Hello!
You dared to dream but I'm back at last for a ticket worthy of the name. You Seaver in these pages I prefer authors who I am excited and make me feel very small ... and though I read like a turtle, I even brought one in as my luggage!
You surely know. But if. If I tell you The Hours, Nicole Kidman viewing decked out with a nose impossible (if indeed Virginia Woolf looked like this I pity her twice: for his unhappiness and his nose), but behind this film there is one book and its author, Michael Cunningham. That here.
There are writers whom I turn around time (I'm slow but determined) before I venture into their work. That was the case for it, with this nuance I read the Hours and I did not like. I feel that some people are outraged but Virginia Woolf was not my cup of tea and three portraits of women left me ice. Believe me, I regret it but at the same time I like Proust, but never caught on Henry James is like that, my brain is forging connections with one or that one, at will. Not that it's snobby, it just tastes good to him. The Hours therefore left me on my hunger and I decided that Michael and I were not yet ready for regular attendance. But now, I succumbed to his latest novel, The Book of Days . A funny thing indeed.
this point of my post, please introduce some drums, bagpipes and Irish voice singing "Paddy's Lament " in Gangs of New York . Because we are going back in time in one direction, then another, wandering Manhattan in the 1850s to a future which I hope will not resemble the vision of Michael Cunningham ... Three stories, three times, a specific place - Manhattan - and a metaphorical place: America, the pilgrims, outcasts, those that greeted the American dream in a mocking spin before dinner at Pierpont Morgan, Malcolm Forbes and George Bush. The hours were so infused Woolf, days The book exudes poetry of Walt Whitman. And I think it wins! Not only because Walt has a nose proportionate to the rest of his face ... (I'm bad ... I will do penance, stand, I shall reread walk to the lighthouse ... someday.). Mainly because it exchanges a writer who could not stand life against a poet who celebrated in all its forms ... and finally, because the book we Cunningham useful reminder that Walt Whitman was the poet of the poor before being rescued by private school students for whom the height of the rebellion was to stand on a table, tearing textbooks or read some poems in the night Timber!
Ah yes, thanks to the Book of Days - which bears the English name of a collection of prose Whitman, Specimen Days - I reread Leaves of Grass . Yes, I admit, the first time I had read, I was fifteen and I came out of Dead Poets Society ... I take this opportunity to move to drag a message to Vincent Delerm: he forgot to mention the impact of this film about high school girls swooning in his song about the girls of 1973. For there was Big Blue AND The Dead Poets , and my girlfriends were going to class again loop before writing poems in red ink to say how life was ugly and beautiful at the same time celebrate the beauty of the revolt, the absolute and suicide, all that. (Even those with a nose of a reasonable size.)
So I read Whitman but I missed out on.
Once I read it carefully and a bilingual version please, in order to recite the stanzas in English like this:
"My call Is the call of battle, I nourrish active rebellion, He going with me
must go well arm'd, He going with me
Often spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions. "
The active rebellion, poverty, angry enemies ... as you say it is far from the kind of film students and their teacher misty eyes. But the good news is that Whitman is also great! Michael Cunningham has not chosen any poet. This bearded protester, cantor of a transcendent moral life, a spirituality freed of religion, a powerful vision of the world came together life and death, living and ghosts, animals, humans and plants in a symphony transgenerational. .. remains today one of the most accurate voice when it comes to talking about America. His most famous book, Leaves of Grass , completed and edited his entire life, carries thousands of voices: that of the famished pilgrims landing on the New York Harbor, the exhausted workers in factories in the first Industrial Revolution ... happy or tormented voice, voice young or old, innocent or condemned, all lancinent the reader in a single stroke to claim a better life: that famous "pursuit of happiness " that Americans inscribed at the heart of their Constitution, and which was constantly undermined by the wars of independence or secession, slavery, inequality of opportunity that did nothing but widen and widen, glorifying the American dream back the initiative and individual achievement.
For pariah, America has always said he was in their power to change fate, that their determination and courage were their social ladder and at the same time, they wandered over the surface of the earth or did not fare by combining three jobs, was their fault.
Celebration of winners, contempt for the losers who have failed to transform the tenacity of gold. Those to whom the world end without murmuring: "You do not want to hard enough. You did not get up early. It was the fate we deserve." And amid these fragments of broken dreams that tread the city worse off than the triumphant looks down, walking Walt Whitman, feeling the pulse in his footsteps a country integer: " Through me many long dumb generations,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, Voices
sick and desperate thieves and dwarfs,
And [...] rights of those that trample on the other foot,
Some poorly trained, insignificant, stupid, the despised, Fog
in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung. "
The Book of Days opens on this first picture, that of Whitman's time. Times are hard and machinery carnivorous who devour the workers' arms and sometimes entire men, without shame. Simon has just died as well. In the factory. He leaves on the floor helpless father, mother slipped into madness, an impoverished young brother, a beautiful fiancee, Catherine, now deprived of the status of a widow and pregnant by him. Suffice to say a future pariah. Lucas takes the place of his elder brother at the plant. It's a weird boy, ugly and sickly, who lives in the company of Leaves of Grass and recites verses when he opens his mouth
" Lucas had no soul at all. He was a foreigner, a citizen of nowhere hand, came from County Kerry but failed to New York where he grew up as a potato riddled with mildew; where he sang nor cried like other Irishmen was not living as a foreigner but not an empty soul filled here and there with painful outbursts of affection, to map the stars and the reflection of flames on the glasses Mr. Mulchady; for Catherine and her mother and a horse on wheels. "
Lucas wants to support his family alone to help Catherine he loves. Every day he works on the machine that killed Simon. He knows she is watching, she is hungry another body. The machines are predatory, it is in their nature. In the world of Lucas, the poor are everywhere and they are ghosts in the making, that poverty has been cut off from life:
"Gradually, he realized that the days at the plant were so long, made a gesture so often repeated that in the end they became a world inside the world, and that those who lived in this world, all men from the factory, would spend most of their lives, making short visits to the other world, where they ate, slept and were preparing to leave. The men at the plant had renounced their citizenship; they had migrated to the factory as Lucas's parents had emigrated to New York after leaving County Kerry. Their past lives were the dreams they did every night, they awoke every morning at the factory. "
a hospital for the needy at a fire scene in a sewing workshop is all America in rags who seizes the reader by the throat. At the heart of a crowd watching helplessly burn brightly poor workers, Lucas feels the presence of ghosts, which tightens the grip each time around Catherine and him
"The air tasted. Lucas turned it into his mouth and he recognized him.
the dead had penetrated the atmosphere. He understood as surely as he had felt the presence of Simon in the pillow. With each breath, he would enter the dead in him. He felt the bitter taste, so it was that they were - earthy and warm - on the tongue. "
A woman burning speaks to him without words, speaking on behalf of all those beings who have surrendered after a battle of the most unequal:
"She said (without saying the words ): This what we are now. We were exhausted and operated, we live in reduced, we ate sweets in secret, but today we are radiant and glorious. We are no longer insignificant. We're part of something larger and more wonderful than imagine the living. "
Thus it appears the death as the doorway to freedom forfeited. And even as ironic as it may seem, to life, as if the rogue could not hope to regain full control of their lives ... and in death.
Second time: we are in contemporary America, the one after September 11 2001, that the Patriot Act and paranoia omnipotent. Cat, a black woman of about forty years, working in standard font. She receives calls from all stamped oozing rage, those who want to set fire to the apartment of their neighbor, eradicate homosexuals or librarians. Most are content to issue threats, but now a teenager who blew himself called, hugging a businessman, not far from Ground Zero. The panic that keeps New Yorkers since Sept. 11 is reactive flows back into the blood vessels, accelerates blood
"The danger which had poisoned air a few years earlier resurfaced and people breathed in the smell. Today, they were reminded - we reminded us - a truth that the world had known for centuries: we could easily, at any time, commit a fatal error. We walked all safe on the streets because nobody had decided to kill us that day. It was impossible to know, as we deal, if we walk away from the blast or if we rush into it. "
And the tension up a notch when a second teenager called Cat. It trying to make him talk. He replied by strange sentences:
Nobody really dies. We perpetuate the grass. We perpetuate the trees. [...] Each atom is mine is yours as well.
Cat is grown, it recognizes the poetry of Whitman.
A second attack took place, this time beating a black man and poor. As the noose tightens around Cat, a third boy seems to have chosen as confidant and as a target, is emerging profile of these young suicide bombers: the lost boys raised by a crazy, brainwashed and fed to the poetry of Whitman. Kids injured and without heart, inaccessible and disempowering. Wild creatures out of control, who grew up without the knowledge of society, on the low side, and who now choose to embrace the victim they take with them into death. Again, this attempted possession of live by the "ghosts", these creatures that cross each day without looking at them as they exist, so to speak. Again this desperate search for life, that this escape is through death as a corridor through which the brotherhood would again become possible, this song brought the pariahs by the poet.
The third story takes us into the Manhattan of the future: a totalitarian world where the sinister and outcasts come either from another planet (as Catareen, a 'dian' green-skinned one reduced to menial tasks), experiments carried out either on the machine by idealists. The first time Lucas had suspected the machine that killed his brother Simon to be animated. In the future, Simon is a robot whose circuits are mixed with human tissue. His appearance is that of a man but did not affect. To replace feelings, its creator has injected a "circuit Poetry. "In the poetry of Walt Whitman, of course. Simon is supposed to have no heart, but he focused on Catherine the dian and both try to escape certain death. On their way they will meet a teenager named Luke and an inventor who has injected the poetry inside his robots and now runs a community bizarre about to leave the land.
Three times, three genres (ghost story, thriller, science fiction) Three stories linked by powerful echoes and by the poetry of Whitman.
In each, a character in whom the poem takes place heart or soul, and who sees the world as a symphony in which death and life are intimately linked, as are all beings that breathe and suffer with those who went to the other side. You did I want to dive into the book days? Reading or rereading Walt Whitman? I hope. I predict that you will be captivated and troubled, you believe in ghosts. Anyway poets ghosts that haunt the great writers of today.
And if we left a few verses of Walt Whitman, like, for the road?
" The words of true poems give you more as poems,
They give you enough to train yourself poems, religions, policy, war, peace, your driving history, testing, everyday life and everything else [... ]
They prepare for death, yet they are not the end but rather the beginning, they
n'amènent person, man or woman, at the end of his journey, or to consider themselves happy and satisfied, one
they bring, they took him into space to show the birth of stars, to teach him one of the meanings,
They took him for he soars with absolute faith, so that traverses the endless circles and would never be off. "
Good evening to you all and see you soon!
