Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Wallace Stevens. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris and work as a writer, but, after working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study law. Stevens graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the bar the following year. He practiced law in New York City until 1916.

Though Stevens was focused on his legal career, he was also part of New York’s literary community. He had several friends among the writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings. In 1914, under the pseudonym “Peter Parasol,” he sent a group of poems under the title “Phases” to Harriet Monroe as entries for a war poem competition hosted by Poetry magazine. Stevens did not win the prize, but Monroe published his work in November of that year.

Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and demonstrated a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, and infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting.

Today’s Quotation is care of Yannis Ritsos. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990), born in Monemvasia, lost his mother and an older brother to tuberculosis at an early age, then contracted the disease himself and spent years in and out of sanatoriums. His first poems, published in the 1930s, were hailed with enthusiasm by Kostis Palamas. He fought in the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation of Greece, sided with the Communists in the Greek Civil War, and subsequently spent years in prison and in detention camps. He was imprisoned again during the dictatorship of 1967-1974. One of the most prolific Greek poets, Ritsos wrote over a hundred volumes of poetry, was broadly translated, and was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1976 and the Order of the October Revolution in 1977.

From The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present.

For more information about Yannis Ritsos:

The Greek Poets: https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Poets-Homer-Present/dp/0393060837

Yannis Ritsos: Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691019086/yannis-ritsos

“Yannis Ritsos”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yannis-ritsos

“Yannis Ritsos, a Greek Poet, 81; Wrote Verse Inspired by Politics”: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/14/obituaries/yannis-ritsos-a-greek-poet-81-wrote-verse-inspired-by-politics.html

“Interview with Edmund Keeley”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkW9OuyjarI

Today’s Quotation is care of Langston Hughes. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes's birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year earlier. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln that Hughes began writing poetry. After graduating from high school, he spent a year in Mexico followed by a year at Columbia University in New York City. During this time, he worked as an assistant cook, launderer, and busboy. He also travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, (Knopf, 1926) was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926 with an introduction by Harlem Renaissance arts patron Carl Van Vechten. Criticism of the book from the time varied, with some praising the arrival of a significant new voice in poetry, while others dismissed Hughes's debut collection. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter(Knopf, 1930), won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in his book-length poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including their love of music, laughter, and language itself alongside their suffering.

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1950); Simple Stakes a Claim (Rinehart, 1957); Simple Takes a Wife (Simon & Schuster, 1953); and Simple's Uncle Sam (Hill and Wang, 1965). He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea (Knopf, 1940), and cowrote the play Mule Bone (HarperCollins, 1991) with Zora Neale Hurston.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, in New York City. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

From https://poets.org/poet/langston-hughes.

Today’s Quotation is care of Joan Fuster. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Joan Fuster (1922-1992) was a highly influential poet, critic and thinker who wrote in both Catalan and Spanish. Born in Sueca, a village near Valencia, he grew up in a middle-class Catholic family and graduated with a law degree from the Universitat de Valencia in 1947. Renowned for his irony, and his concise, incisive style of writing, Fuster is best known as an essayist and left-wing thinker who championed Catalan language and culture in Francoist Spain. Among his most celebrated books are Nosaltres, els valencians (1962), Diccionari per a ociosos (1964), and Final Judgements (1960).

From https://www.umasspress.com/9781913744359/final-judgements/.

For more information about Joan Fuster:

Final Judgements: https://www.umasspress.com/9781913744359/final-judgements/

“Final Judgements by Joan Fuster”: https://www.lunate.co.uk/reviews/final-judgments-by-joan-fuster

“A short biography - Joan Fuster”: https://espaijoanfuster.org/a-short-biography/?lang=en

“Joan Fuster Museum”: https://museujoanfuster.org/en/

“The Catalan Paradox, Part II: Conversation with Translator Mary Ann Newman”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-catalan-paradox-part-ii-conversation-with-translator-mary-ann-newman/

Today’s Quotation is care of William Kentridge. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

William Kentridge uses drawings to create films. In his works, unlike in traditional animation that employs multiple drawings to denote change and movement, Kentridge erases and alters a single, stable drawing while recording the changes with stop-motion camera work. He modifies the drawing slightly, goes to the camera, and begins what he calls “the rather dumb physical activity of stalking the drawing, or walking backwards and forwards between the camera and drawing; raising, shifting, adapting the image.” The result is a hybrid of drawing and film that has been highly praised for both its innovative manipulation of media and its ability to look at troubling social issues in a way that is neither sentimental nor aggrandized.

South Africa, where Kentridge was born and continues to work, is the focal point of his studio practice. Kentridge addresses apartheid and other social wounds without tackling the issues head-on, making them susceptible either to redemption that comes too easily or to a rendering of their history that is too spectacular. He enters into historical discussions through the lives of three fictional characters: Soho Eckstein, Mrs. Eckstein, and Felix Teitelbaum. Their individual lives are set against the wide, political landscape of South Africa as well as the deeper forces of life like renewal and destruction. The various vectors of thoughts, feelings, and inner turmoil of the characters, represented sometimes by animals or lines or other markings, spill across Kentridge’s images and frames. The personal and public become critically mixed, neither free of guilt nor completely capable of redemption.

In Stereoscope, 1999 Soho Eckstein is portrayed as interconnected with both images of the social injustices and upheaval of South Africa and his own sort of primal, fractured existence. The stereoscope, a device used to unite split images into the illusion of a coherent visual field, represents exactly what Kentridge does not allow in the film. He instead uses his method of erasure to move between disparate images and situations, not a presentation of a unified field but a shifting scene of energetic connections and splits. The result is a work that can face the humanity of the individual without expunging guilt and address larger issues in society without trite, easy solutions.

From https://www.thebroad.org/art/william-kentridge

Today’s Quotation is care of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his BA from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Sorbonne. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019), Love in the Days of Rage (Overlook, 1988), and Her (New Directions, 1966).

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, California, helping to support their magazine, City Lights. Two years later, they launched City Lights Publishers, a book-publishing venture, which helped start the careers of many alternative local and international poets. In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems, which resulted in his being arrested by the San Francisco Police for publishing “obscene work” and a subsequent trial that gained international attention. At the end, the judge concluded that “Howl” had “some redeeming social importance” and “was not obscene”; Ferlinghetti prevailed. City Lights became known as the heart of the Beat movement, which also included the writers Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac.

In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in Ferlinghetti’s honor, and in 1998, he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the recipient of many international awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award, presented for “outstanding service to the American literary community,” among others. In 2003, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007, he was named Commandeur of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He died on February 22, 2021, in San Francisco, California.

From https://poets.org/poet/lawrence-ferlinghetti.

Today’s Quotation is care of Thomas Bernhard. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Thomas Bernhard, (born Feb. 9/10, 1931, Cloister Heerland, Neth.—died Feb. 12, 1989, Gmunden, Austria), was an Austrian writer who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilization in general and Austrian culture in particular. Bernhard was born in a Holland convent; his mother, unwed at the time, had fled there from Austria to give birth. After a year, she returned to her parents in Vienna, where her father, writer Johannes Freumbichler (1881–1949), became the major influence on Bernhard. After surviving a life-threatening coma and repeated hospitalizations (1948–51) in tuberculosis sanatoriums, he studied music and drama in Salzburg and Vienna.

Bernhard achieved little success with several collections of poetry in the late 1950s, but in 1963 he gained notoriety with his first novel, Frost (Eng. trans. Frost). In such novels as Verstörung (1967; “Derangement,” Eng. trans. Gargoyles), Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime Works), and Korrektur (1975; Corrections), he combined complex narrative structure with an increasingly misanthropic philosophy. In 1973 Bernhard withdrew his drama Die Berühmten (“The Famous”) from the prestigious Salzburg Festival because of a controversy over staging. After its publication in 1984 his novel Holzfällen(Woodcutters, or Cutting Timber: An Irritation) was seized by police for allegedly criticizing a public figure. Even before its premiere in November 1988, Bernhard’s last play, Heldenplatz(“Heroes’ Square”), a bleak indictment of anti-Semitism in contemporary Austria, provoked violent protests. His other plays include Ein Fest für Boris (1968; A Party for Boris), Die Jagdgesellschaft (1974; The Hunting Party), Die Macht der Gewohnheit (1974; The Force of Habit), and  Der Schein trügt(1983; Appearances Are Deceiving). Bernhard’s memoirs were translated in Gathering Evidence(1985), a compilation of five German works published between 1975 and 1982.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Bernhard.

For more information about Thomas Bernhard:

Concrete: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12747/concrete-by-thomas-bernhard/

“The Art of Extinction: The bleak laughter of Thomas Bernhard”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/12/25/the-art-of-extinction

“Between the Rare Oases of Thought: On Thomas Bernhard and the Mind”: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rare-oases-thought-thomas-bernhard-mind/

“Thomas Bernhard is Dead at 58”: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/17/obituaries/thomas-bernhard-is-dead-at-58-his-last-play-enraged-austrians.html

Today’s Quotation is care of Bessie Smith. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Bessie Smith (ca. 1895–1937) was a blues and jazz singer from the Harlem Renaissance who is remembered as the Empress of the Blues. Elizabeth “Bessie” Smith was the youngest child of seven, born to Laura and William Smith in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her father was a Baptist minister and day laborer and her mother a laundress. In 1900, William Smith died in a work accident and his wife and son Bud passed away in 1906. The six remaining Smith children, including Bessie, were orphaned and left to be raised by an aunt. Living in poverty, Smith began singing as a street performer on Ninth Street, Chattanooga’s center of music and dance, with her guitar-playing brother Andrew. The first published reference of a performance by Smith—when she was only 14 years old—was in the May 8, 1909, issue of the Indianapolis newspaper The Freedman. According to the review of her performance at Atlanta's 81 Theater, Smith captivated her audience through her contralto voice.

Today’s Quotation is care of Seneca. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

A note from the translator of this week’s Quotomania, James Romm:

This quote gives a good sense of why Seneca is so enjoyable to read in Latin or translate. His short clauses fairly crackle with energy; metaphors pop in and out elusively as though playing hide and seek. At times the language is so seductive that one hardly cares what's being said, though the message is usually, as here, a powerful and soul-searching one.

Seneca lived in the Rome of the first century AD and served under emperor Nero as a kind of chief minister, even while composing works of Stoic philosophy. The riddle of a committed moralist who abetted an immoral regime has fascinated readers for centuries, and ultimately cannot be solved except with reference to the paradoxes and contradictions of of human nature. In the work from which this quote comes, "On the Shortness of Life," Seneca inveighs against those who waste their time on business and legal dealings, yet he certainly gave much of his own time to such occupations during his political career. Many have accused him of hypocrisy, but when he writes as passionately as he does here, with the intensity of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, one wants to believe he's sincere.

Death was a constant preoccupation for Seneca, as seen in this quote. "We are dying every day," he said at two different points in his surviving writings (of which there are a vast number). That is, our life is a journey toward death, from the moment we're born. If we truly understood that, we wouldn't waste precious hours on meaningless things -- in modern terms, scrolling through social media or channel surfing. "Life's too short" is an expression we use but we don't really grasp the problem it represents. Life's not short in itself, writes Seneca in "On the Shortness of Life," but we make it so by the way that we live. If we lived to the fullest at all times, we would lengthen our lives and even enjoy a kind of immortality. His essay, retitled in my translation as "How to Have a Life," teaches us how to achieve this.

Seneca addressed his essay to his father-in-law, Pompeius Paulinus, who was serving Rome as praefectus annonae, the official in charge of managing Rome's grain supply. Though the essay is meant to reach a wide readership, he deals at one point with Paulinus's circumstances in very specific terms. How can you think about whether mice are getting into the silos, he asks, when you could be contemplating the motions of stars, the origins of the cosmos, the fate of the soul after death? It's a wonderful passage that reminds us how we're surrounded by dross if we don't lift our minds toward the heavens. Unfortunately Seneca never deals with the problem that mice may very well destroy the grain supply if everyone has their eyes on the Milky Way.

I've translated four small volumes of selections from Seneca and have one more in the works. In spending time with his essays I feel I'm following his most urgent advice in "On the Shortness of Life:" "Those who make time for wisdom are the only ones truly alive," he writes there; "they not only attend to their own lifespan but add every age to their own." That's a powerful incentive to read more Seneca.

Today’s Quotation is care of Peter Brook. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Sir Peter Brook, (born March 21, 1925, London, Eng.—died July 2, 2022, Paris, France), British director and producer. After directing plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, he became director of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden (1947–50). He later directed several innovative Shakespearean productions that aroused controversy, including his 1962 staging of King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Co. During his long association with that company, he directed such other critically acclaimed productions as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). Brook won international fame with his avant-garde direction of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (1964). His films include Lord of the Flies (1963), King Lear (1970), and the six-hour Mahabharata(1989). In 1970 he moved to Paris, where he cofounded the International Centre for Theatre Research. Brook continued to work into the early 21st century.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Peter-Brook.

For more information about Peter Brook:

The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-quality-of-mercy-peter-brook/1114335100

“Peter Brook, Celebrated Stage Director of Scale and Humanity, Dies at 97”: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/obituaries/peter-brook-dead.html

“For Peter Brook, the Experimental Showman, ‘Nothing Is Ever Finished’”: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/theater/peter-brook-interview.html

“Peter Brook: ‘To give way to despair is the ultimate cop-out’”: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/theater/peter-brook-interview.html