Quotomania

Today’s Quotation is care of Lou Reed. Listen in!

Lou Reed, byname of Lewis Allan Reed, (born March 2, 1942, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died October 27, 2013, Southampton, New York), was a singer-songwriter whose place in the rock pantheon rests primarily on his role in guiding the Velvet Underground, a New York City-based quartet that produced four poor-selling but enormously influential studio albums under Reed’s direction from 1965 to 1970.

After quitting the Velvets, he reemerged as a solo performer in England, where he was adopted by admirers such as glam rock pioneer David Bowie, who produced and performed on Reed’s breakthrough hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” (1973), and Mott the Hoople, who covered Reed’s Velvets classic “Sweet Jane.” His albums embraced everything from rote pop to heavy metal and included an orchestrated song cycle about a sadomasochistic love affair, Berlin (1973), and a double album of guitar drones, Metal Machine Music (1975), that are among his most notorious works. At the onset of the 1980s, Reed recruited his finest post-Velvets band, including guitarist Robert Quine and bassist Fernando Saunders, and reimmersed himself in raw guitar rock on The Blue Mask (1982), addressing his fears, ghosts, and joys with riveting frankness. No longer bedeviled by his addictions, Reed adopted a more-serious if less-daring tone on his recordings, peaking with three releases that were less concept albums than song cycles: New York (1989), about the spiritual death of his hometown; Songs for Drella (1990), an elegy for his 1960s mentor, Pop art conceptualist Andy Warhol, done in collaboration with former Velvets bandmate John Cale; and Magic and Loss (1991), inspired by the deaths of two friends. A romantic relationship with American performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson rejuvenated him again in the mid-1990s, resulting in the playful Set the Twilight Reeling (1997) and the harder-hitting Ecstasy (2000).

In 2000–01 Reed collaborated with director Robert Wilson to bring to the stage POEtry, which was based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The songs from the show were also packaged, with spoken-word interludes, on The Raven (2003)—an ambitious if critically panned experiment. It was followed by Animal Serenade(2004), an excellent live recording that echoed Reed’s landmark 1974 concert album Rock ’n’ Roll Animal. In 2006 Reed celebrated New York City in a book, Lou Reed’s New York, which collected his photography. Reed was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Velvet Underground in 1996 and as a solo performer in 2015.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lou-Reed.

Today’s Quotation is care of Ingeborg Bachmann. Listen in!

Ingeborg Bachmann, (born June 25, 1926, Klagenfurt, Austria—died Oct. 17, 1973, Rome, Italy), was an Austrian author whose somber, surreal writings often deal with women in failed love relationships, the nature of art and humanity, and the inadequacy of language. Bachmann grew up in Kärnten during World War II and was educated at the Universities of Graz, Innsbruck, and Vienna. She received a doctoral degree in philosophy from Vienna in 1950. Bachmann’s literary career began in earnest in 1952, when she read her poetry to members of the avant-garde Gruppe 47. She produced two volumes of verse, Die gestundete Zeit (1953; “Borrowed Time”), about the sense of urgency produced by the passage of time, and Anrufung des grossen Bären (1956; “Invocation of the Great Bear”), featuring poems of fantasy and mythology. Of her several radio plays, the best known is Der gute Gott von Manhattan (1958; “The Good God of Manhattan” in Three Radio Plays). First broadcast on May 29, 1958, it is about a couple attacked by a covert group that seeks to destroy all traces of love.

Following Bachmann’s five landmark lectures on literature at the University of Frankfurt in 1959–60, she shifted her focus from poetry to fiction. During this period she also wrote the libretti for Hans Werner Henze’s operas Der Prinz von Homberg (1960; from a play by Heinrich von Kleist) and Der junge Lord(1965; from a fable by Wilhelm Hauff). Among her prose writings are Das dreissigtse Jahr(1961; The Thirtieth Year) and the lyrical novel Malina (1971; Eng. trans. Malina). She also published essays, stories, and more radio plays. Her death by fire may have been a suicide.

Much attention was given to Bachmann’s work both in her lifetime and after her death, and several of her writings were translated into English. A volume of selected poems, In the Storm of Roses, was published in 1986; it was the inspiration for Elizabeth Vercoe’s composition In the Storm: Four Songs on Texts by Ingeborg Bachmann for medium voice, clarinet, and piano. Some of Bachmann’s stories were translated in Three Paths to the Lake (1989), and a bilingual edition of her collected poems, translated and introduced by Peter Filkins, was published as Songs in Flight(1995). Fragments of two novels intended to complete the trilogy begun with Malina were translated and published together in a single volume entitled The Book of Franza & Requiem for Fanny Goldmann (1999).

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ingeborg-Bachmann.

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

Persian lyric poet Hafez, or Hafiz, (born Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī) grew up in Shiraz. Very little is known about his life, but it is thought that he may have memorized the Qur’an after hearing his father recite passages. When his father died, he left school to work at a bakery and as a copyist. Hafiz became a poet at the court of Abu Ishak and also taught at a religious college. He is one of the most celebrated of the Persian poets, and his influence can be felt to this day. As the author of numerous ghazals expressing love, spirituality, and protest, he and his work continue to be important to Iranians, and many of his poems are used as proverbs or sayings.

Hafiz’s tomb is in Musalla Gardens in Shiraz.

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/hafez.

Today’s Quotation is care of Eugenio Montale. Listen in!

Eugenio Montale was born into a family of businessmen in Genoa, Italy, on October 12, 1896. During World War I, he served as an infantry officer on the Austrian front. Orginially Montale had trained to be an opera singer, but when his voice teacher died in 1923, he gave up singing and concentrated his efforts on writing.

After his first book, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), appeared in 1925, Montale was received by critics as a profoundly original and experimental poet. His style mixed archaic words with scientific terms and idioms from the vernacular. He was dismissed from his directorship of the Gabinetto Vieusseux research library in 1938 for refusing to join the Fascist party. He withdrew from public life and began translating English writers such as Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Eugene O'Neill. In 1939, Le occasioni (The Occasions) appeared, his most innovative book, followed by La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956). It was this trio of books established him as a founder of the hermetic school of Italian poetry.

In 1948 he moved from Florence to Milan, where he became chief literary critic for Italy's primary newspaper, Corriere della Sera. In addition to writing poems, Montale was also a prolific essayist, writer of stories and travel sketches, distinguished music critic, translator, and amateur painter. He corresponded with Ezra Pound (despite Pound's Fascist sympathies), Italo Svevo, and Salvatore Quasimodo. In 1961, Montale was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Rome and shortly afterwards, at the universities of Milan, Cambridge, and Basel. In recognition of his work, as well as his courageous opposition to fascism, he was made a lifetime member of the Italian Senate in 1967.

After a long break from writing poetry, Montale published four collections during the last ten years of his life: Satura (Miscellany, 1971), Diario del '71 e del '72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972, 1973), Quaderno di quattro anni (Notebook of Four Years, 1977), and Altri versi e poesi disperse (Other and Uncollected Poems, 1981). In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions." Montale died in Milan in 1981 at the age of 85.

From https://poets.org/poet/eugenio-montale.

Today’s Quotation is care of Kenneth Koch. Listen in!

Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 27, 1925. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree, and attended Columbia University for his PhD. As a young poet, Koch was known for his association with the New York School of poetry. Originating at Harvard, where Koch met fellow students Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, the New York School derived much of its inspiration from the works of action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers, whom the poets met in the 1950s after settling in New York City. The poetry of the New York School represented a shift away from the Confessional poets, a popular form of soul-baring poetry that the New York School found distasteful. Instead, their poems were cosmopolitan in spirit and displayed not only the influence of action painting, but of French Surrealism and European avant-gardism in general. In 1970 Ron Padgett and David Shapiro edited and published the first major collection of New York School poetry, An Anthology of New York Poets, which included seven poems by Koch.

Koch's association with the New York School worked, in effect, as an apprenticeship. Many critics found Koch's early work obscure, such as Poems (1953), and the epic Ko, or A Season on Earth (1959), yet remarked upon his subsequent writing for its clarity, lyricism, and humor, such as in The Art of Love (1975), which was praised as a graceful, humorous book. His other collections of poetry include New Addresses (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; Straits (1998); One Train and On the Great Atlantic Rainway, Selected Poems 1950-1988 (both published in 1994), which together earned him the Bollingen Prize in 1995; Seasons of the Earth (1987); On the Edge (1986); Days and Nights (1982); The Burning Mystery of Anna in 1951 (1979); The Duplications (1977); The Pleasures of Peace(1969); When the Sun Tries to Go On (1969); Thank You (1962); and Seasons on Earth(1960).

Koch's short plays, many of them produced off- and off-off-Broadway, are collected in The Gold Standard: A Book of Plays. He has also published Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribners, 1998); The Red Robins (1975), a novel; Hotel Lambosa and Other Stories (1993); and several books on teaching children to write poetry, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch wrote the libretto for composer Marcello Panni's The Banquet, which premiered in Bremen in June 1998, and his collaborations with painters have been the subject of exhibitions at the Ipswich Museum in England and the De Nagy Gallery in New York. His numerous honors include the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress in 1996, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, where he was professor of English at Columbia University. Koch died on July 6, 2002, from leukemia.

From https://poets.org/poet/kenneth-koch.

Today’s Quotation is care of Jan Morris. Listen in!

Journalist, historian, and travel writer, Jan Morris was the renowned author of more than forty books. Her work ranges from such classics as Pax Britannica, The World of Venice, Hong Kong, and The Matter of Wales to the masterly essays published in Journeys, Destinations, and Among the Cities. She has also written a novel, Last Letters from Hav. An Honorary Litt.D. of the University of Wales and Glamorgan, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), she lived in Wales. Jan Morris died in 2020.

From https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Jan-Morris/1287676.

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

Virgil, or Vergil orig. Publius Vergilius Maro, (born Oct. 15, 70 BCE, Andes, near Mantua—died Sept. 21, 19 BCE, Brundisium), was the Greatest of Roman poets. The well-educated son of a prosperous provincial farmer, Virgil led a quiet life, though he eventually became a member of the circle around Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) and was patronized by Maecenas. His first major work, the 10 pastoral Eclogues (42–37), may be read as a prophecy of tranquility, and one has even been read as a prophecy of Christianity. The Georgics (37–30) point toward a Golden Age in the form of practical goals: the repopulation of rural lands and the rehabilitation of agriculture. His great epic, the Aeneid (begun c. 29, but unfinished at his death), is one of the masterpieces of world literature. A celebration of the founding of Rome by the legendary Aeneas at the request of Augustus, whose consolidation of power in 31–30 unified the Roman world, it also explores the themes of war and the pathos of unrequited love. In later centuries his works were regarded in the Roman Empire as virtually sacred. He was taken up reverently by Christians as well, including Dante, who, in his poem The Divine Comedy, made Virgil his guide through hell and purgatory.

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

Today’s Quotation is care of Baltasar Gracián. Listen in!

Baltasar Gracián, in full Baltasar Gracián y Morales, (born January 8, 1601, Belmonte de Calatayud, Spain—died December 6, 1658, Tarazona), was a philosopher and writer known as the leading Spanish exponent of conceptism (conceptismo), a style of dealing with ideas that involves the use of terse and subtle displays of exaggerated wit.

After studying at Calatayud and Zaragoza, Gracián entered the Jesuit order at the age of 18 and later became rector of the Jesuit college at Tarragona. His early works—El héroe (1637; The Hero), El discreto (1646; The Compleat Gentleman), and El oráculo manual y arte de prudencia (1647; The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle)—were largely efforts to educate people in the ethics of worldly life. His literary ideas on conceptism and the art of conceited writing (writing that continually shocks the reader by the use of startling metaphor) were clearly set forth in Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642, 2nd ed. 1648; “Subtlety and the Art of Genius”). In defiance of his superiors, he published pseudonymously El criticón (1651, 1653, 1657; The Critick), a three-part philosophical novel considered by the 19th-century German pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer one of the most important books ever written. In it he examined society from the standpoint of a savage and gave the clearest statement of his pessimistic philosophy with its emphasis on willpower and struggle.

From https://www.britannica.com/biography/Baltasar-Gracian.

Today’s Quotation is care of William James. Listen in!

William James, philosopher and psychologist, was instrumental in establishing Harvard's psychology department, which at its inception was tied to the department of philosophy. James himself remained unconvinced that psychology was in fact a distinct discipline, writing in his 1892 survey of the field, Psychology: Briefer Course,  "This is no science; it is only the hope of a science" (p. 335). Despite James’s skepticism, in the ensuing century this hope was fully realized in the department he helped to found.

Initially trained in painting, James abandoned the arts and enrolled in Harvard in 1861 to study chemistry and anatomy. During an extended stay in Germany after graduating, James developed an interest in studying the mind, as well as the body. In 1872 James was recruited by Harvard’s new, reformer president, Charles Eliot, to teach vertebrate physiology.  In 1875 James taught one of the university’s first courses in psychology, “The Relations between Physiology and Psychology,” for which he established the first experimental psychology demonstration laboratory.  James oversaw Harvard’s first doctorate in psychology, earned by G. Stanley Hall in 1878.  Hall noted that James’s course was, “up to the present time the only course in the country where students can be made familiar with the methods and results of recent German researches in physiological psychology” (Hall, 1879).

James’s laboratory research on sensation and perception was conducted in the first half of his career. His belief in the connection between mind and body led him to develop what has become known as the James-Lange Theory of emotion, which posits that human experience of emotion arises from physiological changes in response to external events.  Inspired by evolutionary theory, James’s theoretical perspective on psychology came to be known as functionalism, which sought causal relationships between internal states and external behaviors.

In 1890 James published a highly influential, two-volume synthesis and summary of psychology, Principles of Psychology. The books were widely read in North America and Europe, gaining attention and praise from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in Vienna.  James then moved away from experimental psychology to produce more philosophical works (he is credited as one of the founders of the school of American Pragmatism), although he continued to teach psychology until he retired from Harvard in 1907.

From https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/william-james.

Today’s Quotation is care of Marina Tsvetaeva. Listen in!

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (also Marina Cvetaeva and Marina Tsvetayeva) was born in Moscow. During her lifetime she wrote poems, verse plays, and prose pieces; she is considered one of the most renowned poets of 20th-century Russia. Tsvetaeva’s life coincided with turbulent years in Russian history. She married Sergei Efron in 1912; they had two daughters and later one son. Efron joined the White Army, and Tsvetaeva was separated from him during the Civil War. She had a brief love affair with Osip Mandelstam, and a longer relationship with Sofia Parnok. During the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva was forced to place her daughters in a state orphanage, where the younger, Irina, died of hunger in 1919. In 1922 she emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, settling in Paris in 1925. In Paris, the family lived in poverty. Sergei Efron worked for the Soviet secret police, and Tsvetaeva was shunned by the Russian expatriate community of Paris. Through the years of privation and exile, poetry and contact with poets sustained Tsvetaeva. She corresponded with Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, and she dedicated work to Anna Akhmatova.

In 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union. Efron was executed, and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Critics and translators of Tsvetaeva’s work often comment on the passion in her poems, their swift shifts and unusual syntax, and the influence of folk songs. She is also known for her portrayal of a woman’s experiences during the “terrible years” (as the period in Russian history was described by Aleksandr Blok). Collections of Tsvetaeva’s poetry translated into English include Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein (1971, 1994). She is the subject of several biographies as well as the collected memoirs No Love Without Poetry (2009), by her daughter Ariadna Efron (1912–1975).

From https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/marina-tsvetaeva.