Behind the Seen
این جا پشت پرده ی رندان
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The great heart behind a cynic’s discourse: Kurt Vonnegut having fun at the beach…
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007 - so it goes.
Photo: Jill Krementz, Vonnegut’s second wife and a very fine photographer - see her writer’s portrait portfolio here…
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Nonetheless, Ballard (Nov. 15, 1930 - 2009) remains a quintessential avant-garde author whose use of the tropes of war, demolition, accidents, mutilation, art and sex to create a literature of limits is second to none (with the possible exception of W.S. Burroughs…)
J.G. Ballard, 1991: “The novel is still largely a 19th-century form which has completely excluded … any consideration of the impact of science and technology on human beings from the main body of its work … most mainstream 20th-century novelists are still working with a 19th-century form that’s concerned not with dynamic societies but with static societies where social nuance is still important.”
Photo via Corbis
خوزه ساراماگو
Saramago is a self-declared pessimist who nonetheless describes the aspirations and attemps by people to lead tolerable lives even when hindered on all sides by bureaucratic or totalitarian regimes…
The Nobel Committee gave this motivation in 1998 for selecting Saramago as an author ”who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality…”
Literary births and deaths a plenty today:
André Gide (Nov. 22, 1869 - 1951), by Yale Joel, c. 1950 - LIFE
An excerpt from So Be It, or The Chips Are Down - Gide’s last work:
“It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one’s work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what’s the use? … And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don’t bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don’t know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don’t doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ’s words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.”
Birthday of 20th C. great: Paul Celan (Nov. 23, 1920 - 1970, suicide), Bukovinian-Romanian-Jewish German-speaking poet who spent much of his post-WW II life in Paris…
Celan is the most vibrant and essential post-Holocaust poet in Europe. Read Celan if your life depends on it - because it just might…
Photo of Celan during his Bucharest sojourn in 1947 - the period when Todesfuge, his magnum opus, appeared in Romanian…
Most of Celan’s poetry was written in German, the language of his heart and of his mortal enemies, the Nazis: “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland.”
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