John Steinbeck: The Pearl

Art by Jose Clemente Orozco [The Pearl]

John Steinbeck

Excerpts from The Pearl, 1945/1994 New York: Penguin, pp. 25, 27-28

All manner of people grew interested in Kino-people with things to sell and people with favors to ask. Kino had found the Pearl of the World. The essence of pearl mixed with essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated. Every man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl, and Kino's pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy. The news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when when love is withheld. The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it. 

[...]

But Kino's face shone with prophesy. "My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. And my son will make numbers, and these things will make us free because he will know-he will know and through him we will know." And in the pearl Kino saw himself and Juana squatting by the little fire in the brush hut while Coyotito red from a great book. "This is what the pearl will do," said Kino. And he had never said so many words together in his life. And suddenly he was afraid of his talking. His hand closed down over the pearl and cut the light away from it. Kino was afraid as a man is afraid who says, "I will," without knowing.

Now the neighbors knew they had witnessed a great marvel They knew that time would now date from Kino's pearl, and that they would discuss this moment for many years to come. If these things came to pass, they would recount how Kino looked and what he said and how his eyes shone, and they would say, "He was a man transfigured. Some power was given to him, and there it started. You see what a great man he has beome, starting from that moment. And I myself saw it." 

And if Kino's planning came to nothing, those same neighbors would say, "There it started. A foolish madness came over him so that he spoke foolish words. God keep us from such things. Yes, God punished Kino because he rebelled against the way things are. You see what has become of him. And I myself saw the moment when his reason left him."

See also:

Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello: The Ghost of Tom Joad returns

Ursula Le Guin, by Bill Sienkiewicz

[@sinKEVitch]

Ursula K. Le Guin | Bill Sienkiewicz

See also:

Kindness is all we have: goodbye, dearest Ursula

Freedom, not profit: Ursula Le Guin at the N.B.A.s

Kindness is all we have: goodbye, dearest Ursula

Photograph: Marian Wood Kolisch [Ursula K. Le Guin's Website]

Ursula K. Le Guin

1929 - 2018

Excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's speech at the 2014 National Book Awards

Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.
 

Excerpt from The Left Hand of Darkness (London: Orbit, 1969/1992, p.138) 

There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognised as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the centre of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we simply were in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give. 

Excerpt from The Dispossessed (London: Gollancz, 1974/2002, pp. 189-190)

No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendour, the splendour of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!

See also:

Freedom, not profit: Ursula Le Guin at the N.B.A.s

Jean Rhys: Good Morning, Midnight

[kagablog]

Jean Rhys | Good Morning Midnight

Well, let's argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That's my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there's no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbilly, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky – and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn't it so, Mr Blank? There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours. Some must cry so that the others may be able to laugh the more heartily. Sacrifices are necessary. ... Let's say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple – no, that I think you haven't got. And that's the right you hold most dearly, isn't it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. But I wish you a lot of trouble, Mr Blank, and just to start off with, your damned shop's going bust. Alleluia! 

Excerpt from Good Morning, Midnight (1939/2000, Penguin, pp. 15-16)

See also: 

Jean Rhys: when the colours were different

Jack Kerouac, by Allen Ginsberg

[Allen Ginsberg Project]

Allen Ginsberg | Jack Kerouac

Inscription by Allen Ginsberg, quoted by the Allen Ginsberg Project 

Jack Kerouac, Avenue A across from Tompkins Park New York, his handsome face looking into barroom door – this is the best profile of his intellgence as I saw it sacred, time of Subterraneans writing [1953]

See also:

On the Road, with Jack Kerouac and Walter Salles

Stories are the wildest things of all

Illustration by Jim Kay [stories]

Patrick Ness | Siobhan Dowd | Jim Kay 

A Monster Calls

Illustration by Jim Kay [Towerbabel]

Love bears it out even to the edge of doom

Tzortz St., Athens, 24.03.2016

William Shakespeare | Sonnet 116

                                             Let me not to the marriage of true minds
                                             Admit impediments. Love is not love
                                             Which alters when it alteration finds,
                                             Or bends with the remover to remove:
                                             O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
                                             That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
                                             It is the star to every wandering bark,
                                             Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
                                             Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
                                             Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
                                             Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
                                             But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
                                                 If this be error and upon me proved,
                                                 I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Remembering Audre Lorde

[Vileine]

Audre Lorde

Excerpt from The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house 

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

You will never guess to who you are talking

Photograph: Jack Robinson [The New York Times]

Nina Simone

Pirate Jenny

The Threepenny Opera

Bertolt Brecht | Kurt Weill

Film quotes, #8: Paterson

[IMP Awards]

Jim Jarmusch | Paterson

Another One | Ron Padgett

                                                             When you’re a child

                                                             you learn

                                                             there are three dimensions:

                                                             height, width, and depth.

                                                             Like a shoebox.

                                                             Then later you hear

                                                             there’s a fourth dimension:

                                                             time.

                                                             Hmm.

                                                             Then some say

                                                             there can be five, six, seven…

                                                             I knock off work,

                                                             have a beer

                                                             at the bar.

                                                             I look down at the glass

                                                             and feel glad.

Lean to my wound; burn on, burn on

[Wikipedia]

Sylvia Plath | Firesong

                                     Born green we were 
                                     to this flawed garden, 
                                     but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad, 
                                     spitefully skulks our warden, 
                                     fixing his snare 
                                     which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair 
                                     is tricked to faulter in split blood. 

                                     Now our whole task's to hack 
                                     some angel-shape worth wearing 
                                     from his crabbed midden where all's wrought so awry 
                                     that no straight inquiring 
                                     could unlock 
                                     shrewd catch silting our each bright act back 
                                     to unmade mud cloaked by sour sky. 

                                     Sweet salts warped stem 
                                     of weeds we tackle towards way's rank ending; 
                                     scorched by red sun 
                                     we heft globed flint, racked in veins' barbed bindings; 
                                     brave love, dream 
                                     not of staunching such strict flame, but come, 
                                     lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

[internal.org]

See also:

The Applicant, by Sylvia Plath

Ella Mason And Her Eleven Cats, by Sylvia Plath

Standing up against prejudice: James Joyce

[Wikipedia]

James Joyce

Ulysses

Chapter 12 | Wikisource

  But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. 

  What? says Alf. 

  Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

James Joyce's untamable power | James Longenbach, The Nation 

In a crucial scene in Ulysses, when he’s assaulted by a rabidly anti-Semitic Dubliner, Bloom does retort, “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” But later in the day, when he recounts this incident, Bloom admits that he was pretending to be Jewish—pretending to be what the nameless Dubliner assumed him to be—in order to stand up personally against the forces of prejudice: “So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.” 

Joyce spreads the evidence regarding Bloom’s relationship to Judaism far and wide, making it difficult to synthesize and allowing his readers to misread Bloom’s identity, just as the citizens of Dublin do. But Joyce is not playing games; Joyce is never merely playing games. He didn’t simply write a book about prejudice; he wrote a book that embodies in its language the ways in which prejudice is perpetuated, carried aloft by language, regardless of the facts. Language alters reality in Ulysses, conferring an identity on Bloom, an identity that in a moment of selfless nobility Bloom embraces as his own.

Rage against the dying of the light

[Poetry Foundation]

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night

                                            Do not go gentle into that good night,
                                            Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
                                            Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                                            Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
                                            Because their words had forked no lightning they
                                            Do not go gentle into that good night.

                                            Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
                                            Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
                                            Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                                            Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
                                            And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
                                            Do not go gentle into that good night.

                                            Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
                                            Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
                                            Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

poets.org

Winter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald

[El Placer de la Lectura]

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Winter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzgerald | Open Culture

Fitz FINAL from Kenneth I Levis on Vimeo.

See also:

Either you think: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just the sky: Patti Smith on art, life and politics

Photograph by Jesse Ditmar [The Boston Globe]

Patti Smith

This video is an excerpt from Patti Smith's interview at the 2012 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark; the full interview is available here. 

See also:

We'll break all the rules: April Fool, by Patti Smith

I refuse to fall down: Piss Factory, by Patti Smith

Only love can be as perfect as that

Of an aspect bright and fair: Happy New Year

Film quotes #6: A River Runs Through It

[Wikipedia]

A River Runs Through It

Robert Redford | Norman Maclean

But when I am alone in the half-light of the canyon, all existence seems to fade to a being with my soul and memories, and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River, and a four-count rhythm, and the hope that a fish will rise. 

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. 

The river was cut by the world's great flood, and runs over rocks from the basement of time. And some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.  

I am haunted by waters.

What is essential is invisible to the eye

[Wikipedia]

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses. 

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world." 

And the roses were very much embarrassed. 

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passer-by would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. 

And he went back to meet the fox. 

"Goodbye," he said. 

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." 

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

Chapter 21 | Angelfire

[Angelfire]

The uncompromising poetry of Katerina Gogou

Photograph by Dionysis Petroutsopoulos, Patision St., 1978 [Ethnos]

Katerina Gogou

                                   What I fear most

                                   is becoming "a poet"...

                                   Locking myself in the room

                                   gazing at the sea

                                   and forgetting...

                                   I fear that the stitches over my veins might heal

                                   and, instead of having blur memories about TV news,

                                   I take to scribbling papers and selling "my views"...

                                   I fear that those who stepped over us might accept me

                                   so that they can use me.

                                   I fear that my screams might become a murmur

                                   so that to serve putting my people to sleep.

                                   I fear that I might learn to use meter and rhythm

                                   and thus I will be trapped within them

                                   longing for my verses to become popular songs.

                                   I fear that I might buy binoculars in order to bring closer

                                   the sabotage actions in which I won't be participating.

[Excerpt from a poem translated by G. Chalkiadakis | Home page]

[To Periodiko]

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

Photograph by the gentle author [Spitalfields Life]

John Keats

                                         Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

                                         What thou among the leaves hast never known,

                                         The weariness, the fever, and the fret

                                         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

                                         Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

                                         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

                                         Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

                                         And leaden-eyed despairs,

                                         Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

                                         Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Third stanza from Ode to a Nightingale | The Poetry Foundation

Either you think: F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Wikipedia]

F. Scott Fitzgerald | Tender Is the Night

Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

[Wikiquote]