I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” Rushdie says. “The world appears to disagree.”
Photograph by Richard Burbridge for The New Yorker
Consider Scheherazade, whose name meant "city-born" and who was without a doubt a big-city girl, crafty, wisecracking, by turns sentimental and cynical, as contemporary a metropolitan narrator as one could wish to meet. Scheherazade, who snared the prince in her never-ending story. Scheherazade, telling stories to save her life, setting fiction against death, a Statue of Liberty built not of metal but of words. Scheherazade, who insisted, against her father's will, on taking her place in the procession into the king's deadly boudoir. Scheherazade, who set herself the heroic task of saving her sisters by taming the king. Who had faith, who must have had faith, in the man beneath the murderous monster and in her own ability to restore him to his true humanity, by telling him stories.
Salman Rushdie, "Wonder Tales" in Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
Vizionează „Julio Iglesias canta 'Soy un truhán, soy un señor' en 'Me olvidé de vivir' (1980)” pe YouTube
Glenda Jackson as Vickie Allessio - A Touch of Class (1973)
Vizionează „Julio Iglesias - Gwendolyne, Eurovision-1970, Color HD (Remastered)” pe YouTube
Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.
- Glenda Jackson
Although Glenda Jackson was absent from screen and stage for nearly a quarter of a century, when she devoted herself to her political career, she managed to appear in a wide variety of roles on either side of her time as an elected MP to Parliament.
Almost uniquely amongst actors of her generation, she managed to straddle the line between leading actress and character actor, being both a bankable star and a fascinatingly unpredictable performer who would enliven any film or production that she was in. It is hard to think that she ever gave a bad performance.
She deservedly won two Oscars during her illustrious career on both stage and screen. The second Oscar that she won, for the 1973 romantic comedy-drama A Touch of Class, was an appropriate acknowledgement of a decorous and classy performance in a decorous and classy film, and one still fondly remembered now. However, the picture that she first received an Academy Award for, Ken Russell’s inimitable 1969 DH Lawrence adaptation Women in Love, was considerably less restrained.
When she was cast, she was by no means a known international quantity. She had achieved success on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) since the early Sixties - most notably as Ophelia, opposite David Warner’s Hamlet, in Peter Hall’s legendary 1965 production - and had reprised her stage role as Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook’s film of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, but she had never starred in a major picture.
Until Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Jackson had not regarded herself as a political actor, in the way Jane Fonda or Redgrave did. She had long been a Labour party member, and gave time and energy to single-issue campaigns, such as human rights, Oxfam and abortion.
She considered standing for parliament and won despite Labour overall losing to John Major in 1992. In 1997, re-elected in the Tony Blair landslide, she served briefly as a junior transport minister, but she became an increasingly critical voice on her own side, especially over the Iraq war. She was rarely heard in the Commons, but always remained a highly popular constituency MP.
She left politics and made a surprise return to acting in 2015, making waves in a BBC Radio 4 series based on the novels of Emile Zola. It was when she played King Lear on stage at the Old Vic - a role that she later reprised on Broadway in 2019 - that the ferocity and power of her performance was a reminder to many who had been too young to see her in her earlier stage roles that she was a magnificent and multi-faceted performer.
Jackson continued to appear in television and film until the end of her life. However, her last definitive role came a few years ago, in which she starred as Maud Horsham, an elderly woman suffering from dementia who attempts to solve a mystery, even as she ebbs away. She won virtually every award going for the part, including another Emmy and a Bafta,
RIP Glenda Jackson RIP 1936-2023
“I wanted us to walk like lovers,
arm in arm in the summer evening,
and believed so powerfully in that projection
that I had to speak, I had to press you to stand.
Why did you let me speak?
I took your silence as I took the anguish in your face,
as part of the effort to move—
It seemed I stood forever, holding out my hand.
And all that time, you could no more heal yourself
than I could accept what I saw”
Louise Glück, Seated Figure.
Καρηβαρῶν: τὴν κεφαλὴν βαρούμενος ἀπὸ μέθης οἴνου
- Photius
“Heavy in the head”: Weighing down your head from drinking wine.
Photo: Eva Green by Gilles Bensimon, 2005.
Napoleon Crosses the Alps, by Jacques-Louis David, showing the French Emperor on his white Arab stallion Marengo.
Source: mote-historie
"I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."
—Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Check out the novel: ( https://amzn.to/3p83hCZ )
Glenda Jackson, the two-time Oscar winner who renounced a successful film and stage career in her 50s to become a member of the British Parliament, then returned to the stage at 80 as the title character in “King Lear,” died on Thursday at her home in Blackheath, London. She was 87.
Source: The New York Times
Beata Stankiewicz — Wisława Szymborska (oil, water marker, canvas. 2020)
“This is why I value that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself ‘I don’t know’, the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself ‘I don’t know’, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying ‘I don’t know’, and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.”
- Wislawa Szymborska on the importance of telling oneself “I don't know.”
In 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
#NobelPrize
“..in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it.”
— Wisława Szymborska
"Let's take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?"
"The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these are the anxieties that beset every budding bard. But they are curable, if caught in time."
"You've managed to squeeze more lofty words into three short poems than most poets manage in a lifetime: 'Fatherland,' 'truth,' 'freedom,' 'justice': such words don't come cheap. Real blood flows in them, which can't be counterfeited with ink."
"A definition of poetry in one sentence—well. We know at least five hundred definitions, but none of them strikes us as both precise and capacious enough. Each expresses the taste of its own age. Inborn skepticism keeps us from trying our hand at our own. But we remember Carl Sandburg's lovely aphorism: 'Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.' Maybe he'll actually make it one of these days?"
"In school no time is spent, alas, on the aesthetic analysis of literary works. Central themes are stressed along with their historical context. Such knowledge is of course crucial, but it will not suffice for anyone wishing to become a good, independent reader, let alone for someone with creative ambitions. Our young correspondents are often shocked that their poem about rebuilding postwar Warsaw or the tragedy of Vietnam might not be good. They're convinced that honorable intentions preempt form. But if you want to become a decent cobbler, it's not enough to enthuse over human feet. You have to know your leather, your tools, pick the right pattern, and so forth. . . . It holds true for artistic creation too."
"Youth really is an intriguing period in one's life. If one adds writerly ambitions to the difficulties of youth, one must possess an exceptionally strong constitution in order to cope. Its components should include: persistence, diligence, wide reading, curiosity, observation, distance toward oneself, sensitivity to others, a critical mind, a sense of humor, and an abiding conviction that the world deserves a) to keep existing, and b) better luck than it's had thus far. The efforts you've sent signal only the desire to write and none of the other virtues described above. You have your work cut out for you."
and finally
"'Why' is the most important word in this planet's language, and probably in that of other galaxies as well."
— some words of wisdom from Wisława Szymborska, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh. Find even more in the essay these quotes were taken from: 'How To (and How Not To) Write Poetry' (Poetry Foundation)
Hilma af Klint, Buddha’s Standpoint in the Earthly Life, No. 3a, 1920
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette en chemise, 1783