Something For the Weekend #4

It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different and to be able to combine them into some new form’. William Plomer

Some inspirational snippets and recommendations for your weekend

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Something to Watch:  

DVD:  PLEASANTVILLE

A  film  written and directed by Gary Ross from 1998  starring Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels and Joan Allen,  multi-layered, aesthetically and emotionally ,  set in Pleasantville where there has never been any rain, aggression,  change, acceptance, passion or love. Until Now…..

Why you could watch it:

it grapples with our relationship to history and time; it addresses issues in relation to   feminism, race, art and writing.  It uses colour in an amazingly innovative delicate way too. And there’s Joan Allen and  William H Macy and the  makeup scene.   

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Here’s  a taster clip. 

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Something To Listen To: 

Kate Rusby

English Folk Singer From North Yorkshire

Simply beautiful, the song

….Underneath the Stars…..from Kate’s album Underneath the Stars 

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Underneath the stars I’ll meet you
Underneath the stars I’ll greet you
There beneath the stars I’ll leave you
Before you go of your own free will

Go gently

Underneath the stars you met me
Underneath the stars you left me
I wonder if the stars regret me
At least you’ll go of your own free will

Go gently

Here beneath the stars I’m landing
And here beneath the stars not ending
Why on earth am I pretending?
I’m here again, the stars befriending
They come and go of their own free will

Go gently
Go gently

Underneath the stars you met me
And Underneath the stars you left me
I wonder if the stars regret me
I’m sure they’d like me if they only met me
They come and go of their own free will

Go gently
Go gently
Go gently

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Something To Look At:

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration. 
Frida Kahlo 

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Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/frida_kahlo.html#oJBvyK8peZt0PyMX.99 

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Self-Portrait-Roots

Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress

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Something To Read:

Philip Larkin

(1922-1986)

 

“Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.” 
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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Best Society

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired – though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on – in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

 

http://www.poemhunter.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Larkin

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Philip Larkin Sunday Sessions (Extract)

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Something To Think About:

George Steiner

(1929-)

literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator.

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Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. 
Read more at

 http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_steiner.html#1vwq3rhl8CHhkpc1.99 

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The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
Read more at

 http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_steiner.html#1vwq3rhl8CHhkpc1.99

http://www.superfluitiesredux.com/2011/05/17/quotes-george-steiner/

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CHRISTMAS PICTURE QUIZ: Who is Who?

The Answers. Mouse over the bottom of each picture

W. G Sebald

Virginia Woolf

Einstein

Anne Sexton

Edith Sitwell

Orson Welles

Henry Moore

Claude Monet

Marlene Dietrich

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mozart

Nanci Griffiths

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Something For You:

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity. Rollo May