Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Sophocles. Listen in!

Sophocles (born c. 496, Colonus, near Athens—died 406 BC, Athens) was a Greek playwright. With Aeschylus and Euripides, he was one of the three great tragic playwrights of Classical Athens. A distinguished public figure in Athens, he served successively in important posts as a treasurer, commander, and adviser. He competed in dramatic festivals, where he defeated Aeschylus to win his first victory in 468 BC. He went on to achieve unparalleled success, writing 123 dramas for dramatic competitions and achieving more than 20 victories. Only seven tragedies survive in their entirety: Antigone, Ajax, Electra, The Trachinian Women, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, and Oedipus the King, his best-known work. He increased the size of the chorus and was the first to introduce a third actor onstage. For their supple language, vivid characterization, and formal perfection, his works are regarded as the epitome of Greek drama.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/Sophocles.

Today’s Quotation is care of Carlo Ginzburg. Listen in!

Carlo Ginzburg (1939) has taught at the University of Bologna, at UCLA, at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His  books, translated into more  than twenty languages, include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; The Judge and the Historian; Wooden Eyes; No Island is an Island; Threads and Traces; Fear Reverence Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography.  He received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007), the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010) and sixteen honorary degrees from different universities.

From https://history.ceu.edu/people/carlo-ginzburg.

Today’s Quotation is care of C. P. Cavafy. Listen in!

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/c-p-cavafy and https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/.

Today’s Quotation is care of Lucille Clifton. Listen in!

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) was an American poet known for her work focusing on the African American experience and family life. Winner of the National Book Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Clifton is the only author to have two books of poetry nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in the same year. She is best known for her collections Two-Headed Woman, Next, Good Woman, and Quilting. In addition to her several poetry collections, Clifton also wrote numerous books for children, including her Everett Anderson series.

From https://www.nyrb.com/collections/lucille-clifton.

Today’s Quotation is care of Primo Levi. Listen in!

Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy—died April 11, 1987, Turin), was an Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

Levi was brought up in the small Jewish community in Turin, studied at the University of Turin, and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry in 1941. Two years later he joined friends in northern Italy in an attempt to connect with a resistance movement, but he was captured and sent to Auschwitz. While there, Levi worked as a slave labourer for an I.G. Farbenindustrie synthetic-rubber factory. Upon the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in 1945, Levi returned to Turin, where in 1961 he became the general manager of a factory producing paints, enamels, and synthetic resins; the association was to last some 30 years.

Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This Is a Man, or Survival in Auschwitz), demonstrated extraordinary qualities of humanity and detachment in its analysis of the atrocities he had witnessed. His later autobiographical works, La tregua (1963; The Truce, or The Reawakening) and I sommersi e i salvati (1986; TheDrowned and the Saved), are further reflections on his wartime experiences. Il sistema periodico (1975; The Periodic Table) is a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element, on the analogies between the physical, chemical, and moral spheres; of all of Levi’s works, it is probably his greatest critical and popular success. He also wrote poetry, novels, and short stories. A court in Turin ruled his death in 1987 a suicide, a verdict broadly accepted but debated by some. The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015) contains English translations of his entire oeuvre, including pieces never previously available to Anglophone readers.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Primo-Levi.

Today’s Quotation is care of Janet Malcolm. Listen in!

Janet Malcolm (1934–2021) was the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude, which won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

From https://us.macmillan.com/author/janetmalcolm.

Today’s Quotation is care of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Listen in!

F. Scott Fitzgerald, (born Sept. 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1940, Hollywood, Calif.) was a U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Fitzgerald attended Princeton University but dropped out with bad grades. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre (1900–48), daughter of a respected Alabama judge. His works, including the early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and the story collections Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and All the Sad Young Men (1926), capture the Jazz Age’s vulgarity and dazzling promise. His brilliant The Great Gatsby (1925; film, 1926, 1949, 1974; TV movie 2001), a story of American wealth and corruption, was eventually acclaimed one of the century’s greatest novels. In 1924 Scott and Zelda became part of the expatriate community on the French Riviera, the setting of Tender Is the Night (1934; film, 1962). His fame and prosperity proved disorienting to them both, and he became seriously alcoholic. Zelda never fully recovered from a mental breakdown in 1932 and spent most of her remaining years in a sanitarium. In 1937 Scott moved to Hollywood to write film scripts; the experience inspired the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941; film, 1976). He died of a heart attack at age 44.

From https://www.britannica.com/summary/F-Scott-Fitzgerald.

Today’s Quotation is care of Hart Crane. Listen in!

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899 in Garrettsville, Ohio and began writing verse in his early teenage years. Though he never attended college, Crane read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and the nineteenth-century French poets Charles Vildrac, Jules Laforgue, and Arthur Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, the novelist and short story writer Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature.

Hart Crane died by suicide on April 27, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, while sailing back to New York from Mexico.

From https://poets.org/poet/hart-crane.

Today’s Quotation is care of Bruno Schulz. Listen in!

Bruno Schulz was born 12.07.1892 in Drohobych (present Ukraine) and died there 19.11.1942 in tragic circumstances. He spent nearly his entire life there and was generally unwilling to travel. His voyages outside of his native city were sporadic and brief. He viewed Drohobych to be the center of the world and was a acute observer of life there, proving himself an excellent "chronicler." His writings and his art are both saturated with the realities of Drohobych. His stories are replete with descriptions of the town's main streets and landmarks, as well as with portraits of its inhabitants.

Schulz's output as a writer was relatively modest in terms of quantity, but exceptionally rich in quality and subject matter. It consists of two volumes of short stories - The Street of Crocodiles and The Hourglass Sanatorium - and a handful of texts the writer did not include in the first editions of these two collections. Apart from the stories, there is an unusually interesting set of letters, published in the so-called Księga listów / Book of Letters, as well as "critical essays" (primarily press reviews of literary works) that were only recently collected and published in a separate volume.

From https://culture.pl/en/artist/bruno-schulz.

Today’s Quotation is care of Simone Weil. Listen in!

Simone Weil, (born February 3, 1909, Paris, France—died August 24, 1943, Ashford, Kent, England), was a French mystic, social philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance during World War II, whose posthumously published works had particular influence on French and English social thought.

To learn the psychological effects of heavy industrial labour, she took a job in 1934–35 in an auto factory, where she observed the spiritually deadening effect of machines on her fellow workers. In 1936 she joined an anarchist unit near Zaragoza, Spain, training for action in the Spanish Civil War, but after an accident in which she was badly scalded by boiling oil, she went to Portugal to recuperate. Soon thereafter Weil had the first of several mystical experiences, and she subsequently came to view her social concerns as “ersatz Divinity.” After the German occupation of Paris during World War II, Weil moved to the south of France, where she worked as a farm servant. She escaped with her parents to the United States in 1942 but then went to London to work with the French Resistance. To identify herself with her French compatriots under German occupation, Weil refused to eat more than the official ration in occupied France. Malnutrition and overwork led to a physical collapse, and during her hospitalization she was found to have tuberculosis. She died after a few months spent in a sanatorium.

Weil’s writings, which were collected and published after her death, fill about 20 volumes. Her most important works are La Pesanteur et la grâce (1947; Gravity and Grace), a collection of religious essays and aphorisms; L’Enracinement (1949; The Need for Roots), an essay upon the obligations of the individual and the state; Attente de Dieu (1950; Waiting for God), a spiritual autobiography; Oppression et Liberté (1955; Oppression and Liberty), a collection of political and philosophical essays on war, factory work, language, and other topics; and three volumes of Cahiers (1951–56; Notebooks). Though born of Jewish parents, Weil eventually adopted a mystical theology that came very close to Roman Catholicism. A moral idealist committed to a vision of social justice, Weil in her writings explored her own religious life while also analyzing the individual’s relation with the state and God, the spiritual shortcomings of modern industrial society, and the horrors of totalitarianism.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simone-Weil.