Io ho paura. Di quel volto imbrattato di sangue, di quello sguardo. (…) Paura di vedere, in quella bocca piena di sangue, l’immagine simmetrica della bocca che ride per mostrare i denti. Paura di scorgere, nel ghigno dell’umana sofferenza, un soffio algido di vendetta.
Beppe Sebaste, Quel volto di sangue vero
“Questa società è l’insieme delle condizioni a cui facciamo riferimento, e che diamo per scontate. E’ il prodotto di intenzioni e risultati: mentre vediamo (e giudichiamo) i secondi, sentiamo le nostre buone intenzioni, ma non quelle degli altri. Per questo è così facile accusare.” — La capra canta, Ludovica Scarpa (via yt)
N portami a casa
F sei a casa
N portami nell’altra casa
F non ci sono altre case. c’è questa. è casa tua. altre case non ce ne sono
N ne ho anche un’altra
F dove?
N più bella
F come?
N più mia
F non ci sono altre case. c’è solo questa. non ce ne sono altre
N portami a casa.
F guarda com’è bello qui. non ti piace?
N no
F guarda com’è bello. è bello no?
N no. non mi piace
valentina diana
Mary Ellen Bute - Passages from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (1965-67) (.avi)
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan
Cast (in alphabetical order)
Ray Flanagan …Young Shem
Peter Haskell … Shem
Page Johnson … Shaun
Martin J. Kelley … Finnegan
Jane Reilly … Anna Livia
There are currently no copies of this film availabe on VHS or DVD; but a 16 mm print is available for museums, universities, and Joycean institutions. Contact Mrs. Cecile Starr at (802) 863-6904; rental is $180.
A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.
With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut.http://ubu.com/film/joyce.html
SOUND (MP3)
James Joyce Reads “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (8.32) [MP3]http://ubu.com/sound/joyce.html
NOTES
Rec: London, 1929
Recording James Joyce
by Sylvia Beach
In 1924, 1 went to the office of His Master’s Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses. I was sent to Piero Coppola, who was in charge of musical records, but His Master’s Voice would agree to record the Joyce reading only if it were done at my expense. The record would not have their label on it, nor would it be listed in their catalogue.
Some recordings of writers had been done in England and in France as far back as 1913. Guillaume Apollinaire had made some recordings which are preserved in the archives of the Musée de la Parole. But in 1924, as Coppola said, there was no demand for anything but music. I accepted the terms of His Master’s Voice: thirty copies of the recording to be paid for on delivery. And that was the long and the, short of it.
Joyce himself was anxious to have this record made, but the day I took him in a taxi to the factory in Billancourt, quite a distance from town, he was suffering with his eyes and very nervous. Luckily, he and Coppola were soon quite at home with each other, bursting into Italian to discuss music. But the recording was an ordeal for Joyce, and the first attempt was a failure. We went back and began again, and I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved.
Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.
I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out-“he lifted his voice above it boldly”-it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
The Ulysses recording was “very bad,” according to my friend C. K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning by Mr. Ogden and I. A. Richards was much in demand at my bookshop. I had Mr. Ogden’s little Basic English books, too, and sometimes saw the inventor of this strait jacket for the English language. He was doing some recording of Bernard Shaw and others at the studio of the Orthological Society in Cambridge and was interested in experimenting with writers, mainly, I suspect, for language reasons. (Shaw was on Ogden’s side, couldn’t see what Joyce was after when there were already more words in the English language than one knew what to do with.) Mr. Ogden boasted that he had the two biggest recording machines in the world at his Cambridge studio and told me to send Joyce over to him for a real recording. And Joyce went over to Cambridge for the recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”
So I brought these two together, the man who was liberating and expanding the English language and the one who was condensing it to a vocabulary of five hundred words. Their experiments went in opposite directions, but that didn’t prevent them from finding each other’s ideas interesting. Joyce would have starved on five or six hundred words, but he was quite amused by the Basic English version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” that Ogden published in the review Psyche. I thought Ogden’s “translation” deprived the work of all its beauty; but Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards were the only persons I knew about whose interest in the English language equaled that of Joyce, and when the Black Sun Press published, the little volume Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, I suggested that C.K. Ogden be asked to do the preface.
How beautiful the “Anna Livia” recording is, and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known “Anna Livia” by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again.
Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had “Anna Livia” printed in huge type so that the author-his sight was growing dimmer-could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged. The “Anna Livia” recording was on both sides of the disc; the passage from Ulysses was contained on one. And it was the only recording from Ulysses that Joyce would consent to.
How I regret that, owing to my ignorance of everything pertaining to recording, I didn’t do something about preserving the “master.” This was the rule with such records, I was told, but for some reason the precious “master” of the recording from Ulysses was destroyed. Recording was done in a rather primitive manner in those days, at least at the Paris branch of His Master’s Voice, and Ogden was right, the Ulysses record was not a success technically. All the same, it is the only recording of Joyce himself reading from Ulysses, and it is my favorite of the two.
The Ulysses record was not at all a commercial venture. I handed over most of the thirty copies to Joyce for distribution among his family and friends, and sold none until, years later, when I was hard up, I did set and get a stiff price for one or two I had left.
Discouraged by the experts at the office of the successors to His Master’s Voice in Paris, and those of the B.B.C. in London, I gave up the attempt to have the record “re-pressed “-which I believe is the term. I gave my permission to the B.B.C. to make a recording of my record, the last I possessed, for the purpose of broadcasting it on W. R. Rodger’s Joyce program, in which Andrienne Monnier and I took part.
Anyone who wishes to hear the Ulysses record can do so at the Musée de la Parole in Paris, where, thanks to the suggestion of my California friend Philias Lalanne, Joyce’s reading is preserved among those of some of the great French writers.
(a Fefi, la bimba che ride all’orizzonte)
poche cose vorrei dirti
e dirtele per sempre
sentire che i tuoi occhi
mentre ti parlo
sanno essere un intero mare
[ giorni in cui non nasce niente
e altri in cui tutto il giorno è un’alba micidiale ]
The “QQ currency” is substantial: while it was created for use on the web, it is being used in other kinds of commerce (which, since I think that stimulating trade is one of the good things that a payment system should do, is probably a good thing overall).
[From Digital Money Forum: What kinds of competitors?]
must read
Perché dovrei scrivere di altri gialli, potete non leggere più il soffio delle poche parole lungo una strada per un abito da donna.
Perché sto dov’erano, dove potevo anche io come ora sto, ma è l’ombra di un anno, il 1940, che è anche il 2009, così diversi, così uomini e donne nel loro paesaggio vedono, sentono, non posso più scrivere di quelle vite, le scomparse, questo nascere sempre, e sempre diverso, e diversamente finire. Finiti, dimenticati dal tempo che non è uguale. E adesso anni di sto qua sto là sopravvissuto ai posti, e allora così sto, così, ombra e oggi, gli atti da un cervello, la figura dell’uomo di carne mai nuda, mi spoglio spogliando boschi, strade, diversi,
non posso scrivere di un giallo che mai riconoscerete, non leggete più.
As of spring 2009, the leading capitalist states in Europe, North America, and Asia have thus either spent outright, or exposed themselves to financial risks totaling, well over $10 trillion-a figure so vast that one searches in vain for any relevant historical parallel. By comparison, the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II cost a mere $9.3 billion (in constant 2005 dollars). According to the United Nations, it would cost $195 billion to eradicate most poverty-related deaths in the Third World, including deaths from malaria, from malnutrition, and from AIDS. So the amount of money committed by policymakers to save capitalism from itself is already fifty times greater than what it would take to save tens of millions of human beings from terrible daily suffering and premature death.
Michael Bauwens, P2P Foundation
avevo fatto un patto con l’aria
avevo fatto il bravo
sembrava che la luce restasse
[ eppure il mondo era sguarnito
eppure sapevo
sapevo che si muore anche in pieno sole ]
ci sono albe che non saprò vendicare
e fallimenti da portare in tasca come una
pistola carica
“Una moltitudine di giovani cavalieri carichi di oggetti nomadi sempre più ‘intelligenti’. Sono prevedibili e stoccabili, la forma festiva e trans-mediale delle creature dello stato di natura di Hobbes, che reclamano quindi un modo di sovranità all’altezza della loro mobilità e della loro cupidigia”
Gilles Châtelet, Vivre et penser comme des porcs (1993)