From bf779 at freenet.carleton.ca Fri Jan 25 16:45:41 2008 From: bf779 at freenet.carleton.ca (Philip Walsh) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:45:41 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s Message-ID: <479A82B5.1080609@freenet.carleton.ca> Forgive me if this has been mentioned here before. You might find the following web site of interest: http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html It offers free downloads of a large number of MP3s of literary works, many read by the authors. There's no Durrell, but you can find several selections of Henry Miller reading from his works. There are also readings by Joyce (a section from Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. The Beckett folder offers the old LP performance of "Krapp's Last Tape" and a video of "Film" with Buster Keaton. Well worth exploring. Philip Walsh Ottawa, Canada From Jdecker at icc.edu Fri Jan 25 19:37:36 2008 From: Jdecker at icc.edu (James Decker) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:37:36 -0600 Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s References: <479A82B5.1080609@freenet.carleton.ca> Message-ID: Thanks, Philip. I'll credit you in next year's Miller notes. Best, James ________________________________ From: ilds-bounces at lists.uvic.ca on behalf of Philip Walsh Sent: Fri 1/25/2008 6:45 PM To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s Forgive me if this has been mentioned here before. You might find the following web site of interest: http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html It offers free downloads of a large number of MP3s of literary works, many read by the authors. There's no Durrell, but you can find several selections of Henry Miller reading from his works. There are also readings by Joyce (a section from Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others. The Beckett folder offers the old LP performance of "Krapp's Last Tape" and a video of "Film" with Buster Keaton. Well worth exploring. Philip Walsh Ottawa, Canada _______________________________________________ ILDS mailing list ILDS at lists.uvic.ca https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 3985 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080125/07963e60/attachment.bin From bf779 at freenet.carleton.ca Sat Jan 26 04:19:47 2008 From: bf779 at freenet.carleton.ca (Philip Walsh) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:19:47 -0500 Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s In-Reply-To: References: <479A82B5.1080609@freenet.carleton.ca> Message-ID: <479B2563.7070705@freenet.carleton.ca> James Decker wrote: > Thanks, Philip. I'll credit you in next year's Miller notes. > > Best, > James > > James: There's nothing much to credit. It's not my website -- just something I came across. By the way, are the Miller notes available on line? And are there any other Miller resources on line? Best wishes, Philip Walsh From Jdecker at icc.edu Sat Jan 26 05:26:07 2008 From: Jdecker at icc.edu (James Decker) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 07:26:07 -0600 Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s References: <479A82B5.1080609@freenet.carleton.ca> <479B2563.7070705@freenet.carleton.ca> Message-ID: Philip, The single best site for things Miller is http://www.cosmotc.blogspot.com/ The archives also contain some information about Durrell, Nin, and others. We haven't yet put Nexus's Miller Notes online, but the journal has contracted with Ebsco to place all of our materials on one of its databases. Best, James Decker ________________________________ From: ilds-bounces at lists.uvic.ca on behalf of Philip Walsh Sent: Sat 1/26/2008 6:19 AM To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca Subject: Re: [ilds] Literary MP3s James Decker wrote: > Thanks, Philip. I'll credit you in next year's Miller notes. > > Best, > James > > James: There's nothing much to credit. It's not my website -- just something I came across. By the way, are the Miller notes available on line? And are there any other Miller resources on line? Best wishes, Philip Walsh _______________________________________________ ILDS mailing list ILDS at lists.uvic.ca https://lists.uvic.ca/mailman/listinfo/ilds -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/ms-tnef Size: 4441 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080126/f741a431/attachment.bin From odos.fanourios at gmail.com Sat Jan 26 10:23:24 2008 From: odos.fanourios at gmail.com (James Gifford) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 11:23:24 -0700 Subject: [ilds] Literary MP3s In-Reply-To: References: <479A82B5.1080609@freenet.carleton.ca> <479B2563.7070705@freenet.carleton.ca> Message-ID: <479B7A9C.8070908@gmail.com> > We haven't yet put Nexus's Miller Notes online, but > the journal has contracted with Ebsco to place all > of our materials on one of its databases. Fantastic news, James! I'm very glad to hear this. Having more materials available through the electronic databases should increase usage, and with EBSCO you'll actually get an income for the journal from that. Please let us know once it has gone live. Best, James -- ___________________________ James Gifford Department of English University of Victoria Victoria, B.C., Canada http://web.uvic.ca/~gifford From slighcl at wfu.edu Sat Jan 26 16:48:40 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:48:40 -0500 Subject: [ilds] one of those writers like Lawrence Durrell, Message-ID: <479BD4E8.3020305@wfu.edu> *Eulogy for a master Even if it sometimes reads like a rough draft for a longer, more rounded book, Peter Ackroyd's brief life of Edgar Allan Poe is still wonderfully rewarding, says Hilary Spurling Hilary Spurling Sunday January 27, 2008 Guardian Guardian Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd Chatto ?15.99, pp163* 'Wild and shivery, ' wrote an enthusiastic American magazine, reviewing Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' when it first came out in 1845. Poe himself said it was the greatest poem ever written and his contemporaries tended to agree. 'Nevermore' - the raven's catchphrase - became a buzzword in New York. People were seduced by the lilting cadences and rhythms of lines that seem to glide, like certain kinds of pop music, in sugary swoops and swirls over dark pits of unspecified emotion. This was the core of Poe's subsequent appeal for both Symbolists and Surrealists. *He is one of those writers, like Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell, revered far more by French than by Anglo-American intellectuals.* Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Valery admired him. Charles Baudelaire said that, whenever he read Poe, he came across 'not just subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences which I had thought out, written by him 20 years before'. French translation somehow manages to veil sentiment and phrases that remain in English trite or trashy. Even Peter Ackroyd rarely quotes his subject's actual writing, presumably because so much of it teeters on the verge of bathos. That was precisely where Poe aimed to be: 'The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque,' he wrote, defending his rule of deliberate 'bad taste' to an editor who complained that he went too far. Excess, uncertainty, imbalance were for Poe the basic ingredients of both art and life. From start to finish, he existed on (and sometimes over) the edge of catastrophe, breakdown, rejection and dereliction. Child of a couple of strolling players - very young, semi-destitute, both already incubating TB - the infant Edgar was farmed out first to grandparents and later to a nurse who dosed him and an infant sister with laudanum and gin. His biographer traces Poe's fictional preoccupations - the black holes, windowless cells and narrow coffins, the shrouded or chained bodies interred alive in graves and jails - back even before birth to malnutrition in his mother's womb, where he must have known in fact 'the perils of a confined space, in which a victim lays panting'. Poe was not quite three years old when his mother finally took to her bed in the icy winter of 1811. Elizabeth Poe, still capable of projecting herself on stage as a pert, pretty, lively actress barely two months before, now lay dying on a straw mattress in a rented room, abandoned by her husband, attended only by her bewildered children, helplessly exposed to the prurient or charitable gaze of more prosperous local ladies. 'Eddy', as he was known, would recreate the scene nearly 40 years later when his own wife died of TB at 25, the same age as his mother, also lying on straw in wretched lodgings with, according to one visitor, nothing but her husband's greatcoat and the family cat to keep her warm. 'The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world,' he wrote at about this time in a book of tips for aspiring writers. Blurring the sharp outlines of an unbearable reality in favour of grandeur and vaguer imaginative truths was Poe's speciality. It suited the newly emerging popular market for fiction in the US. The dreamlike intensity of his writing, its latent menace, abrupt displacements and hideous reversals mirrored the rootless insecurity of first- and second-generation European immigrants, patchily educated as he was, with no interest in recalling the past from which they fled, or looking too closely at a bleak present and an all too often precarious future. Poe invented the first fictional detective (in The Murders in the Rue Morgue ), pioneered the genre of science fiction, perfected the journalistic flashbacks and shortcuts that would serve Hollywood so well a century later. 'He was one of the first truly professional writers in American literary history,' writes Ackroyd, pointing out that his professionalism proved largely honorary in a market where British books could be pirated for free (Poe's earnings as an author amounted to roughly $3,000 over 20 years ). His private life followed the same unchanging pattern. The orphaned Edgar was adopted by a childless business couple called Allan (hence his middle name), whose initial pride and pleasure rapidly ran out when their handsome, charming, gifted child turned into a resentful adolescent. Exemplary first reports from different schools always ended in discouragement and failure. So did successive attempts to join the army, to retrain as an officer at West Point and later to hold down various more or less unpromising editorial jobs. The one thing that never let him down was the drink he had sucked in instead of mother's milk. Poe got no pleasure from it. Alcohol gave him oblivion, consolation, respite from unfaceable pain and dread. 'He did not drink regularly,' writes his sympathetic biographer, 'but when he did, he could not stop. The red mist fell upon him.' Like many infants missing a mother, he grew up with no streak of sensuality. Even the possibility of sexual consummation appalled him. A long series of abortive love affairs with women who were invariably married, damaged, dying or otherwise ineligible culminated in his wedding to a 13-year-old cousin named Virginia, who probably remained, in Ackroyd's view, a virgin. The single successful sustained relationship of his life was with her mother, Poe's aunt, Maria Clemm, nicknamed Muddy (presumably a childish rendering of Mummy), who loved, comforted and protected him to the end. 'God bless my own darling Muddy,' he wrote in his last letter, two weeks before he died aged 40 of drink and destitution, 'do not fear for your Eddy.' Poe's brilliant, erratic, abbreviated career stands to gain rather than lose from the form of brief life patented by Ackroyd. A short biography is not a long one shrunk. Instead of patiently accumulated details, emotional complexity and architectural shaping, it operates by lightning strikes, atmospheric colouring, impressionistic techniques of concision and suggestion. If this one has a fault, it is precisely that it reads like the first, tenuous rough draft of a fuller, richer, more densely researched book. Ackroyd should perhaps have stuck more closely to Poe's recipe for 'the curt, the terse, the well-timed and readily diffused, in preference to the old forms of the verbose and ponderous'. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080126/65b76e61/attachment.html From slighcl at wfu.edu Sun Jan 27 07:53:10 2008 From: slighcl at wfu.edu (slighcl) Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:53:10 -0500 Subject: [ilds] he was reading Lawrence Durrell In-Reply-To: <479BD4E8.3020305@wfu.edu> References: <479BD4E8.3020305@wfu.edu> Message-ID: <479CA8E6.6030508@wfu.edu> *Saipan Tribune Local Monday, January 28, 2008 http://www.saipantribune.com/newsstory.aspx?newsID=76489&cat=1 Over 100 show up for Kluge lecture* Noted author PF (Fred) Kluge of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, delivers his lecture entitled "Writing on Saipan: Writing About Saipan" sponsored by the NMI Council for the Humanities at the Visitors' Center Theater of the American Memorial Park Friday night. (Jacqueline Hernandez) More than a hundred people packed the American Memorial Park Visitors Center Theater Friday night as they gathered for a lecture by a prominent author who has written several books and articles about Saipan. "Writing on Saipan: Writing About Saipan" by PF (Fred) Kluge is part of Humanities Lecture Series by the NMI Council for the Humanities. "I am not gonna. speak in any way in judgment of what's going on in this place. What I am, however, and it's what brings me here, is a writer," began Kluge, who first came to Saipan in 1967 as a Peace Corps Volunteer. He was then 25. Kluge narrated that *he was reading a work of writer Lawrence Durrell *and was motivated by his decision to request for Ethiopia for his volunteer work but was sent to Saipan instead. "I don't think that my total time on the island aggregates. my years of Peace Corps service. I'm here because I have a long memory of the place, although the time is short but the exposure is over a long period of time." As a writer, Kluge has traveled to different places like Tasmania, Vienna, and Malacca to name a few. He draws a parallel between the experience of travel to that of being a kid. "You're a kid. Your talk is baby talk to prove that you care as a newcomer. And you are exported to safe places and kept away from dangerous ones." In his lecture, Kluge differentiated the kinds of writing he has done about Saipan. "The first is non-fiction. It really happens as reported. You can't make things up, you cannot create character, you cannot fabricate quote, you have to tell things pretty straightforwardly as they happened or you cheated. Fiction is a made-up story." He added that the argument for fiction was "writing to get at truth, inventing things that never happened. And people would believe this. the human conviction discovers its underlying truth and important patterns." Kluge reminisced about his stay on the island at that time. He recounted in detail and quoted from his published works how he saw Saipan and the rest of Micronesia at that time. Even when he got back to the mainland and had a job there, he said that "my heart is some place else. At least part of me is left behind here wondering what on earth is going on." Kluge told his audience how he kept on waiting for an opportunity to come back to the islands. ".it's a constant return to a place. you don't just write one book, cross the topic off your list, say 'been there, done that,' (then) move on to the next thing. my intent in going back to Micronesia was. to see what had happened to him, what had happened to the place, a little bit about what had happened to me while I had been away." In 2004, Kluge came back for the commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Battle in Saipan. His written piece appeared in Antioch Review. "The description that I gave, the point was to explain to the vets what happened since they left, since the war, to connect the Saipan they remember to the Saipan they're visiting now. to make the connection. And I tried to describe the Saipan that I had found when I arrived here in the '60s." Kluge rationalized why Saipan is important to him. "There's a closer weave of life on islands that you confront the eternal questions on a smaller scale. that everybody sort of knows everybody. that it's a proper place to come to terms to life. that human nature reveals itself to be discovered, discussed, dramatized on an island." Kluge, who holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, is currently teaching at Kenyon College in Ohio. Kluge worked for Wall Street Journal, Life magazine, and National Geographic Traveler and wrote articles for Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian. At present, he is working on his 10th book, which also covers Saipan. -- ********************** Charles L. Sligh Department of English Wake Forest University slighcl at wfu.edu ********************** -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080127/d4a32034/attachment.html