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| Beat Generation artists in front of City Lights Books store in San Francisco, 1963. From left: Pat Cassidy, Philip Whalen, Robert Ronnie Branaman, Alan Russo, Ann Buchanan, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti... |
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| Seamus Heaney, photographed at his home in Dublin in 2009: ‘Behind the unforced charm he was one of the most formidable critical intellects of his day.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos
My first thought on hearing the immeasurably sad news of Seamus Heaney's death was a sensation of a great tree having fallen: that sense of empty space, desolation, uprooting. Heaney's place in Irish culture – not just in Irish poetry – was often compared to that of WB Yeats, particularly after he followed Yeats in winning the Nobel prize in 1995. He possessed what he himself ascribed to Yeats, "the gift of establishing authority within a culture". But whereas Yeats's shadow was seen, by some of his younger contemporaries at least, as blotting out the sun and stunting the growth of the surrounding forest, Heaney's great presence let in the light. Part of this was bound up in his own abundant personality. Generosity, amplitude and sympathy characterised his dealings with people at every level, and he was the stellar best of company. It was as if he had learned the lesson prescribed (though not really followed) by Yeats: that the creative soul, "all hatred driven hence", might recover "radical innocence" in being "self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting".
But behind the marvellous manner, unforced charm and wicked hoots of laughter he was one of the most formidable critical intellects of his day, a powerfully subtle analyst of political and social nuance, and the possessor of intellectual antennae that let nothing past them. Living in Ireland and being world-famous was not an unmixed blessing – he described the effects of winning the Nobel as "a mostly benign avalanche" – and he knew how to elegantly evade the occasional begrudgery of others and withdraw into his own resources, sustained by a beloved family life. The distinctiveness of his poetry was unmistakable: a Heaney poem carried its maker's mark on the blade. So was the immense labour that went into the deceptive simplicity of his early collections (throughout his writing career he drew terrific metaphors and images from an extraordinary range of physical work practices). And part of the impact of that early work lay in his use of violence.
That this was often done by implication made it no less shocking; the authentic lifting of the hairs on the back of the neck that I still remember when I opened North (1975), with its exploration of the archaeology of atrocity, was replicated in reading Station Island (1984), with its extraordinary title poem tracing a ghostly Dantean journey through the shades of Irish history, meeting with the dead. This culminates in a visionary encounter with Joyce ("His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers/ came back to me, though he did not speak yet,/ a voice like a prosecutor's or a singer's,/ cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite"), and Joyce spoke to Heaney in more ways than one. Listening to him on Desert Island Discs some years ago, I waited for him to choose Yeats's poems as his elected book, only to hear him demand Ulysses instead; on reflection I was not surprised. His own capaciousness was Joycean.
Like Joyce, Heaney's erudition was immense, and his lectures on literature at Oxford, Harvard and worldwide made wonderful reading and unparalleled listening. They illustrate his openness to world literature and classical history as well as his deep love of unexpected English poets such as Clare and Wordsworth – and his affinity with writers from eastern Europe, Osip Mandelstam above all. "There is an unsettled aspect to the different worlds they inhabit," he wrote in The Government of the Tongue(1988), "and one of the challenges they face is to survive amphibiously, in the realm of 'the times' and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect." This carried – as he himself pointed out – a resonant echo for a poet afflicted by "the awful and demeaning facts of Northern Ireland's history". He lived in Dublin but never evaded those "facts" of his native territory. Indeed, part of Heaney's immense achievement was to use and expand that "awfulness" and its relation to the creative spirit and artistic commitment, using implication rather than assertion – whether in the haunting parallels and allegories of North, or in later poems like From the Frontier of Writing and From the Republic of Conscience.
The note is there also in his wonderful last collection, Human Chain(2010), where one is pulled – yet again – in the wake of a writer able to push out the boat into a limitless sea. But what struck me most in reading it, along with the almost daunting economy of line, was a whispering sense of elegy – not just because many of the poems were dedicated to the dead, but also because they looped back to his earliest images of pen nibs, farm routines, animal life, the rituals of neighbourhood, and love. This sense of an ending was perhaps a sign of poetic prescience.
At the time of his death, though, I come back to the image of the death of a tree. I remember now that he wrote about this himself – both in a marvellous 1985 essay on the work of Patrick Kavanagh, and then in a sonnet sequence, Clearances, in memory of his mother. The tree in question grew from a chestnut which his aunt planted in a jam jar in 1939, the year of Heaney's birth; it flourished, was transplanted to the garden, became a fully sized tree "that grew as I grew" and came to symbolise his own developing life – until, in his early teens, the family moved away from the house and the new owners cut it down. The absence of the tree then created in Heaney's mind "a kind of luminous emptiness". He now identified, he wrote, with "preparing to be unrooted, to be spirited away into some transparent, yet indigenous afterlife". This is the thought that he put into Clearances (whose final sonnet is below), and I think of it now as I remember the marvellous spirit of a great poet who was also a great man.
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge among the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush became a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for.
Acceptance of his Nobel Prize lecture: http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1506
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The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation, also known as the Beat Movement were a group of American writers who emerged in the 1950’s.The most influential members were Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder, William Borroughs, the poet Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
The phrase Beat Generation was invented by Jack Kerouac, the leader and spokesman of the Beat Generation. The phrase was introduced to the general public in 1952 when John Holmes, a friend of Kerouac wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine called `This is the Beat Generation´.
The underlying philosophy was Zen Buddhism, visionary enlightenment and Amerindian CultureThe Beat Generation rejected the prevailing American middle class values and the academic attitude to poetry, feeling that poetry should be brought to people.A common theme that linked the Beat Generation was the need for withdrawal and protest.The Beats sought immediate expression in multiple, intense experience and beatific illumination like that of some Eastern religions like Zen Buddhism.The major Beat´s writings were Jack Kerouac´s On the road, Allen Ginsberg´s Howl, and William Borroughs´ Naked Lunch
Dadaism and Surrealism had a direct impact on the Beats. Dadaism with its attack on the elitism of the high culture and the celebration of spontaneity. Surrealism with its focus on revelations from the subconscious.
Ginsberg said that some essential effects of the Beat Generation could be characterized in the following terms:
To conclude, The Beat Generation influenced a lot of artists such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez ,Jim Morrison,etc. The Beat movement were followed by the hippies, an anti-war movement which led to the environmental movement, Deep Ecology and Earth First.
Hippie movement (1960’s)
The Hippie movement appeared in the 60’s and it was related to their liberal attitude and lifestyle.
They questioned authority and traditional values and they did a cultural revolution.
The hippie culture did not want to conform to society and created their own world trying to escape from reality with drugs.
The hippie generation had influences on music, television and film. It made marks on practices, fashion, hairstyles, the arts, religion and meditation.
The hippies stood for peace, love and freedom and the only way to reached these was though love and tolerance.
It was important to bring virtue, humanity and brotherhood, so they approved the Civil Right movement and protested against Vietnam War.
They developed a close relationship to nature and concerned as environmental pollution, recycling and organic food.
The movement has peaked near the end of the 1960’s with Woodstock.
Woodstock
It was the most important music festival held in 1969 in White lake, New York. It had celebrated from August 15 to August 17 and there were 3 days of “Peace and Music”
That musical festival included different genres such as: Rock and folk, including blues-rock, folk rock, jazz fusion, Hard rock, Latin rock, and psychedelic rock styles.
At first organizers (Michael Lang, John P. Roberts, Joel Rosenman and Artie Kornfeld) decided to sell tickets, but a half million of people travelled to New York, the traffic was stuck and it was not enough secure and fence in the zone. So organisers decided that Woodstock would be free.
The field was covered in mud because of the raining weather, and the audience too. There were not enough bathrooms and comforts.
“Although the festival was remarkably peaceful given the number of people and the conditions involved, there were two recorded fatalities: one from what was believed to be a heroin overdose and another caused in an accident when a tractor ran over an attendee sleeping in a nearby hayfield. There also were two births recorded at the event (one in a car caught in traffic and another in a hospital after an airlift by helicopter) and four miscarriages” said the news.
Besides if we talk about liberal attitude, sex free and drugs in the 1960’s a medicine change the world.
Oral Contraceptives (the Pill) were allowed to be sold by FDA (Food and Drug Administration).
This medicine Helped empower woman to control her pregnancies and prevented illnesses (uterine and ovarian cancers).
Women were free to enjoy spontaneous sex without fear of pregnancy.
This medicine allowed women to decide when she got pregnant.
But when the Pill was introduced in 1960 only married women could buy it. In 1967 single women started to get this pill.
You tube: John Lennon “give a peace of chance” (interview)
David John Lodge CBE, (born 28 January 1935 at Brockley, London, England) is a British author.In his novels, Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular. He was brought up Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism is a major theme. Examples include his novels The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), How Far Can You Go? (1980; published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies) and Paradise News (1991).
In Nice Work (1989) a British government program designed to foster mutual understanding between the academy and the outside world ends up doing (strangely enough) exactly what it intends. Robyn Penrose, a temporary lecturer in English literature at the university, is assigned to "shadow" Vic Wilcox, who runs a factory. Robyn's temporary status makes her at once vulnerable to receiving such an undesirable assignment and consumed by the quest for a tenured position somewhere – "nice work if you can get it," as they say, and hence the title. Her fashionable leftist world view leaves her completely unprepared for the everyday realities of Vic's occupation. The clash of ideologies and lifestyles is deftly drawn and delightful to read.
for some more information on David Lodge and his work ,go to older post of this blog:The poem was not written about the death of a real person. None of Auden's lovers would fit chronologically. It's one of Twelve Songs. There was a previous five stanza version, part of "The Ascent of F6" which is still copyright.
This version was written as a cabaret song for the soprano Hedli Anderson to music by Benjamin Britten. The speaker is a woman. Like the rest of the twelve songs it was satire, not pathos.
Speaking on the BBC's Sunday Night programme in 1965, Auden talks about the moment he became a poet and the purpose of poetry. Taken from Poems on the Box: Re-verse, first shown on BBC Two in 1993.
Click here to watch the interview.
JD Salinger was standing at the kitchen window when I called at his remote farmhouse in the hills of New Hampshire almost exactly a year ago.
He had just turned 90 and the question as to whether his famous reclusiveness might finally have "mellowed with age" had proven irresistible.
It had not, although his outburst upon seeing me - it sounded like "Oh, no!" - was possibly his last, and strangely fitting, remark to the media.
He was replaced at the window by his wife, Colleen, an attractive blonde who was 40 years his junior. We chatted briefly about my journey up there - she somehow knew my car had got stuck in the snow the previous night - before politely informing me, with apologies for a wasted trip, that the author's desire for privacy was not about to end now. So goodbye.
In an email to the local newsletter on Thursday, one day after he died at the age of 91, Mrs Salinger thanked her neighbours in the 1,600-strong community of Cornish for the "protective envelope" they gave her husband after he moved there in 1953, adding that she hoped they would continue to do the same for her.
She is not wrong in speculating that the interest in the Salinger household is unlikely to wither with her husband's death.
It is more likely to grow as Salinger watchers look for answers to the great mystery of his later years: what lies in his safe, waiting to be published.
A former girlfriend said Salinger, who last had a book published in 1963, wrote regularly every morning and that she had seen manuscripts of two finished novels and stacks of full notebooks. A neighbour said Salinger, who once admitted he wrote simply for writing's sake, had told him he had written 15 unpublished novels.
The author's daughter, Margaret, said he kept a detailed filing system of his writing, with red marks for work that could be published "as is" and blue for copy that needed editing.
Some question whether any of it will be worth publishing. The novelist Jay McInerny said he feared it might be like Salinger's last published piece - a 1965 short story for the New Yorker magazine - which he described as "an insane epistolary monologue, virtually shapeless and formless".
Salinger's literary representatives have so far said nothing but disagreements between Margaret and her brother, Matt, are unlikely to expedite matters. The latter attacked his sister's memoir, in which she revealed that their father drank his own urine, spoke in tongues and had a frightening control over their mother, insisting that he "grew up in a very different house".
Predictably, the writer's neighbours have little to contribute on the literary mystery. Salinger continued to appear around town - at the supermarket, the library and the local coffee shop - but there was a strict understanding that nobody was to acknowledge his fame.
In return for the town's protectiveness, Salinger would invite high school pupils to his house once a week, according to a local restaurant waitress.
But when I visited, the code of silence was clearly disintegrating, with neighbours happy to supply anecdotes and theories about "JD". He was - it was commonly agreed - respected rather than liked. Local tolerance for his famous brusqueness was clearly wearing thin.
As for socialising, the only event he appeared still to patronise regularly in later years was a monthly turkey dinner at the local Universalist Unitarian church - a multi-religion denomination which would have appealed to a man who tried out various faiths.
"Nobody is supposed to acknowledge that he's there. You just treat him like he's just another normal person," said Kay Cavendish, a regular church goer.
Robert Dean, who runs Salinger's favourite café, confirmed that even the locals had to be careful how they treated him.
"The rule is that if you have to talk to him, make sure you never acknowledge that he is famous," he said. "If you see him, you know not to talk to him unless he talks to you. He's not one for chitchat."
To read The Catcher in the Rye
To read about more him
source./www.telegraph.co.uk//wikipedia.org
The Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.
Hanif Kureishi talking about The Buddha of Suburbia, or Doris Lessing The Grass is Singing, there´s an audio of David Lodge reading and talking about his novel, Nice Work.Interesting for those who are preparing their final exam or for the ones who are going to attend the subject in 2009, but also for literature lovers in general. this is the link: |
