idea what a sonnet can do
or even what poetry can do.
So the hell with those assholes. They’re all dead
now anyway, or soon will be, thank goodness.
In more recent times the term sonnet
has been used very freely, and the form
has become extremely loose. But some
of the modern sonnets are very good,
such as Robert Lowell’s sonnet on
Harpo Marx or his sonnet on Ezra Pound.
But one keeps getting back to the question
of writing, how it is done, and whether
it is fun. Certainly there are other things
that are more fun—going to bed with
attractive men or women, or eating
Chinese food. One thinks of the T’ang Dynasty,
the golden age of Chinese poetry—
in three hundred years, some of the best
poets ever in any language.
Li Po is the best known in this country,
though Tu Fu was probably a better poet,
and Po Chu I was more versatile.
But even after these three were dead, there
were many great and beautiful poets;
like Han Shan, the Cold Mountain hermit,
and Li Ho, the demon poet; and we
must not forget the great landscape poet,
Wang Wei, who was contemporary with
Li Po. Ezra Pound’s translations of Li Po
are the most exciting in English,
though perhaps not the most exacting
from the sinologist’s point of view.
Li Po was an habitual drunkard,
and wrote in a style that was rather free,
at least by the standards of ancient China.
Tu Fu, on the other hand, wrote in
a style called “regulated verse” (lü-shih),
which is an eight-line form with even
stricter rules than our sonnet, and died,
according to the legend, from eating
Chinese food, or rather, too much Chinese food.
He was trapped in the mountains by a flash flood,
and after starving for several days
he overate at a banquet and died
when the rice swelled up and ruptured his
intestine. This story may not be true.
Li Po and Tu Fu were great friends in their
lifetimes, just as Pound and Yeats were great friends,
and went to Chinese restaurants together,
all of which leads one to ask oneself,
“Will I ever be a truly great poet,
or even the friend of a great poet?”
Not likely. But to be a good poet
may be quite within the reach of many people.
It seems to require initially
an ability to listen with trust
to the little voices you have inside,
the voices that tell you what to do,
and how to write, like the one right now that’s
saying, “This is no sonnet, you damn fool;
it doesn’t even look like a sonnet.”
ANITA BROOKNER
Hotel du Lac
And what is the most potent myth of all? The tortoise and the hare. In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. You could argue that the hare might be affected by the tortoise lobby’s propaganda, might become more prudent, circumspect, slower, in fact. But the hare is always convinced of his own superiority; he simply does not recognize the tortoise as a worthy adversary. That is why the hare wins.
Currently Watching
[101 Shorts Edition]
55. FRENCH ROAST
Fabrice O. Joubert
France, 2008
54. THE PIANO TUNER
Olivier Treiner
France, 2010
53. INVERSES
Vincent Vandries and Jonathan Lempernesse
France, 2011
52. MEMO
Ines Scheiber, Jules Durand, Julien Becquer, Elena Dupressoir, Viviane Guimaraes
France, 2017
51. LE RETOUR DES VAGUES
Manon Cansell, Alejandra Guevara Cervera, Edward Kurchevsky, Francisco Moutinho De Magalhães, Hortense Mariano
France, 2020
KURT VONNEGUT
There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books.
I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.
Currently Watching - 101 Shorts Edition
63.NEXT FLOOR
Denis Villeneuve
Canada, 2008
62. WEBCAM
Nick Delgado
USA, 2024
61. CAUTIONARY TALES
Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor
UK, 2016
60. PORTRAIT OF GOD
Dylan Clark
USA, 2022
59. IGNORE IT
Sam Evenson
USA, 2021
58. DELETE
Maximilien Franco
USA, 2024
57. RHYME OR DIE
Max Lincoln
UK, 2021
56. THE DOLLMAKER
Al Lougher
USA, 2017
OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and Future Men
Even the preceding and touch longer period between the first mammal and the first man, some twenty-five millions of terrestrial years, seems now inconsiderable.
The whole of it, together with the age of the First Men, may be said to lie halfway between the formation of the planets, two thousand million years earlier, and their final destruction, two thousand million years later,
Taking a still wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun's age. And before the birth of the sun the stuff of this galaxy had already endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even those aeons look brief in relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebula themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist in the beginning.
Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.
Currently Playing
Arvo Pärt
MUSIC FOR UNACCOMPANIED CHOIR
Noel Edison
Elora Festival Singers
- Triodion (1998)
- Tribute To Caesar (1997)
- Nunc Dimittis (2001)
-Ode VII (Memento) from Kanon Pokajanen (1994)
- I Am The True Vine (1996)
- The Woman With The Alabaster Box (1997)
- Dopo La Vittoria (After The Victory) (1996/1998)
- Bogoróditse Djévo (Mother Of God And Virgin) (1990)
There used to be a saying “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” But as the world became networked first through newspapers, then radio, television, and then the Internet mass neurosis spread more and more rapidly until a generation into the internet the average neurosis level of young adults was the same as mental patients had been in their grandparents time.
The popular consensus was that knowledge was available for all, but the trade-off had become that intellectual rigour was lost and all knowledge regardless of veracity become regarded as the same worth. What was more, in the West a concept came about that knowledge should be free. This rapidly eliminated the resources which would have allow talented individuals to generate intellectual property rather than be wage slaves. The anti-intellectual trend which stemmed from the origins of universal free education expanded and insulting terms were applied to intellectuals confabulating intelligence and knowledge with poor social skills and inadequate emotional development.
While this was attractive to the masses who felt that everyone had a right to equal intelligence and that any tests purporting to show differences were by definition false this offset any benefits that broader access to knowledge might have brought deterring many of the more able from high levels of attainment in a purely intellectual sphere. Combined with a belief that internalization of knowledge was no longer necessary – that it was all there on the Internet reduced the possible impact substantially as ideas on an external network could never cross pollinate and form a network of concepts in the minds of those whose primary skill was to search rather than to link concepts already internalized.
Donald Trump:
"The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals." (Green Bay, Wisconsin, April 2, 2024)
The Bible:
"But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God." (Leviticus 19:34, KJV)
OLAF STAPLEDON
Last and First Men
There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.
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