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In light of my deeply spiritual vow to never work retail again, I've been loving both my summer jobs in the English and Communication depts. My desk, in the latter, is next to the office of a recently hired professor who was a student of Derrida's.
That said, don't you think Derrida bore a resemblance to Beckett? And Beckett bore a resemblance to Andy Griffith?
by this person's literary elitism. Doesn't he or she know the reference will be lost on most of the passersby? Talk about arrogant.
(shot on Fullerton Pkwy between Orchard and Geneva streets. Sorry the photo's fuzzy - left flash on by accident)
Lifesaver.
On sale at Home Depot: $157. 8000 btu's of retahded wicked wintriness.
Via this fictional dialogue from a very informal and faulty AOL homepage, you can sense the direction English Departments have taken in the last 50 years. Whether it's agreeable is up to you.
Rummagin', backissuin', searchin' and findin'!
Maybe ACD and I can agree on this formula: If classical music is absent from your life, then you are missing out on something huge and grand. What unifies us, I hope, is the urge to tell the news about this music, which, for all its elitist trappings, occupies an underground position in contemporary culture.
-and-
There are far more composers writing music — ten, maybe twenty times as many as a hundred years ago. But musical life lacks a center. It exists off the radar screen of the major media. It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d make a virtue of it. Classical music is the new underground.
I've always been a Lennon boy, but Keef, I'd say, is now right there.
"Dog shit in the Doorway" Keith on Mick's solo album "Goddess in the Doorway" 2002
"Puff Daddy is a piece of crap."
"When Mick plays the harmonica, it's the only time he's not thinking. It comes up from inside of him, and you get the pure unadulaterated Mick Jagger."
''His voice is so eerie, so compelling... and the guitar playing -- it's like Bach.'' (On Robert Johnson)
"The music is bigger than all of us. What are we? We're just players, no matter how good. If you're a Mozart or fucking Beethoven or Bach, all you are is just one of the best. Imagine if Mozart and Beethoven had a fucking Walkman! You know what I mean? You wouldn't have had 26 overtures, you'd have fifty-bleeding-nine. "
"Music, to me, is the joy, right? I love my kids most of the time, and I love my wife most of the time. Music I love all the time. It's the only constant thing in my life. It's the one thing you can count on."
Some of these are primo for less obvious reasons.
This is every Joyce admirer's wet dream. Pull out your copy of Finnegans Wake, open to section 2 and then backjog 3 paragraphs in ch. 8 (pg. 213 in my edition) to the line: "Well, you know or don't you kennet...and that's the he and the she of it."
Joyce's voice is very theatrical and exaggerated when he reads. I wonder where his conversational voice falls in relation to this.
You can listen to JJ read here.
Today marks the start of a considerable project. I am trying to bring in two pianists from Michigan to play at DePaul's concert hall sometime next year. I contacted this woman, and she promptly responded with some encouragement.
Here's your tentative program:
Witold Lutoslawski: Paganini Variations
Francis Poulenc: Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Suite #2, Op. 17.
There is of course the option of throwing in the dainty Mozart 2 Piano Sonata for a little variety.
If by miracle this pulls through, you're all invited to Chicago.
Well, memed that is. rb from suchstuff wants me to answer these 5:
1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video: At my current apartment: zero. I don't own a t.v., but at my folks' place in Michigan about 15-20. I've always been a big renter rather than buyer. But I buy the essentials, like no doubt.
2. Last film I bought: Tree's Lounge? (Little girl to icecream truck guy) "Can I have a banana split, please?" (Icecream truck guy--looks at his co-worker and whispers) "Oh shit, we don't have those do we? Just, well...hmmm....give her a fudge bar."
3. Last film I watched: Laura! "Don't worry, I fall asleep at concerts too." "You can hang me if I am!"
4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no
particular order): This Boy's Life, Taxi Driver, Tree's Lounge, Stroszek, Little Noises
5. If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be? Dwight Hansen (De Niro) from This Boy's Life: "Edsel's a shit car."
I pass this on to Herr Ross--that is if he's geme.
What is Bloomsday and why do we acknowledge it?
Well, 101 years and 6 days ago today, James Joyce, while walking down Nassau Street in Dublin, "caught sight of a tall young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride" to be the lanky figure of one Nora Barnacle. Nora, according to Ellmann, first thought James to be Swedish from his bright blue eyes. She also thought him to be a local sailor because of a goofy yachting cap he was sporting at the time. Joyce, supposedly in love at first glance, requested they meet in Merrion Square 4 days later on June 14th. Nora, however, was a no-show. In classic male frustration, Joyce wrote her this letter of dejection and perseverance:
I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me--if you have not forgotten me!
--James A. Joyce
15 June 1904
Nora agreed and they met on the evening of June 16, 1904. The rest is history. Joyce sets Ulysses to this day (June 16) and Nora dictates the rest of James personal and literary output completely. Richard Ellmann notes:
To any other writer of the time, Nora Barnacle would have seemed ordinary; Joyce, with his need to seek the remarkable in the commonplace, decided she was nothing of the sort. She had only a grammar school education; she had no understanding of literature, and no power or interest in introspection. But she had considerable wit and spirit...
Now on to Ulysses. Not up to reading it? Here's an amusing 30 second summary I found:
* Stephen eats breakfast in a coastal tower with two acquaintances
* Stephen teaches at a school and picks up his pay
* Stephen broods on the beach
* Bloom wakes up, makes breakfast and takes a crap
* Bloom leaves the house, picks up a letter and a newspaper and tries to ogle a woman wearing stockings
* Bloom goes to a funeral
* Bloom tries to get an advert printed in a newspaper
* Bloom eats and walks the streets, ruminating
* Stephen talks about Shakespeare with some friends in a library; Bloom makes a small cameo
* A series of vignettes about various major and minor characters
* Bloom goes to a bar and gets chased by an anti-Semite
* Bloom masturbates on the beach
* Bloom drops into a maternity hospital where Stephen and some of his drunk friends are hanging out
* Stephen winds up at a brothel; Bloom follows, concerned for him
* Bloom and Stephen have trippy hallucinations and Stephen gets punched out by a soldier on leave
* Bloom and Stephen head back to Bloom's house
* They talk over cocoa and piss in the back garden
* Bloom goes to bed and drifts off
* Bloom's wife, woken by his entrance, thinks and masturbates
Lastly, I tutor a student from Taiwan and this is the paragraph I have him read everytime from The Oxen and the Sun chapter:
Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature's boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?
It is a lovely day for a Guinness, no?
