When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as a “science-friendly” writer and has often populated his fiction with scientists and scientific ideas (usually doctors and medicine, as in Enduring Love and Saturday). His new story is called “The Use of Poetry”, but doesn’t quite manage to escape stereotyping his protagonist, the made-up physics...
Posted by Andrew on December 13, 2009 9:56 PM
I'll be introducing this event tomorrow. Come on over for an evening of scientific poetry... HTML.spacepoetry { PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px } BODY.spacepoetry { PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; MARGIN: 0px; PADDING-TOP: 0px } BODY.spacepoetry { FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Tahoma, Helevetica, sans-serif } TABLE.spacepoetry { FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Tahoma, Helevetica, sans-serif } TD.spacepoetry { FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Tahoma, Helevetica, sans-serif } TH.spacepoetry { FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Tahoma, Helevetica, sans-serif } A.spacepoetry { COLOR: #000000; TEXT-DECORATION: none } A.spacepoetry:link { COLOR: #000000;...
Posted by Andrew on November 12, 2008 4:39 PM
I went to see and hear “The Book of Longing” last night, Philip Glass’ musical setting of a selection of Leonard Cohen’s poems. Leonard Cohen, praised for the last forty years or so as much as a singer-songwriter as a poet, is an odd choice as a libbrettist. Glass may mostly be a better composer than Cohen, but it may not be a surprise that Leonard Cohen writes better Leonard Cohen songs than Philip Glass, and sings them better too. Throughout, the work suffers from the usual problem of my lowbrow encounters with English-language “art song”: words not written to...
Posted by Andrew on October 21, 2007 8:42 PM
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. But he was too good a poet to settle merely for spewing bile, too much in love with the language of William Blake and Walt Whitman: to recreate the...
Posted by Andrew on October 6, 2005 9:16 PM
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