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Joey Ramone sings John Cage (and it’s awesome)
01.13.2015
10:45 am
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I’m far from an expert on John Cage, but of the works of his I know, I find “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” to be among the loveliest. Since it’s short, simple to perform, and its haunting melody is easier on the listener than a lot of other 20th Century classical music, it’s one of his most oft-performed works, as well, and YouTube is full of fantastic versions. Cage composed it in 1942, limiting the vocalist to three notes and further instructing him/her to sing in a flat affect, avoiding vibrato. The musical accompaniment was written for a piano with the lid shut on its keys, the pianist directed to make percussive taps with his/her fingertips and knuckles in various places on the piano’s outside, including the bottom. This video shows that process quite clearly, and here’s what the notation looks like:
 

 
Musicologist Lauriejean Reinhardt had much to say in her illuminating essay on the history and meaning of the piece. (If this stuff doesn’t interest you and you just want to hear the Joey Ramone rendition, skip all the way to the end, no one has to know.)

Cage composed “The Wonderful Widow” in response to a commission from the soprano Janet Fairbank (1903-1947), whom he had met during his brief appointment at the Chicago Institute of Design in 1941-1942. Fairbank was an ambitious amateur singer from a wealthy family with close ties to the Chicago arts community … Endowed with modest vocal abilities, Fairbank nevertheless endeared herself to critics and advocates of modern music by her tasteful and intelligent performances and her tireless promotion of contemporary music.

Her interest in Cage proved prescient, for the Carnegie Hall recital that occasioned the setting of “The Wonderful Widow” coincided with the composer’s now-famous concert at the Museum of Modern Art, an event that placed the young Cage at the vanguard of modern music.

Evidently given free reign to prepare the song’s lyrics, Cage selected the paean to Isobel from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a passage that not only gave him a theme, and some lines to lift directly, but also the piece’s title. Frankly, I find the sparseness of Cage’s interpretation a relief from the difficult density of Joyce. From Reinhardt again:

Cage’s song text, condensed and rearranged from Joyce’s original, only intensifies the lyrical dimension of the passage, for it highlights both the sylvan imagery with which the child is described (“wildwood’s eyes and primarose hair,” “like some losthappy leaf,” “like blowing flower stilled”) and a number of key alliterative phrases (“in mauves of moss and daphnedews,” “win me, woo me, wed me, ah weary me!”) that give rise to the passage’s lilting lyricism.

Compare Cage’s lyrics below to the passage from Joyce here.

night by silent sailing night,
Isobel,
wildwoods eyes and primarose hair,
quietly,
all the woods so wild
in mauves of moss and daphne dews
how all so still she lay
‘neath of the white thorn,
child of tree
like some lost happy leaf
like blowing flower stilled
as fain would she anon
for soon again ‘twill be,
win me, woo me, wed me,
ah! weary me
deeply,
now even calm lay sleeping
night,
Isobel,
Sister Isobel,
Saintette Isobel,
Madame Isa Veuve La Belle.

 

 
The 1993 compilation Caged/Uncaged - A Rock/Experimental Homage To John Cage features contributions from punk and artrock figures like Lee Ranaldo, Arto Lindsay, Debbie Harry, Lou Reed, Elliot Sharp and Ann Magnuson, and is available to hear and download for free on the wonderful UbuWeb. And on that comp, “The Wonderful Widow Of Eighteen Springs” was performed—stunningly—by Joey Ramone. The timbres of his voice are somehow perfect for this song. It may be that I find the familiarity of his singing comforting, but I think this completely dusts some (SOME) versions by trained operatic singers. It sounds like the percussion is performed here on regular drums instead of a closed piano.

I resignedly anticipate opprobrium from the purists.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.13.2015
10:45 am
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Happy Bloomsday!: Hear James Joyce read from his Modernist classic ‘Ulysses’
06.16.2013
05:11 am
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Today is Bloomsday—the day that commemorates and celebrates the life and works of James Joyce across the world.

Bloomsday is the day on which the events of Joyce’s most famous novel Ulysses take place, June 16th, 1904. This is also the date on which Joyce first stepped out with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, to stroll around the city of Dublin.

To celebrate Bloomsday, here is James Joyce reading Episode Seven: “Aeolus” from Ulysses. This recording was made in 1924, on the insistence of Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare & Co. and publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. As the recording is rather basic, a transcription of the extract is been included of below.

He began.

— Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?
— And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.

FROM THE FATHERS

It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.
— Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
— You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:
— But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

Download James Joyce reading from Ulysses here.
 

 

 
Bonus audio of Joyce reading from ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ plus documentary ‘A Stroll Through Ulysses,’ after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.16.2013
05:11 am
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Books By Their Covers: Oliver Bevan’s Fabulous Op-Art Designs for Fontana Modern Masters

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In 1970, Fontana Books published the first of seven paperback books in a series on what they termed Modern Masters - culturally important writers, philosophers and thinkers, whose work had shaped and changed modern life. It was a bold and original move, and the series launched on January 12th with books on Camus, Chomsky, Fanon, Guevara, Levi-Strauss, Lukacs, and Marcuse.

This was soon followed in 1971 with the next set of books on McLuhan, Orwell, Wittgenstein, Joyce, Freud, Reich and Yeats. And in 1972-73 with volumes on Gandhi, Lenin, Mailer, Russell, Jung, Lawrence, Beckett, Einstein, Laing, and Popper.

Fontana Modern Masters was a highly collectible series of books - not just for their opinionated content on the likes of Marx or Proust, Mailer or McLuhan, but because of Oliver Bevan’s fabulous cover designs.

This eye-catching concept for the covers came from Fontana’s art director, John Constable, who had been experimenting with a Cut-Up technique, inspired by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin and based on The Mud Bath, a key work of British geometric abstraction by the painter David Bomberg. It was only after Constable saw Oliver Bevan’s geometric, Op Art at the Grabowski Gallery in London, did Constable decide to commission Bevan to design the covers.

The first full set of books consisted of nine titles. Each cover had a section of a Bevan painting, which consisted of rectilinear arrangements of tesselating block, the scale of which was only fully revealed when all ten covers were placed together. Bevan designed the first ‘3 sets of 10’ from 1970-74. He was then replaced by James Lowe (1975-79) who brought his own triangular designs for books on Marx, Eliot, Pound, Sartre, Artaud and Gramsci. In 1980, Patrick Mortimer took over, with his designs based on circles.

The original Fontana Modern Masters regularly pop-up in secondhand bookshops, and are still much sought after. Over the years, I have collected about twenty different volumes, but have yet to create one complete painting. Here are a few samples, culled from my own collection and from the the web.
 
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A small selection of Fontana Modern Master covers, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.22.2012
06:52 pm
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Who said it, James Joyce or Kool Keith?
04.12.2012
01:00 pm
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Take the “who said it” Kool Keith vs. James Joyce challenge:

One is the most innovative writer of the 20th century, the other is James Joyce. Can you distinguish between sentences written by the Irish novelist and the lyrics of surrealist rapper Kool Keith?

Via The World’s Best Ever

Posted by Tara McGinley
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04.12.2012
01:00 pm
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James Joyce himself reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake
06.17.2010
01:10 am
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Image via Rodcorp
 
An actual recording of James Joyce himself reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Ulysses. Click here for audio. Via the awesome Ubuweb.

Recording James Joyce by Sylvia Beach

In 1924, 1 went to the office of His Master’s Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses. I was sent to Piero Coppola, who was in charge of musical records, but His Master’s Voice would agree to record the Joyce reading only if it were done at my expense. The record would not have their label on it, nor would it be listed in their catalogue.

Some recordings of writers had been done in England and in France as far back as 1913. Guillaume Apollinaire had made some recordings which are preserved in the archives of the Musée de la Parole. But in 1924, as Coppola said, there was no demand for anything but music. I accepted the terms of His Master’s Voice: thirty copies of the recording to be paid for on delivery. And that was the long and the, short of it.

Joyce himself was anxious to have this record made, but the day I took him in a taxi to the factory in Billancourt, quite a distance from town, he was suffering with his eyes and very nervous. Luckily, he and Coppola were soon quite at home with each other, bursting into Italian to discuss music. But the recording was an ordeal for Joyce, and the first attempt was a failure. We went back and began again, and I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved.

Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.

I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out-“he lifted his voice above it boldly”-it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.

The Ulysses recording was “very bad,” according to my friend C. K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning by Mr. Ogden and I. A. Richards was much in demand at my bookshop. I had Mr. Ogden’s little Basic English books, too, and sometimes saw the inventor of this strait jacket for the English language. He was doing some recording of Bernard Shaw and others at the studio of the Orthological Society in Cambridge and was interested in experimenting with writers, mainly, I suspect, for language reasons. (Shaw was on Ogden’s side, couldn’t see what Joyce was after when there were already more words in the English language than one knew what to do with.) Mr. Ogden boasted that he had the two biggest recording machines in the world at his Cambridge studio and told me to send Joyce over to him for a real recording. And Joyce went over to Cambridge for the recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle.”

So I brought these two together, the man who was liberating and expanding the English language and the one who was condensing it to a vocabulary of five hundred words. Their experiments went in opposite directions, but that didn’t prevent them from finding each other’s ideas interesting. Joyce would have starved on five or six hundred words, but he was quite amused by the Basic English version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” that Ogden published in the review Psyche. I thought Ogden’s “translation” deprived the work of all its beauty; but Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards were the only persons I knew about whose interest in the English language equaled that of Joyce, and when the Black Sun Press published, the little volume Tales Told of Shem and Shaun, I suggested that C.K. Ogden be asked to do the preface.

How beautiful the “Anna Livia” recording is, and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known “Anna Livia” by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again.

Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had “Anna Livia” printed in huge type so that the author-his sight was growing dimmer-could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged. The “Anna Livia” recording was on both sides of the disc; the passage from Ulysses was contained on one. And it was the only recording from Ulysses that Joyce would consent to.

How I regret that, owing to my ignorance of everything pertaining to recording, I didn’t do something about preserving the “master.” This was the rule with such records, I was told, but for some reason the precious “master” of the recording from Ulysses was destroyed. Recording was done in a rather primitive manner in those days, at least at the Paris branch of His Master’s Voice, and Ogden was right, the Ulysses record was not a success technically. All the same, it is the only recording of Joyce himself reading from Ulysses, and it is my favorite of the two.

The Ulysses record was not at all a commercial venture. I handed over most of the thirty copies to Joyce for distribution among his family and friends, and sold none until, years later, when I was hard up, I did set and get a stiff price for one or two I had left.

Discouraged by the experts at the office of the successors to His Master’s Voice in Paris, and those of the B.B.C. in London, I gave up the attempt to have the record “re-pressed “-which I believe is the term. I gave my permission to the B.B.C. to make a recording of my record, the last I possessed, for the purpose of broadcasting it on W. R. Rodger’s Joyce program, in which Andrienne Monnier and I took part.

Anyone who wishes to hear the Ulysses record can do so at the Musée de la Parole in Paris, where, thanks to the suggestion of my California friend Philias Lalanne, Joyce’s reading is preserved among those of some of the great French writers.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.17.2010
01:10 am
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Marilyn Monroe reads James Joyce
06.16.2010
12:47 pm
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And the Bloomsday celebration continues with this 1954 photo by Eve Arnold. From Joyce and Popular Culture, a quote from a letter from Arnold about the day she took the shot:

We worked on a beach on Long Island…I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.

 
Via Steve Silberman

Posted by Brad Laner
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06.16.2010
12:47 pm
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Happy Bloomsday!

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Today, June 16th, being the day, of course, which marks Leopold Bloom‘s epic meanderings through Dublin in James Joyce‘s modernist masterwork, Ulysses.  While those events occurred a whopping 106 years ago, Bloomsday is a still-celebrated event, complete with pub crawls and public readings of the novel.  And if you’re in New York, or even near a radio:

Bloomsday on Broadway, staged annually at Symphony Space since 1981, has a cabal of actors and writers performing scenes from the novel.  This year’s iteration, which will be simulcast on WNYC radio, and Symphony Space, explores the parallels between “Ulysses” and Homer’s “Odyssey.”  Excerpts from both works will be enacted on Wednesday by a cast that includes Stephen Colbert, Ira Glass, Malachy McCourt, Tony Roberts and David Margulies.  Isaiah Sheffer, artistic director of Symphony Space, will host.

“Joyce was a poet of sound; he wasn’t a visual person,” Mr. Sheffer said.  “It’s meant to be read aloud.  The big discovery is that it’s funny.”  Mr. Colbert, who cites Bloomsday on Broadway as one of the reasons he moved to New York, will play Odysseus.  “Performing ‘Ulysses’ on Bloomsday at Symphony Space is the only way I’ll ever finish the damn book,” Mr. Colbert admitted in an e-mail message.  The seven-hour event will culminate with a two-and-a-half-hour uncensored reading of Molly Bloom’s erotic late-night monologue by the actress Fionnula Flanagan.

Last week, I mentioned the recent passing of film director Joseph Strick.  If, say, you have today only a few hours to devote to Joyce, you can check out Strick’s 1967 film version of Ulysses at—why not?—this Chinese video site.

And while footage of the author himself is as hard to come by as that of his fellow Irishman, Samuel Beckett, what follows below is a short clip of Joyce in Paris.  The anecdote relayed by the narrator is worth the watch itself.  “Deal with him, Hemingway, deal with him!”

 
Stream of Conviviality for Leopold Bloom’s Day

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.16.2010
02:45 am
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Tropic of Cancer: the movie

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Saddened to see last week the passing of underrated film director Joseph Strick.  You might not know the name, but there can be little doubt you’re familiar with some of the books he adapted into films.

If you’ve never seen his take on James Joyce’s Ulysses, it’s definitely worth checking out—if only for the rather graceful way Strick handles the closing monologue of Molly Bloom.  It was banned in Ireland for 33 years, but now, thanks to Chinese video site, Youku, you can stream the entire ‘67 film here.

Ulysses wasn’t the only 20th Century modernist classic the director would try to wrestle into submission.  Two years later, Strick brought to the screen Henry Miller‘s Tropic of Cancer.

While Miller’s initial hopes for the project ran high (in a letter to the Hungarian photographer, Brassaï, Miller wrote, “The film of Tropic of Cancer will be definitively produced and directed by Joseph Strick, who made Ulysses.  He’ll do it the same way.  No castration, no modification.  Bravo for him, I say!”), he was ultimately saddened that in no way would the production budget allow for a faithful recreation of Paris in the 30’s.  Hired as a consultant on the film, Miller’s visit to the set would be the last time the author set foot in Paris.

While Tropic of Cancer had Rip Torn as Miller, a definitely sexy Ellyn Burstyn as Mona, and incorporated generous portions of the novel into its voiceover, the film never had much of a chance to reach an audience.  It opened to middling reviews, and, more damaging, with an X rating (it’s since been rated NC-17).  Long available, to my knowledge, on bootlegs only, its opening moments follow below:

 
Joseph Strick, Who Filmed the Unfilmable, Dies at 86

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.10.2010
08:45 pm
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