Love Nelly Sachs, Rosa Aüsslander et al. Very relevant today!
Now you’ve got your getaway baggage
across –
the border is open
but first
they throw all your “home”
like stars through the window
don’t ever come back
live in the empty desert
and die –
Schon hast du dein Fluchtgepäck
hinüber –
die Grenze ist offen
aber vorher
werfen sie alle deine “zu Hause”
wie Sterne durchs Fenster
komm nicht mehr zurück
im Unbewohnten wohne
und stirb –
Sometimes it is the state of the world that preoccupies him,
campaigning for peace and pensioners.
Although public opinion has moved his way,
Meetings, groups and such occasions eat up his time.
He is powered with a zeal for international security.
The state of his roof preoccupies him and in a rash rush of
domestic disasters, he almost gassed himself.
He put his pipe alight into his pocket and burned his coat.
The car breaks down and is broken into.
Now the roof caves in when the builder walks across it,
and accidentally puts his foot right through the ceiling.
His old adversaries would need hard hearts not to sympathise
with his bouts of depression. He becomes deaf and has trouble
with his heart and legs.
Only his friends sustain him and the pride he feels
at his children’s success is uncontainable.
His jokes are demonstrably unribtickling.
He marches out into the world with a thermos flask
and a Mars bar.
He remains unashamedly sentimental.
The case for working people is coming back and
though there are times for despair, there are still days of hope
as he enjoys life’s afternoon sunshine
with his grandchildren.
(Found Poem -With thanks to the Guardian Review 20.10,07 by David McKie
reviewing More Time for Politics; Diaries 2001-07 by Tony Benn)
I only read two pages of Paris Match yesterday. It was about Elia Kazan and a film he failed to make about Greek-Turkish relations. It isn’t always easy to read French but the little makes for an alternative and memorable perspective.
If you have read The Last Samurai and are in a state of nostalgia for the days when discovering Helen DeWitt was still ahead of you, go and indulge in her entire blog.
I can’t comment on these translations; happy to believe that both have much to offer. The one thing I’d say is, if you’re thinking of reading Proust and you’ve studied any French at all, do order Du côté de chez Swann from amazon.fr so you can read at least a few of Proust’s sentences in French.
People often say: “Well, I had a couple of years of French in high school but I’ve forgotten it all.” What they mean is not normally, “I had a couple of years of French in high school, but when I looked at the first paragraph of Du côté de chez Swann I couldn’t understand a word,” what they mean is, “If I…
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His paintings give us an insight into how life was lived in a variety of styles to.
In the 1880s, the great Swedish watercolourist Anders Zorn (1860–1920) doesn’t seem to have spent a full year in any one place. In 1887, he spent the summer back in Sweden while simultaneously exhibiting at both the Salon in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. That autumn/fall, he and his wife travelled to Britain with the artist Alice Miller. It was there that he started to paint in oils.
Anders Zorn (1860–1920), Fish Market in Saint Ives (1888), watercolour, 100 x 76.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Although Zorn’s early oils from his stay through the winter in the art colony and fishing village of Saint Ives, in Cornwall, were impressive, this watercolour is perhaps the most brilliant of his paintings from that visit. He had apparently become fascinated by this “plump fisherman’s wife” shown dragging some of the catch of fish around as it was being sold off…
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Sometimes E.U. money has not be wisely spent- not their fault, of course.
Cornwall, with a population of 530,000 people, received more than €654m from Brussels during the EU’s 2007 to 2013 budget cycle. This is more than the West Midlands and the East of England combined. Up until Brexit it was set to receive at least another €600m between now and 2020, that’s €1,209 per person. This is a county in which 56.5% of voters chose to back Brexit and leave their biggest benefactor. I was interested to look briefly into why this might have been the case and reflect on some of the consequences this might have for one of the poorest areas of the United Kingdom.
Firstly, it might be worth reflecting on some of the positive and tangible things that Cornwall has received from being a member of the EU. The construction of Exeter University’s Penryn Campus was partly funded with around £100million of EU money. £50million of EU money has been spent on
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“Moderation in Everything” is of course, an Epicurean Philosophy. Often misunderstood and misinterpreted as self-indulgence. Thanks for posting.
Great actor! If I could choose, “If” would have a revival- it’s very apposite for today!
Malcolm McDowell was the insolent prince of early-70s cinema, the Liverpool salesman who stormed the establishment’s barricades. You can see him on screen in Lindsay Anderson’s If…., kickstarting a bloody revolution inside an English public school. You can see him in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, hanging with his droogs at the Korova milk-bar, making up his rassoodock what to do with the night. The sky was the limit. The world was his oyster. One felt he could achieve pretty much anything…
…McDowell’s imitation of Gielgud is perfect. He catches the man’s mellifluous delivery and querulous top note. “He’d say: ‘Oh, my accountant says I have to make cutbacks but I don’t see where I can.’ And I’d say, “Well, you’ve got a huge house, John.’ He’d say: ‘Oh yes, but I can’t sell that.’ ‘Well OK, but don’t you have a chauffeur-driven Rolls?’ ‘But, but –…
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Rilke- always fascinating!!
I think it worth pointing out that Zorn painted fishermen and fish sales in 1888 in St Ives, Cornwall. David Tovey remarks that his painting in the Luxembourg, Paris brought many visitors to the town.
The story of the career of Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860–1920) isn’t quite rags-to-riches, but he was born to an unmarried mother, and never even met his father, a Bavarian brewer who met her when she was doing seasonal work in a brewery in Uppsala. Zorn was brought up on the family farm near the village of Mora, in Dalarna, central Sweden. His itinerant father died in 1872, providing his son with a small legacy which enabled education at a grammar school in the distant town of Enköping.
While he was there, Zorn must have showed artistic talent, as in 1875, at the age of only fifteen, he won himself a place to study sculpture at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. He left the beautiful rolling lakelands of Dalarna for the crowded capital. It was there that he discovered that watercolour painting was his forte, and…
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penwithlit