poetry – Page 24

CBC: Ideas: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and its author Stephen Greenblatt, are the subject of the latest CBC Ideas podcast. The Swerve is the story of the recovery of a lost epic Roman poem, by Titus Lucretius Carus, titled On The Nature Of Things – Greenblat makes the case for it being a work that changed the world, made it modern, by bringing ancient philosophy into an age ready for enlightenment. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. Host Paul Kennedy, as usual, shows that Canadian tax dollars can be used incredibly well when put in the right hands.

The poem in question is available as a LibriVox audiobook HERE.

And The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is available from Recorded Books (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini).

Here’s the book’s description:

Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature Of Things from certain oblivion.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius – a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book – the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age – fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare, and even Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s the |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: Beside Still Waters by Robert Sheckley

SFFaudio Online Audio

Robert Sheckley was a joker, a satirist, a poker of fun at all of the silliness in life. But there’s something more going on in this short short story from 1953. Sure there’s the existentialist angle, and of course there’s the requisite Sheckley humor, but it’s the other quality in Beside Still Waters that makes this Sheckley story a bit different. You can see it right there in the title (taken from Psalm 23 of the Hebrew Bible), and you can see it in the Virgil Finlay’s illustration for the story too:

Beside Still Waters by Robert Sheckley - Illustration by Virgil Finlay

Beside Still Waters is an elegiac tale, offering only a cup of sadness to the reader, it’s the sort of story that Clifford D. Simak might have written. And that should be recommendation enough.

Beside Still Waters
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Frank Malanga
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 28, 2010
When people talk about getting away from it all, they are usually thinking about our great open spaces out west. But to science fiction writers, that would be practically in the heart of Times Square. When a man of the future wants solitude he picks a slab of rock floating in space four light years east of Andromeda. Here is a gentle little story about a man who sought the solitude of such a location. And who did he take along for company? None other than Charles the Robot. First published in Amazing Stories Oct.-Nov. 1953.
|ETEXT|

And here’s the |PDF| I made from the original magazine publication.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Logicians Refuted by Jonathan Swift – read by Gregg Margarite

SFFaudio Online Audio

Gregg Margarite recorded only one poem for LibriVox.org. I find it highly appropriate. It’s by one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Swift.

Here’s Gregg’s reading of The Logicians Refuted |MP3|.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Hypnobobs: Imaginary Friends (includes Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier and Mr. Lupescu by Anthony Boucher)

SFFaudio Online Audio

Mister Jesse has lots of friends, and they all do something you wouldn’t ever think of, not in a squillion years.

One of Mister Jesse’s friends is named Mister Jim Moon. He is one of Mister Jesse’s very good friends, though Mister Jesse has never really seen Mister Jim Moon.

Sometimes Mister Jesse thinks that Mister Jim Moon isn’t real. But because Mister Jim Moon is so fun to play with Mister Jesse doesn’t want to think too hard about it. He doesn’t want Mister Jim Moon to disappear!

Mister Jim Moon’s podcast, Hypnobobs, is full of wonderfully terrible stories of the weird and the macabre.

Mister Jim Moon’s latest podcast is a short collection of weird poems. But the one before that, Hypnobobs #68, is entitled “Imaginary Fiends” and includes two short stories with imaginary friends at their center.

Here is the episode: |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hypnobobs

One story is named Thus I Refute Beelzy. It was written by Mister John Collier. And the other is called Mr. Lupescu and was written by Mister Anthony Boucher.

It seems likely to Mister Jesse that Mister Anthony Boucher’s story inspired one of the characters in Mister Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

Mister Jesse has tracked down the accompanying illustrations from the print publications and made PDFs too!

Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier |PDF|

Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier
Thus I Refute Beelzy illustration by Virgil Finlay

Mr. Lupescu by Anthony Boucher |PDF|
Señor Lupescu por Anthony Boucher |PDF| (a Spanish translation)

Mr. Lupescu by Anthony Boucher
Mr. Lupescu illustrated by Boris Doglov

Senor Lupescu - illustration by Lisa

Posted by Jesse Willis

To Virgil Finlay… by H.P. Lovecraft (narrated by Wayne June)

SFFaudio Online Audio

To Virgil Finlay by H.P. Lovecraft

I mentioned to Wayne June that I’d found the above poem in the July 1937 issue of Weird Tales. He hadn’t heard of it before. Then he went and narrated it for us!

|MP3|

Written in a letter, dated November 30, 1937, it was sent from H.P. Lovecraft to Virgil Finlay. It was inspired by art drawn for a Robert Bloch story, published in the May 1936 issue of Weird Tales, and entitled The Faceless God. Here’s the illustration that inspired it:

The Faceless God - illustration by Virgil Finlay

Here’s at least part of the letter:

“I could easily scrawl a sonnet to one of your masterpieces if you weren’t too particular about quality. For example –

To Virgil Finlay Upon his Drawing Of Robert Bloch’s Tale “The Faceless God”
By H.P. LOVECRAFT

In dim abysses pulse the shapes of night,
Hungry and hideous, with strange miters crowned;
Black pinions beating in fantastic flight
From orb to orb through soulless voids profound.
None dares to name the cosmos whence they course,
Or guess the look on each amorphous face,
Or speak the words that with resistless force
Would draw them from the halls of outer space.

Yet here upon a page our frightened glance
Finds monstrous forms no human eye should see;
Hints of those blasphemies whose countenance
Spreads death and madness through infinity.
What limnner he who braves black gulfs alone
And lives to wake their alien horrors known?

Well well – quite in the Yuggoth tradition! I’ll have to keep a copy of this to try on one or another of the fan magazines!”

[Thanks Wayne!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe

Here’s the LibriVox version |MP3| as ably read by Bob Gonzalez (from the Vintage Verse Rhapsody A Poetry Collection).

The Conqueror Worm
by Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! ’tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

Posted by Jesse Willis