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Leading Ladies: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry

May 2, 2025 / terry / No comments

In the latter half of the 19^th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.

Category: Art, Literature, Painting, Photography, Poetry / Tags: Alphonse Mucha, Anton Chekhov, Cleopatra, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry, Felix Nadar, Gabriele d'Annunzio, George Watts, Hamlet, Henrik Ibsen, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Phedre, Sarah Bernhardt

Friedrich Hölderlin: Little Knowledge but Joy Enough

Apr 22, 2025 / terry / No comments

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets. He was exquisitely sensitive to the beauties of the natural world, and thoroughly enamoured to the glories of Ancient Greece. His verses are strikingly beautiful in their sound, and have been set to music by many composers. As a young man he was very productive, writing poems and the epistolary novel Hyperion (1799). He also made important new translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, in 1806 he lapsed into madness. From 1807 until his death, he lived alone in a room overlooking the Neckar River in Tübingen. He mumbled to himself in many languages, and occasionally wrote brief fragments of verse for visitors, signing them with various pseudonyms and fictitious dates. This posting considers some of his poetry.The text of the poems can been enlarged by clicking on them to get a separate window. Read more

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Music, Poetry, Psychiatry / Tags: Alcaic Stanzas, Fates, French Revolution, Greek Independence, Heidegger, Hyperion, Moirai, Nazi Propaganda, Neckar River, Paul Celan, Romanticism, Stefan Zwieg, translation

Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction

Mar 20, 2025 / terry / No comments

Bridget Riley (1931- ) came to fame in the early 1960s with her striking black-and-white abstract paintings, which were paintings were included in an important exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled The Responsive Eye (1965-66). After her first success, she moved on to colored abstract paintings and prints that infuse the viewer with a sense of movement.

Category: Art, Language, Literature, Poetry, psychology / Tags: Futurism, Georges Seurat, Giacomo Balla, Kiss, Maurice de Sausmarez, Movement in Squares, Op Art, Perceptual Abstraction, Ruth Padel, The Responsive Eye, Venice, Victor Vasarely

Words and Music: Schubert and Goethe

Jan 21, 2025 / terry / No comments

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) died young, but not before he was able to compose music that has become justly famous. As well as symphonies, piano works, sacred music, and chamber works, he composed over 600 songs or Lieder. This essay considers a few of his over 70 settings for poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Category: History, Literature, Music / Tags: Erlkonig, Faust, Franz Schubert, Goethe, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Lieder, Mignon, Song of the Harper, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship

Some of the Evil of my Tale: Lawrence of Arabia

Nov 18, 2024 / terry / 3 comments

In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, psychology, Religion / Tags: Aqaba, Arab Revolt, Asraq, Augustine, Burroughs motorcycle, Damascus, Deraa, Edmund Allenby, Faisal ibn Hussein, Hejaz, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, Iraq, Jerusalem, Jordan, Lowell Thomas, masochism, Mecca, Palestine, Paris Peace Conferences, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Syria, T. E. Lawrence

Knowledge of Good and Evil

Apr 18, 2024 / terry / 9 comments

According to the book of Genesis, Yahweh created Adam and Eve to live in the Garden of Eden. He commanded them on pain of death not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, Eve was convinced by the Serpent to eat of the tree, and she in turn convinced Adam to do the same. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden. The interpretation of this myth has led to the Christian idea that humanity is forever tainted by “Original Sin,” and that our only hope for immortality is through the sacrifice of Christ which offers redemption from sin and entry into eternity to those who believe in him. The concept of Original Sin has become dangerously ingrained in Christian thinking, and needs reworking,

Category: Art, Ethics, Literature, Painting, Religion / Tags: Adam, Augustine, Eden, Eve, Freedom of Choice, Milton, Morality, Original Sin, Paradise Lost, Pelagius, Serpent

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Mar 10, 2024 / terry / No comments

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: An Lushan Rebellion, Chan Buddhism, Chang'an, Chinese Poetry, Daoism, Kenneth Rexroth, Li Bai, Spring View, Stephen Owen, Tang dynasty, translation, Wang Shimin, Wang Wei

Basho’s Journey to the North

Oct 29, 2023 / terry / 4 comments

Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), one of the most famous poets of Japan, was a master of the haiku, a poetic form in which an abundance of meaning is concentrated into a paucity of syllables. Basho travelled widely in Japan, writing about t his experiences in a fascinating mixture of prose and poetry. In 1689 he undertook his longest journey: from Edo into the far north of Japan, a region known as Oku. His record of that journey is known as Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the North).

Category: History, Literature, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Bush Clover, haiku, Matsuo Basho, Matsushima, Morikawa Kyoriku, Oku no Hosomichi, Yamadera, Yosa Buson

Zeno of Elea

Aug 12, 2023 / terry / No comments

Zeno of Elea

Zeno of Elea was a Greek philosopher who lived in the 5^th Century BCE. He described a set of paradoxes to prove that space and time are continuous and cannot be divided into discrete parts. The most famous of these are the Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, which purportedly shows that Achilles could never catch up with the much slower Tortoise, and the Paradox of the Arrow, which shows that an arrow in flight is always stationary.

Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Algebra, Archilles and the Tortoise, Arrow Paradox, Arthur Eddington, Calculus, Entropy, Gravity, Infinite Series, Le Cimetiere Marin, Ludwig Boltzmann, Paul Valery, Rudolf Clausius, Time and Space, Velia, Zeno of Elea

Robinson Jeffers

May 20, 2023 / terry / 3 comments

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California’s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel Point using rocks from the shore. From 1920 to 1924 he built by himself the adjacent Hawk Tower. Jeffers became famous soon after the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924. This book and those that followed included both long narratives and shorter lyrics. His epics were bloody and tragic; his verse was free and passionate. Underlying his poems was an austere philosophy of “inhumanism.” This compared the transience of humanity to the persistence of the natural world, and proposed that we should detach ourselves from the passions of mankind and simply celebrate the beauty of the universe. Over the next decade, Jeffers published extensively and in 1932 his photograph graced the cover of Time. After World War II, his outrage at the death and destruction that occurred during the war and the severity of his inhumanist philosophy led to controversy and obscurity. In more recent years, the environmental movement has found inspiration in his love of the natural world and his anger about how humanity has despoiled it.

Category: Literature, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: Big Sur, Carmel, Edward Weston, Environmentalism, Humanism, Inhumanism, No Man Apart, Pacifism, Silent Spring, Tamar, Una Jeffers

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