Donnerstag, 1. Oktober 2009

29.11.2016 - Steinbeck2 and Pres. Sp. 1962 etc...





dali48 and writing books and photographing parks etc...



01.10.2009 - Interpretation of dali48

While studying at Stanford University, he often had to earn his living by working on the ranches! - He left Stanford without graduating, and went to New York as a freelance writer in 1925 - After bitter years of struggling to exist, he returned to California - where he found a home in a lonely cottage by the sea! - There he continued his writing... (J. Steinbeck, Pres. Sp. 1962)

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is the story of the emigration to California - which was forced upon a group of people from Oklahoma through unemployment and abuse of power! - This tragic episode in the social history of the United States inspired in Steinbeck a poignant description of the experiences of one particular farmer and his family - during their endless, and heart-breaking journey to a new home...

Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth - with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American - be it good or bad...

"I wonder why progress so often looks like destruction" - he says in one place when he sees the bulldozers flattening out the verdant forest of Seattle - to make room for the feverishly expanding residential areas and skyscrapers! - It is in any case a most topical reflection, valid also outside America...

There is in him a strain of grim humour which to some extent redeems his often cruel and crude motif! - His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed - he likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for money! - But in him we find the American temperament also in his great feeling for nature - for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains, and the ocean coasts - all an inexhaustible source of inspiration to Steinbeck in the midst of, and beyond the world of human beings... (J. Steinbeck, Pres. Sp. 1962)


Annex2 to the blogs of dali48



30.11.2016 - Seferis2 and Greece etc...




dali48 and writing books and photographing in SHA etc...
 

01.10.2009 - Interpretation of dali48  

In 1941 Seferis married Marika Zannou - who had 2 young daughters. They had met on vacation in 1936. At that time Selferis had ended his relationship with Loukia Fotopoulou - a highly educated woman who lived apart from her husband - she died in 1939...

"Wherever I travel - Greece wounds me," he once said...

During the Cyprus crisis in the 1950s - he contributed to the negotiations that resulted in the London Agreement (1959), making Cyprus independent of British rule...

Seferis's years as a diplomat in several countries - made him a modern Odysseus...

Seferis also expressed his fears about the triumph of commercial culture - and once told his dream in which the Parthenon was auctioned off to become an advertisement - "every column a gigantic tube of toothpaste"...

Seferis died on September 20, 1971 - 1000s of young people escorted his coffin, to honour him as a spokesman for freedom - His widow cut off her hair and flung it into his grave - "I am fully conscious that we do not live in a time - when the poet can believe that fame awaits him, but in a time of oblivion. This doesn't make me less dedicated to my beliefs - I am more so"... (G. Seferis, P.A.C.)


Annex2 to the blogs of dali48