tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post322361968207666360..comments2024-03-29T03:56:08.315-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: Harry's Funeral by Nathanael Westjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-36299343845844092512010-08-01T15:58:03.562-04:002010-08-01T15:58:03.562-04:00My best guess--- matches description, title maybe ...My best guess--- matches description, title maybe close enough--- is: Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, chorale prelude. Horowitz plays it beautifully on Youtube.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-81513243541492760382010-08-01T15:37:55.412-04:002010-08-01T15:37:55.412-04:00I want so badly to hear this. Is there a cantata n...I want so badly to hear this. Is there a cantata number, another name?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-68076657080570935672010-04-19T18:58:40.000-04:002010-04-19T18:58:40.000-04:00Do you know the Bach piece he is describing? I ca...Do you know the Bach piece he is describing? I can't locate it under the title West indicated.<br /><br />I was reading "Day of the Locust" and paused to look up that music. I wound up at your website via a Google search; you were the only match for "Come Redeemer, Our Savior."<br /><br />You have a great website. Very interesting.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-39615747910223555412010-03-07T15:52:26.411-05:002010-03-07T15:52:26.411-05:00West saw movies, as he saw L.A. itself, as a vast ...West saw movies, as he saw L.A. itself, as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longings that exposed the pinched, disappointed lives of ordinary people, much like the pitiful letters to the advice column in "Miss Lonelyhearts". West's imagination, like Sherwood Anderson's, was ignited by the grotesque pathos of people's twopenny dreams and frustrated desires and by the explosive potential of their dumb dissatisfaction. But there was a political dimension as well: West's sense of the dynamics of fascism as a decaying populism rife with real potential for mass violence, as shown by the rioting of the crowd at the end of "The Day of the Locust". F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the other hand, saw dreams and aspirations as the vital center of people's lives, their poetry of hope and experience. He respected even the degraded dreams manufactured in Hollywood as popular art to which the Depression lent new power."<br /><br />Like Fitzgerald, West too came to Hollywood because of his failure as a novelist. His first three books died commercially, though one of them, "Miss Lonelyhearts", now a classic, was extravagantly admired by discerning contemporaries like William Carlos Williams and Edmund Wilson. Fitzgerald was rewarded by MGM, yet he felt stymied by the special demands of screenwriting, which thwarted his rich descriptive powers, and by a system which forced him to work with other writers or see his work rewritten by them. He was credited for only one film. West, on the other hand, earned much less money but gained numerous credits for his work on routine programmers for lowly Republic Pictures, a back-street studio that specialized in low-budget westerns, and later for RKO and Universal."<br /><br />"West's Hollywood, like his construction of the California version of the American Dream, is a collection of cheesy simulations that are amusing and outrageous but can easily take a serious turn. As the narrator, Tod, walks among the studio sets, we track his preposterous passage from one historical period to another; we feel their flimsy inauthenticity as he looks at their 'final dumping ground', a graveyard in which "no dream ever entirely disappears." The unfinished set where the studio where the studio is filming the Battle of Waterloo collapses under the army of extras, defeated like Napoleon's army at the original battle. 'It turned into a rout. The victors of Bersina, Leipsic, Austerlitz, fled like schoolboys who had broken a pane of glass..the armies of England and her allies were too deep in the scenery to flee.' The simulation reenacts the disastrous event itself, first time as tragedy, the second as farce...With uncanny foresight, West anticipated historian Daniel Boorstein's exposition of the pseudo event, Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacrum, and the post-modern sense of pastiche."<br /><br />"West's work proved too harsh for the Depression audience, but it would appeal to more cynical readers two or three decades later, long after he died in an automobile accident in 1940. In the end, almost single-handily, he helped alter the image of Southern California from a natural paradise to a scene of freakish eccentricity, corruption and human waste. He exposed the machinery of the dream factory and gave its surroundings a nightmarish cast. More than most thirties writers, he was an American original."<br /><br /><br />"Dancing in the Dark; "A Cultural History of The Great Depression" by Morris Dicksteinjohnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-17871564586870427442010-03-07T13:31:33.521-05:002010-03-07T13:31:33.521-05:00http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_West
One o...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_West<br /><br />One of the great writers of the Great Depression era. My 90 year old mother encountered him in college in the late 30s. His content and style seems brilliantly reproduced by the contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq. French Surrealism being a common root.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com