Mayakovsky by Frank O’Hara

It is the coldest day of the year, so here’s to that.
Music: Duke Ellington – After all
Photo: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison (http://www.parkeharrison.com/)

A Telephone Call by Dorothy Parker

I didn’t know much about Dorothy Parker until I watched Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle a couple of years back and fell in love with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance and the amazing life of Dorothy Parker, with whom I strongly empathized. Dorothy lived in New York in the roaring 20s and was a member of Algonquin Round Table and was best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. She hasn’t written tones of short stories, but you might have stumbled upon her poetry, based mainly on her not so happy life, but really witty and sarcastic.
Please have a tasting of two of her poems:

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under the host.”

Symptom Recital

“I do not like my state of mind;
I’m bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn’s recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I’m disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I’d be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men….
I’m due to fall in love again.”

Today, I chose to read one of her emblematic short stories, A Telephone Call, which is about an obsessed, slightly hysterical woman, who keeps persuading God to make her boyfriend call her. Very funny, with a twist of OCD 🙂 You can read it here: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/teleycal.html
Music: Miles Davis – Blue Moods
Photograph by the great Ellen von Unwerth (Revenge collection)

The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: XXIII by Rainer Maria Rilke

The masterpiece of Rilke’s most mystical writing is definitely the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. The Sonnets were written in just a few days, in a great inspirational outburst, using the Orphic myth in order to explore the nature of poetry in relation with our lives.
Music by contemporary Italian composer Giovanni Allevi – Luna
Painting by English painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – Orpheus and Eurydice on the Banks of the Styx, first exhibited in 1878.

Frank O’Hara – Meditations in an Emergency

The poem Meditations in an Emergency gives the title of Frank O’Hara’s most original volume of verse and my favorite of them all, though I do adore Lunch Poems as well.
Born in 1929, he moved to New York in the early 50’s and most of his poems are related to this city he adores. He is definitely one of the greatest and most striking poets of the twentieth century and a great contributor to the New American Poetry.
To accompany my reading, I chose a piece of Miles Davis, found on the soundtrack of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Miles Davis was born only three years before O’Hara in Illinois, US and was one of the most influential (jazz) musicians of the last century. In O’Hara’s Personal Poem, he even mentions Miles Davis, you can read the excerpt here: “I’d like to have a silver hat please/ and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for/ LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and/ shaker the last five years my batting average/ is .016 that’s that, and/ LeRoi comes in/ and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12/ times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop/ a lady/ asks us for a nickel for a terrible/ disease but we don’t give her one we/ don’t like terrible diseases.”
All there is left for me to say is that I would have loved to live in New York in those incredible times, to bump into Frank in Central Park and to go listen to Miles in clubs.
Enjoy the reading and may you dream with eyes wide open for the rest of the day!

Sylvia Plath – Mad Girl’s Love Song

Mad Girl’s Love Song must be one of my favorite poems written by Sylvia Plath, when she was 20 years old, in the 50s. Anguish and severe depression were what controlled Sylvia’s mind in those college years and it was two years after having written this poem that she attempted suicide for the first time. World can sometimes be a terrible place for people with great imagination, who often fantasy the ones around them, rather than see them. But, I won’t analyze it, this is a mere introduction to this great poem.
The image I chose to use in order to illustrate this poem belongs to American photographer Francesca Woodman, born in Denver, Colorado, who some might say is the Sylvia Plath of photography. She took her first self-portrait at the age 13, and by the age of 22, the moment of her untimely death by her own hands, she took about 800 beautiful works, most of which nudes, blurred and using long exposure. Woodman’s work is represented in the collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Tate/National Galleries of Scotland. You can find more of her works here: http://www.artnet.com/artists/francesca-woodman/
The background music is Mozart’s Lacrimosa (Requiem).

Charles Bukowski – Bluebird

Dear friends,

Welcome to my new blog, I hope you will enjoy every reading of mine I will be posting here. I started with Bukowski’s Bluebird, this one is dedicated to a dear old friend who just moved to New York and dragged his own bluebird along with him across the Atlantic. My voice is accompanied by Eleni Karaindrou’s excerpt of the piece On the road.