Thoughts on Waves

Background, context, and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/09/sylvia-plath-spoken-word-tulips-bbc/

Sylvia Plath reads "Tulips": A Rare BBC Recording

Background and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/17/billy-collins-reads-marginalia

POEM TEXT

Billy Collins reads "Marginalia"

Background, poem text, and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/09/charles-bukowski-reads-friendly-advice-to-a-lot-of-young-men/

Charles Bukowski reads his "Friendly Advice To A Lot Of Young Men"

Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/interactionofcolor

Background, context, and discussion <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/16/interaction-of-color-josef-albers-50th-anniversary/">here</a>.

Josef Albers and the art of seeing

Background and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/24/mary-oliver-reads-wild-geese/

Recorded by the Lannan Foundation in 2001.

DETAILS / POEM TEXT

Mary Oliver reads "Wild Geese"

Mary Oliver reads from her exquisite collection 'Blue Horses.' Background, poem text, and context here: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/mary-oliver-blue-horses-fourth-sign-of-the-zodiac/

Excerpted from https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/sets/mary-oliver-listening-to-the

MORE/TEXT

Mary Oliver reads from Blue Horses

The acclaimed actors Helena Bonham Carter, Bill Nighy, Tom Hiddleston and Harry Enfield bring poems alive with the iF Poem iPhone/iPad App. 10% of all sales goes to the Save The Children Charity.


The iF Poems App is available here on iTunes:
For the iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems/id474446630?mt=8
For the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems-for-the-iphone/id476329476?mt=8

For more information, visit us on our website:
http://ifpoems.com/

Bill Nighy - If - (Go to our iTunes link to download more audio!)

The acclaimed actors Helena Bonham Carter, Bill Nighy, Tom Hiddleston and Harry Enfield bring poems alive with the iF Poem iPhone/iPad App. 10% of all sales goes to the Save The Children Charity.

The iF Poems App is available here on iTunes: 
For the iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems/id474446630?mt=8 
For the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems-for-the-iphone/id476329476?mt=8

For more information, visit us on our website: 
http://ifpoems.com/

Tom Hiddleston - If Music Be The Food of Love - (Download our app for more audio!)

The acclaimed actors Helena Bonham Carter, Bill Nighy, Tom Hiddleston and Harry Enfield bring poems alive with the iF Poem iPhone/iPad App. 10% of all sales goes to the Save The Children charity.

The iF Poems App is available here on iTunes: 
For the iPad: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems/id474446630?mt=8 
For the iPhone: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/if-poems-for-the-iphone/id476329476?mt=8

For more information, visit us on our website: 
http://ifpoems.com/

Tom Hiddleston - Bright Star - (Download our app for more audio!)

Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious april walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds' irregular babel
And the leaves' litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower;
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then! --
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock; each sentiment within border,
And heart's frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.

But here -- a burgeoning
Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motley --
A treason not to be borne; let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.

Sylvia Plath reading Spinster

Late Night Tales: Friendly Fires presents Benedict Cumberbatch - Flat Of Angles (Part 1); a spoken word piece.


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Buy the compilation

Benedict Cumberbatch reads Flat Of Angles [Part 1] (Late Night Tales: Friendly Fires)

Narration: Virginia Woolf, from BBC radio broadcast (“Craftmanship”), 29 April 1937

Duration: 9:50

Instrumentation: chamber orchestra (1-1-1-1, horn, harp,
piano, 2-2-2-2-1), tape, and electronics

Written for Royal Academy of Music Performers
Michael Alexander Young, Conductor

A Eulogy to Words is a multi-media composition for chamber orchestra, pre-recorded electronics, and tape, featuring the audio document of Virginia Woolf’s BBC Broadcast from 29 April 1937 (“Craftmanship” from a part of series called “Words Fail Me”). The Society of Authors in London, who hold rights and ownership of this document, had granted permission for me to use this recording in my composition. A Eulogy to Words was premiered at the Royal Academy of Music’s Composers Platform concert on 21 November, 2012. Below is the transcript from the surviving audio file:

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.

You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you’d pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-‐lectured, un-‐criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-‐teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-‐a-‐million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride
and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-‐roving, a-‐roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-‐conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans.

They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-‐sided, and they convey it by being many-‐sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive.   Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

A Eulogy to Words

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/18/tolstoy-reading-rare-1909-recording/

The fascinating story of A Calendar of Wisdom, with selected highlights: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/15/a-calendar-of-wisdom-tolstoy/

Leo Tolstoy reads from "A Calendar of Wisdom," 1909

The second part of the four-part Late Night Tales story 'Flat of Angles', written by Simon Cleary and read by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Order: http://latenighttales.co.uk/product.php/200/r-yksopp-late-night-tales
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/late-night-tales-royksopp/id643663833

The new edition of Late Night Tales journeys to Scandinavia to invite Norwegian duo Röyksopp to delve through their record collection. Their Late Night Tales mix is eclectic, diverse and wonderful. Sliding from light folk to widescreen ambience to experimental rock to prog-pop (seasoned with the occasional guilty pleasure); it’s all in the spirit of the night.

Following the exclusive introduction track 'Daddy's Groove', Rare Bird's beautiful 1975 B-side'Passing Through' then leads into Australian supergroup Little River Band. The first of several delicate folk moments, it's joined by the ever soulful John Martyn. There's a strong representation of alternative European sounds. Röyksopp mine deep and wide to unearth the rare and unusual German psych-pop of Richard Schneider Jnr (featuring none other than Can's Jaki Leibezeit on drums), France's unique F.R. David and the new age melodies of Switzerland's Andreas Vollenweider - it's pop Jim, but not as we know it. There are also the more familiar names of XTCand Thomas Dolby, as well as Röyksopp's exclusive cover of Depeche Mode's 'Ice Machine' and brand new track opening Daddys Groove. The music draws to a close with goth-dream-pop 4ADfounders The Mortal Coil's Emmylou Harris cover 'Till I Can Gain Control Again'; blending into a cinematic moment from German electronic avant-garde band Popol Vuh, contributing to the soundtrack of Werner Herzog's 1972 movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The second part of theBenedict Cumberbatch narrated story 'Flat of Angles' closes time on this coolly individual edition of Late Night Tales.

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Benedict Cumberbatch reads Flat Of Angles (Part 2)

T.S. Eliot reads from his celebrated classic, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/04/t-s-eliot-reads-t-s-eliot-the-ad-dressing-of-cats-1947/

Thoughts on Waves

kimiberr