Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: June 29, 2010

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Ukulele. Photo by Massimo Barbieri

Found this by perus­ing Crooked Timber. Had never heard of them and now won­der why. They are funny, tal­ented, don’t take them­selves seri­ously at all, and their eccen­tric­ity seems well earned. Simply put, they make us smile …

So, with­out fur­ther ado, I present The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain!!!

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Posted on: June 23, 2010

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Leo Tolstoy, by Ilya Repin. 1887

Back to back films, biopics of great writ­ers. Thinking about the trade offs. First, Sylvia Plath and then Leo Tolstoy. Marked con­trast between the two on so many lev­els. Most obvi­ously, Tolstoy lived a long life, dying at the ripe old age of 82, while Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30:

Dying
Is an art, like every­thing else.
I do it exceptionally well.

 

Both movies por­tray the strug­gle, the con­flict of life against art and art against life, of sac­ri­fic­ing loved ones for that craft and for genius. But in “Sylvia,” the betrayal runs too deep. There is no rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, no final, mov­ing, pow­er­ful reunion, as there is with “The Last Station.”

It may well be that to know a poet’s biog­ra­phy intrudes upon the poem, espe­cially if a poet’s life was stormy, filled with drama, child­hood trau­mas, and her life seems to rip­ple out to impact oth­ers long after her death.…

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Posted on: June 16, 2010

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Sunflowers. By Vincent Van Gogh. 1888

Nothing was as it seemed, when Van Gogh painted it. Roiling under­neath the sub­ject, fly­ing above it, sur­round­ing it, were his pas­sions, his inten­sity, his flights into realms most of us could only guess at, if we can match him for moral imag­i­na­tion, or imag­i­na­tion period. With Van Gogh, a rose was not a rose was not a rose.

Ray Succre writes poetry along these same lines, or con­junc­tions, or coin­ci­dences, with a mask or two thrown in for good mea­sure. Surreal, meant to be heard, meant to be spo­ken, they sing the uncanny.

Spinozablue presents two of his poems below.

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In honor of Bloomsday, I wanted to point you in the direc­tion of a fine lit­tle essay about the peo­ple, real peo­ple, and their descen­dants, who found their way into Joyce’s Ulysses.…

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Posted on: June 15, 2010

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Flower Poetry

When the flow­ers first escaped the row,
hav­ing scat­tered their gen­er­a­tives in time with a good wind,
I used poi­son to con­tain them. 
All gar­den­ers know you can only own beau­ti­ful things
if you keep them in a square.

These were hearty poison-​​​​eating flow­ers, I dis­cov­ered.
Soon, they made the grounds, even root­ing in the con­crete walk.
Hurrah for wild­ness, hur­ray for its life, I thought,
leav­ing them be.

I remem­ber too clearly the morn­ing I wit­nessed
the first flower to get inside the house.
It was grow­ing from the kitchen floor.
I con­tained this pretty crea­ture by set­ting a large soup-​​​​pot over it.
By next after­noon, the flower had called a com­pa­triot,
and the pot had been overturned.

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