Nothing Good Gets Away

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Steinbeck

The Nobel Prize winner and author of The Grapes of Wrath on the importance of waiting for love.

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Source: Steinbeck: A Life in Letters;

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming

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RSC_Google_Dream40_poster

The Royal Shakespeare Company and Google Creative Lab team in an attempt to create a new performance experience as they produce a three day, real-time performance of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (June 21st through 23rd). The event will be situated in the real world at the RSC’s home of Stratford-upon-Avon and virtually at Dream 40.  During this production, Google wants people to interact with the play in a myriad of ways as they follow the characters’ journeys through the magical forest of dreams to the final marriage scene between Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Hermia. People can take part online via a Google+ community hangout and other social media using the hashtag #dream40.  Titled thus on account of this being the 40th full production of the play by the RSC.

The live performance, directed by the RSC’s Artistic Director Gregory Doran, takes place at the outdoor Dell Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Audience members on site will be able to  join in on 23 June by making decorations, writing blessings for the happy couples and by attending the wedding itself as part of the congregation.

Project director at Google Creative Lab Tom Uglow wrote a detailed explanation of how he hopes the play will work on multiple platforms, complete with animation of William Shakespeare himself working with a time-traveling pig.

The experimental nature of Midsummer Night’s Dreaming hopes to explore how or if theatrical performance can engage with the online world in real time. However, Puck is the only character to bridge the live and digital performances with his own online profile.

http://youtu.be/7IatrprhNcU

 

Beckett’s original manuscript of “Murphy” up for auction

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Six notebooks, containing the handwritten draft of Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy, are to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on July 10th, and has an estimated price of £800,000 – £1.2 million.

Initially entitled Sasha Murphy, the heavily revised draft was penned by Beckett between August 1935 and June 1936 when he was undergoing an intense period of psychoanalysis.

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The manuscript – originally titled Sasha Murphy – is filled with doodles and extensive corrections, including sketches of his friend and mentor James Joyce, himself, and Charlie Chaplin,  as well as astrological symbols and musical notations.

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Beckett_Murphy 4

Beckett_Murphy 3

The first 11 pages are entirely crossed out.  The novel’s famous opening sentence did not come easily for Beckett.  He tried “The sun shone, as only the sun can, on nothing new”, working through various alternatives before ending up with: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Beckett_Murphy 2

At over 800 pages long, the draft provides a substantially different text from the printed version of the published 1938 novel. which concerns Murphy and his farcical attempts to find peace without intrusion from the outside world, most notably by working in an insane asylum.  Despite its dark philosophical underpinnings, it is a comic masterpiece, and marks Beckett’s last major effort at writing in English, prior to switching to French.

“The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.”

Fan letter from James Joyce to Henrik Ibsen, 1901

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joyce

Honoured Sir,

I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.

What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. [Ed: Ha! What an ego! 18 years old!] I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence — your lofty impersonal power. You rminor claims — your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debating-societies, and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.

But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead — how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now.

Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing drak for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlighenment lies — onward.

As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally — but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.

Faithfully yours,
James A. Joyce

Miles Davis: The Art of Cool

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An exhibition of original artwork by Miles Davis,“Miles Davis: The Art of Cool,”  is at the Napa Valley Museum in partnership with Napa Valley Performing Arts Center at Lincoln Theater June 8-July 28.  The exhibition features sketches and oil paintings by Davis and some personal items including one of his trumpets, a 1989 Grammy Award and a Miles Davis Yamaha Amplifier. The showing is  inspired by Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork a new book by Scott Gutterman with Miles Davis, scheduled for release on October 10th.

The Napa Valley Museum and Napa Valley Performing Arts Center at Lincoln Theater are situated mid-valley in Yountville, Calif., between St. Helena and Napa. For more information about the exhibition and events, visit Napa Valley Museum.

Happy Birthday Miles Davis

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Jazz musician Miles Davis by Tom Palumbo.

“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.”

“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there”

“Do not fear mistakes – there are none.”

“Knowledge is freedom, and ignorance is slavery”

“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.”

“My ego only needs a good rhythm section”

“Jazz is the big brother of revolution. Revolution follows it around.”

“Good music is good, no matter what kind of music it is”

“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if its’s good or bad.”

Peter Scott, Cat Burglar

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Peter Scott, 'King of thee Cat Burglers'

Peter Scott, Britain’s most notorious cat burglar, recently passed away at the age of 82 and received an obituary fit for those that he stole from in the The Telegraph.  His victims included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Sophia Loren, and Maria Callas.

“I felt like a missionary seeing his flock for the first time,” he explained when he recalled casing Dropmore House, the country house of the press baron Viscount Kemsley, on a rainy night in 1956 and squinting through the window at the well-heeled guests sitting down to dinner. “I decided these people were my life’s work.” (from the Telegraph’s obituary)