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Daniel Silliman
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| 26.6.02 |
“People don’t have enough creativity.”
My sister writes of my defense of flower eating and other things strange.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Sounding Normal
Sometimes there is a real disadvantage to growing up on the West Coast. That blasted broadcast-standard way of talking. Pretty much every accent has some charm and no one is as truly devoid of accents as we are.
And sometimes, the accent makes all the difference.
by Daniel Silliman @
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| 25.6.02 |
Dylan Thomas
This afternoon I read “Dylan,” a play by Sidney Michaels that was preformed (with Alec Guinness in the title role) at the Plymouth Theatre, New York City on January 18, 1964.
I am an admirer Dylan Thomas, have read his poems, read about him and written about him. He was a poet’s poet. He lived the legend of the poet. And his poetry was good. Some people seem to forget that or perhaps never to grasp that.
Some of the lines in this play I found fascinating and insightful. Here’s a sampling.
The poet, scared of growing older in a way reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, says:
“All I can think about now is money. Like every other poet since time began. I tell you, I must be growing up or something. And I don’t like it. I’m sacred. I’m scared to the bone. I used to look like some f’ing angel or something. In my cherubim-twenties, when your great Augustus John pled with me to pose of him, and the day you were so wild to have met me, the very year Dame Edith Sitwell up’d and said I was the only lyric poet of the twentieth century and, my God, I really didn’t think I was that good, but I suppose she knew what she was talking about. Well, it all came easier. Came easier and went easier. The beer went down easier, it was easier breathing. I’ve got uglier now. I’ve put on weight like a man who’s middle-aged. My heir’s darker. I’m dirtier and smaller. The callus on my finger from the pencil’s big as an egg. Stained. Cigarettes. From hack work—for money—for travelogues—for writing “as we sail of into the sunset and leave the beautiful Isle of Birdspit.” (Pause) I haven’t written a new poem in a terribly long time. Take the last BBC broadcast I did; d’you know, Cat, I was suddenly aware there I was reading the best of me and it was all fifteen-year-old stuff.” [pp. 10-11]
Later the playwright gives a cute little nod to the complexity of Thomas and also hits the attitude of the poet:
“REPORTER Speaking of clairity. Some of us, Dylan, have had trouble understanding your poems.
DYLAN Then you should read Robert Frost.” [pp. 17]
Just because we’re talking about him, here’s one of his best poems:
IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART
In my craft or sullen art
Excercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their greifs in their arms,
I labor by the singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the Raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Not for the Towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the greifs of ages
Who pay no praise of wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Washed-up Hack of an Artist
A washed-up reporter in the newsroom, an old reporter who never rose to a paper of any size and still here with the J-school grads and the J-school students, being criticized and teased because of a poor bit of grammar says, says with laughter and self-deprecation and without a trace of bitterness:
“I am an artist among hacks.”
by Daniel Silliman @
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As seen on the wall...
First Graffito: “Don’t let the media tell you who you are!”
Second Graffito: “Don’t let graffiti tell you what to do.”
by Daniel Silliman @
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Booklovers’ Pilgrimage
Jeffery Nelson and I just made our yearly pilgrimage to Powell’s, in Portland, Ore. We drove for four hours to go to this bookstore on a rainy Monday. After the bookstore we walked around a little bit and drove four hours home.
Powell’s is a bookstore, not that this really tells you what it is. It is the bookstore.
Powell’s is one square block, four stories high and full of books. Used books mixed with new books. Paperback mixed with hardback. If books were a religion this would be Mecca. Everyone upon entering this temple would genuflect and make the sign of the book.
It is the bookstore to end all bookstores. When you walk into Powell’s and get splendidly lost, facing the wave upon wave of books shelves, you know the search for the greatest bookstore in all the land has ended. I have found it and its name is Powell's.
As far as I know it is the biggest bookstore in the world. I should know. I am a great bibliophile and bookstore connoisseur and I have gone on a quest for the worlds-greatest bookstore. Powell's is larger than anything on the West Coast and it is larger than New York City’s largest bookstore, Strands.
There are a few American cities left to check. Perhaps Chicago or maybe Atlanta might be able to compete. But probably not. Powell’s is so huge they have to color code the rooms to keep things sorted out. I’ve lived in towns smaller than that bookstore. If there is a larger one, which I doubt, it would have to in Rome or somewhere like that.
The experience of that place. The opportunity unbounded. The splendor of the books and the glory of the pages.
Oh the books.
by Daniel Silliman @
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Splendily Esoteric Post about Words
Here’s the sort of esoteric post that I find really interesting. Of course, it’s not just esoteric but it’s also about words and I’ll fall for any interesting writing about writing/language/words.
by Daniel Silliman @
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