In this blog we will share with you our vision of beauty, balance, harmony.

As Mark Leach writes in his book Raw Colour with Pastels: “Sound is all around us, and it is musicians who refine that sound into something of beauty. As a painter, I have always felt that my purpose is to craft colour in a similar way, to see through the confusion and seek harmony and beauty.”

And we add: Words, fragments of sentences, spoken noise is all around us, and Ken arranges words in such a way as to capture beauty in the accidental, the ambient soundtrack of life.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Bella Italia




Upper Town Fiesole 30 x 20 cm





THE TREES OF LUCCA

Some of his friends
called D.H. Lawrence “Lorenzo,”
I suppose because of his love for Italy. He had
utopian fantasies about the Etruscans
who, judging from their tomb paintings,
seemed to think the afterlife was an elegant orgy.
He enjoyed long walks in the countryside, and after
didn’t mind getting down on his knees and scrubbing floors.


It would be interesting to see how Don Lorenzo would react
to a pierced, tattooed, wired-for-sound urban
proletarian riding the subway some Manhattan morning,
abundantly, inspiringly female
on her way to Columbia or the New School
for a seminar on English Modernist Novelists.

How would she react to him?
No doubt she’d give him crap about his sexism,
his laughable phallic imagery, that he sometimes punched
his German wife, Frieda, and about his endless tourism
and negative views on masturbation
which is, as everyone knows, like, a very cool activity.

The whole time that she’s putting
not only his work but his existence into question,
she’s sucking some coffee shop product 
from a cup/mug/baby bottle made out 
of a substance he’s never seen before
since it hadn’t been invented yet in the 1920’s. The fact that she
calls him “dude,” and advises that he “chill,” also is perplexing.

It might be humane at this point to send him back to Tuscany,
buy him a caffè “corretto” (espresso with a splash of grappa), and draw
his attention to the strange fact that actual trees do grow out of the towers and walls of Lucca.






O Soave Fanciulla from La Boheme


 Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti

2 comments:

  1. I can't make any sense of D.H. Lawrence's life story. He decries modernity, and then he ends up as a modernist? Hmm. Maybe I'd better read some of his works.

    I'm glad I did just read Mark Leach's book, so that I can read your quote from him intelligently. I found myself wanting to adopt much from Raw Colour, yet resisting much as well. All in all, a good experience, and I was impressed with how Leach expresses himself in writing. Must have been a wonderful teacher.

    Glad to see Fiesole again. This time the Alto area.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Casey, one has to make a destinction between "modernity" and "modernism". Most of the great modernists -- Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and Lawrence, et al -- distrusted modernity. One of the nice ironies of literary history. Hence the interest of having a great modernist like D.H. Lawrence confront a brazen example of modernity in the form of a young, educated urban woman. Of course all of this is played for comedy. Try reading D.H. Lawrence and I can also recommend "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy", by Peter Gay.

      This was Ken talking!
      Thank you for commenting and your interest.

      Delete

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