Showing posts with label hughes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hughes. Show all posts

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Existential E

I came across a website address today - www.equote.com - and decided, without looking it up, to imagine what the 'e' might stand for.  With all the earthquakes Christchurch has been having, it could stand for earthquake quotes, a company that keeps an eye out for you when you're buying a house so that you don't wind up with a place that gets demolished by an earthquake.

Hmmm..don't think that's going to work.  There were warnings thirty years ago about potential earthquakes in the Christchurch region.  To a great extent they were pooh-poohed.

It could stand for eternity quote, as in, will I get into heaven?  On second thoughts I'm not sure that any company would offer bets on that possibility.   Ah, maybe it's existential quote - when you're stuck for a quote that's quintessentially existential, you could contact them by email, or even chat, and ask.  If I was running such a company you might wind up with quotes where the word existential was used, rather than an existential quote, but since existential is a pretty loose concept anyway, I doubt that that would matter.  Here's an example of what I'd give you:

There is no motor driving it, no music to tether it, and nothing to hold it aloft apart from that up-draft of sensual atmosphere and existential dread. 

Seems to me that's a pretty existential sentence in itself.  It comes from the Guardian article on Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, which Xan Brooks says is his favourite Hitchcock movie.

Or this interesting piece from Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker:

The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will came of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.”


And finally here's a nice piece by Robert Hughes on Damien Hurst's fish artwork:

I am underwhelmed by the blither and rubbish churned out by critics, publicists and other art-world denizens about Hirst's fish and the existential risks it allegedly symbolises. 

That'll do for today...by the way, equote is an online insurance company, though as far as I can see it doesn't give us an explanation for the 'e'.




Sunday, August 21, 2011

Eliot App

Now here's a bit of a surprise....of all the enhanced ebook apps for iPad you might think people would download in quantity, The Waste Land by T S Eliot isn't perhaps one of them. Yet the app made its money back for the publishers (Faber Digital) in just six weeks. That must have been something of a surprise.

So, apart from Eliot's elliptical poem, what else do you get on this app?

* a film of actress Fiona Shaw reading the entire poem (this was specially filmed for the app).

* audio recordings of the poem by T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness and Viggo Mortensen.

* interactive notes explaining many of the poem's references.

* more than 35 experts on video talking about their perspective on the poem.

The video below is from The Guardian, and has people explaining how this piece came to be available for the iPad.