Wednesday, November 15, 2017

WHAT WRITING MIGHT BE

Sound Track
(Nothing to see and no words so just let it play while you read on)
Julian Bream plays Lute Music from the courts of Europe
(29 minutes)



Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea"
(Sonnet 65)
by William Shakespeare





Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
~*~


"Nocturns"
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Just completed listening to the book on audio CDs having had a most engaging and satisfying experience with it for several days.
"Nocturnes" is a series of novellas that pick up on themes of aging, memory and music. Here, in an ABC Fora first, Kazuo Ishiguro is beamed live via satellite to the Sydney Writers' Festival where he chats about his life with Sandra Yates.
(7 minute Interview)
https://youtu.be/kXLC0v0Ah7U

Kazuo Ishiguro was born November 8,1954 and is best known for haunting, elegiac novels like Remains of the Day (1989), about an English butler working in a big house in the years before World War II, which won the Booker Prize. Ishiguro was born in Japan but moved to England at the age of five (1960). He didn’t go back for 29 years. Ishiguro says: “I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie. In England, I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan.” As a child in England, he pored over comic books and was obsessed with movies about cowboys and the American West, which influenced his later writing.  He spent a gap year after university hitchhiking through America and working for the Queen Mother as a grouse beater in Balmoral, all the while hauling around his portable typewriter and guitar. He says, “I tried to be a songwriter, but the door never opened.” He decided to write a 30-minute radio play called Potatoes and Lovers, about two young people working in a fish-and-chips joint. They are both cross-eyed, and they fall in love. It was an odd plot, but he used it to apply to graduate school in creative writing, and he got in. His first novel, A Pale View of the Hills (1982), was published to international acclaim. Ishiguro’s novels include An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Buried Giant (2015), and The Unconsoled (1995), a 500-page book narrated by a pianist — a book that one critic said “invented its own category of badness.” It’s now considered a classic. On his writing, he says: “You can think of me like an early aviator before airplanes were properly invented. I’m building some sort of flying machine in my back garden. I just need it to fly. And you know how odd some of those early flying machines looked? Well, my novels are a bit like that. I put them together out of anything I can think of according to my thinking to make the thing fly.”
~*~
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this year.
~*~
Interview about writing with Charlie Rose
February 2017
(25 Minutes)
https://youtu.be/RohhPLfXWfE


2 comments:

Mo Crow said...

what a beautiful metaphor for the creative process

jude said...

such great stuff here Michelle...