Back to Gombrowicz...

No really set itinerary. Can't plan plan when you fly standby. Just have to get from Amsterdam to Poland and back again, so I'm thinking something like: West to East: Amsterdam, Aachen, Wurzburg, Dresden, Wroclaw; East to West: Berlin, Lubeck, Hamburg, Amsterdam. But like I say: all very fluid. And that's partly why I'm back to Gombrowicz and his Diary.

*

Why am I taking it out on poets? I will let you in on the reason for my benevolent cruelty: I know that the poet can bear just about anything and will not feel offended on the condition that you acknowledge that he is a poet. And here I can give them full satisfaction and can say a hundred times, yes, they are poets and even, as the Anthology will have it, the most outstanding poets (I have nothing against this).
     But you, people, be on guard against their historically justified twilight. Do not allow yourself to be drawn into the little game which consists of their "singing" and your admiring. Review your platitudes. Sometimes we admire because we have grown accustomed to admiring and also because we do not want to ruin the parade. Sometimes it also happens that we admire out of delicacy, so as not to hurt anyone. Just in case, I advise you: let us strike at them hard to see whether or not they tumble over. For that blow may free the modern day in us and will give us a key to the future. Idiots! Why do you allow history to impose poets upon you? You alone must create them, them and history.  

Comments

Post a Comment

POPULAR POSTS

Tarkovsky's Death and the Film "Stalker"

Several people involved in the film production — including Tarkovsky — had met deaths, which some crew members attribute to the film's long, arduous shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. [ 6 ]   [From Wikipedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film )]
Read more

TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
Read more

Hitchcock's Soda City

I was watching Saboteur last night (Encore has a slew of Hitchcock's films up now) and wanted to know more about Soda City. Figured it wasn't real. It's not. Apparently it was shot somewhere in Nevada (makes sense). This site gives a nice run-down of the various places throughout the US that Hitchcock used in his films: Hitchcock's America.
Read more

Coetzee's "Costello": Koba the Bear and Paul West

Image
Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are
Read more