I've been sharing with you guys so much stuff from books I never finished reading that it gives me great pleasure to announce that I actually finished reading one recently. The tile appears to be "Garcia Lorca" and the name "Carl W. Cobb" appears below it and an enormous globe surmounted by Pegasus above and the number 23 displayed clearly above that to mark the book as number 23 in a series of presentations of the World's Greatest Writers in "clear, concise English." On the inside jacket it says "University of Tennessee" but the publisher is Twayne Publishers in New York and on the copywright page it says at the bottom "Manufactured in the United States of America." So with my typically imaginative mind I began to wonder if the whole thing were not a terrific joke by Lorca himself or effort to write himself into the history books by force.It's highly unlikely of course, but it was fun reading just to solve that mystery for myself.
The writer is clearly very knowledgeable about how to write poetry, how Lorca himself appears to have written poetry, and how Surrealism is created. Apparently, Lorca came up with a poetic concept he called "evasions," which can be made still more elusive so that they become surrealism, though of course it takes considerable talent to come up with a truly Surrealistic evasion. So let us say you are born an Andalusian dog and, moreover, are gay, or what was called homosexual back then. Society might look the other way if you kept it behind closed doors, but what if you wanted to write erotic poetry about people you loved? Lorca's answer is you would then read Freud's book "On Dreams" and then come up with things that are just a little removed from what you want to say, but which make no sense at all unless you are moved vicariously by the writer's passion. "The Evildoing of the Butterfly," a musical Lorca wrote in college was about a grasshopper whose parents want him to live at home his whole life so they can take care of him and keep him safe. But then an injured butterfly comes to stay with them and the young grasshopper has to share his room to save on space. As the butterfly recovers he tantalizes the young grasshopper with stories about how wonderful it is to fly until the young grasshopper begins to believe that he too is a butterfly. But then comes the day when the butterfly is all better and leaves with only a peremptory goodbye to the young grasshopper, who is left in the final scene alone on a darkened stage asking, "How can a loving God have created me? So alone and without wings?"
The author of the text considers the play very juvenile and not one of Lorca's best works, but it sounds absolutely terrific to me. It is as if the criticism were written by the artist himself, and not without that juvenile cunning that says, "If I pretend to despise my own masterpieces, how can you not then fall down in reverence of them?" I mean, I'm on the ground already, Dude.
The most brilliant part of the book is the description of how his boyhood faith in God kept his spirits up right after Salvador Dali ended their love affair and forged in Lorca and ever greater genius and an ever greater determination to love with his body in a carnal and even aggressive way. It's an absolutely incredible paragraph and I totally can't find it right now. Damn library books.But where the book taught me something about myself that I didn't already know is that Loorca reports that at the first riot of the Spanish Civil War, "he was very scared and stayed scared." For those of you who know what it's like to be continuously scared as a fact of life, you can relate to what he's talking about. Nonetheless, he kept on pursuing his art and championing of the theatre with even more risky material than before, as well as many traditional plays that the common people of the countryside or even the cities had never seen in their lifetimes. That's what being a hero means to me. It's just being yourself and taking risks to say what you want to say and do the work you want to see done and refuse to be so intimidated by fear of death that it let's it silence you. So I'm really really glad I read the book and I think I learned a lot about the technical side of poetry, too. And that's why I made damn sure I finished the whole thing.
The writer is clearly very knowledgeable about how to write poetry, how Lorca himself appears to have written poetry, and how Surrealism is created. Apparently, Lorca came up with a poetic concept he called "evasions," which can be made still more elusive so that they become surrealism, though of course it takes considerable talent to come up with a truly Surrealistic evasion. So let us say you are born an Andalusian dog and, moreover, are gay, or what was called homosexual back then. Society might look the other way if you kept it behind closed doors, but what if you wanted to write erotic poetry about people you loved? Lorca's answer is you would then read Freud's book "On Dreams" and then come up with things that are just a little removed from what you want to say, but which make no sense at all unless you are moved vicariously by the writer's passion. "The Evildoing of the Butterfly," a musical Lorca wrote in college was about a grasshopper whose parents want him to live at home his whole life so they can take care of him and keep him safe. But then an injured butterfly comes to stay with them and the young grasshopper has to share his room to save on space. As the butterfly recovers he tantalizes the young grasshopper with stories about how wonderful it is to fly until the young grasshopper begins to believe that he too is a butterfly. But then comes the day when the butterfly is all better and leaves with only a peremptory goodbye to the young grasshopper, who is left in the final scene alone on a darkened stage asking, "How can a loving God have created me? So alone and without wings?"
The author of the text considers the play very juvenile and not one of Lorca's best works, but it sounds absolutely terrific to me. It is as if the criticism were written by the artist himself, and not without that juvenile cunning that says, "If I pretend to despise my own masterpieces, how can you not then fall down in reverence of them?" I mean, I'm on the ground already, Dude.
The most brilliant part of the book is the description of how his boyhood faith in God kept his spirits up right after Salvador Dali ended their love affair and forged in Lorca and ever greater genius and an ever greater determination to love with his body in a carnal and even aggressive way. It's an absolutely incredible paragraph and I totally can't find it right now. Damn library books.But where the book taught me something about myself that I didn't already know is that Loorca reports that at the first riot of the Spanish Civil War, "he was very scared and stayed scared." For those of you who know what it's like to be continuously scared as a fact of life, you can relate to what he's talking about. Nonetheless, he kept on pursuing his art and championing of the theatre with even more risky material than before, as well as many traditional plays that the common people of the countryside or even the cities had never seen in their lifetimes. That's what being a hero means to me. It's just being yourself and taking risks to say what you want to say and do the work you want to see done and refuse to be so intimidated by fear of death that it let's it silence you. So I'm really really glad I read the book and I think I learned a lot about the technical side of poetry, too. And that's why I made damn sure I finished the whole thing.
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