All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
Who is writing your play and who is directing you?
Write your own script and perform it on your own stage, don’t just repeat the lines you’ve been fed by people who would pull your strings and make you dance.
This is the National Theatre in London. Designed by Denys Lasdun and constructed from raw concrete – béton brut in French. It is a Brutalist building not only in material – béton brut – but also in appearance and intention. It is brutal on the eye and the soul in that it is designed and built with minimal decorative enrichment because humans are only part of the machine that is modern architecture. It is functional, utilitarian and bereft of humanity, as are the architects who design such inhumane carbuncles.
My thoughts exactly … great illustration images as well.
wonderful blog M. You’ve a sensitivity and insight to match your hilarious and incendiary hashtags on lomo which I also am a fan of. Of course the best time to blog is precisely when you’ve imbibed too much rose, one too many pints, perhaps a few shot of smooth whiskey etc. In those moments I feel like Poe in a bar on the bowery stumbling through horror after horror, or perhaps at times like captain lebyadkin from the possessed, some sort of loudmouth hero inebriated, but otherwise repentant in recovery…
Ta very much for the act of kindness, humouring an old bloke in his raging dotage…
If I thought I was anything like Lebyadkin I’d top myself. By the way, the title should always be Demons, according to Mrs M who is a native of the Rus. The word Бесы is one of those infuriatingly evasive things that Russians have so many of. It means those unpleasant creatures that cause mayhem when they get into your psyche, or it means small supernatural things that steal your car keys or knock over that last glass of wine…you get the idea. It is never “The Possessed”. Russian has no definite article.
And.
Never, ever, fucking anytime ever, read the translations of Peavear and Volokhonsky. The are junk of the highest order, they are ordure, they are the flutings of two imbeciles which have no poetry, no flow and no bloody sense. Read Garnett or Magarshack. The old translations are still the best. Good old Constance knew what she was up to and only wankers spout the old trope: “You are not reading Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/Turgenev/Chekhov etc, you are reading Garnett” ho ho ho.
Bollocks mate.
She got it right from the start – even though the publisher changed the title to The Possessed because he didn’t like “Demons” – and her work shits all over pissing peavear and his fat fraudulent fraulein volokhonsky.
Funny thing is that I always write this crap sober. Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong…