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Artist Heather Benning Has Created A Giant Dollhouse Installation

| Art and design | June 30, 2012

Heather Benning Dollhouse

dollhouse installation built by heather benning in canada

installation by Heather Benning called dollhouse

Heather Benning, a Canadian artist, began building ‘Dollhouse’ way back in 2005 while she was an artist in residence in Saskatchewan, Canada. She converted the derelict farmhouse into a giant doll’s house closing the house in with plexi glass because she wanted it to be inaccessible and tomb-like, encapsulating a time and lifestyle that no longer exists and will never exist again.

Here’s what she said about the project:

When I saw the house through the windows, I saw a life sized dollhouse. I thought to myself, that should be the main project I work on while I’m in the area. Once I returned home from the supply trip I made contact with the landowners of the property and found out the house had been abandoned since the late 1960s and was suffering from substantial water damage.
I met with the owners of the land at their farm and promised them that if they donated the house to me, that I would complete the project and would not leave them with a mess to deal with.

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Gyula Várnai Has Made This Wonderful Installation, ‘Now I Know’

| Art and design | June 30, 2012

Gyula Várnai now i know

now i know Gyula Várnai

Gyula Várnai art installation what I know

 art installation by Gyula Várnai called what I know

Gyula Várnai, a Hungarian artist created this wonderful installation, ‘Now I Know’, four years ago but I only came across it recently. I don’t often come across installations made from natural materials but when I do I’m always transfixed. I’m not sure why, I’m not an outdoorsy person.

Perhaps its my response to seeing such strong, primal, natural materials forced into an intellectual, conscious, human structure. After all whenever I see man made materials used in the same way they don’t often have the same resonance. Maybe that’s it. Resonance. Maybe.

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Gorgeous Happy Life Animation Film By Xin Sun And Yun Li

| Film and animation | June 30, 2012

Happy Life Animation Film By Xin Sun And Yun Li

‘Happy life’ is a gorgeous animation film by Xin Sun and Yun Li who are currently based in Berlin. It tells the tale of a boy called ‘EGG’ who lays an egg from which a monster is born. The boy, terrified, throws the monster into the forest. However, the incident repeats every night which leads EGG to feels like a monster himself.

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Joel James Devlin Takes Beautiful Long Exposure Photographs Of Light Trails

| Art and design | June 29, 2012

Joel James Devlin photography

long exposure photographs by Joel James Devlin

Joel James Devlin long exposure photography

landscape photography by Joel James Devlin

Light Waves and Dark Currents by Joel James Devlin

Joel James Devlin photography series Light Waves and Dark Currents

Photographer Joel James Devlin has spent years experimenting with long exposures by taking photographs of light trails in the landscape. In his series called ‘Light Waves and Dark Currents’ he has taken 50 minute exposures of airplane trails over the skies of London as well as light moving on water.

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‘The Spanish Earth’ Written And Narrated By Earnest Hemingway

| Culture and politics | June 29, 2012

the spanish earth with ernest hemingway

‘The Spanish Earth’ is a documentary film, written and narrated by Earnest Hemingway,that uses footage of war and glimpses of rural Spanish life in its portrayal of the struggle of the Spanish Republican government against the fascist forces of General Franco.
So how did it come about?
Well, before Heminway headed to Spain as a reporter in 1937 he and a group of artists including Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos and Lillian Hellman decided to produce a film to raise awareness of the Republican cause in Spain. The group came up with $18,000, $5,000 of it from Hemingway, and hired the Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens to make the film.

MacLeish and Ivens drafted a short outline around the theme of agrarian reform. The idea was to tell the story of Spain’s revolutionary struggle through the experience of a single village. That village was to be Fuentedueña de Tajo, southeast of Madrid. That plan was soon scrapped as the realities of war prevented them from building any kind of sets or recreating any elaborate historical scenes. So the plan changed and both Dos Passos and Ivens decided to come up with a concept that would look to glorious future amid all the misery and madness.

However, when Hemingway arrived everything changed as his relationship with MacLeish was disintegrating at the time. What was agreed that Hemingway would write the commentary for the film as well as help Ivens and Fernhout dodge bullets in what was a fractious war.
Ivens biographer was to later write:

Hemingway was a great help to the film crew, with a flask of whisky and raw onions in his pockets, he lugged equipment and arranged transport. Ivens generally wore battle dress and a black beret. Hemingway went as far as a beret but otherwise stuck to civvies. Although he rarely wore glasses, he almost never took them off in Spain, clear evidence of the seriousness of their task.

In his short story ‘Night Before Battle’, Hemingway had this to say about filming in a war zone full of snipers:

At this time we were working in a shell-smashed house that overlooked the Casa del Campo in Madrid. Below us a battle was being fought. You could see it spread out below you and over the hills, could smell it, could taste the dust of it, and the noise of it was one great slithering sheet of rifle and automatic rifle fire rising and dripping, and in it came the crack of the guns and the bubbly rumbling of the outgoing shells fired from the batteries behind us, the thud of their bursts, and then the rolling yellow clouds of dust. But it was just too far to film well. We had tried working closer but they kept sniping at the camera and you could not work.
The big camera was the most expensive thing we had and if it was smashed we were through. We were making the film on almost nothing and all the money was in the cans of film and the cameras. We could not afford to waste film and you had to be awfully careful of the cameras.
The day before we had been sniped out of a good place to film from and I had to crawl back holding the small camera to my belly, trying to keep my head lower than my shoulders, hitching along on my elbows, the bullets whocking into the brick wall over my back and twice spurting dirt over me.

Later, in a dispatch Hemingway sent back to America, he had this to say about it:

Just as we were congratulating ourselves on having such a splendid observation post and the non-existent danger, a bullet smacked against a corner of brick wall beside Ivens’s head. Thinking it was a stray, we moved over a little and, as I watched the action with glasses, shading them carefully, another came by my head. We changed our position to a spot where it was not so good observing and were shot at twice more. Joris thought Ferno had left his camera at our first post, and as I went back for it a bullet whacked into the wall above. I crawled back on my hands and knees, and another bullet came by as I crossed the exposed corner. We decided to set up the big telephoto camera. Ferno had gone back to find a healthier situation and chose the third floor of a ruined house where, in the shade of a balcony and with the camera camouflaged with old clothes we found in the house, we worked all afternoon and watched the battle.

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Just Discovered Transcript Of Conversation Between John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Tim And Rosemary Leary

| Culture and politics | June 29, 2012

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Rosemary Leary and Timothy Leary at bed in Hotel Queen Elizabeth in Montreal

This is a transcript of a conversation between John Lennon, Yoko Ono,  Timothy and Rosemary Leary at the Hotel Queen Elizabeth in Montreal on May 26, 1969 is fascinating.

Why that date? Well it was the venue for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s second ‘Bed-In’, the first being held in Amsterdam. This one was meant to be held in New York but because Lennon had a conviction for maijuana possession they couldn’t hold it in America. They then went to the Bahamas but that was to hot – oh the woes of being a wealthy pop star – so they took off to the rather cooler Montreal.
It was here that they recorded ‘Give Peace a Chance’ with some of their visitors such as Tommy Smothers, Dick Gregory, Murray the K and psychedelic guru Timothy Leary.
However, Leary, being a man of full consciousness wanted a little more out of his trip, excuse the pun, and so recorded a conversation with Lennon and Ono about a variety of subjects and here is the transcript below.

The transcript was only found recently in an unmarked envelope in a box of miscellaneous papers by Leary archivist Michael Horowitz. The conversation begins with the finer points of teepee life, moves on to the effects of place on one’s state of mind, touches on both couples having found themselves on the wrong side of drug law enforcement and ends with Lennon and Leary comparing notes on how they use the media to convey their message:

TIMOTHY: Living in a teepee is great. It’s pretty basic. It’s the first artificial habitat, after all.

ROSEMARY: It’s the sexiest building ever invented.

TIMOTHY: It’s like being in a sailboat, because you have to know exactly where the wind is. You raise the fluttering banners, and just look up through the smoke-flap and you can see how the wind blows. If you don’t have the flaps the right way, the wind will blow the smoke down. We always have to be aware of the wind.

JOHN: Yeah, Yoko had this plan for us two. To blindfold ourselves for two weeks, y’know, and just work it out. We might do that when we get to the new house and find out about it.

ROSEMARY: Yes, it’d be a fantastic way to learn about it.

TIMOTHY: Also, of course, we live with rattlesnakes. That’s groovy because it requires absolute consciousness. You just can’t go thumping through the brush, thinking of what you’re going to do tomorrow. You have to realize that you’re intruding on their territory. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to stumble in and step on you. So your consciousness has got to be focused. And of course it’s always helpful to have dogs. We learn a great deal from animals.

JOHN: How long have you been there, in the teepee? I mean, before you sussed the wind and everything, and you know, got your senses back?

ROSEMARY: We had to put the teepee up three times before it was right. It’s like you can touch it, and it resounds like a drone, and then it’s perfect, the canvas. It’s a wind instrument that plays like a drone.

TIMOTHY: You would really love the teepee, because it’s a work of art which involves all the senses. You start with white canvas. Then you get the pine. Each man has to strip the bark so you get the wood smooth, smooth. You have to line the poles carefully. There are fifteen of these poles, and if you do it wrong you end up with too big a hole. It’s sculpture. Then once you’ve got it built, it’s a light show, because the moon shines through the smoke hole and you can see the stars.

ROSEMARY: If you placed it properly to the east, the sun rises right over the opening, so at one point during the day the sun is full blast down into the teepee.

YOKO: Is it very wide?

ROSEMARY: It’s a little narrower than the width of this hotel room.

TIMOTHY: And at night you have a fire. All right. We’re sitting around, with the fire here in the center. That means your shadow is thrown on the screen behind you, big, and I’m gesticulating like this and you catch my shadow. And the silhouettes flicker. The fire’s dancing. So, if you are outside, you can tell a mile away what’s going on. Then you get the wind coming. It creaks a little. The door, by the way, is shaped like the yoni and you have to bend your head down as you come in, in honor of it.

ROSEMARY: The only thing that comes through the yoni is the sun and the stars and the moon; actually only people go through the lower exit and entrance.

TIMOTHY: It’s a sexy place.

YOKO: All those nasty magazines in London, they all call me Yoni.

JOHN: Yeah. Yoni Ono.

YOKO: John Lingam and Yoni Ono.

TIMOTHY: We sent a message to you, through Miles, that said that next time you come to the United States, if you wanted to get away for a few days, there’s a place…

JOHN: We never got the message from Miles. [Footnote: Barry Miles, UK countercultural activist, helped launched Indica Bookshop and International Times.] We miss a lot. Yeah, we’ve got it now. And if we come…

TIMOTHY: It would have to be done in a way that no one would know you’re there. Once you just get into the valley, it’s another world. Of course, we’ve been doing nothing but studying consciousness for the last seven or eight years, and at Millbrook, we had this large estate. You probably heard about it–this big 64-room house. It became like a mecca for scientists and barefoot pilgrims.

“We’ve been doing nothing but studying consciousness for the last seven or eight years.”–Tim

YOKO: I’ve heard of Millbrook. I mean, it’s famous.

TIMOTHY: Yes, and police informers and television people. But then we saw how geography was important. The land north of the house was uninhabited. As you got there, you got farther away from the people, and the games, and the television, and the police. What we’ve been trying to do is create heaven on earth, right? And we did have it going, for a while–in the forest groves where there were just holy people. Just people going around silently eating brown rice or caviar, and when you went there, you would never think of talking terrestrial. You never would say, “Well, the sheriff’s at the gate.”

JOHN: We were going to have no talking either, for a week.

TIMOTHY: Well, this was a place where you only would go if you just wanted to. It was set up somewhat like, you know, the Tolkien thing, with trees and shrines. There was another place where we lived, which we called Level Two, which was in a teepee, and people would come up there, and we would play, and laugh. And then you get down to the big house, and that was where you could feel the social pressures starting. And once you left the gate, then you were back in the primitive 20th century. As soon as you walked out the gate, if you didn’t have your identification, then they’d bust you. So it was all neuro–geography. The place you went to determined your level of consciousness. As you went from one zone to another, you knew you were just coming down or going up.

JOHN: That’s great.

TIMOTHY: Now we’ve got that going again out in the desert.

ROSEMARY: We’re living with a more intelligent group of people this time.

YOKO: What did you do with the place, Millbrook? Is it still going?

TIMOTHY: We were supposed to go there this week. Matter of fact, we may go there tomorrow night. It’s still there. But it’s the old story. In the past, societies fought over territory. They thought, “We’ll hold this space, or we’ll force you out.” It’s an old mammalian tradition. As you pointed out about Reagan, what we’re doing in the United States is transcending this notion of the good-guy cowboy. That’s Governor Reagan: he’s gonna shoot down hippies, shoot down blacks and college students. So we gave up Millbrook, because there’s no point in fighting over the land, and making it a thing of territorial pride. If they want it so much that they’re

going to keep an armed guard there all the time, they can have it. We’ll be back. [Footnote: Reagan ordered the California National Guard to shoot at protesting students during the People's Park uprising in Berkeley two weeks earlier; it was G. Gordon Liddy, later one of the Watergate burglars, who drove Tim and his extended family from Millbrook.]

JOHN: Yeah, that’s where we’re shouting at the kids at Berkeley: “forget the park, move on.” They’re all saying. “Where?” Y’know, I’m saying, “Canada. Anywhere.” There’s plenty of space.

TIMOTHY: There is.

ROSEMARY: Yes, if you fly over this country in an airplane you’ll just be amazed at the amount of space there is.

JOHN: Pioneers. Pioneers are very important today, because people won’t go where somebody hasn’t already gone. Yeah! That’s what we’re saying: what did your forefathers do? How did they make it?

YOKO: And it’s a healthy thing to do, isn’t it?

TIMOTHY: What do the kids say when they talk to you? [Footnote: All day John and Yoko have been talking to every radio station they can reach, and to anyone calling in to one of these radio stations wanting to talk to them.]

JOHN: About peace, or about anything in general? On the phone? Well, if they’re not saying, “Welcome to Canada,” they’re saying, “What can we do?” y’know?

ROSEMARY: That’s good.

JOHN: They’re saying, what can we actually do, and then I say, we say, “well we can’t tell you what to do?” y’know, we can only sort of say, “there’s other things to do.”

TIMOTHY: You’re in charge. You don’t have to ask.

JOHN: Yeah, think about it. But they’re getting it, y’know, I mean they must be. Our voices must be going out solid about every quarter of an hour. And if it isn’t singing, it’s talking, and we’re just repeating the same bit, y’know, and there’s very little “Me eyes are brown and Paul’s…y’know? I mean I do that for the ones that need it. Most of it’s just, “let’s get it together,” and it must be going out now like a mantra. We’re trying to set up a mantra, a peace mantra, and get it in their heads. It’s gonna work.

TIMOTHY: It’s Pierre Trudeau that got us in Canada. Because, about a year and a half, two years ago, there was a big university thing in Toronto [Footnote: Perception ’67, a conference/ cultural event featuring, in addition to the two named by Leary, Humphry Osmond, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Ed Sanders, and Ali Akbar Khan], and they invited people to speak about drugs. Paul Krassner came, McLuhan was there, and I was supposed to come up to give a talk, but the government wouldn’t let me in. So I sent a tape, and they confiscated it.

Then I went to the International Bridge in Detroit and handed it across, and the Americans busted me ’cause I wasn’t supposed to leave the country. That was two years ago, before Trudeau was premier. This time they checked with higher-ups. They kept us waiting about an hour. They were very polite. They were getting instructions from– wherever they get their instructions.

JOHN: They kept us about two hours, searched through everything. Yeah, well, we wanted to get to Trudeau, we’re really headed for Nixon.

“We wanted to get to Trudeau, we’re really headed for Nixon.” — John

TIMOTHY: I am too.

JOHN: We’re just telling them that we want to give them two acorns—a piece of sculpture that we entered in an exhibition. So we wanted to get that to Nixon and tell him all we want you to do is make a positive move, y’know. And then they’d either have to accept it or deny it publicly, and then we’d ask, “Why, why, don’t you give us that time schedule?”

TIMOTHY: How are things in Europe?

JOHN: They’re okay there, you know, it’s relaxed and everybody’s…they’re all smoking their cigars and drinking coffee, y’know, and you go to Paris and Amsterdam, and they’re all just rolling along.

YOKO: And they don’t dislike you for smoking.

JOHN: No, it’s not the same. They get down about it, but there’s none of that…

YOKO: Not hatred.

ROSEMARY: I’m always surprised when I read of any of you being busted in England, because…

JOHN: Oh, it’s again a bit paranoid in England now. It’s getting a bit heavy. ‘Cause there’s a lot of Americans coming in, y’know, sort of refugees, and it’s not even that so much. There’s just more people around, and they’re busting the pop stars. Like they got Mick Jagger and Marianne yesterday. [Footnote: Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were busted for possession of marijuana at their London home on May 28, 1969.] There’s one guy doing it all, one little Sergeant Pilgrim.

“They’re busting the pop stars. Like they got Mick Jagger and Marianne yesterday.” — John

ROSEMARY: Pilgrim?

JOHN: Yes, I think he’s on a pilgrimage, collecting scalps.

ROSEMARY: Your Pilgrim and our Purcell. [Footnote: Neil Purcell of the Laguna Beach police dept. followed the Learys around for months before pulling them over and busting Tim for two marijuana roaches in the backseat ashtray of their car, on Dec. 26, 1968, which are the very charges that sent him to prison in March 1970.]

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Bert Simons Makes Bizarre Hyper Realistic 3D Paper Portraits

| Art and design | June 29, 2012

bert simon paper portraits

bert simon paper portraits

paper sculpture by bert simon

bert simon self portrait

paper portraits by Bert Simon crerated with software

Bert Simons is a Dutch artist who only uses paper – a very simple material – to make these bizarre hyper realistic 3D portrait sculptures. Having said all that it takes open source software known as Blender to realise them.

To make the heads he plots and flattens the model through the Blender program. With the 3D image rendered into a 2D map he is able to glue all the bits together creating these weird, uncanny porttraits. If you want to see what the 2D bits look like check out his own paper clone self portrait

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Anders Lonnfeldt: A Music Photographer From Finland

| Photography | June 29, 2012

Anders Lonnfeldt photography

photography by Anders Lonnfeldt

music photography by Anders Lonnfeldt

concert photography Lonnfeldt in finland

Anders Lonnfeldt is an upcoming photographer, filmmaker and cinematographer from Finland. He may be young, he may be starting out but he’s already winning praise for his work in the music industry. Having just finished studying cinematography in Helsinki he’s now busy shooting concerts and directing music videos.

So, I’d thought I’d show you a bit of what’s going on up north in Finland with his latest video and a few a shots from his portfolio. Below is an excerpt from an interview Lonnfeldt did for a magazine in Helsinki – I thought you’d enjoy it:

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Here’s A Cute Stop Motion Animation Short Called No Noodles By Tyler Nicolson

| Film and animation | June 28, 2012

No Noodles by Tyler Nicolson

‘No Noodles’ by Tyler Nicolson is a wonderul stop motion animation about small creatures exploring and living in an even smaller world. And that’s about it. I just thought you’d like a little break. My three year old daughter wanted to watch it again and again. Very simple. Very good.

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My Dog Sighs Makes Free Art On Crushed Cans For Random Pedestrians

| Art and design | June 28, 2012

My Dog Sighs street art on cans

street art by My Dog Sighs

My Dog Sighs street art

free street art from My Dog Sighs

My Dog Sighs, a street artist from Portsmouth, England has been creating these wonderful painted faces on found crushed cans which he then leaves on the streets in random places for passersby to take home.

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Artist Ugo Rondinone Creates ‘Primitive’ A Wonderful Installation At Art Basel 2012

| Art and design | June 28, 2012

Ugo Rondinone primitive

installation by Ugo Rondinone called primitive

Primitive is a Ugo Rondinone installation

installation called primitive by Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone recently created this installation ‘Primitive’ for Art Basel 2012. The work is made up of a group of 59 different bronze cast bird figures and an illuminated clock mounted onto a wall made from stained glass with no hands – a metaphor for our consciousness of time. As you can see the wonderful birds are placed across the entire exhibition space and positioned so they all face different directions.

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A Great Clip Of Johnny Depp Reading Jack Kerouac’s Chorus 113

| Book reviews and writers | June 28, 2012

johnny depp reciting jack kerouac

This is a great clip of Johnny Depp reading Chorus 113 by Jack Kerouac, a piece from his ‘Mexico City Blues: 242 Choruses’ a book of improvisational verse published in 1959. As the beat icon was to say about it:

I want to be considered a jazz poet, blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next.

The recording was made for a 1995 TV mini-series caled The United States of Poetry; a portrait of America as seen through its language and poetry. It featured a range of poets like Joseph Brodsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz and Allen Ginsberg along with other famous people reading poetry such as Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Jimmy Carter. Depp appeared in ‘Show Five: The Word’. And here’s the poem:

Chorus 113
Got up and dressed up
and went out & got laid
Then died and got buried
in a coffin in the grave,
Man -
Yet everything is perfect,
Because it is empty,
Because it is perfect
with emptiness,
Because it’s not even happening.
Everything
Is Ignorant of its own emptiness–
Anger
Doesn’t like to be reminded of fits–
You start with the Teaching
Inscrutable of the Diamond
And end with it, your goal
is your startingplace,
No race has run, no walk
of prophetic toenails
Across Arabies of hot
meaning–you just
numbly don’t get there

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Luzinterruptus Create A Pool Of Light As An Artistic Action Against A Retail Development

| Art and design | June 28, 2012

luzinterruptus community art

Luzinterruptus Pool on a background of Field of Barley

light installation by luzinterruptus

spanish art collective luzinterruptus

spanish light installation by luzinterruptus in madrid

luzinterruptus spanish art collective based in madrid

Luzinterruptus are an anonymous art collective that conduct urban interventions in public spaces using light as a raw material:

We left our sparkles of light lit… for others to turn them off for us…

With this in mind they created their latest installation in Madrid, Spain. As with Ireland developers have been the scourge of Spain and in 2008 an area in Madrid’s La Latina neighborhood – which up until then had a public swimming pool – was demolished with the promise by the authorities that it would be redeveloped as a new cultural centre, a renovated public market and a huge wooded area for the benefit of the residents.

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Vladimir Nabakov Recites His Farewell To Russian Literature

| Book reviews and writers | June 27, 2012

vladimir nabakov poetry

Vladimir Nabokov had spent over 20 years as a Russian exile by the time the 1930s was coming to a close and at that stage had built up an international reputation as a gifted writer of poetry and prose. However, as war was looming he found himself destitute and unable to obtain permission to work in France. With a wife and a young son to support and the Nazis on the march he knew he had to get out fast. The most obvious route was through academia and he looked for a post in England or America.

His decision to leave France marked the moment when he would stop writing, for the most part, in Russian and by 1940 he was composing primarily in English. This farewell to his mother tongue was obviously a defining moment for Nabakov but, before he made his break, he wrote a few last poems including a final farewell to his younger self, a poem that would eventually be called ‘We So Firmly Believed’.

In this video Nabokov recites an early translation of the poem which was then called ‘To My Youth’. The poem is one of the best from Nabokov’s Russian period and according to Alexander Dolinin, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin – Madison:

He wrote it on the brink of World War II when his career as a leading Russian author in emigration was coming to an end, in a sense, all his poems from this period are farewells to Russian language, Russian literature and ‘old world’ as he knew it.

So here it is in text. A 1954 translation of the poem, which he describes on tape as “a clumsy, but more or less exact affair”:

To My Youth
We used to believe so firmly, you and I, in the unity
of existence; but now I glance back–and it is
astounding–how impersonal in color, how unreal in
pattern you have become, my youth.

When one examines the matter, it is like the haze of
a wave between me and you, between the shallows and the
drowning–or else I see a receding highway, and you
from behind as you pedal right into the sunset on your semi-racer.

You are no more myself, you’re a mere outline, the subject
of any first chapter–but how long we believed
in the oneness of the way from the damp gorge
to the mountain heather.

Nabokov retranslated the poem for his 1970 volume, Poems and Problems and called it ‘We So Firmly Believed’. There’s quite a difference. Perhaps it him addressing the problem of clumsiness. Perhaps it is time, memory.

We So Firmly Believed
We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,
but now I’ve looked back–and it is astonishing
to what a degree you, my youth,
seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.

If one probes it, it’s rather like a wave’s haze
between me and you, between shallow and sinking,
or else I see telegraph poles and you from the back
as right into the sunset you ride your half-racer.

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Forever Young By Bob Dylan Is Now A Children’s Book

| Book reviews and writers | June 27, 2012

bob dylan forever young childrens book

Bob Dylan recorded “Forever Young” for his 1974 album Planet Waves. Myself and my wife play it alot for daughter, after all its the perfect kids song, a pean to youth.
Dylan wrote it about his then four year old son Jakob (now frontman for the Wallflowers) and innumerable musicians have covered it since including; Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart, The Pretenders, Eddie Vedder and Norah Jones.

So to the point of this post…
The lyrics to the song make for a good childrens book and so it was to be. In 2008, Dylan along with illlustrator Paul Rogers published a children’s book called, ‘Forever Young’. The lyrics are the only text with the illustrations providing the real narrative – the story of a kid growing up during the folk scene of the 1960s in Greenwich Village.

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