YouTube Copyfraud Strikes again

Or, how to abuse the law to one's own advantage

On YouTube's page of our very own Down to Earth video (Public Digital Festival 2010 entry) you may see a message saying that it contains material from an entity called IODA.

November 2009 Special

Ten anthology film scenes

A small anthology scene collection from famous, less famous, and even infamous innovative and influential films through the decades.

20th Century Poetry

The latest (and perhaps the last, but not least) turning point

This last century has been one of the world's most decisive eras. Progress in all fields has been lightning fast and spectacular - another Renaissance, whose technologically "upgraded" alchemy has changed the face of the earth radically and irrevocably. And of course, art and poetry had to reflect all the unavoidable vicissitudes, while also keeping an eye on its equally inescapable archetypal foundations.

Invitation au Voyage

A poetic voyage around the world

Folk or formal, classical or modern, rhymed or in free verse, idyllic or melancholy, from any country and in any language, poetry is the most reliable vehicle for a dream trip through time and space, in the known and unknown universe.

Federico Garcia Lorca

The Sonnets to His Dark Love

The Sonnets to His Dark Love (Sonetos del Amor Oscuro - written in 1936 and published posthumously, in 1983) are Lorca's last poetic work, inspired by the style and themes of San Juan de la Cruz, Shakespeare and Gongora. They are his personal statement about love and poetic art, made even more poignant by the fact that he was arrested and executed by his country's dictatorial government the very same year the poems were written. The Sonnets are therefore not a complete work, cut horifically short by the poet's unjust and untimely death at the age of 37.

Literature in Translation

An introduction

Translation is more than the mere issue of a mental process. It is both an intellectual enterprise and a physical task. Things become even more difficult when having to deal with a literary text: literature has its own determining features, and language, the instrument of its expression, is a self-sufficient living system in which every presupposition of perfection has been fulfilled. The risks a translator is obliged to take in this case are much similar to those taken by a surgeon who performs a delicate operation: although the result may perfectly be accomplished under conditions of utmost conscientiousness and knowledge, nothing can guarantee that the patient will eventually survive. In fact, a literary text rarely manages to survive without any more or less serious damages when transferred from one language into another. The task is excessively hazardous; skill in manipulating written speech is as essential as profound linguistic intuition and instruction; a wide spectrum of academic information is as indispensable as personal sensitivity to the subject one is occupied with.

George MacBeth - An Approach

Clutching at things, plain things

The poetic universe of George MacBeth is determined and defined, in a large number of his poems, by plain, common, everyday things, personal objects and sometimes plants or animals which are obsessionally used in a variety of poetic images. But the poetic image is not created for its own sake; it carries along with it a great number of connotations which sometimes elevate it to the point of becoming a universal symbol and a key for the poet's philosophical anxiety.

Graham Greene - A Tribute

The invisible side of exoticism: Phuong's character in the Quiet American

Phuong's character in The Quiet American is one of the most difficult to define, as she holds no real leading part in the novel and her particular characteristics are shown to the reader through the eyes of Fowler, the narrator, that is through the deforming prism of both a male vision and a European spirit. Attempting thus an approach to Phuong's character, one should beware of a number of traps liable to mislead one's judgement - if it is ever possible to fully analyse a character whose only known aspects are those revealed to us by the author himself through the character mostly acting as his mouthpiece.

On Popular Fiction

A widespread literary paradox

"Popular fiction" is by definition meant to appeal to a large, if not the largest, part of the reading public in literate societies. From the Bible (or even Homer) to Walter Scott and from Goethe to Raymond Chandler, the nature of this literary phenomenon presents a considerable range of variations according to the historical background of each era. What in particular seems to correspond to the term in question the last two or three centuries, and especially during and ever since the Industrial Revolution, consists mainly of a secondary, "unofficial" kind of literature with less, or, sometimes, no literary value (to the extent, of course, that such an attribute can be objectively assessed), easy to read and highly digestible, usually doomed to oblivion after a meteoric success. From this rule must, of course, be exempted the works which, due to their own exceptional merits, managed to resist time and establish themselves as classics, like those of Balzac, Dickens or Zola.

Samuel Beckett - A Tribute

Beckett's view of the human condition in Waiting for Godot

Written in the mid-'50s, in other words shortly after the end of World War II, Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot offers a most perceptive, bitter and yet quite sympathetic vision of the human condition in the trying times Europe was then going through. Vladimir and Estragon, the two principal characters, spend their lives "waiting for Godot" in an almost desert scenery. The characters of the play are very few, five only, plus Godot, the invisible sixth, who is all the same omnipresent due to the continual reference to him by Estragon and Vladimir. In a dramatic environment where the animate element, as well as the non-animate, appear reduced to the absolutely functional, an entire existential reasoning is amply presented to the audience.

Jane Austen - Nonsense & Insensibility

The place of rank & money in Jane Austen's world

In Jane Austen's Emma, one of the author's best known novels beside Pride & Predjudice, the homonymous main female character is described as "handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition". It is not by chance that Emma's wealth is mentioned in the very heart of the description, among natural personal qualities such as beauty, intelligence, generosity and pleasant temper: amusingly implanted in the middle of the list of conventional moral and physical attributes, Emma's fortune immediately suggests the social dimension, or perspective, of both the novel character and the novel itself. Austen's world is one of more or less financially self-sufficient middle class provincials, successors probably of the mediaeval feudalists, or otherwise liberal professionals having acquired a certain economic sufficiency through hard work, like the naval officers in Persuasion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - A Tribute

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The present six verses of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge are extracted from the fourth part of the poem and constitute in fact the ending of this part. The Mariner, who has been subject to complete material and moral deprivation for having killed the beneficent Albatross, immobilised in a tormentingly static universe and surrounded by corpses, now attains absolution through the ability to recognise the beauty of living creatures and finally to feel genuine love for them. This turning point in the Mariner's soul and mentality will signal his reconciliation with the natural elements and his gradual re-integration in a friendlier, familiar world.

De Propaganda

A libel

Propaganda is not only the worst form of argument - it is opium and gas. It is poison. It spreads around in great, impressive sounds, insidiously magnificent with its bright shapes and colors which force their way into our heads, imprinting their power there forever. It takes hold of our minds, seduces, hypnotizes them like tin soldiers vowed to the struggle for ideals. And then, heroically self-confident, we rush upon our innocent fellow citizens to enact the noble mission of spreading the epidemic. For the virus of propaganda has always been incurably contagious.

An Attempt at Comparative Analysis: A Sketch

Brian Patten VS. D. H. Lawrence

The two poems in question present, first of all, a similarity in subject: they both deal with the cinema. The first one refers to an unexpected incident during the projection of a film, while the second one describes the personal feelings of the poet while watching a love story οn the screen. In the first poem the event is narrated in the third person singular, which actually represents the "projectionist" mentioned in the first line, while in the second poem the "Ι" of the poet-narrator is very obviously present.

Fragments of Time

A mini mock essay

Time is the most genius, the most puzzling and wonderful of all human inventions. In his attempt to seize the rhythm of the world surrounding him, man discovered proportion, progress, duration. These three notions, fundamental, functional for the history of humanity, were, at a critical moment, united in the most unconceivable idea, which was fatally to become the ruler of the world.

Much Ado About Nothing

The title of the play as related to the content

Apart from having universally been recognised as one of the most brilliant pieces of comedy ever written, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing can also be considered as a humorous yet quite accurate definition of the nature of dramatic art, answering with their own weapons to his contemporaries who condemned the theatre considering it as "nothing" because it highlighted spectacle and artificiality against substance and meaning. From beginning to end, the plot of the play is "much ado about nothing", as every character makes too much fuss, or too much ado, about forged facts and testimonies of misled witnesses. An entire theatrical intrigue is therefore introduced within the given, conventional scheme conformable to the very nature of the comic piece, a multiple game of observation and eavesdropping ("noting"), based on false impressions and deformed appearences, in other words on nothing. Moreover, the phonetic relationship between the words "nothing" and "noting" (taking into consideration the fact that "nothing" was pronounced "noting" by the Elisabethans) is here inevitable to remark. The "noting" taking place on stage has, in a further interpretation, nothing as a reasonable counterpoise, it is vacant and meaningless, like a mask which is lifted to reveal no face underneath.

King Lear - A Scene by Scene Walkthrough

Act I, Scene 1

The King of France is surprised and indignated at Lear's unexpected injustice to Cordelia. Lear has just approved of her rejection by the Duke of Burgundy and addressed France, warning him of her supposedly bad nature:

Amos Oz: Black Box

Love's debris & the irreversible of written speech

In his article on Black Box (in a superb English translation by Nicholas de Lange), published in New Statesman on the 1st of July 1988, Sean French expresses his surprise for the epistulary form of this novel; he also locates the inevitable problem of doubtful verisimilarity presented to a novelist by the application of this writing technique. In any case, the epistulary novel, especially when consisting of a letter exchange among individuals of different characters, mentality and origins, could always constitute a temptation to the writing skill of an author, as the heterogeneousness it entails makes it a first class exercise of style.