Great new look to the CW. I love it, and love this idea of sharing comments regarding creative experiences, etc. I've been working on a new book of poetry and prose, and trying to finish another book about the history of modern poetries, which I had originally started with Homer, and then I realized, literature predates Homer, too. Though Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare had never heard of The Epic of Gilgamesh, since it wasn't rediscovered until mid 19th century, and took decades to decipher, and much of it has still not been deciphered, but such as it is, I've fallen into the quicksand pit of Gilgamesh, Sumerian & Akkadian & Babylonian literature. Anyone interested in reading Gilgamesh, here's a few translations–or renderings–I would recommend. Having read it 30 years ago, I still favor the John Gardner version (he also wrote Grendal, and On Moral Fiction, two books I also highly recommend), but Stephen Mitchell has a recent translation that is also wonderful (Mitchell also translated Book of Job and what? I can't remember now. Also, for Gilgamesh fans, there's THE BURIED BOOK: the Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, written by David Damrosch. Who knows, maybe eventually, Gilgamesh will become a hit sit-com. Anyway, kudo's to Adam and the new look of the Weekly, and a chance for us creative turpentine bungaloes to yell for water as we cross the desert looking for signs of life.
The writer — or painter, or poet, or filmmaker — stands between the silence and life's cacophony listening to his or her own heart. From Gilgamesh to Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the question confronting us is always the same: How does one find meaning in chaos? The art we create is essential because it preserves what matters and helps us better understand the human experience. Sumeria, with all its political intrigue, war and peace, has slipped into obscurity. Yet Gilgamesh remains.
Lori Zimmerman
January 8th, 2012 at 7:50 PM
I love eating breakfast while reading the Sunday paper and I live in Los Angeles and am on a budget so today it was the Los Angeles Times. After so many years you learn how to fold the paper just so, in order to read it comfortably on your left side while allowing enough room for the plate on your right. While rationing bites and word, in order that they end at the same time, I came across a wonderful piece by Pico Iyer called “Why we need long sentences.”
Long sentences are as much about investigating and expressing the subtleties and ambiguities of life as they are about style and grammar. Here is a tidbit from Pico Iyer, ”Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).
One of the great wonders of long sentences is their ability to convey the richness and complexity of the human condition. There is an intriguing nexus between what you are saying here and the post by Ulli K. Ryder found in Conversations under "Technologies" where she underscores what is lost on the "Tumblr-Twitter-Facebook-YouTube-iPhone Generation." The ability to think, interconnect, relate, and discuss in depth is daily being eroded by the reduction imposed by technology. Speed and brevity trump reason. And ideas are reduced to sound bytes. The tragic notion that if it can't be said in 140 characters, it's not worth saying is a destructive concept. With apologies to T.S. Elliot:
"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a Twitter."
maybellcottage
January 20th, 2012 at 6:15 PM
Sign of life, another turpentine bungles on the wedge hair of goddess dreams, thankfully we aren't in 1984 yet, although I wonder reading the cover of the New York Times. The thing we still have is the private life and if we feel like reading a book all day we CAN, with no telescreens, no crime thought, no double speak. It is OURS, to savor and enjoy, thankfully, it's all in the writing and even if we fall down the Rabbit hole of Akkadian literature and jump over to ITUNES to download Philip Glass music of Akhnatan, the man of religion, which has nothing to do with Akkadian literature, I think, we can still glow out the ordinary and relish in the writing, the writing, the writing.
9P, going up, just as I hoped for in the midst of the gloom of the rain soaked Monday. Oh Goodie, there is so much good art in LA, my head is swimming. Check my comment on THE COLBURN SCHOOL under music.
Share your creative experiences about literature, writing and poetry by entering a comment below.
Comments (6)
Jack Grapes
January 2nd, 2012 at 10:54 PM
Great new look to the CW. I love it, and love this idea of sharing comments regarding creative experiences, etc. I've been working on a new book of poetry and prose, and trying to finish another book about the history of modern poetries, which I had originally started with Homer, and then I realized, literature predates Homer, too. Though Virgil and Dante and Shakespeare had never heard of The Epic of Gilgamesh, since it wasn't rediscovered until mid 19th century, and took decades to decipher, and much of it has still not been deciphered, but such as it is, I've fallen into the quicksand pit of Gilgamesh, Sumerian & Akkadian & Babylonian literature. Anyone interested in reading Gilgamesh, here's a few translations–or renderings–I would recommend. Having read it 30 years ago, I still favor the John Gardner version (he also wrote Grendal, and On Moral Fiction, two books I also highly recommend), but Stephen Mitchell has a recent translation that is also wonderful (Mitchell also translated Book of Job and what? I can't remember now. Also, for Gilgamesh fans, there's THE BURIED BOOK: the Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, written by David Damrosch. Who knows, maybe eventually, Gilgamesh will become a hit sit-com. Anyway, kudo's to Adam and the new look of the Weekly, and a chance for us creative turpentine bungaloes to yell for water as we cross the desert looking for signs of life.
Garner Simmons
January 4th, 2012 at 5:02 PM
The writer — or painter, or poet, or filmmaker — stands between the silence and life's cacophony listening to his or her own heart. From Gilgamesh to Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the question confronting us is always the same: How does one find meaning in chaos? The art we create is essential because it preserves what matters and helps us better understand the human experience. Sumeria, with all its political intrigue, war and peace, has slipped into obscurity. Yet Gilgamesh remains.
Lori Zimmerman
January 8th, 2012 at 7:50 PM
I love eating breakfast while reading the Sunday paper and I live in Los Angeles and am on a budget so today it was the Los Angeles Times. After so many years you learn how to fold the paper just so, in order to read it comfortably on your left side while allowing enough room for the plate on your right. While rationing bites and word, in order that they end at the same time, I came across a wonderful piece by Pico Iyer called “Why we need long sentences.”
Long sentences are as much about investigating and expressing the subtleties and ambiguities of life as they are about style and grammar. Here is a tidbit from Pico Iyer, ”Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying "Open wider" so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it's not the mouth that he's attending to but the mind).
For more: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/l…
Garner Simmons
January 11th, 2012 at 4:17 AM
One of the great wonders of long sentences is their ability to convey the richness and complexity of the human condition. There is an intriguing nexus between what you are saying here and the post by Ulli K. Ryder found in Conversations under "Technologies" where she underscores what is lost on the "Tumblr-Twitter-Facebook-YouTube-iPhone Generation." The ability to think, interconnect, relate, and discuss in depth is daily being eroded by the reduction imposed by technology. Speed and brevity trump reason. And ideas are reduced to sound bytes. The tragic notion that if it can't be said in 140 characters, it's not worth saying is a destructive concept. With apologies to T.S. Elliot:
"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a Twitter."
maybellcottage
January 20th, 2012 at 6:15 PM
Sign of life, another turpentine bungles on the wedge hair of goddess dreams, thankfully we aren't in 1984 yet, although I wonder reading the cover of the New York Times. The thing we still have is the private life and if we feel like reading a book all day we CAN, with no telescreens, no crime thought, no double speak. It is OURS, to savor and enjoy, thankfully, it's all in the writing and even if we fall down the Rabbit hole of Akkadian literature and jump over to ITUNES to download Philip Glass music of Akhnatan, the man of religion, which has nothing to do with Akkadian literature, I think, we can still glow out the ordinary and relish in the writing, the writing, the writing.
maybellcottage
January 23rd, 2012 at 6:17 PM
9P, going up, just as I hoped for in the midst of the gloom of the rain soaked Monday. Oh Goodie, there is so much good art in LA, my head is swimming. Check my comment on THE COLBURN SCHOOL under music.
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