summer reading
jules n. binoculas
relationships have all been bad
mine have been like verlaine's and rimbaud's"
-- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_
is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most words) --
since school is out for many rmd readers,
here is some summer reading...
find similarities and differences between the french
symbolist poetry movement and the works of bob dylan -- discuss.
Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur
Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854-91), French poet of the
symbolist school. He was born and educated in Charleville, Ardennes
Department. He exhibited great
intellectual precocity and wrote verse at the age of ten. When he was
17, he composed the strikingly original poem, The Drunken Boat
(1871; trans. 1941), which he submitted to the older poet Paul
Verlaine. This work, which set the tone of the entire symbolist, or
decadent, movement, so impressed Verlaine that he entreated the
author to move to Paris. Later, accompanied by Verlaine, he went to
England and then to Belgium. In Belgium, Verlaine, with whom
Rimbaud had a
stormy relationship, tried twice to take the life of the younger poet,
wounding him seriously in the second attempt. Rimbaud wrote an
allegorical account of the matter
in A Season in Hell (1873; trans. 1932).
In 1880 Rimbaud became a trader in North Africa, with headquarters
at Harar and Shoa, central Abyssinia. Verlaine, under the impression
that Rimbaud was no longer alive, published the latter's poems in
Illuminations (1886; trans. 1932). This work contains the famous
Sonnet des voyelles (Sonnet of the Vowels), in which each of the five
vowels is associated with a different color. In 1891 Rimbaud returned
to France for medical treatment of a tumor on his knee; he died in a
hospital at Marseille. On the strength of a few poems that he wrote
between the ages of 10 and 20, Rimbaud ranks as one of the most
original of all French poets.
"Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur", Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c)
1993
Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's
Corporation
Verlaine, Paul
Verlaine, Paul (1844-96), French poet, who was a leader of the
symbolist
movement.
Verlaine was born on March 30, 1844, in Metz, the son of an army
officer, and educated at the Lycie Bonaparte in Paris. His early
works, including Pohmes saturniens (1866), are characterized by the
antiromanticism of the Parnassians with whom Verlaine was then
associated; the verse is concerned more with technique than with
feeling. In 1870 Verlaine married, but he left his wife two years later to
travel and live with the 17-year-old poet Arthur Rimbaud. Verlaine shot
and wounded Rimbaud during a quarrel in 1873 and was imprisoned
for the next two years. The collection Romance sans paroles (Songs
Without Words, 1874), is based on his life with Rimbaud and was
written in prison. Also in prison Verlaine returned to the Roman
Catholicism of his childhood; his reconversion is the source of a
volume of confessional religious poetry, Sagesse (Wisdom, 1881).
Verlaine taught French in England from 1875 to 1877, then returned to
France to teach English for a year. With his student Lucien Litinois,
whom he called his adopted son, Verlaine tried unsuccessfully to be a
farmer. Litinois died suddenly in
1883; Verlaine's Amour (1888) is primarily about Litinois. The rest of
Verlaine's life consisted of alternating periods of drunken debauchery
and ascetic repentance.
With the publication of Les pohtes maudites (Accursed Poets, 1884),
a work of criticism, and of Jadis et Naguhre (Long Ago and Not So
Long Ago, 1884), a collection of verse, Verlaine emerged as a
symbolist poet, concerned with dreams
and illusion.
Verlaine thus exerted considerable influence on the French poets who
followed him. The sound of his poetry is usually more important than
its meaning; it is therefore
unusually difficult to translate. He also wrote autobiographical prose,
including Mes Htpitaux (My Hospitals, 1892), Mes prisons (My
Prisons, 1893), and Confessions
(1895). Verlaine died on January 8, 1896.
"Verlaine, Paul", Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993 Microsoft
Corporation.
Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
Mallarme, Stiphane
Mallarme, Stiphane (1842-98), French poet, one of the originators of
the symbolist movement. He was born in Paris and educated at the
lycee in Sens. He taught English at the Lycee Fontanes, Paris, and
translated literary works in English,
notably the poems (1888) of the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. He
used symbols to express truth through suggestion rather than by
narration. His poetry and prose
are characterized by musical quality, experimental grammar, and
thought that is refined and allusive to the point of obscurity. His best-
known poems are L'aprhsmidi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun,
1876), which inspired the prelude by the
French composer Claude Debussy, and Hirodiade (1869). Among
Mallarmi's other writings are the anthology Vers et prose (1893) and
the volume of prose studies Divagations (Ramblings, 1897).
Mallarmi was noted for his conversation, which was as lucid as his
writings were obscure. At his renowned Tuesday-night receptions at
his home in Paris, his critical
comments on literature, art, and music did much to stimulate the
creative efforts of the French symbolist writers and the artists and
composers of the impressionist
school that developed late in the 19th century and emphasized
spontaneity, as opposed to formality, of composition.
"Mallarme, Stephane", Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993
Microsoft
Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821-67), French poet and critic, a
leader of the
symbolist school.
Baudelaire was born in Paris on April 9, 1821, and educated at the
Collhge Louis-le-Grand. His boyhood and adolescence were
unhappy, for his father died when he was six years old, and he
disliked his stepfather and resented his mother for having married
him. Opposed to his choice of a literary career and hoping to distract
him, his parents sent him on a sea voyage to India. He left the ship,
however, and
returned to Paris more determined than ever to devote himself to
writing. In an effort to solve his financial problems he began to write
critical journalism. His first
important publications were two booklets of art criticism, Les salons
(1845-46), in which he discussed with acute insight the paintings and
drawings of such contemporary French artists as Honori Daumier,
Idouard Manet, and Eughne
Delacroix. He was first acclaimed as a skilled literary craftsman in
1848, when his translations from English of the work of the American
writer Edgar Allan Poe began to appear. Encouraged by that success
and inspired by his enthusiasm for Poe,
with whom he felt a strong affinity, Baudelaire continued to translate
Poe's stories until 1857.
Baudelaire's major work, the volume of poetry Fleurs du mal (Flowers
of Evil), appeared in 1857. Immediately after its publication the
French government prosecuted Baudelaire on a charge of offending
public morals. Although the elite of
French literature came to his support, he was fined, and six poems in
the volume were suppressed in subsequent editions. His next work,
Les paradis artificiels (1860), is a self-analytical book, based on his
own experiences and inspired by
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey.
From 1864 to 1866 Baudelaire lived in Belgium. Stricken by
paralysis, he was brought back to Paris, where he died on August 31,
1867.
One of the great poets of French literature, Baudelaire possessed a
classical sense of form, great skill at choosing the perfectly
appropriate word, and a true gift for musical language; he produced
some of the most mordant but loveliest verse in the French language.
His originality sets him apart from the dominant literary schools of his
time. His poetry has been variously regarded as the last brilliant
summation of
romanticism, the precursor of symbolism, and the first expression of
modern techniques. He viewed an individual as a divided being,
drawn equally toward God and Satan; his poems deal with the
timeless conflict between the ideal and the
sensual. They depict all human experiences, from the most sublime to
the most sordid.
Among his other writings are Petits pohmes en prose, a collection of
prose poems, and his intimate journals, Fusies (Fireworks) and Mon
coeur mis ` nu (My Heart
Laid Bare). All were posthumously published in 1869.
"Baudelaire, Charles Pierre", Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c)
1993 Microsoft
Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
Symbolist Movement
Symbolist Movement, in literature, an aesthetic movement that
originated in France in the late 19th century and encouraged writers to
express their ideas, feelings, and
values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct
statements.
Symbolist writers, in reaction to earlier 19th-century trends (the
romanticism of novelists such as Victor Hugo, the realism and
naturalism of Gustave Flaubert and
Imile Zola), proclaimed that the imagination was the true interpreter
of reality. They also discarded rigid rules of versification and the
stereotyped poetic images of their
predecessors, the so-called Parnassians. Important precursors of
symbolist poetry were the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the
French poet Girard de Nerval.
The symbolist movement had its beginning in the poetry of Charles
Baudelaire, whose Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857) and Le
spleen de Paris (1869) were judged as decadent by his
contemporaries. Stiphane Mallarmi's literary
salon and poetry, such as L'aprhs-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a
Faun, 1876), carried on the movement; his prose studies Divigations
(Ramblings, 1897) formed one of the most important statements of
symbolist aesthetics. Three works of poetry chiefly associated with
the movement are Paul Verlaine's Romances sans paroles (Songs
Without Words, 1874) and Arthur Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre (The
Drunken Boat, 1871) and Une saison en enfers (A Season in Hell,
1873).
The symbolist movement survived well into the 1890s, in the works of
such French poets as Jules Laforgue and Paul Valiry, as well as
those of the writer and critic Rimy de Gourmont. Pellias et
Milisande, by the Belgian playwright Maurice
Maeterlinck, is one of the few symbolist dramas. From France,
symbolism spread worldwide notably to Russia, where it was
evidenced in the work of the poet
Aleksandr Blok and had great influence on the shaping of 20th-
century literature.
In the visual arts, symbolism has both a general and a specific
meaning. It refers, in one sense, to the use of certain pictorial
conventions (pose, gesture, or a repertoire of attributes) to express a
latent allegorical meaning in a work of art (see Iconography). In
another sense, the term symbolism refers to a movement that began
in France in the 1880s, as a reaction both to romanticism and to the
realistic
approach implicit in impressionism. Not so much a style per se,
symbolism in art was an international ideological trend that served as
a catalyst in the development away from representation in art and
toward abstraction.
Inspiration was found initially in the work of the French painters Pierre
Cicile Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon,
who used brilliant colors and exaggerated expressiveness of line to
represent emotionally charged dream visions, often verging on the
macabre, inspired by literary, religious, or mythological subjects. Their
followers included the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, renowned for
his use of color to express emotions, and the French painters Paul
Gauguin and Imile Bernard (1868-1941). Gauguin and Bernard,
working together at Pont-Aven, in Brittany, between 1888 and 1890,
adopted a style that made use of pure, brilliant
colors and forms defined by heavy contour lines, resulting in flat,
decoratively patterned compositions exemplified by Gauguin's
Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888,
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). This style they dubbed
synthetist, or symbolist (using the two terms interchangeably),
in opposition to the analytic approach of impressionism. The first
symbolist exhibition was organized by Gauguin in 1889-90 at the
Paris World's Fair.
Influenced by contemporary French symbolist poetry, the symbolist
trend in painting led in one direction from 1889 to 1900 to the work
of Paul Sirusier (1865-1927),
Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, and Idouard Vuillard. Calling
themselves the Nabis, they emphasized art as decoration and used
color subjectively. Symbolism also was basic to the very different
styles of Ferdinand Hodler, the Swiss painter;
James Ensor in Belgium; Edvard Munch, the Norwegian artist; and
Aubrey Beardsley in England. In Beardsley's art, the link between the
erotic aspects of symbolism and the sinuous forms of the art nouveau
style is clearly seen.
Symbolism, with its concern for the subjective, allusive employment of
color and form, can be seen to underlie successive later 20th-century
art styles as well:
Fauvism, expressionism, and surrealism.
"Symbolist Movement", Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1993
Microsoft
Corporation. Copyright (c) 1993 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation
Jack Lynch
JNB: -- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_.
is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most
words)?
The best I can come up with is "Most Likely You Go Your Way
and I'll Go Mine" for number of words, and "Stuck Inside of
Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" for number of letters.
JNB: find similarities and differences between the
french symbolist poetry movement and the works of bob
dylan -- discuss.
As I recall, David Pichaske, in _A Generation in Motion_,
relates a story where Dave Van Ronk asks Dylan -- in the mid
sixties, if memory serves -- whether he'd read the
Symbolists. The answer was, according to Van Ronk, "'Huh?'
The stupidist [_sic_] 'huh' you could imagine." Later Van
Ronk showed up at Dylan's place and found a volume of the
Symbolists on Dylan's shelf, thoroughly annotated, with
snippets of what would later become Dylan's songs in the
margins.
I look forward to an expert refreshing the lapses in my
memory.
-- Jack Lynch; jly...@english.upenn.edu
John Howells
<"situations have ended sad
<relationships have all been bad
<mine have been like verlaine's and rimbaud's"
< -- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_
<is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most words) --
What about "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"?
--
John Howells
New address --> how...@netcom.com
Craig Jamieson
>"jules n. binoculas" <p00...@psilink.com> writes:
>< -- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_
><is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most words) --
>What about "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"?
> New address --> how...@netcom.com
Close, very close.
Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)
has more words, more letters, more spaces, and more punctuation!
On letters it wins.
On number of words
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Wins on words, wins on spaces.
Ron Mura
> John Howells (how...@netcom.com) wrote:
> >"jules n. binoculas" <p00...@psilink.com> writes:
> >< -- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_
> ><is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most words) --
> >What about "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again"?
>
> Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)
>
> has more words, more letters, more spaces, and more punctuation!
>
> On letters it wins.
>
> On number of words
>
> It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
>
> Wins on words, wins on spaces.
What if we consider titles as Dylan has announced them in concert?
There's "Yes, I Can See You Got Your Brand-new Leopard-skin Pill-box
Hat" in '66. If you de-hyphenate "brand-new," which is common in current
writing, it has as many words as "It Takes a Lot..."
--
- Ron Mura, Boston, Massachusetts rm...@world.std.com
Sorabh Saxena; Masters
(Jack Lynch) writes:
|> jules n. binoculas (p00...@psilink.com) wrote:
|>
|> JNB: -- _you're gonna make me lonesome when you go_.
|> is this dylan's longest title? (i.e., most letters, most
|> words)?
|>
|> The best I can come up with is "Most Likely You Go Your Way
|> and I'll Go Mine" for number of words, and "Stuck Inside of
|> Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" for number of letters.
What about, "It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry?"
Sorabh
*******************************************************************************
"Maybe what's most surprising about Bob Dylan is that once you
connect with his vision, everything he says makes sense." - Bill Flanagan
Sorabh Saxena
1017, Howland Square,
Baltimore,MD-21227
Phone No (H):(410)-536-4931
(O):(410)-455-3545
R...@ula.cam.ac.uk
>concert? There's "Yes, I Can See You Got Your Brand-new
>Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat" in '66. If you de-hyphenate
>"brand-new," which is common in current writing, it has as
>many words as "It Takes a Lot..."
"This is call, this is called, "Yes I... This is uh, this is
called, "Yes I See You Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-
Box Hat". [Guitar pause, then cheers] Rhythmic hand
clapping, shouting and whistling (with stage voices in the
background) is broken up by "One, two, three" and The Band
is underway again. -- Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England,
17 May 1966. [151]
John Howells
What about"
"I Don't Believe You, It Used To Be Like That and Now It Goes Like
This".
--
Marc E. Stein
Okay, enough about song title with most letters, how about song
title with fewest letters. Having given this less than ten
seconds thought myself (why take all the fun out of it?), I
nominate "I & I", written like that. Anybody got a better one?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Marc Stein
Sybase New York Professional Services
mst...@sybase.com
saf
> rm...@world.std.com (Ron Mura) writes:
...or
"Hanging On To A Solid Rock Made Before The Foundation Of The World"
Pretty darn close,
steve *************************************************
s...@hiwa61.com * "Ah...memories, memories. *
* Where is that brain damage they promised us? *
* - Hunter S. Thompson *
*************************************************
Mark Kaunisto
You may be right, but "Dirge" I believe is the one with fewest phonemes!
;-)
(I decided to change the title of this posting, as the subject doesn't seem
to have anything to do with "summer reading" anymore.)
-- Mark ("There are a whole lotta irrelevants in the
circus." - Chico Marx)
Steve Michel
>Okay, enough about song title with most letters, how about song
>title with fewest letters. Having given this less than ten
>seconds thought myself (why take all the fun out of it?), I
>nominate "I & I", written like that. Anybody got a better one?
If spaces count, then "Sara" is shorter.
dit...@tigger.stcloud.msus.edu
> <2qlibm$r...@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>
>Date: Mon, 9 May 1994 19:13:09 GMT
>Lines: 28
Talkin' Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Disaster Blues. I havent counted the
letters but it looks close. I guess this discussion is getting pretty
theoretical.....
.
Ditlev S. Larsen
Denmark/currently St. Cloud State University, Minnesota