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Showing posts from March, 2025

Bill Porter South of the Yangtze quotes

" Yuehyang Tower . China had three such towers dating back nearly two thousand years. The other two were in Wuhan and Nanchang. The one in Yuehyang was the smallest of the three. It was only fifteen meters high. But it was a better place to watch the sunset than the other two, both of which now look out over polluted cities." From South of the Yangtze by Bill Porter P.82: Yu Po-ya was one of ancient China's most famous musicians, but he never felt his music was truly appreciated until the day he met Chung Tzu-ch'i. One day around 1000 BC, when Po-ya was playing his zither on this very terrace overlooking the place where the Han River joins the Yangtze, a wood collector stopped to listen. The wood collector's name was Chung Tzu-ch'i. When Po-ya was done playing, Tzu-ch'i described to Po-ya what the musician had been thinking about while he played. Po-ya was so impressed the two became fast friends despite belonging to very different social classes. Years l...

I find myself reading Magic Mountain

I don't watch every episode, but I like Strange Lucidity  YouTube channel. I don't know her name. She's a European literature student, Austrian, and goes to France at some point. She speaks in English, and read a little of the German just for a small taste to hear it for her English speaking audience. She has a sweet demeanor. She worked with people with disabilities, if I remember correctly. Anyway, she gave an introduction, and gives her email address. So I'm going to try and read this book. Kickoff video on YouTube .  She prefers the John E. Woods translation to the other.  The Magic Mountain was published in 1924, and I missed the centennial last year.  Thomas Mann lived 1875-1955. He lived a life of a repressed homosexual married to a woman.  First he studied sciences, then history, economics, art history and literature for journalism. Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933 except he lived in Palestrina Italy for a year with his novelist broth...

Rafael Alberti

Rafael Alberti (1902-1999) was born in Cadiz. His grandfathers were Italian. He had a Spanish grandmother and an Irish grandmother. They were vintners. Handing the business down, the family sold some businesses they shouldn't have, and his father was a traveling salesman for the company.  Interesting moment in his childhood, he was kicked out of school, but his family moves to Madrid in 2017 when he is 15 and he was spared the shame of being kicked out of a school. In Madrid he neglected his studies to go to museums and paint, and he seemed to be becoming a painter, but when his father died, a matador died, and the novelist  Benito Pérez Galdós died, he felt compelled to write poems.  In 1921 he begins to write poetry, he's published first in 1922. His first book of poems in 1925 wins the poetry award. Many big poets came alive and published in 1927, called generation 1927 , and he was one of them (See list below).  He gets a job working for the communist party tha...