from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This is me reading the last paragraph of the first chapter ("All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here") of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Language and Vision

Simplistic concepts of human nature, and allowing superstition to dominate thinking about human nature, leaves us with a black-and-white and impoverished view of ourselves and the universe. This video is profoundly exciting and fascinating:

Neurology Lecture on Seeing

The brilliant neurologist V.S. Ramachandran on the neurology of vision:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00gpxhb

Fascinating.

Going Bananas: Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, is a masterpiece of 20th-Century writing, one of the greatest American novels. It is Joycean (the highest complement, to me) in its complexity and richness.

I recorded myself reading one of my favourite passages, the Banana Breakfast scene very early in the book. I love the voices, the truth to detail, the richness of language, the complexity of reference and allusion. I find it very beautiful writing. I also love the way it takes me back to the London I remember so well, a London long gone, the London of the War, when anonymous random destruction rained down on the teashops, gardens, parks, brick walls--and on neighbours and friends, strangers, and faces glimpsed but once or twice in a lifetime from the top deck of a red bus or across the crowd on a train-car in the Tube. We were young then, and life burnt brightly...and all too briefly for so many.

Because of the 15-minute limit to YouTube videos, I have had to break the selection up into two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

"Locksley Hall", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

"Locksley Hall" is a poem by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson was the most famous poet writing in English in his day. No poet writing in English since has been so revered in his own lifetime. His work was adored throughout the Empire, and in the United States, Ireland, and by English-speaking colonials across the globe, as well. To modern ears he might seem a bit stilted now, particularly since the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman changed poetry in English forever and the High Modernists, led by Ezra Pound, threw off the tyranny of the rhymed pentameter ("that was the first heave") and other traditional forms for a less mannered and more natural music. Tennyson uses an unusual line in this poem, a trochaic octameter with the last foot having a missing syllable [catalectic octameter]. It might sound ponderous to a modern ear, but was much admired in his day. [He used an unusually long line to give the feeling of time moving on, as a train along tracks; he broke the final rhythm with a catalexis so that the eight-foot line wouldn't sound like two tetrametric lines--he wanted the line-rhythm to feel prolonged, as opposed to the lilting brevity of tetrameter.]

This poem is relevant to the blog here, because the title of Colum McCann's masterpiece of a novel, Let the Great World Spin, is gleaned from "Locksley Hall". You will find it in a fragment of a line toward the end of the poem.

There are also many famous lines in the poem, often misquoted. You might recognize some that you have heard before.

This poem describes a young man's disillusion and heartbreak, and his resolution to set out into the world nursing a deep inner wound; it describes both an excursion from and return to childhood and young heartbreak; in a meditative moment he has a vision of the future in which science and technology bring wonders and unity to Mankind, an expression of the Victorian ideal of Progress and its vision of hope and an Earthly salvation. Home, hearth, and heath are the starting point, but he steps out into the void of an unknown future, a sort of Victorian version of the Byronic hero.

I had to break the reading up into two parts because of YouTube's 15-minute limit. Here is Part 1:

Part 2:

Decades later, the older Tennyson composed a response, "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After", in which he looks ironically at his young man's bitter Romanticism, and described a settled, phlegmatic personal history greatly in contrast to the young man's dramatic angst, and a larger history in which the young man's glowing vision of Mankind's future, rooted in new technology and science, has gone awry. But Tennyson recapitulated the rhythmic structure of the original, looking back at youthful passion and folly, and yet in continuing the form also valuing his young idealism, however misplaced, in late-life retrospect.

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann

One of the great writers of our time, Irish-born New York City author Colum McCann, wrote a masterpiece, Let the Great World Spin, a book that has been mentioned in my class many times.

Here is my reading of the introductory section that precedes the first chapter of Let the Great World Spin:

Here is the first part of the first chapter, "All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here" (YouTube has a 15-minute limit on the length of YouTube videos, so I have to break chapters up into parts):

Here, then, is the second part of the first chapter:

I will add other chapters/sections over time....