‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own
blood on the walls of their prison. ****
Stravinsky’s thoughts on reaching eighty: “Were Eliot
and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side (Webern,
Schoenberg, Joyce, Klee) sought new forms of travel? I believe this
interpretation or distinction, much discussed a generation ago, is no longer
viable. Our era is but a great unity in which we all share a part. It may indeed
seem that Eliot and I made things that lacked living continuity, that we made
art out of disjecta membra: quotations from other poets and artists, references
to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’). But we used these
things along with anything else that came to hand, treating everything
ironically in order to rebuild. We did not pretend to have invented new
conveyors or new means of travel, for the true job of the artist is to refit old
ships. He can say again, in his way, only what others have already said before
him.”
In a book he published in ’48, entitled Organon for a Small Theater , “Brecht rejects his early
artistic works as political and didactic. The theater must be a place for
aesthetic pleasure and nothing else — though it is also necessary to keep up
with the fashions of the age and work scientifically. . . . We need a theater
that does not merely make possible the emotions, insights, and impulses allowed
by the relevant field of human relationships in which the actions occur.
Instead, we need a theater that will exploit and generate ideas, so that they
might play a role in changing the world.” Brecht ,
Ronald Gray.
Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood
by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution.
“You could say that in my last phrase I’ve joined the
new realism. Its characteristic features are not at all the same as those of
traditional realism, which is supposed to provide a faithful representation of
life. The new realism goes beyond details and rounded characters. This isn’t an
advance in style, but a change of content. The basis of traditional realism is
life — you paint its picture, show how it works, extract its tendencies and what
lessons it might offer. That’s where the story begins and ends: it depends on
life and on the living, the way they dress, the details. For the new realism,
the motive for writing lies in ideas, in specific passions that make reality
into a means for expressing them.” Naguib Mahfouz.
June
John Dos Passos (born 1896), the total,
panoramic view. Journalistic spirit. The city itself rather than a particular
individual in the USA Trilogy .
Hemingway: A tight frame with three dimensions: Simple
character. Simple style. Simple setting. In The Green Hills
of Africa , he talks about four-dimensional prose: the kind that
hasn’t yet been written, but which is possible. There is a fourth and a fifth
dimension (the symbolic?).
Hemingway, The Writer as
Artist , Carlos Baker, translated by Dr. Ihsan Abbas.
— On Africa: “ You ought to always
write it. Write it down, state what you see and hear, without worrying what
you might get out of it . ”
— “Where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as
we have been.” The practical standard is participation. There are other
practical standards: the truthfulness of the writing, its vital verisimilitude
(in other words, nothing that is in life, whether language, thought, or action,
can be wholly excluded without some loss to the vital principle).
— Hemingway’s experience in Africa in the translation of
reality. He says in the introduction to Green Hills :
“Given a country as interesting as Africa, a month’s hunting there, the
determination to tell only the truth, and to make all that into a book — can
such a book compete with a work of the imagination?” The answer is that it
certainly can, provided the writer is skilled, as well as being committed to
both truth and beauty — in other words, the way it was + formal
blood on the walls of their prison. ****
Stravinsky’s thoughts on reaching eighty: “Were Eliot
and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side (Webern,
Schoenberg, Joyce, Klee) sought new forms of travel? I believe this
interpretation or distinction, much discussed a generation ago, is no longer
viable. Our era is but a great unity in which we all share a part. It may indeed
seem that Eliot and I made things that lacked living continuity, that we made
art out of disjecta membra: quotations from other poets and artists, references
to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’). But we used these
things along with anything else that came to hand, treating everything
ironically in order to rebuild. We did not pretend to have invented new
conveyors or new means of travel, for the true job of the artist is to refit old
ships. He can say again, in his way, only what others have already said before
him.”
In a book he published in ’48, entitled Organon for a Small Theater , “Brecht rejects his early
artistic works as political and didactic. The theater must be a place for
aesthetic pleasure and nothing else — though it is also necessary to keep up
with the fashions of the age and work scientifically. . . . We need a theater
that does not merely make possible the emotions, insights, and impulses allowed
by the relevant field of human relationships in which the actions occur.
Instead, we need a theater that will exploit and generate ideas, so that they
might play a role in changing the world.” Brecht ,
Ronald Gray.
Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood
by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution.
“You could say that in my last phrase I’ve joined the
new realism. Its characteristic features are not at all the same as those of
traditional realism, which is supposed to provide a faithful representation of
life. The new realism goes beyond details and rounded characters. This isn’t an
advance in style, but a change of content. The basis of traditional realism is
life — you paint its picture, show how it works, extract its tendencies and what
lessons it might offer. That’s where the story begins and ends: it depends on
life and on the living, the way they dress, the details. For the new realism,
the motive for writing lies in ideas, in specific passions that make reality
into a means for expressing them.” Naguib Mahfouz.
June
John Dos Passos (born 1896), the total,
panoramic view. Journalistic spirit. The city itself rather than a particular
individual in the USA Trilogy .
Hemingway: A tight frame with three dimensions: Simple
character. Simple style. Simple setting. In The Green Hills
of Africa , he talks about four-dimensional prose: the kind that
hasn’t yet been written, but which is possible. There is a fourth and a fifth
dimension (the symbolic?).
Hemingway, The Writer as
Artist , Carlos Baker, translated by Dr. Ihsan Abbas.
— On Africa: “ You ought to always
write it. Write it down, state what you see and hear, without worrying what
you might get out of it . ”
— “Where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as
we have been.” The practical standard is participation. There are other
practical standards: the truthfulness of the writing, its vital verisimilitude
(in other words, nothing that is in life, whether language, thought, or action,
can be wholly excluded without some loss to the vital principle).
— Hemingway’s experience in Africa in the translation of
reality. He says in the introduction to Green Hills :
“Given a country as interesting as Africa, a month’s hunting there, the
determination to tell only the truth, and to make all that into a book — can
such a book compete with a work of the imagination?” The answer is that it
certainly can, provided the writer is skilled, as well as being committed to
both truth and beauty — in other words, the way it was + formal
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