A Conversation with Jacques Barzun (2010)
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- A conversation with Jacques Barzun, hosted by Jack Jackson, Sept. 12, 2010, SoL (Source of Light) Center, University Presbyterian Church, San Antonio, TX. Uploaded with the permission of Jacques Barzun and Jack Jackson.
For more about Barzun, read Michael Murray, Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind (Beil, 2011). bit.ly/loM16A
What a legend, more than a hundred years old and still sharp.
He's right: passion activates personal voice in writing. You can tell when a writer has put his heart into what he has written.
What a marvellous guy! God bless him.
He has a truly remarkable mind at over 100! I am sad this video doesn't have many more views.
Thank you for putting this on for the wider public.
We will never forget you, Barzun.
R.I.P. Jacques Barzun
not bad for 103 years old.
My absolute hero!
Family Circus is mentioned!! RIP Bil Keane. Want to know more about Barzun. Interersting conversation.
interview starts at 04:59
Yes, more than once in interview, JB mentions liking Family Circus.
You're very welcome. Michael Murray's biography of JB to be published in November 2011.
Starts at about 5:40.
Maybe it is because I'm not a native speaker of English or because Mr. Barzun's tongue was failing on him on the day of this interview, but I didn't quite understand what he meant with saying that while writing on a computer you can't edit your "excess" because it gets "blended" with the rest of your text, whereas writing long hand you can cut out this "excess." Could someone explain what he meant to me, please?
On paper ur writing is constrained by the paper. And to read it ur eye moves as if on a road, slowly (relative to a computer) observing the text. On a computer, because it's one continuous blank screen that can scroll endlessly, the entire text is seen as a whole and therefore meshes together, excess and all.
An analogy might help if I don't make any sense. Writing long hand is walking in a forest, observing the sights, the lights, colours, shadows, shapes, and moving figures. A computer is driving on a highway-interstate as the scenery lumbers quickly by and passes before the mind can completely comprehend and examine what it saw.
+Rainbow Bubbles I perfectly understand what you mean, Bubbles. Ever since I saw this talk I started to write more often by hand Iand it's quite enjoyable to have a paper full of ink you produced yourself, the paper a little bit deformed on account of the pen's pressure. It's really cool. I only wonder if Prof. Barzun wrote all the 900 pages FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE by hand.
."edit your excess" means, to me, you cut the excess or any kind of mistakes at the time of the conception of your writing wich is, of course, still in your mind therefore avoiding to correct such mistakes and consecutively save time.
This was a deeply disturbing book. I had to think as I read it, this is not about dawn to decadence, but a beginning of the process of decadence & it now leading to its terminal phase. The disintegration of the West begins w/ the Reformation. That is when European culture began to disintegrate.
He reminds of Gore Vidal being interviewed in the last days....
Don't be sad: people also see the video on Vimeo.
A man of endless contradiction. None more my favorite than his astute derision of "amiable stupidity" that is utterly lost on his gushers.
Well, what we call Western Civilisation is a restoration of a more ancient Classical Civilisation. The largely Latin & Greek based Classical culture was a broader catagory then Western EUROPEAN Civlisation. That is the WEST we mean when we talk about Western Civlisation. The Greeks were declining even as their culture was being made universal by the conquering Romans. Perhaps the WEST is experiencing a further universalization process, even as they betray that culture internally.
Since you died, Sir, things have gotten MUCH worse!