people to ponder | Richibi's Weblog

__________

for Barbara, who died recently,
she would’ve loved this

Shostakovich was just nineteen when
his Symphony No.1, opus 10 was
first performed – it had been his
graduation piece the previous year
from the Petrograd Conservatory –
by, then, which is to say 1926, the
Leningrad Philharmonic, renamed the
Saint Petersburg after the fall of the
U.S.S.R., the name it had held before
the Bolshevik Revolution, the oldest
philharmonic orchestra, therefore,
incidentally, in our Russia, going
back to 1882

the work was a complete success, not
surprisingly, if you’ll consider its scope,
its power, and its novel musical
interpolations, I mean a piano as an
integral orchestral instrument rather
than as a distinct, however interrelated,
component, a pas de 40 instead of a
pas de deux, something I can’t remember
anywhere else having seen for piano

not to mention the drum roll between
the last two movements, drums making
a splash in an orchestral setting, who’d
‘a’ thunk it, though Richard Strauss had
done just that in his extraordinary
“Burleske” several decades earlier,
another youthful work, Strauss only 21

but meanwhile back in Russia, before
I too seriously digress, Shostakovich
was immediately compared to another
earlier young prodigy there, Alexander
Glazunov, who’d himself put out his
own First Symphony, the “Slavonic“,
at age 16, introducing, incidentally, his
own instrumental novelty then, an oboe
obbligato, which by very definition is
lovely

Glazunov also mentored, by the way,
Shostakovich at the Petrograd, proved
to be instrumental indeed in his
progress

it’s interesting to put these last two
together, to compare, the Glazunov, 1881,
follows the traditional Romantic
imperatives, tempo, tonality and
repetition, but with more bombast, to my
mind, than its European counterparts,
its fields are the Russian steppes with
troikas, horse-drawn carriages, flying
across vast unhampered vistas of the
Russian snow-covered, therefore
pristine, tundra, to whet the unbridled
Russian spirit, the Europeans, Brahms,
Mendelssohn, Mahler, conversely,
are confined to the hunt, however ever
glorious, but with shrubs, copses,
thickets, if not veritable forests, to blur
the sonic arena, inspire dreams,
consequently, less far-reaching than
those of Johnny Appleseed even, of
the North American Prairies poets,
their own far-flung, boundless
imaginations, inspiration, you can
hear it all, blatantly, in the resonance
of the horns

you’ll note the movements follow
essentially the same rhythmic order
in either symphony, the first two fast
enough, then a third that’s somewhat
slower, a variation from the strictly
Classical order of fast, slow, fast, then
a last, eclectic, movement

but Shostakovich is more atonal,
melodically divergent, an eccentricity
he’ll later polish to a degree of
politically subversive brilliance

for not submitting, however, to the rule
of repetition, which is manifest, though,
in Glazunov, Shostakovich, I find, leaves
us trying to find our bearings as his music
rolls along, kind of like in biographical
movies, when you start looking at your
watch to determine how many life
incidents remain in this particular,
however significant, existential drama

as spectacle – and it must be noted that
symphonic displays were at the time
indeed spectacles – there was no
phonographic, photographic
equipment to transmit such
experiences, the symphony itself was
the show, it had, right there, itself, to
wow the audience

in all of these cases, all of them did

Shostakovich, however, of all of them
remained eventually potently
pertinent, powerfully paramount,
watch

R ! chard

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October 30, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10

“Portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich“ (1963)

Martiros Sarian

______

after being transfixed, rendered aquiver, by
this mesmerizing conductor in a performance
I can only remember for his magnetism,
expressive fingers performing arabesques of
such exquisite sensitivity, eyes that melt,
light up, gleam, glitter, at every ebb and flow
of the turbulent, towering, music, eyebrows
that, blonde, cherubic, angelic, display with
manifest intention, the spiritual implications
of every musical turn, a youth only, in my
senescent estimation, taking on the conquest
of the 21st-Century world, lately installed as
conductor, most illustriously, of both the
Royal Liverpool, in 2005, and the Oslo, in
2011, Philharmonics

Vasily Petrenko led me back to Shostakovich,
after his monumental Tchaikovsky 5th,
whereupon I’ve undertaken a chronological
review of all Shostakovich’s symphonies,
something I did long ago with Beethoven’s
sonatas, to my great cultural advantage, it
was a journey that informed me not only
intellectually but, even more significantly,
spiritually, taught me about patience, tumult,
and the wisdom, even glory, one acquires in
resignation, so long as you hold onto your
principles, your core

you look back, I told a man once, and you
see what you’ve come through, and you
are proud, you recognize the hero that
you are, or weren’t

we have only our poise and grace to lend
to the world, or our venom and invective

but I digress

here’s Shostakovich, his First, in a line
of Shostakovichian explorations

if you’ll join me

R ! chard

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September 23, 2017

on “Aristotle” – Billy Collins

“Homer Reciting his Poems“ (1790)

Thomas Lawrence

_________

thanks Collin

hot on the heels of my paean to
Billy Collins, his my favourite
poem of the year, a friend sent
me “Aristotle“, saying, hey, you
might like this, like this, Aristotle
has been my rebuke to Plato for
a while now, latent even in my
least metaphysical speculations

in his poem, Collins goes back
to the earliest definitions of the
structure of literary works as
anticipated, or defined even, by
arbiters who were trying to
understand their place and
function, the poems’, in the
culture, Aristotle’s “Poetics“ is
the very source, 350 BCE, the
diagram, for our understanding,
even in the present age, of what
we mean, in the West, by art,
we’ve been answering him ever
since, it’s genetic

Billy Collins‘ description is not
chronological, it’s poetic,
appropriate to its topic

its structure nevertheless
follows specifically Aristotelian
logic, shedding glory,
coincidentally, on both prophets

for a special treat, listen to the
poet’s audio recording at the
poem’s site – which delivers
even more compelling
information – by clicking the
red arrow pointing right
beside “Aristotle“, the title

R ! chard

___________

Aristotle

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Billy Collins

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September 11, 2017

Nobuyuki Tsujii / Chopin

“The Old Blind Guitarist“ (1903)

Pablo Picasso

________

to watch Nobuyuki Tsujii play the
piano, a piano he cannot see, nor
anything else around him, not
even his fingers, is a wonder,
one beholds the work of the
imagination taking place inside
a tenebrous, one would’ve
supposed, cerebellum, a place
without height, depth, width,
without the idea, even, of, verily,
spatial dimensions

not only has he had to imagine
Chopin’s extraordinary, admit it,
First Piano Concerto there, he’s
had to imagine himself playing
it, playing it before even
international audiences – here,
the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition,
in which he tied for first place –
despite surely profound physical,
moral, emotional impediments,
mountains most, I’m sure,
couldn’t climb

it is to see the face of an angel,
I think, to watch him, only angels,
I believe, can do this sort of thing

watch, be inspired

and the Chopin is terrific

R ! chard

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September 6, 2017

on “Elegy for the Victims of the Tsunami of March 11, 2011 in Japan” – Nobuyuki Tsujii

“Tsunami“ (1998)

Jacek Yerka

__________

while watching Nobuyuki Tsujii play the
extraordinarily demanding Tchaikovsky
First Piano Concerto on television the
other night, with no less than Valery
Gergiev, conducting the resident
orchestra at the Mariinsky Theatre in
Moscow, for its White Nights, I was
wonderstruck by the challenges a
visually handicapable pianist would
have to conquer in order to reach
such an apogee

everything must be learned by ear, all
items must be discovered tactually,
from the piano itself to the very
individual keys, not to mention
the player’s very own fingers

there can be no visual contact with a
conductor, either, for cues, for
instance, nor for any other
accompaniment, for neither even an
audience, it would all take place in
the dark recesses of the head, the
amorphous and, I suppose,
confounding, cerebellum

later he played for an encore his own
composition, “Elegy for the Victims of
the Tsunami of March 11, 2011 in Japan“,
a fine addition to my budding collection
of threnodies

and a very, very moving piece

an elegy, incidentally, is usually written,
while a threnody is composed, but these
terms are often used interchangeably, as,
indeed, they are here

you’ll note the utterly Classical mode of
composition of the “Elegy“, it adheres to
a uniform tonality, a consistent tempo,
and the grounding and comfort of
repetition, returning always to the main,
endearing air, rather than more modern
tripwires and stridencies, traditionalism
being not an inappropriate, nor ineffective,
mode of address for honoured forebears

long live Classicism

R ! chard

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June 23, 2017

“My Romance” – Carly Simon

“Hot Jazz“ (1940)

Franz Kline

_____

in this video of one of her concerts,
Carly Simon tells the story of how
when she told her special guest on
the program, Harry Connick Jr., that
he was born the same year as
Sgt. Pepper, he answered, Sgt. Who

“Harry, you were born the same year that
Sgt. Pepper came out”, she said
“Sgt. Who”, he answered

the same had happened to me when
I’d told someone, a sprite, ten years
younger, don’t ask, about my
admiration for Susan Hayward,
Richard, he asked, who’s Susan
Hayward, to my utter consternation

I mean, Susan Hayward

you might not know who Carly Simon
is, nor even Sgt. Pepper, but the story
is that those who once had been our
very idols fade and become question
marks in the eyes of the following
generations

you might not either know who Harry
Connick Jr. is, but listen to both of
them here, Carly and Harry, put
together an entertainment enough
to turn an otherwise lazy hour into
an unmitigated enchantment

Richard

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February 5, 2017

what, me worry

“Philosophy (Final State)“ (1899-1907)

Gustav Klimt

______

at lunch recently, a friend was telling
me about taking her family, kids,
grandkids, to Hawaii

I hope we have a good time, she said

what do you mean, I hope, I asked

I’ve been worrying a lot lately, I wake
up in the middle of the night, I worry
about sharks, for instance, off the
coast of Maui

I know what you mean, I answered, I
worry about an earthquake hitting
while I’m asleep, the whole city does
in fact, I confirmed, those here who
worry

when I was going to Munich in December
and January with my mother, I continued,
and people were saying it’d be cold, I
determined that we’d have a wonderful
time despite whatever obstacles we might
encounter, I meant it as a gift to my mother,
after all it was for the magic of the C***mas
and New Year’s Eve festivities there we
were going, kind of like your Hawaiian
beaches, I pointed out

there was the uncomfortable flight over,
the usual stomach upsets, cold and
snow, which I hadn’t experienced in
several years, an unruly Internet
connection, but they were the price of
admission to the wonderland I’d
determined to fashion out of the
elements that we’d find there, and did

there were neither sharks nor earthquakes
eventually, nor even the terrorist attacks
that had threatened, but that no amount of
worrying anyway could’ve done anything
about

and I just read something out of the New
Yorker, I continued, that put me back on
track, put everything back together again
before any great existential fall

it’s all in your head, it said, or rather it
quoted Epictetus, Epictetus, the Stoic
philosopher I’ve always profoundly
admired, I said, I’ll send it to you, the
article, Stoicism was a way of facing
the world bravely and seeing it as a
condition of your worth

is still a way, I extrapolated

also I’ve found that focussing on what
you’ve been worrying about, and
thinking about what you can do about
it, helps

about sharks, for instance, what would
you do – don’t go in the water – after
which there isn’t much else to think
about but go on to the next problem

meanwhile, you’re not worrying, but
actually being productive, and reducing
everything to what you can indeed do,
which ends up being most often not
much

pray for grace, I’ve been telling myself
for the longest while, and make sure
your tie ‘s on right, that’s all you
can ever do, I repeat to myself, and to
anyone who’ll listen, like an incantation,
a refrain

but still I take my anti-depressants just
in case, I said

we drank to Stoicism

afterwards we saw a new play about
Queen Elizabeth

Richard

psst: the New Yorker article

How To Be a Stoic

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was born a slave, around 55 A.D., in the Greco-Roman spa town of Hierapolis—present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. I first encountered his teachings in 2011, shortly after moving from San Francisco to Istanbul. I lived alone on a university campus in a forest. In the midst of a troubled long-distance relationship, I sometimes went days without talking to anyone but my boyfriend’s disembodied head on Skype. I was demoralized by Turkish politics, which made both secularists and religious people feel like victims. If you were a woman, no matter what you were wearing—décolleté or a head scarf—someone would give you a dirty look.

The first line of Epictetus’ manual of ethical advice, the Enchiridion—“Some things are in our control and others not”—made me feel that a weight was being lifted off my chest. For Epictetus, the only thing we can totally control, and therefore the only thing we should ever worry about, is our own judgment about what is good. If we desire money, health, sex, or reputation, we will inevitably be unhappy. If we genuinely wish to avoid poverty, sickness, loneliness, and obscurity, we will live in constant anxiety and frustration. Of course, fear and desire are unavoidable. Everyone feels those flashes of dread or anticipation. Being a Stoic means interrogating those flashes: asking whether they apply to things outside your control and, if they do, being “ready with the reaction ‘Then it’s none of my concern.’ ”

Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. Wasn’t it my fault that I lived in such isolation, that meaning continued to elude me, that my love life was a shambles? When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. Epictetus’ advice: when alone, “call it peace and liberty, and consider yourself the gods’ equal”; in a crowd, think of yourself as a guest at an enormous party, and celebrate the best you can.

Epictetus also won me over with his tone, which was that of an enraged athletics coach. If you want to become a Stoic, he said, “you will dislocate your wrist, sprain your ankle, swallow quantities of sand,” and you will still suffer losses and humiliations. And yet, for you, every setback is an advantage, an opportunity for learning and glory. When a difficulty comes your way, you should feel proud and excited, like “a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck.” In other words, think of every unreasonable asshole you have to deal with as part of God’s attempt to “turn you into Olympic-class material.” This is a very powerful trick.

Much of Epictetus’ advice is about not getting angry at slaves. At first, I thought I could skip those parts. But I soon realized that I had the same self-recriminatory and illogical thoughts in my interactions with small-business owners and service professionals. When a cabdriver lied about a route, or a shopkeeper shortchanged me, I felt that it was my fault, for speaking Turkish with an accent, or for being part of an élite. And, if I pretended not to notice these slights, wasn’t I proving that I really was a disengaged, privileged oppressor? Epictetus shook me from these thoughts with this simple exercise: “Starting with things of little value—a bit of spilled oil, a little stolen wine—repeat to yourself: ‘For such a small price, I buy tranquillity.’ ”

Born nearly two thousand years before Darwin and Freud, Epictetus seems to have anticipated a way out of their prisons. The sense of doom and delight that is programmed into the human body? It can be overridden by the mind. The eternal war between subconscious desires and the demands of civilization? It can be won. In the nineteen-fifties, the American psychotherapist Albert Ellis came up with an early form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, based largely on Epictetus’ claim that “it is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them.” If you practice Stoic philosophy long enough, Epictetus says, you stop being mistaken about what’s good even in your dreams.

Elif Batuman

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December 10, 2016

“the nerdwriter” on e.e. cummings, and Donald Trump

“Self-portrait with sketchpad“ (1939)

e.e. cummings

________

one of e.e. cummings‘ poems that I
didn’t know of, “i carry your heart
with me(i carry it in ]“, but that is
apparently one of his most
accessible, is explored and
wonderfully deconstructed in this
video, which’ll also prove how much
we need nerds, people who’ll open
up areas of profound but murky
matter for us

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

    i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
   my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
   i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
    by only me is your doing,my darling)
    i fear
    no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
    no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
    and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
    and whatever a sun will always sing is you

    here is the deepest secret nobody knows
    (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
    and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
    higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
    and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

e.e. cummings

when I grow up, I want to be a nerd

Richard

psst: listen to how “the nerdwriter”, Evan Paschal,
deconstructs Donald Trump

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November 18, 2016

the judgment of richibi

“The Judgment Of Paris“ (1625)

Peter Paul Rubens

___________

at the end of a long overdue visit to
a friend’s home the other night, she
asked me, did you notice their facial
skin, which of us do you think had
the best complexion, you can be
honest, she insisted

we had intended to watch the finals
of a voice competition we’d both
been following, over a glass of
wine, or two, each, when a friend
called, from, essentially, the door,
with a second friend in tow on their
way to a concert in the city

the friend of the friend, a lovely,
effervescent woman, from Poland
originally, with a story to tell of
growing up behind the Iron
Curtain, was also a beautician in
a spa she runs in a nearby resort
city

the first friend, equally effervescent,
had been telling my own friend of the
intervening events since last they’d
met, while I lapped up, more or less
by default, this other alternate Soviet
reality, perfumed as it was irresistibly
throughout with the friend’s
friend’s mellifluous Polish accent

I hadn’t paid any attention whatsoever
to skin quality apart from accepting
a spa courtesy card for my mother, who
would, naturally, be interested

my dearest dear, I answered, I am
not going anywhere near that one,
look what happened to Paris when
he fell into that trap

what happened, she asked

the Trojan War, I answered

the Trojan War, she asked

Paris was the son of Priam and Hecuba,
king and queen of Troy, I explained, he,
one of its princes, he’d been awarded
Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta,
by Aphrodite, goddess of love, he’d
chosen Aphrodite to be the most
beautiful among the goddesses, that
was her prize

but let me step back a little, I
interrupted, you need more context

Eris, goddess of discord, had not been
invited to the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis, I recounted, he a Greek hero,
she a sea nymph, parents both later to
Achilles, hero at Troy, slain, incidentally,
by that very Paris, you can read all about
it in the “Iliad“, I highly recommended

during the festivities, Eris tosses a
golden apple among the assembled
divinities, which reads

“to the fairest”

you can hear the stirrings of the much
later Sleeping Beauty, incidentally, in
this earliest of tellings, reconfigured
from the original myth

Athena, Aphrodite and Hera, all assume
they are meant to receive the apple, and
ask Zeus, father and husband, to decide

you’ll have to get someone else to touch
that one, he replies, much as I did

and delegates the task, with the help
of Hermes, the messenger god, to the
the guileless Paris, son of Priam and
Hecuba, Trojan king and queen, as I
said, he, Paris, prince

Paris was tending sheep on Mount Ida
when, fatefully, by a spring, the nubile
goddesses appeared vaunting their
unadorned splendours, stark, flagrant,
manifest, to the musical accompaniment
of the Graces, Faith, Hope and Charity,
also the Horae, the Hours, goddesses
of the seasons, maidens all in complicit
attendance

Paris, mere mortal, would never have
stood a chance

but to sweeten, nevertheless, the
deal, were it not yet sufficiently sweet,
Hera promises Paris Europe and Asia
should he choose her, Athena,
conquest in war, Aphrodite, goddess
of love, was set to give him the most
beautiful woman in the world

Paris opts for Aphrodite, and is
awarded Helen, the face that
launched the thousand proverbial
ships, the wife, not incidentally,
and completely inconveniently, of
the King of Sparta, Menelaus, who
attacks thereupon Troy with his
brother, Agamemnon, and their
allied legions, to reclaim
Menelaus’, whether abducted, or
indeed unfaithful, wife, no one
has ever conclusively determined,
Paris having been Paris

no one won

no one survived but Odysseus,
but that’s another story

I walked home shortly afterwards,
crossed my own Aegean, ten or
eleven blocks back, red lights,
nighttime traffic, watched the voice
competition I’d taped in any case at
home, whooped it up along with my
favourite contestants, drank to my
narrow miss, had gotten away, I
considered, with the equivalent of
Europe and Asia, if only in my
mind

beauty might be in the eye of the
beholder, I surmised, but it can
have its thorny indeed
consequences

Richard

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October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry

“Aristotle” (1653)

Luca Giordano

___________

so what’s a poem

in an attempt to get a clearer picture
of what a poem should be, rather
than trust only my own, however
informed perhaps, opinion – though
it must be added that we all bring
something to that word’s definition,
mine no less worthy than yours,
yours no less worthy than mine – I
thought I’d go back to authoritative
sources to see what they might
have said

and it doesn’t get any earlier and
authoritative than Aristotle, writing
in 350 B.C.E., at the height of
Ancient Greek preeminence,
dissecting the term in his
penetrating and perspicacious,
ahem, “Poetics”

“I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds,
noting the essential quality of each, to inquire into the
structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the
number and nature of the parts of which a poem is
composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within
the same inquiry.“, he says in Part 1 of his
magisterial treatise

and proceeds to declare the parameters
of “Poetry” for the ages

“Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes“,
he proceeds, imitation and rhythm

by imitation I think it best to think of
representation, which is another way,
anyway, of saying imitation, but
much more evocative in this instance,
more attuned to our sense of his word

a poem is a representation then, a
reproduction of something other than
itself

while its rhythm is what George
Gershwin‘s got, and by extension, as
you can see from this video, Gene Kelly

and yes, that means that “Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also
and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in
most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of
imitation.”

so, according to Aristotle, is dance

all, therefore, poems

an interesting elaboration about “Tragedy”
states that it should have the three unities
that I grew up with during my French
Canadian upbringing, the unity of time, of
space, and of action the famous French
Classical dramatists, Racine and Corneille,
applied under the aegis of Louis XlV

not to mention “Tragedy’s“ use of iambic
pentameter, Shakespeare’s ubiquitous
beat, a beat that persevered into the very
Nineteenth Century, in France with
Rostand‘s “Cyrano de Bergerac“, for
instance, and into the Twentieth Century
with Eliot‘s “Murder in the Cathedral“,
about the assassination of Archbishop
Thomas Becket at Canterbury in 1170
under Henry the Second‘s own aegis,
all written as poetry

the most famous play to follow the
three unities in the modern era is
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?“,
the play which I think defines the
Twentieth Century, which takes
place overnight somewhere in a
New England college town, mid-
century, at George and Martha’s

though followed closely by O’Neill‘s
“Long Day’s Journey int Night“,
which transpires from morning, one
day in August, 1912, till midnight, at
the home of, unity of space, note,
the dysfunctional Tyrones

so it appears not much has changed
about poetry, Aristotle got a lot of
mileage out of his early definition,
nearly 2500 years

makes you wonder why so much
attention was paid instead to
Plato, his contemporary, the
mystic, who would’ve banned
poetry, he thought it was
subversive

Richard

psst: for a modern day application
of the three unities, watch
“In Treatment“, a television
series, which takes place
in a psychotherapist’s office,
each episode a session,

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: people to ponder

November 1, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10, continued

October 30, 2017

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony no. 1, opus 10

September 23, 2017

on “Aristotle” – Billy Collins

Aristotle

Billy Collins

September 11, 2017

Nobuyuki Tsujii / Chopin

September 6, 2017

on “Elegy for the Victims of the Tsunami of March 11, 2011 in Japan” – Nobuyuki Tsujii

June 23, 2017

“My Romance” – Carly Simon

February 5, 2017

what, me worry

December 10, 2016

“the nerdwriter” on e.e. cummings, and Donald Trump

November 18, 2016

the judgment of richibi

October 23, 2016

Aristotle on poetry