A beautiful and thoughtful essay. The skies here in South Africa are very beautiful as well, especially in the summertime. In my native language (Afrikaans) we have a word, ‘môregloed’, translation; morning glow. We even have a small suburb bearing the name. There truly is so much beauty, meaning and memories in the most ‘simplest’ and everyday words.
Hi, I love your work, different from the regular RUclips reviewers. Being from Mexico I would like you to talk about Latin American literature, so vast and diverse. Not all is magical realism. In my experience I found that threre are literary bridges between Latin American authors and some Irish or even Polish ones (here we have to mention Kapuscinski). Sergio Pitol (with a very innovative work of his own) was a great contemporary writer that translated Polish and Rusian writers, marking them known in this side of the world. This video broth back to me some descriptions of the sky in the pampa, the genre called "the gaucho novel". Keep up the great work. Greetings from Canada.
I will look out for Sergio Pitol - he's new to me, so thanks for sharing. I hope to be able to discuss some Latin American literature at some point, too. Thanks for the kind words.
Hello, sorry about my bad english. Anyway, ever since I've found your channel I rekindled my passion for literature. This year through influence of your videos I've read some of the best books I could find: Pynchon, McCarty, Bolano. I'd like to thank you for your work, since this channel is some sort of literary masterpiece of its own.
Hello - no need to apologise! You express yourself very well. I'm so pleased to hear that I've helped you to find your love for literature again. That's exactly why I make these videos. It's lovely to hear about it - I really appreciate the kind words.
Another superlative video. Always excited for these. Also, when you discussed your podcast in a previous video, I went back and listened to a few episodes and they are exactly how I would expect a literary podcast to be. I love the blending of the author's background, summary, best quotes, literary analysis, historical background and all the other elements. The house of hunger is now my next book. Keep up the good work!
Thank you, James. I'm really glad you enjoyed some the podcast episodes. I'm never sure if anyone is still listening to those, but I really enjoyed making them. Dambudzo Marechera is terrific!
@@SherdsTube Just finished House of Hunger, read it in an evening. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. The narrative voice was wonderful, a lot of the writing was really powerful and vivid, the personification was really well done. One of the best books I've read this year. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Lovely video! As usual, there are several works here I haven't read, and your meditations on them whet my appetite. But I also loved being reminded of that lovely moment in "The Meridian". I read Buchner's works mainly because I wanted to understand Celan's speech better, to find that Lenz is a truly heartbreaking work, as is Woyzeck. It's brief, and isn't lyrical at all, but when you mentioned the sky in literature I immediately thought of Beckett's evocation of Ecclesiastes in the first paragraph of Murphy: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings."
Thanks so much, M C! Agree about Lenz and Woyzeck - they both had a huge impact on me when I read them early on. Yes, I love that opening of Murphy. Would have been a brilliant one to include. As I said to @kulchurkat on Instagram, there are so many great passages I wish I had put into this video - maybe there should be a part 2 at some point! :)
Beautiful video. I suppose an obvious example of writers using the sky as "a carrier of meaning," as you put it, is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. A poem by Li-Young Lee called "Night Mirror" uses imagery of the night sky in a very affecting way. "All that space / the nighthawk plunges through / homing, all that distance beyond embrace / what is it but your own infinity."
I feel like I'm just beginning to excavate the sherds buried within my reader's mind, but the first and clearest recollection that came to me when you mentioned the sky as a vehicle for meaning was O'Hara's "Mayakovsky": The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. The second re-collection - a death scene in DeLillo's _Mao II_ - was a bit hazier, but a quick check of the text confirmed my suspicions; there it was, tucked neatly away at the end of Chapter 13: "They were still boarding. The light was the kind that splits the sky, a high sulfur spearhead fading into night. He went to find his compartment, which consisted of three wire hangers and a bunk. He grew dizzy again and lay down, his forearm over his face to keep the light out. The boat whistle sounded, making him think it was nice, inside the pain, that boats still have whistles that seem to call a song. He thought he was resting well, having a good rest. He thought the pages he'd done showed an element of conflict, the wrong kind of exertion or opposition, a stress in two directions, and he realized in the end he wasn't really thinking about the prisoner. Who is the boy, he thought...He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the ship sailing morningward toward the sun." Finally, it dawned on me (no pun intended) that Kerouac had mentioned the skies over my long-suffering home state in the final paragraph of _On The Road_ : "So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty." Another excellent entry, Sam! Keep them coming!!
In Dante's Devine Comedy the sky plays a major role story wise. I tried to remember when the sky was importnat in books I've read, but I only came up with Dostoevsky's White Nights, in which it is important that the sun doesn't set in Petersburg in Summer. A romance can play out in the night. It's one of the best novellas I've read due to the poetic elements in the first fourth.
Beautiful video! I love looking at skies 😊 I have Blood Meridian on my to-read-list, but I’m a bit terrified. And I’ll add The Devil Under Maison Bleu to it as well. Have a lovely evening 😊
Thank you, Silje. Yes, Blood Meridian isn't the most comforting of books ;). Actually, the whole Michael Wehunt collection, 'Greener Pastures', is fantastic.
I love the Western genre for many reasons, and one of them is the importance and resulting prevalence of the sky (e.g. it's mentioned 3 times in the opening chapter of Lonesome Dove!) and how authors can flex their creativity to use it to their advantage.
I wish I could recall more renditions of the sky in the books I have read! Hard to think of a specific description off the top of my head, but in some books, the sky seems to have a certain character throughout. In another work by Cormac McCarthy - 'The Road' - I remember the sky as alarming in its absence, being literally blotted out, a foreboding grey dome of nothingness. It has been a while since I have read a maritime novel, but I imagine you'd be able to find some skygazing in Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville for example. And how about those examples of dual moons or blood-red skies one can find in SF & Fantasy (Gene Wolfe & M. John Harrison springs to mind yet again). Even in Haruki Murakami's '1Q84' dual moons have a significant effect on the characters. The same goes for a much less known work - but a brilliant one - the short story 'Luna Seconda' by danish author Ursula Scavenius, from the collection 'Fjer'. A shame it is not yet translated into English! Guess I was able to recall some things after all. Thank you for the effort, Sam, your love of literature is stimulating! Great video as always :) Andreas / Copenhagen
There is a great passage in Bataille's Story of the Eye, where the narrator looks up at the sky. Unfortunately I don't have an English translation at hand. The narrator describes the milky way as "astral sperm and celestial urine floating through the skull's concavity of the luminaries, where they burst forth from the perfect silence like the scream of a rooster" (my translation from the German translation I read).
Here in my city, the clay-white inescapable sky is always there. And when I feel numb about its dimming light, every rare sunny day becomes unbearable because I can't hide my body of sadness in the indifferent world around me.
Hark now, hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly
Into the mystic
Van Morrison
A beautiful and thoughtful essay. The skies here in South Africa are very beautiful as well, especially in the summertime.
In my native language (Afrikaans) we have a word, ‘môregloed’, translation; morning glow. We even have a small suburb bearing the name. There truly is so much beauty, meaning and memories in the most ‘simplest’ and everyday words.
Thanks for the kind words and for sharing a new one with me. I love it.
Hi, I love your work, different from the regular RUclips reviewers. Being from Mexico I would like you to talk about Latin American literature, so vast and diverse. Not all is magical realism. In my experience I found that threre are literary bridges between Latin American authors and some Irish or even Polish ones (here we have to mention Kapuscinski). Sergio Pitol (with a very innovative work of his own) was a great contemporary writer that translated Polish and Rusian writers, marking them known in this side of the world.
This video broth back to me some descriptions of the sky in the pampa, the genre called "the gaucho novel".
Keep up the great work.
Greetings from Canada.
I will look out for Sergio Pitol - he's new to me, so thanks for sharing. I hope to be able to discuss some Latin American literature at some point, too. Thanks for the kind words.
Hello, sorry about my bad english. Anyway, ever since I've found your channel I rekindled my passion for literature. This year through influence of your videos I've read some of the best books I could find: Pynchon, McCarty, Bolano. I'd like to thank you for your work, since this channel is some sort of literary masterpiece of its own.
Hello - no need to apologise! You express yourself very well.
I'm so pleased to hear that I've helped you to find your love for literature again. That's exactly why I make these videos. It's lovely to hear about it - I really appreciate the kind words.
Another superlative video. Always excited for these.
Also, when you discussed your podcast in a previous video, I went back and listened to a few episodes and they are exactly how I would expect a literary podcast to be. I love the blending of the author's background, summary, best quotes, literary analysis, historical background and all the other elements. The house of hunger is now my next book.
Keep up the good work!
Thank you, James. I'm really glad you enjoyed some the podcast episodes. I'm never sure if anyone is still listening to those, but I really enjoyed making them. Dambudzo Marechera is terrific!
@@SherdsTube I personally still listen to them and I recommend them to people whenever I can
@@SherdsTube Just finished House of Hunger, read it in an evening. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. The narrative voice was wonderful, a lot of the writing was really powerful and vivid, the personification was really well done. One of the best books I've read this year.
Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
This was incredible, beautifully put together and very well presented.
That means a lot coming from you, mate. Thanks so much for saying so.
Beautiful
Thanks for saying so.
These videos are "that occasional, rare thing" I look forward to and savour.
Great video as always!
Thanks for all your support, Dominik. I really appreciate it. Hoping they won't be so rare one day.
Lovely video! As usual, there are several works here I haven't read, and your meditations on them whet my appetite. But I also loved being reminded of that lovely moment in "The Meridian". I read Buchner's works mainly because I wanted to understand Celan's speech better, to find that Lenz is a truly heartbreaking work, as is Woyzeck.
It's brief, and isn't lyrical at all, but when you mentioned the sky in literature I immediately thought of Beckett's evocation of Ecclesiastes in the first paragraph of Murphy:
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings."
Thanks so much, M C! Agree about Lenz and Woyzeck - they both had a huge impact on me when I read them early on.
Yes, I love that opening of Murphy. Would have been a brilliant one to include. As I said to @kulchurkat on Instagram, there are so many great passages I wish I had put into this video - maybe there should be a part 2 at some point! :)
Love it!
Thanks, Keith!
You, my friend, are amazing
Why thank you!
Beautiful video. I suppose an obvious example of writers using the sky as "a carrier of meaning," as you put it, is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. A poem by Li-Young Lee called "Night Mirror" uses imagery of the night sky in a very affecting way. "All that space / the nighthawk plunges through / homing, all that distance beyond embrace / what is it but your own infinity."
Yes! The Sheltering Sky is a great example. Thanks for sharing the poem.
I feel like I'm just beginning to excavate the sherds buried within my reader's mind, but the first and clearest recollection that came to me when you mentioned the sky as a vehicle for meaning was O'Hara's "Mayakovsky":
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
The second re-collection - a death scene in DeLillo's _Mao II_ - was a bit hazier, but a quick check of the text confirmed my suspicions; there it was, tucked neatly away at the end of Chapter 13:
"They were still boarding. The light was the kind that splits the sky, a high sulfur spearhead fading into night. He went to find his compartment, which consisted of three wire hangers and a bunk. He grew dizzy again and lay down, his forearm over his face to keep the light out. The boat whistle sounded, making him think it was nice, inside the pain, that boats still have whistles that seem to call a song. He thought he was resting well, having a good rest. He thought the pages he'd done showed an element of conflict, the wrong kind of exertion or opposition, a stress in two directions, and he realized in the end he wasn't really thinking about the prisoner. Who is the boy, he thought...He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the ship sailing morningward toward the sun."
Finally, it dawned on me (no pun intended) that Kerouac had mentioned the skies over my long-suffering home state in the final paragraph of _On The Road_ :
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Another excellent entry, Sam! Keep them coming!!
Wow! Such great additions to the sky-collage! Thanks for sharing, and for the kind words.
In Dante's Devine Comedy the sky plays a major role story wise.
I tried to remember when the sky was importnat in books I've read, but I only came up with Dostoevsky's White Nights, in which it is important that the sun doesn't set in Petersburg in Summer. A romance can play out in the night. It's one of the best novellas I've read due to the poetic elements in the first fourth.
It has been a long time since I read 'White Nights', but I recall enjoying it enormously. Time to revisit it soon!
Beautiful video! I love looking at skies 😊 I have Blood Meridian on my to-read-list, but I’m a bit terrified. And I’ll add The Devil Under Maison Bleu to it as well.
Have a lovely evening 😊
Thank you, Silje. Yes, Blood Meridian isn't the most comforting of books ;). Actually, the whole Michael Wehunt collection, 'Greener Pastures', is fantastic.
McCarthy was the first guy I was thinking about aswell haha
He's definitely a go-to sky guy ;)
I love the Western genre for many reasons, and one of them is the importance and resulting prevalence of the sky (e.g. it's mentioned 3 times in the opening chapter of Lonesome Dove!) and how authors can flex their creativity to use it to their advantage.
I love that about it, too!
I wish I could recall more renditions of the sky in the books I have read!
Hard to think of a specific description off the top of my head, but in some books, the sky seems to have a certain character throughout.
In another work by Cormac McCarthy - 'The Road' - I remember the sky as alarming in its absence, being literally blotted out, a foreboding grey dome of nothingness.
It has been a while since I have read a maritime novel, but I imagine you'd be able to find some skygazing in Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville for example.
And how about those examples of dual moons or blood-red skies one can find in SF & Fantasy (Gene Wolfe & M. John Harrison springs to mind yet again).
Even in Haruki Murakami's '1Q84' dual moons have a significant effect on the characters.
The same goes for a much less known work - but a brilliant one - the short story 'Luna Seconda' by danish author Ursula Scavenius, from the collection 'Fjer'.
A shame it is not yet translated into English!
Guess I was able to recall some things after all.
Thank you for the effort, Sam, your love of literature is stimulating!
Great video as always :)
Andreas / Copenhagen
Thanks for the kind words, Andreas. I appreciate it. Fantastic selection here. Very intrigued by Ursula Scavenius - keen to check her out soon.
@@SherdsTube Her second short story collection 'The Dolls' has been translated & published by Lolli Editions :)
Yes, I saw that. Will pick it up soon, hopefully.
There is a great passage in Bataille's Story of the Eye, where the narrator looks up at the sky. Unfortunately I don't have an English translation at hand.
The narrator describes the milky way as "astral sperm and celestial urine floating through the skull's concavity of the luminaries, where they burst forth from the perfect silence like the scream of a rooster" (my translation from the German translation I read).
Excellent passage! Thanks so much for sharing it with me.
Here in my city, the clay-white inescapable sky is always there. And when I feel numb about its dimming light, every rare sunny day becomes unbearable because I can't hide my body of sadness in the indifferent world around me.
You're right - it can be oppressive sometimes, too. What's your city?
@@SherdsTube Chengdu