The oscillation between humour and drama (Paul Auster)

"Life is both tragic and funny, both absurd and profoundly meaningful. More or less unconsciously, I've tried to embrace this double aspect of experience in the stories I've written – both novels and screenplays. I feel it's the most honest, most truthful way of looking at the world, and when I think of some of the writers I like best – Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett – they all turn out to be masters of combining the light with the dark, the strange with the familiar. The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a very curious story. A story about a man who writes a story about a man who writes a story – and the story inside the story, the film we watch from the moment Martin wakes up to find Claire sleeping beside him to the moment Martin stops typing and looks out the window, is so wild and implausible, so crazy and unpredictable, that without some doses of humour, it would have been unbearably heavy. At the same time, I think the funny bits underscore the pathos of Martin's situation. The tire scene, for example. The viewer knows that Claire has just left the car and run off into the woods, and here comes Martin pushing a tire down the road, unaware that the woman he loves has just disappeared – and suddenly the tire gets away from him. It's classic silent comedy: man versus object. He runs after the tire – only to have it bounce off a stone and knock him to the ground. Funny, but also pathetic. The same goes for Fortunato, with all his weird comments, bad jokes, and ridiculous short stories. He shows up when Martin is at his most abject, suffering over the loss of Claire, and amusing as I find this character to be, his presence underscores the powerful loneliness that has enveloped Martin."

– Paul Auster, in an interview which Céline Curiol conducted with him on August 22, 2006, to be found in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 16).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

"Tu was du liebst, und liebe was du tust": Ray Bradbury im Gespräch

Photo by Alan Light 1975

"Ich wache jeden Tag auf und sage, heute ist schon wieder Weinachten: ich bin am Leben, und kann schreiben." (Ray Bradbury)

Ray Bradbury, am 22. August 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois (USA) geboren, nähert sich bald seinem 90.ten Geburtstag. Als Denis Scheck ihn nach seinem Rezept für ein erfülltes Leben fragte, entgegnete Bradbury, u. a., mit folgendem Rat: "Tust du was du liebst? (...) Wenn nicht, dann ändere das, sofort."

Auf Deutsch liegt sein Werk im Verlag Diogenes vor.

"Ich glaube nicht an Lehrer, ich glaube an Bibliotheken." (Ray Bradbury)

Die vollständige Deutschlandfunk (DLF) Sendung vom 27.11.2008, aus deren "Büchermarkt" Reihe (Sendezeit 16:10 - 16:30 Uhr, täglich!), kann man unter www.dradio als PODCAST anhören:
Podcast - Ray Bradbury im Gespräch mit Denis Scheck

"Ich habe mehr Freunde durch Automobilunglücke verloren, als durch Kriege." (Ray Bradbury)

WEITERE LINKS:
Official Ray Bradbury author site
Ray in conversation in his L.A. home (videos)
Wikipedia entry (English)
Wikipedia Eintrag (Deutsch) mit Auswahl-Bibliographie
Ray Bradbury bei Diogenes Verlag
Ingrid Mylo über ihre Begenung mit Ray Bradbury

Writing can certainly be dangerous (Paul Auster)

Céline Curiol: (...) Do you think writing is a dangerous weapon. Can it kill?

Paul Auster: Writing can certainly be dangerous. Dangerous for the reader – if something is powerful enough to change his view of the world – and dangerous for the writer. Think of how many writers were murdered by Stalin: Osip Mandelstam, Isac Babel, untold others. Think of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Think of all the imprisoned writers in the world today. But can writing kill? No, not literally. A book isn't a machine gun or an electric chair. And yet, strange things sometimes happen that make you stop and wonder. The case of the French writer Louis-René des Fôrets, for instance. I first heard about it when I was living in Paris in the early seventies, and it haunted me so much that I wound up incorporating it into one of my novels years later, Oracle Night. Des Fôrets was a promising young writer in the fifties who had published one novel and one collection of stories. Then he wrote a narrative poem in which a child drowns in the sea. Not long after the book was published, his own child drowned. There might not have been any rational link between the imaginary death and the real death, but des Fôrets was so shattered by the experience that he stopped writing for decades. A terrible story. It's not hard to understand how he felt.

– Paul Auster, interviewed by Céline Curiol in 2006, excerpt taken from the interview that precedes the screenplay in The Inner Life of Martin Frost by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007, page 18).

LINKS:
Paul Auster Bio & Bibliography - Wikipedia

Pebbles in Ice (George Mackay Brown / Gunnie Moberg)

© Gunnie Moberg, Stromness, Orkney (from Orkney: Pictures and Poems, 1996)


Pebbles in Ice

A glacier dragged us
All the way from the north.

Did he dump us like a dustman?

No, he dropped us
Here, from his hand, like a
jeweller.

© George Mackay Brown (from Orkney: Pictures and Poems, 1996)


Little could Gunnie Moberg know, that Orkney: Pictures and Poems would become the swan song of the poet with whom she'd already collaborated on several book projects in the 1980s, when she asked him, in the mid-nineties, if he would write short captions for those photographs that were to be gathered together for a new book accompaning a retrospective exhibition at Piers Arts Centre in Stromness.

His reply, that he thought he could find something to say about them, turned out to be quite an understatement...

Over a period of about half a year, both looked at a display of the pictures set up in his sitting room together. All this time, she had no idea that he was not writing captions, but remarkable poems instead.

The 48 poems, that Brown surprised her with, interact marvelously with Moberg's photographic aptitude at capturing patterns and textures in the natural world. The project turned into a beautiful combination of the word and the visual.

He died before the book was published, but the collaboration was complete, and has been published as Orkney: Pictures and Poems (1996, hardcover and paperback) by Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, Scotland.

GMB was not only a gifted storyteller, but a very perceptive poet as well. The remarkable interaction documented in this book is a moving closure to his life as "the singer of the islands".
He left behind a nourishing and astonishing body of work, a gift that remains well-worth exploring, and that the generations that follow should continue to treasure.

LINKS
Website Colin Baxter Photography Ltd (Publisher of Orkney: Pictures and Poems)

GMB official author site (very good, has an exhaustive bibliography!)

The Independent - Obituary Gunnie Moberg

Shetland News - Obituary Gunnie Moberg

The Times Obituary - Gunnie Moberg

Shags: Mother and Chick (George Mackay Brown / Gunnie Moberg)

© Gunnie Moberg (from Orkney: Pictures and Poems, 1996)


Shags: Mother and Chick

Young one,
You are to thank the artificer of birds always

You have not swan's beauty
Nor kestrel's cruel plummet and strike

Nor lark's broken
Scattering necklace of notes
Along the red west

Nor duck's clown procession
From barn to farmyard

Nor gull's blizzarding
After ploughs and fishing boats.

To be a cormorant
Is to sit on a sea rock
A lean dark tide-watcher;
Of passing interest
To photographer and poet only.

© George Mackay Brown (from Orkney: Pictures and Poems, 1996)


Gun Margoth ("Gunnie") Moberg and George Mackay Brown published several collaborations in the eighties, among them The Loom of Light in 1986, prior to the publication of Orkney: Pictures and Poems, in 1996.

Moberg, artist and photographer, was born in Göteborg, Sweden on 8 May 1941. She moved to Orkney with her husband Tam MacPhail in 1976. Her substantial body of work included photographs of the people of the islands, as well as landscape and wildlife photography. She died in Stromness, Orkney on 31 October 2007.

"Her pictures reflected the stark beauty of their wind-stripped landscapes and wave-scoured stones. In images of a ruined neolithic village outlined by driven snow, of white geese teetering across an expanse of grey ice, of a green field cut geometrically by the pencil-black shadow of a lighthouse and by a line of pale sheep glowing in the setting sun, she achieved an almost Japanese spareness of pattern and colour. (...) what marked her out was the way she caught the patterns made by treeless hillsides and jagged coastlines, and used the low, rapidly changing, northern light — a nightmare for most photographers — as confidently as a studio lamp." (Excerpts from The Times, November 9, 2007 obituary)

Brown was born on 17 October 1921 in Stromness, where he died on 13 April 1996. As poet, author and dramatist, he spent most of his life in his native islands and from them drew most of his inspiration. He was deeply interested in history and archaeology and immersed himself in the traditions and myths of the islands. He also drew upon the Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga, especially in novels and short stories. His collections of essays include reflections of life in the Orkneys and on the history of the islands.
Several books also collect those observations from the weekly column that he wrote in The Orcadian for several decades, thus he has become a chronicler of life of these Scottish islands in more than one way, in his battle against loss of traditions and memory. Even several official tourist guides to Stromness and the Orkney Islands boast texts of his. He left behind a wealth of work, more than 80 rewarding books, waiting to be explored and cherished.

LINKS
GMB official author site (very good, has an exhaustive bibliography!)

The Independent - Obituary Gunnie Moberg

Shetland News - Obituary Gunnie Moberg

The Times Obituary - Gunnie Moberg

Instruction Pieces No. 7

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 7

1.
The multitude of images continuously projected of God, must turn us all
into television receivers perpetually on the blink,
like so many bullets in a discarded brain.

2.
Are we really all eyes in the same head,
like so many stars perceived as belonging to one firmament?

3.
Or are we, each of us, on loan
from one plane of existence to another reality?

© George H.E. Koehler, 2002

Openness to all forms of being, and to all manner of perception (Henry David Thoreau)

Tolerance accepts plurality:

"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." – Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

LINKS
Various books by Thoreau available online - at Project Gutenberg

The Maine Woods by H. D. Thoreau - available online

Thoreau Biography (Wikipedia)

Instruction Pieces No. 6

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 6

1.
Peddling a broken heart is an indescribable waste
of life energy and time.
Learn to become a mountain;
a mountain always seems to be at peace,
even in the most tormenting environment.

2.
Try to nourish, without striving, like water does.

3.
Securities are imaginings – to hold onto
wishes for a secured life
is living within a dream of life,
and not a real life.

4.
Expect thunder from a quiet sky.

© George H.E. Koehler, 2001

HÖRTIPP: Aufgepaßt, Philip K. Dick Fans! Hörspiele im Dezember

Portrait Philip K. Dicks von Pete Welsch

Den 80.ten Geburtstag des – am 02. März 1982 bereits mit 54 Jahren verstorbenen – eklektischen Schriftstellers, nimmt der Deutschlandfunk zum Anlaß einige radiophonische Zuckungen aus dem conspiracy theory-Universum des PHILIP KINDRED DICK (geboren 16. Dezember 1928) zu wiederholen.

Mit diesen 3 Hörspielen beschert das Dezemberprogramm des DLF seinen Zuhörern einen Jahresausklang mit typisch mißtrauischem Dick'schen Blick auf die Wirklichkeiten, die der Mensch im Stande ist wahr zu nehmen...

Mit der Mitternachtskrimi Sendereihe begleitet der DLF seine Zuhörer bereits seit ca. 4 Jahrzehnten in den Frühmorgen vom Freitag zum Samstag, und dies mit sehr unterschiedlichen Kriminalhörspielen, Psychodramen, Sozialstudien, und Kriminalgrotesken. Dabei beglückt uns der Kölner Sender nicht nur mit neueren Produktionen, sondern auch mit Wiederholungen diverser Klassiker und skurrilen Fundstücken aus den Archiven.

Zum Jahresende 2008 machen - wie im letzten Jahr - die Krimis den Sendeplatz für einen Science-Fiction Schwerpunkt frei. In diesem Jahr können wir einige akustische Splitter von Dicks phantasievollen paranoiden Welten erlauschen, dessen erfindungsreicher Weltenschöpfer wohl einer der originellsten, wenn nicht der wesentliche Entwickler von Verschwörungstheorie-Romanen schlechthin betrachtet werden kann.

Die Sendetermine (mit Sendebeginn stets um 00:05 Uhr) sind wie folgt:

06.12.2008 Die Kolonie
13.12.2008 Zeit aus den Fugen
20.12.2008 Träumen Androiden?

Genießen! Und am besten die Finger über eure Aufnahmetasten bereit halten!


Nähere Angaben zu den Hörspielen:

06.12.2008 • 00:05 Uhr
Die Kolonie
Science-Fiction-Hörspiel nach Philip K. Dick

Regie: Andreas Weber-Schäfer
Produktion: SDR, 1986
Dauer: 51'40"
Erstsendung: 02.06.1986

Sprecher:
Lawrence Hall - Klaus Herm
David Friendly - Peter Rühring
Stella Morrison - Eva Garg
Major Wood - Claus Boysen
Gail Thomas - Hedi Kriegeskotte
Robert Hendricks - Siegfried Gressl
u.a.

Die Kurzgeschichte "Colony" erschien 1953.

---------------

13.12.2008 • 00:05 Uhr
Zeit aus den Fugen
Science-Fiction-Hörspiel nach Philip K. Dick
Aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Gerd Burger und Barbara Krohn

Komposition: Thomas Bogenberger
Bearbeitung und Regie: Marina Dietz
Produktion: BR 2001
Dauer: 53'35
Erstsendung: 29.04.2001

Sprecher:
Ragle Gumm - Martin Umbach
Victor Nielson - Michael Tregor
Margo Nielson - Christiane Rossbach
Junie Black - Tanja Schleiff
Bill Black - Thomas Meinhardt
Kay Kesselmann - Elisabeth Endriss
u.a.

Die Romanvorlage "Time out of Joint" erschien 1959. Sie diente dem Film "The Truman Show" (1998) ebenfalls als Vorlage, auch wenn Dicks Name nicht in im Nachspann erwähnt wird.

--------------------

20.12.2008 • 00:05 Uhr
Träumen Androiden?
Science-Fiction-Hörspiel nach Philip K. Dick
Aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Norbert Wölfl

Bearbeitung und Regie: Marina Dietz
Komposition: Thomas Bogenberger
Produktion: BR 1999
Erstsendung: 25.10.1999

Sprecher:
Rick Deckard - Udo Wachtveitel
Ireen - Annette Wunsch
Isodore - Arne Elsholz
Bryant - Michael Mendl
Rachael - Sophie von Kessel
Phil - Max Tidorf
u.a.

Die Romanvorlage "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" erschien 1968. Der Roman wurde 1982 unter dem Titel "Blade Runner", mit Harrison Ford in der Hauptrolle, von Ridley Scott verfilmt.

LINK
Deutschlandfunk - Programm Vor- und Rückschau

Instruction Pieces No. 5

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 5

1.
Do not confuse a perfect scenario with the truth.

2.
One man’s agony may be another
man’s technicolour dream.

3.
One man’s speculation may become another’s judgement.

4.
Provide a context and the rest will follow.

© George H.E. Koehler, 2001

Instruction Pieces No. 4

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 4

1.
Remember your purpose.

2.
You do not need anyone else, to lose your way, don’t forget
it is your own hate that will always suffice to lead you astray.

3.
Staying in places others disdain is being close
to the real way of life.

4.
Disdain causes withdrawal, leading you away from reality.

5.
Reality loss is the birth of obsession.


© George H.E. Koehler, 2001

Instruction Pieces No. 3

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 3

1.
Repetition is - allegedly - the mother of wisdom.

2.
Are you busy being born? No?
Then you are busy dying.
To be born again and again,
Step forward from where you stand.

3.
Sometimes only ruthlessness reaches truth,
You insufferable dreamers.

4.
Always go too far - truth is always beyond:
Beyond words, beyond gestures.

5.
Never be afraid to go too far, in order
To transgress human nature and its myriad duplicities.

6.
The damaged receive.

7.
(Well, all candour can eventually make us sorry.)

© George H.E. Koehler, 2001

Blast From The Past

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I'm waiting at the train station ...
Lofty windows lurch into perspective,
High ceilings collect spaces still reeling
In my stomach, the mirror of my squealing mind:
The waiting hall's an echo of past times,
And memories won't coax my soul
To celestial heights any more –
Our parting is still rippling through my mind

I want to sit in an empty room
With just a candle burning,
And strum some strings and sing a simple song -
I'm waiting, waiting for my train ...

© George H.E. Koehler, 1985 & 1986 (taken from the Travelogues poem cycle, from Haunted Lives)

Instruction Pieces No. 2

INSTRUCTION PIECES No. 2

1.
Survive without smothering your feelings, or those of others.

2.
Whenever you force a set of values down a person’s throat, you are taking part in the extinguishing of a whole culture,
whether you realise it or not.

3.
Piss on the flames of fear: though fear is a good advisor, it should never become your constant instructor.
Survival is all about managing fear.

4.
Allow plurality to flourish, but, remember to weed,
before the unintelligibility of over-proliferation gets the better of you.

5.
Don’t lose yourself within diversification: remember, in time, to organise sufficiently.
There is always time to structuralise.

6.
Where conditioning exists, there is no freedom. In other words, no one is free.
In your dealings with your fellow men, kindly take this into account.

7.
Preconceptions will dull your perception.

8.
Be in love with your life all the time.

© George H.E. Koehler, 2001 – 2002

"Die Musik ist kein Botschafter..." (Gilad Atzmon)

Hier einige Aussagen zum Thema Musik und Musizieren, von Gilad Atzmon:

"Die Musik ist kein Botschafter, sondern die Botschaft selbst."

"Musik kommt ins Spiel, wenn Gedanken dahinsterben, Bewusstsein zerfällt und Ideologien implodieren."

"Frieden ist nirgendwo. Jeden zweiten Tag entsteht irgendwo ein neuer Konflikt. Die Welt wird immer feindlicher, die Musik ist unsere Zuflucht geworden." (Aus den Anmerkungen zur aktueller CD "Refuge")

"Obwohl ein gelernter Bopper, weigere ich mich, Jazz als technisches Abenteuer zu sehen. Es geht nicht umm die Geschwindigkeit, mit der ich meine Finger bewege, oder die Komplexität meiner Rhythmusfiguren. Ich bestehe darauf, dass Jazz kein Wissensstoff ist, sondern eine Geisteshaltung. Jazz ist eine innovative Form des Widerstands." (Aus dem Essay "Jazz ist Freiheit")

Alle oben aufgeführten Bemerkungen entstammen dem Programmheft zum 39. Deutschen Jazzfestival Frankfurt 2008, Seite 20-21, herausgegeben von hr2-kultur.

Links:
Porträt - Jazzzeitung.de (dt.)

Gilad Atzmon - Wikipedia Biographie (Deutsch)

Gilad Atzmon - Wikipedia Biography (English)

-------------------

"to eradicate the line..." (Robert Lax)

(to
e
rad
i
cate

the
line

be
tween

sleep
ing

&
wak
ing)



be
tween
liv
ing

in
the
womb
of
night

&
be
ing
born

in
to
day



drop
ping

deep

in
to

the
life
death
con
tin
u
um



whose
oth
er
name

is

be
ing



conscious

un
con
scious

con
tin
u
um


- Robert Lax (from A Thing That Is, 1997)