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Post by toom on Feb 6, 2008 2:55:00 GMT -5
I was only halfway kidding with that comment, trying to say good poetry reveals more about the reader than the writer. Yeah, I know It's about everything.
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Post by owen on Feb 13, 2008 4:04:38 GMT -5
looks like we're getting trappatoni. getting on now but he has to be better than the useless twat we had last time
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Post by dino on Feb 13, 2008 4:25:26 GMT -5
so UK got Capello, Ireland Trapattoni
about time you understood that italian football is the real thing
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manho
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Post by manho on Feb 14, 2008 5:16:08 GMT -5
Ginsberg first recording found after 50 years· Howl debut made in Oregon, not California · Beat poet heard joking with college students "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn," wrote Allen Ginsberg more then 50 years ago in what was to become the epic poem of the Beat generation. Now what is believed to be the first ever recording of the late poet reading Howl has been discovered in Oregon. It had always been thought that Ginsberg first recorded Howl in Berkeley, California, in March 1956. But, according to the Oregonian newspaper, the historic first recording took place a month earlier in student lodgings at a private college in Portland. Ginsberg had just hitchhiked to the city with fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder in the winter of 1956. Snyder, who had grown up in Portland and graduated from Reed College, brought his friend to the campus for a couple of readings. Ginsberg had written Howl, complete with its references to "angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo" only the previous year and had performed it in the Six Gallery in San Francisco but it was not recorded. The second reading, to a small audience in a student hostel, the Anna Mann Cottage, was recorded on a reel-to-reel machine on February 14. The discovery of the tape was made by John Suiter, an academic carrying out research for a Snyder biography. Looking through the college archives, Suiter came across a box apparently untouched for more than 50 years, marked "Snyder Ginsberg 1956". It contained a 35-minute good quality tape of Ginsberg reading the first section of Howl and other poems. Ginsberg does not read the whole of the lengthy Howl, remarking: "I don't really feel like reading any more. I just sorta haven't got any kind of steam." He also jokes with his student audience about "corrupting the youth". The student paper confirmed the dates of the visit. "It was completely serendipitous," Suiter said of the discovery. "I had no idea there was a tape." The finding has been hailed by academics. "This is absolutely a very significant deal," Pancho Savery, an English professor at Reed, told the paper. The freewheeling and much-imitated Howl, with its many references to sex and drugs, became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1957 after US customs officials seized copies of it and were outraged by passages about gay sex being performed by "saintly motorcyclists" and references to "flashing buttocks" and Turkish baths. An action brought against City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, which published and sold the poem, was eventually thrown out by the judge. Ginsberg clashed frequently with the authorities; when he heard that the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, had photos of him naked with other men he asked if he could use them on the cover of a book. The recordings are to be posted at www.reed.edu
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Post by cripes on Feb 14, 2008 11:53:59 GMT -5
Ginsberg does not read the whole of the lengthy Howl, remarking: "I don't really feel like reading any more.
What's this then? Perhaps he'll read more later.
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bart
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Post by bart on Jun 23, 2008 12:56:28 GMT -5
Holding out on us, eh, manho?
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manho
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Post by manho on Nov 16, 2008 6:47:06 GMT -5
Into the wide world of words
The surprisingly elusive Seamus Heaney tells of his life as a poet, from writing on his childhood bedroom wall to winning the Nobel Prize
Sean O'Hagan The Observer, Sunday November 16 2008
It seems extraordinary that Seamus Heaney has not been the subject of a major literary biography. Now 69, a Nobel Prize-winner, and probably the best-known living poet, he has somehow evaded biographical canonisation. The most illuminating critical reading of Heaney's work and its often deep-rooted sense of place remains Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney, published in 1998. Now comes this big book of interviews by a fellow poet, Dennis O'Driscoll.
The late critic Ian Hamilton once described Heaney as 'the most over-interviewed of living poets', an observation with which O'Driscoll takes issue in his introduction. 'Apart from a handful of exceptions,' he writes, 'Heaney interviews, though fascinating in themselves, have been too narrow in scope to present a comprehensive portrait of the man and his times.' These 'linked interviews', as O'Driscoll calls them, set out to trace, book by book, the contours of Heaney's writing life and the events and memories that inform it. To a great degree, they succeed, though the question-and-answer format may prove a trying read for all but the faithful. It is a book, then, as O'Driscoll acknowledges, 'for readers of [Heaney's] oeuvre, on whose behalf I hope to have asked the kinds of questions which they themselves might have wished to pose'.
Interestingly, all but two of the interviews here were conducted, at Heaney's insistence, 'in writing and by post', which means the answers are often as crafted and considered as his prose but seldom attain the conversational cut-and-thrust that can occur when an interviewee sits down opposite his interrogator. A considered book, then, and perhaps in places a touch too reverent.
Its title is taken from Heaney's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which he described his 'journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life - turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination'. The first section, Bearings, consists of two short chapters which evoke Heaney's childhood in rural County Derry. This is familiar territory, not least because it has been mapped out in his early poems, and in the recollections gathered in his first book of essays, Preoccupations. Anahorish, Mossbawn, Lough Beg, Toome - these are the place names that, to quote Heaney on one of his formative influences, Patrick Kavanagh, are used 'as posts to fence out a personal landscape'.
His family lived in 'a one-storied, longish, lowish, thatched and whitewashed house about thirty yards in from the main road'. He remembers 'the pleasure of tearing wallpaper off the wall beside the bed' and the 'pink, distempered plaster underneath' on which he wrote. Poetry, like God, is in the details. There are recalled moments of Wordsworthian childhood wonder too: 'Out in the country on starlit nights in Glanmore, pissing at the gable of the house, I had the usual reveries of immensity.'
In his childhood, the sounds of the farm were often drowned by the roar of traffic on the road, 'backwards and forwards, morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night'. His mother, he recalls, was 'a bus-taker', and it was near the local bus stop that his younger brother, Christopher, aged three, was killed by a car. Here, Heaney recalls in spare but vivid detail the dreadful events that would later spark the poem, 'Mid-Term Break', written in one hour in 1963, while he waited for dinner in a shared student flat.
O'Driscoll deftly steers Heaney on through the key poems of his early collections, Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, until North, published in 1975, when their talk inevitably turns to the critical 'hammering' it received in Northern Ireland, mainly from his fellow poets there. 'I've been overwritten with praise,' says Heaney, 'and to a lesser extent with blame.' Most of that blame, for a time, centred on his supposed reluctance to meet the Troubles head-on in his poems. In North, his now famous poem, 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing', grapples with the weight of that expectation.
In Field Work, though, published four years later, there are several poems born out of the Troubles. 'The Strand at Lough Beg' is an elegy for his second cousin, Colum McCartney, the victim of a loyalist killing gang, while 'After a Killing' alludes to the IRA's assassination of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador in Dublin, an act that Heaney describes as 'more like the breaking of an ancient taboo than a breach of international protocol'.
There is a telling moment here in which Heaney, at O'Driscoll's prompting, recalls the people he knew who died in the Troubles, including several Protestant and Catholic neighbours - one of whom was the IRA hunger striker Francis Hughes - as well as friends from his student days and 'one or two, at least, of the kids I'd taught in ... Ballymurphy'. What Heaney did not do, of course, was take sides, either as a poet, or, as his fame increased, a reluctant statesman.
As the book proceeds, it inevitably becomes more about Heaney's writing than his life, which takes him from Wicklow to Harvard and beyond. There are some great anecdotes about the moment, while holidaying on a Greek island, when he found out he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and, overnight, became 'Famous Seamus'. That honour, too, brought forth the begrudgers, most notably the ever truculent journalist Eamon Dunphy, who sneered at Heaney in the Irish Independent. Dunphy is dismissed in a few lines here - 'Even at the time, I realised he was unwittingly doing me a service. He queered the pitch for stealthier people capable of more informed criticism.' Touché!
Throughout Stepping Stones there are moments when Heaney seems to belong to another era, one on which popular culture has not impinged. When asked about the 'pop poetry of the Sixties', he says: 'It was more like background music or fairground music - I enjoyed the sound of it going on around me but didn't regard it as having anything to do with the word-work.' What he calls 'the Orphic thing in Dylan' did not impress him either. You have to look to the poetry of his friend, the more mischievous Paul Muldoon, to sense the force of Dylan, and rock in general, on the contemporary poetic imagination (though Heaney does like Eminem - see p24).
The book concludes with a chapter on Heaney's recent brush with mortality in the form of the stroke he suffered in August 2006. It has made him, he says, 'more successful at staying clear'. You sense always the private, self-absorbed poet behind the public persona. O'Driscoll asks him: 'What has poetry taught you?' The answer is typically thought-through and characteristically thorough: 'That there's such a thing as truth and it can be told - slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorised away and is worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of possessing inherent strength of reason by its sheer made-upness, its integratis, consonatia and claritas.' Now, there's man who, as they say at home, know his onions.
Nonce Words by Seamus Heaney from District and Circle (2006)
The road taken to bypass Cavan took me west, (a sign mistaken) so at Derrylin I turned east.
Sun on ice, white floss on reed and bush, the bridge-iron cast in an Advent silence I drove across,
then pulled in, parked, and sat breathing mist on the windscreen. Requiescat ... I got out
well happed up, stood at the frozen shore gazing at rimed horizon, my first stop like this in years.
And blessed myself in the name of the nonce and happenstance, the Who knows and What nexts and So be its.
Faber & Faber Ltd
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Post by owen on Nov 16, 2008 13:48:52 GMT -5
thanks for that, nick.
ive thought of a few nonce words myself driving them roads.
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Post by Cat Stevens on Dec 7, 2008 9:05:41 GMT -5
I was just reading the front page of that poetess from the beginning of the thread -- staff.science.uva.nl/~apalmigi/other%20activities.html-- it's all "manho's terrific, manho's cute, check out his great blog", followed by various uninteresting sites who discussed her work, but nothing whatsoever on the thread that launched her into the poetry orbit; yes, that's right, this very thread, page one? gratitude, eh? still, great body.
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manho
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Post by manho on Jan 11, 2009 9:01:34 GMT -5
Reasons to be cheerful
Hit Me! The Life & Rhymes of Ian Dury Leicester Square Theatre, London WC2 Ian Dury's life story has been hit by controversy on the road to the West End. He would have loved it
Kitty Empire The Observer, Sunday 11 January 2009
What would Ian Dury, author of 1978's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, have made of the controversy surrounding the staging of his life story? You can't help but conclude that the poliomyelitic pop miscreant would have found it all a hoot.
Hit Me! The Life & Rhymes of Ian Dury has just transferred to the West End after a short run at Hoxton's Courtyard Theatre. It began its celebrated life at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, starring Jud Charlton as Dury and Josh Darcy as his long-suffering minder, Fred "Spider" Rowe. It was - and is - a candid recounting of the ballad of Ian Dury, who died from cancer in 2000 with a few hits, considerable notoriety and much geezer-savant wordplay to his credit. He was possibly the only pop star to appear on Top of the Pops in leg irons. His influence lives on, most palpably in laddish wordsmiths like the Streets but also in cult figures like Pete Doherty. The Libertines' What a Waster is a homage to Ian Dury and the Blockheads's What A Waste. Dury's story is well worth telling.
But over Christmas Hit Me! lost its lead actor - and half the production as a result. There are only two roles. Adrian Schiller now plays Dury while Darcy continues as Spider. One preview last week was jinxed by a power cut. Since then it has emerged that Charlton quit over tweaks to the script authored by disgraced actor Chris Langham, former star of The Thick Of It who was jailed for downloading child porn in 2007. Charlton objected to Langham's addition of "crude jokes", alleging that the rewrites amount to a character assassination of Dury. The secrecy surrounding Langham's involvement was another factor.
I never saw the Courtyard or Edinburgh version, but the post-Langham script does Dury's story no irredeemable injustice. Hit Me! succeeded - and continues to succeed - on the strengh of its depiction of Dury as a manipulative charmer who lit up a particularly rich period of British pop history. There are jokes, played for laughs, but perhaps they are a necessary evil for a cult production making a bid for mainstream success.
The play appeals most directly to Blockheads fans but sociologists would find it compelling. Could one argue that the polio outbreak of 1949 created punk rock? It certainly helped. The young Dury probably contracted the virus at Southend's lido. It made him a chippy outsider whose mixture of charisma and viciousness had a deep impact on all those in his orbit. Sent to a boarding school for the disabled, this dreamy, well-spoken son of an Irish bohemian and an Essex bus driver was never the same after the school's brutal regime turned him into a hair-trigger Mockney irritant. Dury came to fight both friends and foes with words and lashings of eyeliner. His razor blade earring, scornful wit and habit of leaning on his mike stand for support while fronting his pub rock band Kilburn and the High Roads were witnessed by a young John Lydon. "Fuck me, that's me 20 years younger," Dury is reported to have said to Malcolm McLaren when the Sex Pistols supported Kilburn in June 1976. "What have I started?"
Hit Me! tells his compelling story on one, unchanging stage set. The play has only two modes: flashback and fighting. The first act basically consists of two London men of a certain age and disposition yelling "You faaacking caant" at one another; there is a rematch later on. This unremitting Anglo-Saxon is undoubtedly true to life, but the storytelling has moments of elegance and subtlety. Songs punctuate and illustrate the unfolding tale, satisfying the jukebox requirement inherent in all band-derived stage fare. Schiller sometimes fluffs his lyrics, but covers well. It's not hard to "do" Dury. With his physical tics, garish get-ups and coarse delivery, he is almost a caricature already. But Schiller does an admirable job of inhabiting the irascible, wounded singer, particularly considering the speed at which he had to master two hours of dense monologue and dialogue.
Schiller and Darcy are wonderfully co-dependent, bickering like a married couple as they reveal how history and happenstance got them together and how Dury's vicious streak splits them apart. We hear in anecdote form of Dury's childhood, the rise of his Blockheads, his put-upon wives and the time he turned down an offer from Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the script for Cats
Darcy makes for a flawed, believable Spider, a rubbish criminal who'd really rather not hit anybody. It is a shame, however, that his geezer mode can't help but recall Al Murray's Pub Landlord.
Although writer-director Jeff Merrifield is clearly a fan, Dury is never let off the hook for his callousness to friends, wives and the loyal Spider, whose job it is to stop Dury (aka "The Raspberry", from the Cockney rhyming slang for cripple, "raspberry ripple") getting his head kicked in.
Dury's fascinating story deserves a wide audience, and the frisson of controversy engendered by Langham's involvement might do this tale no disservice.
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Post by Cat Stevens on Oct 27, 2010 16:53:18 GMT -5
Keith Richards, Macca create musical collaboration London, Wed, 27 Oct 2010ANI London, Oct 27 (ANI): Keith Richards and Sir Paul McCartney, whose bands were the biggest rivals in the Sixties, have now made a musical collaboration. The Rolling Stones guitarist, whose memoir Life was released yesterday, said he and the former Beatle recently met up on holiday and ended up composing together. "We were really pleased to see each other," the Daily Express quoted Richards as saying. "We fell straight in talking about the past, talking about songwriting. He told me because he was left-handed he and John Lennon could play the guitars like mirrors opposite each other, watching each other's hands. "So we started playing like that. We started composing a song together, a McCartney/Richards number whose lyrics were pinned to my wall for many weeks," he added. (ANI) www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/187219
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