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 Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 9:17 am Post subject: |
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Brazil
Paperback
By John Updike
Based on the tragic romance of Tristan and Iseult
| Quote: | | Uncle Donaciano rooted his ebony-and-ivory cigarette holder - empty, since he was trying to stop smoking, and used the holder to pacify his habit - deeper in the side of his mouth, giving his lips a sage and sinister twist. His lips were thin but ruddy, as if freshly scrubbed. "The hands of the many would tear everything up," he explained. "Even so, the Rio of my youth has been turned into one big slum. So beautiful it was, so amusing - the tram along the Botanical Garden, the cable car to Santa Teresa, the Casino where Bing Crosby would come and sing. So quaint and charming, like an exotic piece of Venetian glass, unique. Now, in the shell of its beauty, it has gone rotten. There is no air, there is no silence. All the time, traffic noise and music, the music of the brainless samba; everywhere, the stink of human secretians. Everywhere, bodum." (From iii. Uncle Donaciano, p. 23) |
| Quote: | | The couple held hands stickily in the growing heat, dozing alternately. Tristao had spent the night stretched on a bench in the bus terminal, fearful of being robbed, his arms entwined with his knapsack straps, his bundle of cruzeiros tucked against his lower belly, behind the pocket of his bathing shorts where the razor blade waited to be unsheathed. The terminal lights were bright and a small local group seemed to use it as a gaming club, slapping down domino tiles and shrieking as they rolled the dice, playing bozo. He had slept for ten minutes at a time and kept waking as the straps cut off circulation in his arms. Isabel had lain awake in her bleak room at the end of the gently curved hall, listening to the tall thin manservant and his fat wife slowly settle to sleep. She stared at the angles of the room she had adorned with a college student's posters and records and books, books whose broad spines stared back at her in the moonlight, reproaching her with desertion. At five she rose and stealthily packed two blue suitcases, made her way down the hall, and trusted that the security man in the lobby would be stretched out behind his desk asleep. With her heavy two suitcases on the streets she looked like one more hopeful immigrant to the capital, come to find government work, rather than a fleeing child of privilege. She took a taxi to the bus terminal, where whe shared with Tristao a cheap breakfast of coffee and pupunha and bread and cheese. This time as a couple, they promised each other, they would be more economical than in Sao Paulo. (From XV. Goias, at pgs. 111-112) |
| Quote: | | For some hours they shared the rocking vehicle, its hard floor softened by a strewing of old sugar canes, with three other passengers, mestizo garimpeiros or parasites upon the gamimpeiros, who marvelled at Isabel's bright white hair and her two blue suitcases, as weighty with clothes as if loaded with stones. They assumed she was going to work on the mountain as a prostitute and that Tristao was a curious cross between her slave and her protector. They joked about her price, speculating that the arrival of such luxuries betokened an upturn in the luck of Serra do Buraco. There advances became sufficiently physical - a dark hand reaching to caress the shimmering faint fur on her forearm - that Tristao seized the nearest of the three and struck him a blow in the face, as calmly as if tightening a bolt on a fusca engine support. The man mumblingly called him nigger and cur but slumped back among his two companions, caressing the bloody gum above a tooth the blow had loosened. He had lost several front teeth already, to combat or decay. "We are going to test our luck with the gods of gold," Tristao explained, as if to apologize. She showed them the folded papers of the claim. (From XVI. The Mine, at pgs. 123-124) |
The Capilano Review
Magazine Subscription
Tristram's Book
By an otherwise unreadable Frostback, Brian Fawcett
No. 19 (1981)
| Quote: | A lousy bargain I was given
Tristram sad in exile
in return for an eternal love.
Sadness takes the comfort from home
no love is possible
to have and hold
without home. Taken
from me, given
in return
this eternal return
looking for you where no love
can thrive. This
is the first forest
I lost you in.
(-- p. 13) |
From the Will to Win:
| Quote: | Only a fool believes a single fire
can burn down a whole forest.
Yet in the face of ordinary logic, love
is a torch in the hand
of a pyromaniac. Or is it ordinary logic
in the face of love.
Between these, ordinary lovers hold hands
and build small fires to keep their love alive
believing in small fires and the existence
of the whole forest.
In the face of which
despite love and logic
it begins to rain.
(-- p. 28) |
The movie:
| Quote: | Tristan and Isolde
DVD
The danger in a production based on this story is in casting the character of King Marke such that he is more compelling than the romantic lead, Tristan, precisely what's happened here with Rufus Sewell. Never good, that. Sound also a big problem here. Marke, at least, enunciates. |
| Quote: | Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner
Wowsers! An excellent starter for an Italian opera fan hoping to uncover a latent appreciation for Nazi favorite, Wagner. This production looks as good as it sounds. A triumph! |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4205#4205 |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 11:50 am Post subject: |
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Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Story
Little Drops of Water
By Kurt Vonnegut
June, 2009
| Quote: | ... There was Edith Vranken, the Schenectady brewer's daughter who wanted to sing; Janice Gurnee, the Indianapolis hardware merchant's daughter who wanted to sing; Beatrix Werner, the Milwaukee consulting engineer's daughter who wanted to sing; and Ellen Sparks, the Buffalo wholesale grocer's daughter who wanted to sing.
I met these attractive young ladies - one by one and in the sequence named - in Larry's (baritone Larry Whiteside's) studio, or what anyone else would call apartment. Larry adds to his revenues as a soloist by giving voice lessons to rich and pretty young women who want to sing. While Larry is soft as a hot fudge sundae, he is big and powerful looking, like a college-bred lumberjack, if there is such a thing, or a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman. His voice, of course, gives the impression that he could powder rocks between his thumb and foreginger. His pupils inevitably fell in love with him. If you ask how they loved him, I can onlyreply with another question: Where in the cycle do you mean? If you mean at the beginning, Larry was loved as a father pro tem. Later he was loved as a benevolent task master, and finally as a lover.
After that came what Larry and his friends came to call graduation, which, in fact, had nothing to do with the pupil's status as a singer, and had everything to do with the cycle of affections. The cue for graduation was the pupil's overt use of the word marriage.
Larry was something of a Bluebeard, and, may I say, a lucky dog while his luck held. |
Previously unpublished fiction, coming October, 2009:
Watch the Birdie
Hardcover
By Kurt Vonnegut
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=4375#4375 |
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