#tseliot — Public Fediverse posts

Aprile è il mese più crudele; fa nascere
i lillà dalla terra addormentata, e mescola
memoria e desideri … https://cctm.website/t-s-eliot-aprile/

T. S. Eliot

da La Terra desolata, Einaudi, 1963

#aprile #tseliot #poesia #cctmwebsite #anoipiaceleggere #leggere

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece – BBC

Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

1 February 2022.

By Colm Kelpie, BBC News, NI

In the spring of 1921, Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach boasted about her plans to publish a novel she deemed a masterpiece that would be “ranked among the classics in English literature”.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” she wrote of James Joyce’s acclaimed and challenging novel, written over seven years in three cities depicting the events of a single day in Dublin.

And it did.

On 2 February 1922, Beach published the first book edition of Ulysses, just in time for Joyce’s 40th birthday.

Stylistically dense in parts, it tells the stories of three central characters – Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly – and is now celebrated as one of the world’s most influential texts.

‘Tosh’

TS Eliot, writing in 1923, believed Ulysses was “the most important expression which the present age has found”.

But the path to publication was not a smooth one. The novel sparked controversy and was greeted with revulsion by many – even among some in the literary community.

Virginia Woolf described it as “tosh”.

Parts had been serialised by US magazine Little Review in 1920, resulting in an obscenity trial that concluded with the editors being fined and ordered to cease further publication. It was also censured in Great Britain.

Beach, the owner of Shakespeare & Company on the Rue Dupuytren, was determined to have it published in book form, which she did, bankrolled in part by her own money on the promise of subscribers.

Writing about the task at the time, she said she had to “put every single centime aside to pay” the book’s printer.

Prof Keri Walsh, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at New York’s Fordham University, says Beach’s decision to publish turned her into a “culture-hero of the avant-garde.”

“There was a sense that people knew that this was going to be one of the defining books of modernism, so she understood that she would assure her own place in literary history by being the publisher of it,” Prof Walsh tells BBC News NI.

Joyce and Beach first met in 1920, not long after he moved to Paris.

He had long left Ireland in self-imposed exile, living in Trieste, Zurich and the French capital.

Beach described that meeting as a powerful moment, says Prof Walsh.

“Joyce was very tired at this point. He had spent so much time fighting to finish Ulysses, and get through [World War One] and survive, he felt she could provide some sort of stability and support for him and his family,” she adds.

“She was much more than a publisher – a banker, agent, administrator, friend of the family. For a very long time that relationship worked well.”

But following disputes over publishing rights, the relationship between Joyce and Beach soured and the latter ultimately ceded the novel’s rights, writes Prof Walsh in The Letters of Sylvia Beach.

Random House published Ulysses in 1934 after the US ban on publication was overturned the previous year.

That marketed it to a bigger audience, but it was 20 years before writers began to “claim” Joyce, says John McCourt, professor of English at the University of Macerata in Italy.

While Joyce was deeply frustrated by the reception Ulysses had received, he was equally unrelenting, adds Prof McCourt.

“He wouldn’t change a comma to make it more acceptable to whatever public taste deemed was OK.

“He saw himself becoming a cause celebre and played it for all it was worth.”

Tips for reading (or attempting to read) Ulysses

Prof John McCourt, University of Macerata, Italy

Nobody is fully prepared to read the book.

If you know something about music that would be a big help.

If you know something about Ireland and its history, that would help.

Don’t try and read it too quickly. Read it out loud as it does come alive.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Ulysses: Celebrating 100 years of a literary masterpiece

How do cultural objects change who we are?

From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

There are four aspects of this which I think it’s important to untangle:

• “the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object”
• the timing of their meeting
• the experiences which are produced
• the capacity of those experiences to move us forward in our becoming who we are

The most powerful experiences of cultural objects come when these four aspects are in alignment. I stumbled across T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at a particularly bleak time in my life and there was something I dimly perceived in my existence (“not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness…”) which I could see more acutely after reading Little Gidding for the first time. That each moment could somehow be a home if only I could relate to it with sufficient care. That some moments bring higher, fuller experiences which I needed to be more disciplined in order to be able to receive. To see it made made it an object of reflection and exploration. It enabled me to elaborate myself in relation to it and find other objects to help me explore it. There was something latent in how I was trying to make sense of my existence (my idiom) which suddenly found expression through my engagement with the poem (my object). But that meeting came at a critical juncture, a ‘fateful moment’ to use the lingo of biographical sociology, which meant that it me on a new course.

I wonder however what a mundane sociology of these experiences would look like. One attuned to the scaffolding which makes such meetings possible. In my case I’d spent the previous year circling round Rilke with a sense I saw something in there which couldn’t reach in the same way. Or the blogging through which I tried to identify self-states which could be imbued with some reality by sharing with the Big Other before they came to elaborated in a way that felt coherent to me. Or even the whole problematic of presence underpinning how I received Little Gidding which rested on a whole gamut of therapeutic, spiritual and philosophical sources in a melange I don’t think I’d realised until now I’d been constructing for many years. The idiom has to be saturated with latent meaning that can burst out into a new expression at a moment of experienced fullness. It’s not created by the new object but rather facilitated by it.

You can’t choose cultural objects to solve a problem. Indeed if you’re relating to these objects to do something it will almost certainly blunt the possibility of resonance. There’s a subtle dialectic here in which a movement takes a more definitive form through these fateful encounters rather than being created by them. There’s a risk that, much as with explaining the lived life, we miss the subtle grounds for transformation if we get too preoccupied with the observable transformation itself. There was a grammar which pre-existed it within and through which change became possible. That’s where sociology can contribute something meaningful to the psychoanalysis of personal change through cultural objects.

#art #change #christopherBollas #culturalObjects #literature #music #TSEliot

How do cultural objects change who we are?

From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

There are four aspects of this which I think it’s important to untangle:

• “the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object”
• the timing of their meeting
• the experiences which are produced
• the capacity of those experiences to move us forward in our becoming who we are

The most powerful experiences of cultural objects come when these four aspects are in alignment. I stumbled across T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at a particularly bleak time in my life and there was something I dimly perceived in my existence (“not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness…”) which I could see more acutely after reading Little Gidding for the first time. That each moment could somehow be a home if only I could relate to it with sufficient care. That some moments bring higher, fuller experiences which I needed to be more disciplined in order to be able to receive. To see it made made it an object of reflection and exploration. It enabled me to elaborate myself in relation to it and find other objects to help me explore it. There was something latent in how I was trying to make sense of my existence (my idiom) which suddenly found expression through my engagement with the poem (my object). But that meeting came at a critical juncture, a ‘fateful moment’ to use the lingo of biographical sociology, which meant that it me on a new course.

I wonder however what a mundane sociology of these experiences would look like. One attuned to the scaffolding which makes such meetings possible. In my case I’d spent the previous year circling round Rilke with a sense I saw something in there which couldn’t reach in the same way. Or the blogging through which I tried to identify self-states which could be imbued with some reality by sharing with the Big Other before they came to elaborated in a way that felt coherent to me. Or even the whole problematic of presence underpinning how I received Little Gidding which rested on a whole gamut of therapeutic, spiritual and philosophical sources in a melange I don’t think I’d realised until now I’d been constructing for many years. The idiom has to be saturated with latent meaning that can burst out into a new expression at a moment of experienced fullness. It’s not created by the new object but rather facilitated by it.

You can’t choose cultural objects to solve a problem. Indeed if you’re relating to these objects to do something it will almost certainly blunt the possibility of resonance. There’s a subtle dialectic here in which a movement takes a more definitive form through these fateful encounters rather than being created by them. There’s a risk that, much as with explaining the lived life, we miss the subtle grounds for transformation if we get too preoccupied with the observable transformation itself. There was a grammar which pre-existed it within and through which change became possible. That’s where sociology can contribute something meaningful to the psychoanalysis of personal change through cultural objects.

#art #change #christopherBollas #culturalObjects #literature #music #TSEliot

two lectures by william burroughs

https://youtu.be/d-2a0Rti6-Y?si=KioGJXflz24OVOLE

Audio recording of a lecture & writing class with students at Naropa University. Poet Allen Ginsberg is also in the audience. Burroughs covers topics including paranormal phenomena, magic, synchronicity, precognition, dreams, his cut-ups technique for writing, & he answers many questions from students & from Ginsberg in a Q & A. He reads from some of his fiction & non-fiction writings. The woman who asks many questions near the end & thanks him at the end I believe is Anne Waldman of Naropa University.

https://youtu.be/xKfS1xemH6U?si=tiykZp1l2fnq2Bli

This audio recording complements the previous one.

In this recording Burroughs covers the cut-up method of writing in some detail, & reads from his own cut-up writings, as well as some by Burroughs’ sometime collaborator Brion Gysin. Burroughs describes how some cut-ups appear to be uncanny prognosticators, accurately predicting future events, according to Burroughs.

He also describes experiments with audio cut-ups using tape recorders. He had intended to play recordings of some of Gysin’s tape experiments at this lecture, but the tapes had not arrived on time. Instead, Burroughs describes some of the cut-up tape experiments.

And he covers other tape experiments that interest him conducted by paranormal investigators & what today is commonly known as EVP (electronic voice phenomena), where tape recorders are supposed to record unexplained mysterious human voices though no such sound input is available to the recorder. Burroughs refers to these as “Paranormal Voices” experiments/phenomena.

Burroughs also makes reference to dreams, the last words of Dutch Schultz, Shakespeare, computers, Homer, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, & Carl Jung.
There’s a long Q & A session with students at the end.

#AllenGinsberg #AnneWaldman #audio #audioRecording #BrionGysin #BurroughsLectures #CarlGustavJung #computers #cutUp #cutUp #cutUpTechnique #cutUpsTechnique #cutup #dreams #DutchSchultz #electronicVoicePhenomena #EVP #GertrudeStein #Homer #JamesJoyce #Jung #lecture #lectures #magic #NaropaUninversity #Omero #paranormalPhenomena #precognition #QA #QuestionAnswer #Shakespeare #synchronicity #TSEliot #tapeExperiments #WilliamBurroughs #writingClass

To arrive where I started…

Whatever the origin of religion, it is so often present in our lives as a way to try to understand the ineffable; a way to give presence and weight to an experience that defies words; that takes place outside of thought and perception. What are we to do with such an experience – a thing commonly known as mystical, or numinous? It cannot be thought, or described, since it is entirely beyond the realm of cognition and language.

This was my own experience; as a young man – even as a child – I had been prone to experiences like this, for which I had no words, nor even a broad category or discipline to which to assign them. (The nearest I got to the feeling was reading about astronomy or zoology or meteorology – a sense that here was something in terms of which everything else made sense, rather than my trying to make sense of it.)

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital in my teens that I had the freedom to begin to explore; to realise that the natural direction of this condition of mind was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was something I learned to call “spirituality”. When I began to discover that I was not alone in this, of course my fellow pilgrims were in general religious people, and so it seemed to me that these must be religious experiences. Despite my having early on read Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu, it was all too easy to understand these experiences in terms of either Buddhism, or later, irresistibly, the Christian mystical tradition – which of course brought the whole complex machinery of faith clattering along with it.

Extraordinarily, despite my by then growing and scarcely repressed doubts, it took the enforced isolation of the recent pandemic, and the discovery of writers like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, finally to shake me loose; to let me realise that, as Harris points out so poignantly in the first chapter of Waking Up, “Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ for millennia… there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.” Somehow, I had to recapitulate this for myself; it often amazes me to realise that it took me the best part of my adult life “to arrive where [I] started, and know the place for the first time.”

#awakening #awareness #faith #JidduKrishnamurti #LaoTzu #philosophy #religion #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore #TSEliot

To arrive where I started…

Whatever the origin of religion, it is so often present in our lives as a way to try to understand the ineffable; a way to give presence and weight to an experience that defies words; that takes place outside of thought and perception. What are we to do with such an experience – a thing commonly known as mystical, or numinous? It cannot be thought, or described, since it is entirely beyond the realm of cognition and language.

This was my own experience; as a young man – even as a child – I had been prone to experiences like this, for which I had no words, nor even a broad category or discipline to which to assign them. (The nearest I got to the feeling was reading about astronomy or zoology or meteorology – a sense that here was something in terms of which everything else made sense, rather than my trying to make sense of it.)

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital in my teens that I had the freedom to begin to explore; to realise that the natural direction of this condition of mind was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was something I learned to call “spirituality”. When I began to discover that I was not alone in this, of course my fellow pilgrims were in general religious people, and so it seemed to me that these must be religious experiences. Despite my having early on read Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu, it was all too easy to understand these experiences in terms of either Buddhism, or later, irresistibly, the Christian mystical tradition – which of course brought the whole complex machinery of faith clattering along with it.

Extraordinarily, despite my by then growing and scarcely repressed doubts, it took the enforced isolation of the recent pandemic, and the discovery of writers like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, finally to shake me loose; to let me realise that, as Harris points out so poignantly in the first chapter of Waking Up, “Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ for millennia… there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.” Somehow, I had to recapitulate this for myself; it often amazes me to realise that it took me the best part of my adult life “to arrive where [I] started, and know the place for the first time.”

#awakening #awareness #faith #JidduKrishnamurti #LaoTzu #philosophy #religion #SamHarris #SusanBlackmore #TSEliot