Thursday
Oct. 10, 2002
The Music-Makers
Listen (RealAudio) | How to listen
Poem: "The Music-Makers," by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.
The Music-Makers
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
It's the birthday of Italian composer Giuseppe
Verdi, born in Rancola, Italy (1813).
It's the birthday of the French writer Claude
Simon, born in Tananarive, on the island of Madagascar (1913). He became
known as the representative of the nouveau roman literature style that emerged
in the 1950s.
It's the birthday of jazz pianist Thelonious
Monk, born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina (1917). He once said: "There
are no wrong notes."
It's the birthday of English playwright, actor, poet, and political activist
Harold Pinter,
born in East London, England (1930). He started writing poetry for little magazines
in his teens. As a young man, he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to undertake an
acting career. He spent years working in provincial repertory before deciding
to turn his attention to playwriting. Pinter started writing plays in 1957.
He had mentioned an idea for a play to a friend who worked in the drama department
at Bristol University. The friend liked the idea so much that he wrote to Pinter
asking for the play.The only problem was that if the university was to perform
the play, they would need a script within the week. Pinter wrote back and told
his friend to forget the whole thing--then sat down and wrote the play in four
days. He said: "I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch
of people. We don't need critics to tell the audiences what to think."
He wrote (among others) The Homecoming and The Caretaker.
It's the birthday of novelist and short story writer R.K.
(Rasipuram Krishnaswami) Narayan, born in Madras, India (1906). Narayan's
first book was Swami and Friends (1935), which, like many of this other
books, is set in a fictional town of Malgudi. He said: "I had an idea of
a railway station, a very small railway station, a wayside station. You've seen
that kind of thing, with a platform, trees and a stationmaster... a street,
a depot, a school or a temple at any spot in a little world...with the result
that I am unable to escape Malgudi." He stayed contentedly in his home
country, venturing abroad only rarely. He rarely addressed political issues
or tried to explore the cutting edge of fiction. He was a traditional teller
of tales, a creator of realistic fiction which is often gentle, humorous, and
warm rather than hard-hitting or profound. Graham Greene greatly admired R K
Narayan and helped publish his works in Britain. The remarkable fact about their
relationship was that Greene and Narayan met only once, briefly, in London in
1964. The friendship began in 1934 when Greene happened to come across a manuscript
of Swami and Friends. Greene was impressed and passed it on to Hamish
Hamilton. He also began a correspondence with R K Narayan. The correspondence
lasted until his death, with both of them taking around fifteen years to switch
from Dear Mr. Narayan and Graham Greene, to Dear Narayan and Graham.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
