AlokeKumar

JOHN UPDIKE

( 1932-2009)

John Updike, regarded as one of the greatest and most prolific writers in modern American letters, died Tuesday on 27th January 2009.

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. His father, Wesley, was a high school mathematics teacher, the model for several sympathetic father figures in Updike's early works. Because Updike's mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, nurtured literary aspirations of her own, books were a large part of the boy's early life. This fertile environment prepared the way for a prolific career which began in earnest at the age of 22, upon the publication of his first story, "Friends from Philadelphia, " in the New Yorker in 1954.

Updike admired the New Yorker and aspired to become a cartoonist for that periodical. He majored in English at Harvard where he developed his skills as a graphic artist and cartoonist for the Lampoon, the college's humor magazine. In 1953, his junior year at Harvard, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliff art student. Upon graduation the following year, Updike and his bride went to London where he had won a Knox fellowship for study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

He returned to the United States in 1955 and took a job as a staff writer at the New Yorker at the invitation of famed editor E. B. White, achieving a life-long goal. But after two years and many "Talk of the Town" columns, he left New York for Ipswich, Massachusetts, to devote himself full time to his own writing

His novels and stories, written in a well-modulated prose of extraordinary beauty and dazzling fluidity, usually treat the tensions and frustrations of middle-class life, often mingling the joys and sorrows of suburban life with a current of existential dread. The classic novel Rabbit Run (1961), set in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, concerns a young man who yearns for his days as a high school athlete and deserts his wife and child. In Rabbit Redux (1971), the same hero confronts racial tension, job obsolescence, sexual freedom, drugs, violence, and the alienation of the young. The quartet continues with Rabbit Is Rich (1981; Pulitzer Prize) and ends with Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer Prize). The Rabbit characters are brought up to date in Rabbit Remembered, a novella-sequel included in the volume Licks of Love (2000).

Updike has been honored throughout his career: twice he received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He also received the American Book Award and was elected to the American Acade

GIAN LORENZO BERNINI

(1598-1680)

Italian playwright, painter, composer, architect, theater designer, and caricaturist. However, he was most known for his sculptor. His sculptors are so detailed that you can mistake it for real.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was born in Naples in 1598. His mother was Neapolitan. He was trained as a sculptor by his father, Pietro, who came from Florence. But Bernini was Roman: he was brought to Rome as a child; he remained there almost all his life; and he absorbed completely Rome's dual heritage of empire and papacy.

Not long after Pietro Bernini moved from Naples to Rome, he began work on the sculpture of the Pauline Chapel, the enormous addition to S. Maria Maggiore built for the reigning pope, Paul V. This commission gave the elder Bernini an opportunity to introduce his son, who was a child prodigy, to the Pope and the Pope's favorite nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The cardinal, a man of vast wealth with a real passion for art, was to become Bernini's first important patron

In his youth Bernini made the customary studies of the work of Raphael and Michelangelo. But Hellenistic sculpture and Roman sculpture in the Hellenistic tradition were to influence his development far more, and it was largely from these ancient sources that he drew the powerfully dynamic and fluid style that was to characterize his mature work. Contemporary painting as well, by Caravaggio, the Carracci, and Guido Reni, was to play a role in his stylistic formation.



Under the rule of the Barberini pope, Urban VIII , Bernini dominated the artistic scene in Rome. With Urban's successor, Innocent X, his fortunes changed. Finding the papal treasury empty the new pope drove the Barberini from Rome and rejected everyone, including, Bernini. At the same time sculptors and architects who had been envious of Bernini's fabulous success rushed to attack him on trumped-up charges. But Bernini's trials were short-lived. He was soon back in favor, hard at work for Innocent X, who had found it impossible to find another artist with half Bernini's talent. For the rest of his life each succeeding pope sought his services.

MAO ZEDONG

also MAO TSE-TUNG

(1893-1976)

In the summer of 1967 when I was a lad of 11, I felt the impact of Mao Zedong. A section of Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) led by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal led a violent uprising in 1967, trying to develop a "revolutionary opposition". The insurrection started in 1967 in Naxalbari village when a peasant was attacked by hired hands over a land dispute. Majumdar greatly admired Mao Zedong and advocated that Indian peasants and lower classes must follow in his footsteps and overthrow the government and upper classes. Large number of students left their education to join revolutionary activities. My own elder brother and sister joined the group, inspite of my father being landed gentry and thus a bourgeois.

Mao Zedong was the world's most prominent Chinese communist during the 20th century. Mao's Red Army overthrew Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949, and the communists seized power of mainland China. Ruthless and ambitious, Mao turned China into a world military power and created a cult of personality. His campaign to export communism made China a threat to the West and led to confrontations in Southeast Asia and Korea. Under Mao's rule China endured a series of economic disasters and political terrorism, but for more than 25 years Mao was China.

Born in Hunan on Dec. 26, 1893, Mao Zedong did not venture outside his home province until he was 25. Up to then, his formal education was limited to 6 years at a junior normal school where he acquired a meager knowledge but developed a lucid written style and a considerable understanding of social problems, Chinese history, and current affairs.

The son of a peasant, Mao joined the revolutionary army that overthrew the Qing dynasty but, after six months as a soldier, left to acquire more education. At Beijing University he met Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, founders of the CCP, and in 1921 he committed himself to Marxism. At that time, Marxist thought held that revolution lay in the hands of urban workers, but in 1925 Mao concluded that in China it was the peasants . He became chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic and its Red Army withstood repeated attacks from Chiang Kai-shek's army but at last undertook the Long March to a more secure position in northwestern China. There Mao became the undisputed head of the CCP. Guerrilla warfare tactics, appealed to the local population's nationalist sentiments. Mao's agrarian policies gained the party military advantages against their Nationalist and Japanese enemies and broad support among the peasantry. This agrarian Marxism differed from the Soviet model, but, when the communists succeeded in taking power in China in 1949, the Soviet Union agreed to provide assistance.

However, Mao's Great Leap Forward and his criticism of "new bourgeois elements" in the Soviet Union and China alienated the Soviet Union irrevocably; Soviet aid was withdrawn in 1960. Mao followed the failed Great Leap Forward with the Cultural Revolution, also considered to have been a disastrous mistake.

Mao died in Sept., 1976. Mao's embalmed body is displayed in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

I ,on my part, appreciate the calligraphy and poems of Mao.

LUCIAN BLAGA

(1895 - 1961)

Lucian Blaga is all over SU. Till recently he was an unknown poet until a friend introduced me to him. Then suddenly I found everybody quoting him and I followed suit.....and then with a few weeks he was in The Telegraph.. But who is he........

Blaga was born on May 9, 1895, in Lâncrâm, Transylvania, in what was then part of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire but which became Romania. He was the ninth child born to a Romanian Orthodox priest and his wife. Interestingly, the future poet did not speak until he was four years old. His education was a predominantly German one, and he was especially influenced by the philosophical texts of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gotthold Lessing, and Henri Bergson. Blaga attended primary school in his native village, but after his family became destitute upon the death of his father in 1908, he withdrew from school. He resumed his schooling in Sebeş, where his family moved in 1909, and completed his secondary schooling in Braşov.

Blaga published his first poems in 1910, and two years later he traveled to Italy, where he scoured libraries for books on philosophy and visited historical sites. In 1914 he published "Notes on Intuition in Bergson," his first philosophical article. From 1914 to 1917 he avoided serving in the Austro-Hungarian army by taking theology courses at the Sibiu Orthodox Seminary, then moved to Vienna, where he studied philosophy and biology at the University of Vienna. In 1919 his first volume of poetry, Poemele luminii (Poems of Light), was published. His thesis titled "Culture and Cognition" earned him a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1920.

Blaga moved back to Romania in 1920 and published plays and more poems. He and a group of prominent Romanian writers established the journal Gîndirea (Thought) which was devoted to exploring Romanian national identity and which became the most influential literary magazine of its day. In 1921 the Romanian Academy presented Blaga with the Adamachi Award and in 1922 his thesis was published.

In 1926 Blaga began a career as a diplomat and journalist as the press attaché to the Romanian legation in Warsaw and continued till 1932 to Vienna. One year later his diplomatic career took him to Bucharest, Romania, and then to Lisbon, Portugal.

In 1939 Blaga returned to Romania to become a professor, at the University of Cluj. The 1949 Communist takeover forced Blaga to give up his academic chair at the University, and he was banned from publishing. He found work as a librarian and resigned himself to publishing translations of German authors. He became the Romanian Academy's head librarian in 1951. In 1956 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and was on the verge of receiving the award when the communist regime in Bucharest made false protest of his nomination.

Silenced as a writer , Blaga died of cancer.

This spot is for my dear friend Roxana, from Romania who introduced me to the poems of Luciana Blaga.

BERTOLT BRECHT

(1898-1956)

I came to know of Brecht in my college days from the staging of the Bengali version of `Threepenny Opera" called "Tin Paisar Pala" .He was then a favorite of the Coffee House and owned by the left intellectuals of Calcutta.Playwright, poet and lyricist Bertolt Brecht was among the most controversial figures ever to impact musical theater; an avowed Marxist, he worked to create one of the most provocative bodies of work ever staged.

Bertolt Brecht was born on Feb. 10, 1898, in Augsburg. The son of a Catholic businessman, Brecht was raised, however, in his mother's Protestant faith. In 1917 he matriculated at the University of Munich to study philosophy and medicine. In in Augsburg, Bavaria; while attending Munich University, he was drafted to serve as a medic in World War I, later forging a career as a writer. The unpleasantness of this experience confirmed his hatred of war and stimulated his sympathy for the unsuccessful Socialist revolution of 1919.

His early Express ionist dramas -- Trommeln in der Nacht, Baal and Im Dickicht der Stadte -- reflected his anti-establishment leanings, as well as an obsession with violence; he then spent the majority of the 1920s touring the cabaret circuits of Germany and Scandinavia, often courting further controversy over the outspoken politics and nihilistic edge of his songs.

In 1928 Brecht earned his greatest theatrical success with Die Dreigroschenoper, a musical adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera featuring music composed by Weill; like the previous year's Mann Ist Mann and 1929's Mahagonny, it spotlighted the playwright's gift for incisive satire of bourgeois sensibilities.

By 1933, Brecht -- exiled to Denmark in the wake of the Reichstag fire -- had acquired an international reputation on the strength of work like The Threepenny Opera, which opened in an English-language version on Broadway. An outspoken critic of the Nazis, his plays, poems and radio dramas of the period attacked the Hitler regime with thinly-veiled contempt; finally, in 1941 he was forced to flee to Hollywood, settling there to write works including Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis and Leben des Galilei. In 1947 Brecht was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for his pro-Communist beliefs.

In 1948 Brecht settled in East Berlin, where he remained until his death. He and his wife, founded the Berliner Ensemble. This group became the most famous theater company in East Germany and the foremost interpreter of Brecht. He himself devoted much of his time to directing. He wrote no new plays except Die Tage der Commune. There is some evidence that he modified his austere conception of the function of drama and conceded the importance of the theater as a vehicle for entertainment.

He died of a heart attack in August 1956.


This spot is for Gwendolyn from Alabama,USA. Who likes the work of Brecht. For more on her visit : swandolyn.stumbleupon.com [swandolyn.stumbleupon.com]

ALFRED TENNYSON

(1809-1892),

English poet regarded by his contemporaries as the greatest poet of Victorian England. A superb craftsman in verse, he wrote poetry that ranged from confident assertion to black despair.

Alfred Tennyson, who is known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on Aug. 6, 1809, in the rectory of the village of Somersby, Lincolnshire. His parents were the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson. Dr. Tennyson, the poet's father was an educated man, a country clergyman, and Alfred read widely in his father's library. As Dr. Tennyson grew older, he grew more passionate and melancholy: he took to drink, he suffered from lapses of memory. Misfortune and madness, not surprisingly, haunted the whole Tennyson family.

His early literary attempts included a play, The Devil and the Lady, composed at 14, and poems written with his brothers Frederick and Charles but entitled Poems by Two Brothers (1827). In his three years at Cambridge, Tennyson wrote a prizewinning poem, Timbuctoo (1829), and Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and began his close friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, son of the historian Henry Hallam.


Upon the death of his father in 1831, Tennyson became responsible for the family and its precarious finances. His volume Poems (1832) included some of his most famous pieces, such as "The Lotus-Eaters," "A Dream of Fair Women," and "The Lady of Shalott."

Tennyson's next published work, Poems (1842), expressed his philosophic doubts in a materialistic, increasingly scientific age and his longing for a sustaining faith. The new poems included "Locksley Hall," "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur," and "Break, Break, Break." With this book he was acclaimed a great poet, and in addition, he was granted an annual government pension of £200 in 1845.

The Princess (1847) was followed in 1850 by the masterful In Memoriam, an elegy sequence that records Tennyson's years of doubt and despair after Hallam's death and culminates in an affirmation of immortality. The same year saw his appointment as poet laureate and his marriage to Emily Sellwood, whom he had courted since 1836 but had been unable to marry because of his precarious financial position. Occasional poems, such as the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852) and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1855), were part of his duties as laureate.

The first group of Idylls of the King appeared in 1859. Latter he arranged the 12 poems chronologically in 1888 to constitute a ethical epic of the glory and the downfall of King Arthur. In the Arthurian legend, Tennyson projected his vision of the hollowness of his own civilization. Included among his other works are Maud (1855), a "monodrama"; Enoch Arden (1864); several poetic dramas, most notably Becket .

Tennyson passed his last years in comfort. In 1883 he was created a peer and occupied a seat in the House of Lords.

This spot is for Maureen from Michigan, USA, who likes the works of Tennyson. For more on her visit: maureenlynne.stumbleupon.com [maureenlynne.stumbleupon.com]

BERTRAND RUSSELL

(1872-1970)

British philosopher and mathematician

Russell, who was born at Trelleck, England, was orphaned at an early age and brought up in the home of his grandfather, the politician Lord John Russell. He was educated privately before attending Cambridge University (1890), from which he graduated (1893) in mathematics.In 1895 he became a fellow and lecturer at Cambridge. His work after 1920 was mainly devoted to the development of his philosophical and political opinions.

World War I had a crucial effect on Russell: until that time he had thought of himself as a philosopher and mathematician. Although he had already embraced pacifism, it was in reaction to the war that he became passionately concerned with social issues. His active pacifism at the time of the war inspired public resentment, caused him to be dismissed from Cambridge and led finally to a six-month imprisonment in 1918. From 1916 until the late 1930s, Russell held no academic position and supported himself mainly by writing and by public lecturing. In 1927 he and his wife, Dora, founded the experimental Beacon Hill School, which influenced the development of other schools in Britain and America.

He succeeded to the earldom in 1931 and in 1938 began teaching in the United States, first at the Univ. of Chicago and then at the Univ. of California at Los Angeles. In 1941 he went to teach at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., after his appointment to the College of the City of New York was canceled as a result of a celebrated legal battle occasioned by protest against his liberal views, particularly those on sex. These views, much distorted by his critics, had appeared in Marriage and Morals (1929), where he took liberal positions on divorce, adultery, and homosexuality. In 1944 he was restored to a fellowship at Cambridge. In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Prior to World War II, in the face of the Nazi threat, Russell abandoned his pacifist stance; but after the war he again became a leading spokesman for pacifism and especially for the unilateral renunciation (by Great Britain) of atomic weapons. In 1961 his activity in mass demonstrations to ban nuclear weapons led once more to his imprisonment. Almost until his death he was active in social reform.

Throughout his life his dissent had scorned popularity with either the right or the left. Untamable, he had profound trust in the ultimate power of rationality, which he voiced with quenchless zeal. Philosophically and ethically Russell's thought grew in reaction against the extremes he encountered. His emphasis on logical analysis influenced the course of British philosophy in the 20th century.

Russell was an essentially shy man, yet brilliant and witty in conversation Although frail in appearance, he was vigorous and active throughout most of his life. He died at Wales, in 1970.


This spot is for Marina from Serbia.who likes the writings of Russell. For more on her visit : moolfs.stumbleupon.com [moolfs.stumbleupon.com]

Watching Horror:
A Look at Terrorism, or,
Everything I Need to Know About Terrorism Learned in the Mumbai Attack

Friends have enquired if all is well with me and my family. Seeing no changes in the post made them feel that something is amiss. I owe them my love. Friends visited the site over and over again, without seeing any new post, leaving a faint trace of their anxiety. I owe them my gratitude. Friend forwarded e-cards wishing me a very happy Christmas and New Year, to them I reciprocate from the bottom of my heart. A very Happy New Year to all. There is hope....for all this speaks of a new world order.

I am shell shocked and in a stupor. On November 26th, just as in a movie theater, I was free to walk away from the terrifying images on my television screen, but how could I? What purpose would disengaging from the terror serve? It would be a temporary relief, like burying my head, but I knew that the images would be replayed endlessly by the media. I knew that only once I was able to look, I could not turn away from the screen that compelled me to keep watching. I stayed with the November 26th. coverage until my gaze was fixed on the terror.

On the other hand, by watching terrorism the way I watch horror movies, was I allowing myself to enter into denial? Was my viewing practice actually a refusal to acknowledge the full reality of what happened? On the evening of November 26th, when I tried to put thoughts to paper about the enormity of the tragic events, I felt strangely distanced from what had occurred only hours earlier. How was it that, in such a short span of time, my horror became less visceral, the strength of my initial reaction diluted? I felt robbed of an emotional intensity, of my ability to be fully cognizant of the magnitude and pure cruelty of the violence committed that day. The artificial numbness to a once-debilitating terror, identical to the numbness induced through horror movies, was profoundly troubling to me. I desperately tried to regain those earlier feelings of horror; giving them up felt somehow inhuman, as if I had no feelings at all. I learnt that a dear friend of mine had lost his life along with 200 others. I did not know how to react. Do I keep my teenaged son from watching the horror or do I initiate him into it to make him mentally stronger.

Everybody on the television, repeatedly tells us that to be scared is to let the terrorists win; the truly patriotic thing is to be brave, to live with our fear until it no longer affects us. To be a good World Citizen, I must learn to look ?

But there is Hope in this word. In the midst of it all I got solace from a friend from a far away land, whom I have never met. She offered her friendship, love and understanding in this time of distress. She became close to me and just held my hand. We do not speak the same language. Has she faced the horrors of terror? Has she lost a near and dear one? Or has terrorism become a large monster which knows no boundary?

I am getting the feeling that the biggest unifying force on earth, in this New Year, will be against terrorism. Let us pledge to fight terrorism.

This spot on terrorism is for my friend Aline from France, living in, California, USA. who wrote : "The situation in your country is dramatic and requires much input from inside and outside, I do think you are one of the best minds to help your country make it through this rough time!!!." For more on her visit : expressioniste.stumbleupon.com [expressioniste.stumbleupon.com]