Saturated with lachrymose melodies, dirgelike rhythms and the ghastly, fatal oompahs of sad waltzes, the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness, or perhaps even imagine. At least that’s how his work sounds today, converging in our ears with music about various horrors written by composers he inspired: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein. Because of their achievements, and the Mahleresque tones of composers as different as Arnold Schoenberg and Franz Schmidt, Anton Webern and Kurt Weill, Luciano Berio and George Crumb, Mahler seems like a far more central figure than he was during his lifetime, when French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew.
After his death, Alma Mahler described her husband as a “Christgläubiger Jude,” a Jew who believed in Christ. Henry-Louis de La Grange’s inability to discern the many shades of this statement and other racial and religious characterizations of Mahler undermines his monumental biography of the composer, of which the fourth and final volume, A New Life Cut Short, has finally appeared in English. Its 1,758 pages chronicle less than three and a half years of Mahler’s fifty-year life, from his arrival in New York City in December 1907 to his death in Vienna in May 1911.
03/07/2009
Mahler’s Body
30/06/2009
Ch’an Buddhism and the Prophetic Poems of William Blake
MARK S. FERRARA, Journal of Chinese Philosophy Vo.24 1997
The similarities between William Blake’s philosophical
system and that of Buddhism (particularly the Ch’an(a) or Zen
School) are no less than astonishing. One is struck by a
fundamental similitude underlying the teaching of the Ch’an
school and that of Blake’s radical epistemology. Scholars are
aware that William Blake (1757-1827) knew the BhagavadGita in
its first English translation by Sir Charles Wilkins (1785).
Blake’s A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809) even has
an entry for a piece called “The Bramins-A Drawing.”
Moreover, Kathleen Raine suggests that Blake knew “some of
the Proceedings off the Calcutta Society of Bengal promoted
by Sir William Jones.”(1) Further, Blake believed fundamentally
All Religions are One (1788). He wrote, “As all men are alike
(tho, infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars
have one source.”(2) It was also his opinion that”The
philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human
perception.”(3)
Although the above constitute enough evidence to suggest
Blake’s familiarity with the East (particularly Indian
thinking as found in the Vedic tradition) they do not fully
explain the strange parallelism of thought between the
English poet-painter’s mythic philosophy and that of
Mahayanna Buddhism. More…
Recommend: William Blake Virtual Gallery
17/06/2009
Virginia Woolf’s neat brown paper parcels
By Claire Harman
Virginia Woolf began her publishing career the year her father, Leslie Stephen, died. She could never have been a writer, she said later, had he lived; his influence and example would have been too inhibiting. Yet she gravitated naturally towards the form he had specialized in, the literary essay, and spent a lifetime perfecting her own version of it. Though her earliest pieces were written mostly as practice and potboilers and to get a foot in the door, Woolf knew she had “some gift that way”.How extensive and idiosyncratic a gift was obvious from the first collection of Woolf’s non-fiction, The Common Reader, published in 1925, and its sequel, The Common Reader: Second series (1932), both reprinted by Leonard Woolf, with a great deal else, in a four-volume Collected Essays in the 1960s. In 1986, the definitive Hogarth Press edition set out to do scholarly justice to Woolf’s achievement as “arguably the last of the great English essayists”, but it slowed to a stop after four volumes in 1994. Fifteen years later, and with Stuart N. Clarke taking over from Andrew McNeillie as editor, the appearance of Volume Five of the projected six is a welcome sign of the project’s resuscitation. More…
12/06/2009
Three Presences – Denis Donoghue: Yeats, Eliot, Pound
This essay is the text of a a lecture Denis Donoghue will deliver at The Yeats International Summer School on July 28th in Sligo.
On April 2nd, 1916, one of Yeats’s plays for dancers, At the Hawk’s Well, received its first performance in Lady Emerald Cunard’s drawing room in Cavendish Square, London before an invited audience. Michio Ito danced the Guardian of the Well. The guests included Ezra Pound and TS Eliot. For all I know, this may have been the only afternoon on which Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were together in the same room. Many years later, Samuel Beckett wrote a play, like At the Hawk’s Well, about waiting; waiting for someone who is supposed to arrive but doesn’t, a variant of waiting for a transforming flow of water which is never received because the guardian of the well distracts those who are longing for it. In Happy Days Winnie utters the first line of At the Hawk’s Well, “I call to the eye of the mind”, one of many literary allusions that she recalls – or rather, that Beckett recalls on her behalf. I draw a loose connection between these occasions to suggest a literary context for the relations I propose to describe: Yeats and Eliot, Yeats and Pound. More…
03/06/2009
Joseph Conrad’s Tragic Predicament
John G. Rodwan, Jr.
“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
– Albert CamusJoseph Conrad, laureate of futility and ambassador of the unspeakable, fills his fiction with indistinct forms, unknowable characters, inscrutable events and irresolvable mysteries. Repeatedly drawing attention to the insurmountable challenges to clear and precise expression, he devises stories about the impossibility of telling accurate stories. He often uses multiple, backward-looking narrators recounting partially remembered events pieced together from various sources. Conrad frequently depicts characters struggling to cope with uncertainty and overcome – or desperately sustain – the illusions they predictably develop in a confounding and ultimately meaningless universe. For a solidly productive author, Conrad’s body of work evinces remarkable doubts about the utility of language and a deep skepticism about the value of writing. More…
22/05/2009
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
Over the past couple of years, an extraordinary thing has happened in India. Driven by vertiginous economic growth, the burgeoning of an aggressively consumerist, astonishingly wealthy urban elite and the rise and rise of the bellwether stock-market index, a phrase has gained unrivalled currency: New India. This isn’t India Shining – the tagline previously used to describe a country whose economy had just begun to catch fire. This is an India so dazzled by the glow of its own success that it has turned an adjective into a proper noun. We have learnt to embrace New India as a different entity – like the New Testament, perhaps, or New Labour.
Elsewhere, everyday India (the old India) limps, coughs, splutters and throws up a good deal of blood. One of every six Indians continues to live in the shadow of insurgency. Farmers with little access to irrigation and devastated by failing crops continue to kill themselves. And nearly 300 million Indians remain unsure of where their next meal will come from.
Aravind Adiga’s riveting, razor-sharp debut novel explores with wit and insight the realities of these two Indias, and reveals what happens when the inhabitants of one collude and then collide with those of the other. Balram Halwai, the narrator of The White Tiger, is a “self-taught entrepreneur”, the story of whose upbringing is “the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced”. “I am not an original thinker,” he confesses, “but I am an original listener”. More…
