Ulysses

Happy Bloomsday.

Neil Gaiman Reads Jabberwocky

I think he gets a few words wrong, but overall very impressive.

Madeleine Reads "The Swan" By Charles Baudelaire

Let us acknowledge the publication on this date in 1857 of Les Fleurs du mal.

Vladimir Nabokov discusses "Lolita" part 2 of 2

Happy birthday to VN.

William Wordsworth - The World Is Too Much With Us

T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday

Jonathan Winters - A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" was first published on this date in 1843. I heard Jonathan Winters reading the story on NPR a few years ago and really enjoyed it. So for your delectation, here it is.

Shakespeare and Original Pronunciation

The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus died on this date in 1887.

Reading of "Dog's Death" by John Updike

The root word in "amateur" is "love."

Ernest Dowson - They Are Not Long

It's the birthday of Ernest Dowson, born this date in 1867. He died in 1900, and his brief life resonates well with what might be his most famous poem. The Latin epigram may be translated as "the brief sum of life forbids us from thinking of far-off hope."

    Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.

    They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
    Love and desire and hate;
    I think they have no portion in us after
    We pass the gate.

    They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
    Out of a misty dream
    Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.

Emily Bronte - Remembrance

Happy 196th birthday to Emily Bronte, one of my favorite writers. Her major achievement was the novel Wuthering Heights, but she wrote poetry as well. Here the reading is by Stella Gonet.

RIP Maya Angelou

My favorites of her works are the memoirs. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is deservedly a classic, but the books that follow, which take her through much of her adulthood and a rich and fascinating life, are also good.

Prospero's Speech on Mortality in The Tempest Act 4 Scene 1

Happy four hundred and fiftieth birthday to WS. This is not the best version  of this speech available, but it's still pretty good.

RIP Peter Matthiessen

I've only read Far Tortuga, but thought it was very good. Guess I'll have to read the others now. Matthiessen was a writer of a particular type, erudite but never the least bit showy, deeply interested in human beings both as individuals and in the aggregate. His last book will be published on Tuesday. Here's the Guardian obit.

Walt Whitman - Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking / From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

As read by Alexander Scourby. I'm really only pushing "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" here; "From Pent-Up Aching Rivers" is good as well but not my focus. Unfortunately I don't know how to restrict the clip to play only part, so both are given.

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is about as good an example as I can think of that shows what it means to begin to try to comprehend what it means that living things die. It's beautiful, sad, and uplifting simultaneously.

Terry Southern in eBook Form

I was talking last night about Terry Southern with someone. A little online searching turned up this clip about how his works are now available in eBook format.

"Lycidas" by John Milton (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

RIP Doris Lessing

Deeply influential, a true original, like Simone de Beauvoir an outspoken feminist when that was extremely rare. Her fellow novelist Margaret Atwood has an appreciation in the Guardian.

She was political in the most basic sense, recognising the manifestations of power in its many forms. She was spiritual as well, exploring the limits and pitfalls that came with being human, especially after she became an adherent of Sufism. As a writer she was inventive and brave, branching out into science fiction in her Canopus In Argos series at a time when it was a dodgy thing for a "mainline" novelist to do. She was also very down-to-earth, having famously remarked "Oh Christ!" when informed in 2007 that she had won the Nobel prize. She was only the eleventh woman to do so, and never expected it; a lack of expectation that was in itself a kind of artistic freedom, for if you don't think of yourself as an august personage, you don't have to behave yourself. You can still kick up your heels and push the limits, and that was what interested Doris Lessing, always.

Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

This is good news. Thirteenth woman, first Canadian, and a specialist in the short story instead of the novel or poetry, Munro is a genius with a heart, which is supposed to be what literature is about, one hopes. Here's more from the Toronto Globe & Mail:

Jane Smiley [has] noted that: “the surface of Alice Munro’s works, its simplicity and quiet appearance, is a deceptive thing, that beneath that surface is a store of insight, a body of observation, and a world of wisdom that is close to addictive.”....Fellow short story writer Cynthia Ozick has called Munro “our Chekhov.”