Remembering Frost...

Hey all...

my tribute to the wisest man of poetry who said: Good Fences make Good Neighbors.

I wish India had taken this quote into account. Life would have been easy and we would not lose a match after scoring pigs litter of runs (300+) is definitely a score even Ivory Coast would defend!

Anyway, here goes a collection of Frost quotes. My favourite is the one I have blocked in Bold and Underlined!

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty
minutes.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman.

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life
has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so.

But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.

College is a refuge from hasty judgment.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.

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Freedom lies in being bold.
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Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

I always entertain great hopes.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I am glad the invitation pleases your family. It will please my family to the fourth generation and my family of friends and, were they living, it would have pleased inordinately the kind of Grover Cleveland Democrats I had for parents.

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.

I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.

If one by one we counted people out/ For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long /To get so we had no one left to live with. /For to be social is to be forgiving.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia.

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.

Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation
Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent.

One aged man - one man - can't fill a house.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

"Skepticism," is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, "Well, what have we here?"

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

The best way out is always through.

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

The middle of the road is where the white line is - and that's the worst place to drive.

The only way round is through.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

There is no arguing with him, for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.

There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man-fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them.

They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true.

Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

To be social is to be forgiving.

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Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
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Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

What is this talked-of mystery of birth. But being mounted bareback on the earth?

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.

You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.

A Genius of Clarity - Friedrich Schiller

(This was an article I had posted elsewhere that has ceased to exist. So just updating my web-presence with this and some other articles from past. Upon approaching the 200th anniversary of Schiller...)

Friedrich Schiller - the flamboyant heart and soul of German Literature!

Well, there was this article in Der Spiegel of 18th Oct. 2004. The title is as above. It's about Schiller and is about time we started taking stock of this flamboyant contemporary of Goethe. It's such a sin that we need to know of Schiller today in the context of Goethe, made an iconoclaustic better-known of the former's times. And I love the way Ruediger Safranski (59), a Schiller Biographer goes about how Schiller has been underestimated as a poet, dramatist, writer and most of all philosopher. He is the Poet as Philosopher.

Schiller, for the lay-men/women to German Literature, was a writer very popular in his time (aren't all geniuses and recognised writers so?). Today unfortunately Schiller is known more as a contemporary of Goethe and as a man mostly known to contemporary international audience through his stage plays such as Die Räuber (The Robbers) and Don Carlos. It doesn't say all. The man himself and his personality and his women and the sleaze that sorrounded him and his casual attitude to everything makes him more fascinating (why does an artist's sordid life attract people more than art itself? Remember Mozart? Monroe? Wilde? Oh, all you artist- and art-tits lovers, do you hear me?) and is made of stuff that makes biographies worth writing.

The first time we come to know of Schiller... So goes Volker Hage in his cover story on Schiller ('course am juicing it up a bit): "The first audience had come already about 1 pm to the theatre. They were told they were to wait for a Genius whose genius is much talked about and raved and touted about in Mannheim and the sorrounding art-circles. The 22 year old author, who was all the same at that time travelling from Stuttgart with his friend, just ran into a very buxom serving-lady of a tavern, whose company assumed more importance that he stayed behind in preference to a Performance that was supposed to start at 5 pm and expected to run for 5 hrs." What do we say? what do we assume?

And on 13 January 1782, his The Robbers opened. There was total chaos and the world broke loose and the foyer and balconies were straight out of Hell upon inhabitation by all the Fallen Angels floating about in the Phosporous Sea after being chucked out by God! The Myth has it so! The theatre was like a madhouse - rolling eyes, fiery faces, rolled fists, stamping feet, crescendoing cries of disgust in the audience area... That was Schiller's entry into the world of Theatre. Now, how dare one calls him Goethe's contemporary. Goethe never incited people to set fire... he may have set a few more hearts a-fire. But Schiller was better with his women as well! Schiller was a veritable Dantonian figure... the type of hero in real life that Büchner would have loved to immortalise.

But getting back to the Poet as a Philosopher... Schiller's idealism is all about how one continues to live longer through his power to impress, than through one's physical life on earth. Schiller achieves this through his capability to be playful with what he calls as 'perishable material'. How does one take inane stuff and make eternity out of it? To rephrase and vice-versa a statement by a Neil Simon character, the trick is in making a Goose-liver paté out of a Hero-sandwich. Consequently, we understand that we all do go down, but how much one extracts from life - without being competitive and getting motivation from outside, out of winning, doing everything to the best of enjoyment - well, Schiller's success as a writer comes from this. Is there a better ground-zero philosophy possible? Hegel and Fichte and Hölderlin held him in awe. He is compared with Sartre. Not that he needs a Sartre to compare against. But his existentialism smacked of the quintessential Sartrian hero who takes things by their balls and owns up the responsibility of success or failure thereof! And a man who explored (ask Safranski please!) more areas - poetry, literature, art, philosophy, politics and history... well what about science! - than Goethe ever did. Oh yes, he came very handy for some of the 19th century political movements, not to mention radicals, to quote from. How about this: his 100th birthday was celebrated as a national event in Germany by BOTH the Liberals and the commoners. He belonged to all. That probably was his weakness... exposing and keeping himself fundamentally accessible to all and sundry. He could never be a Goethe you see, elitism was not in him! Am I eulogising him? You bet, if you don't believe what am saying, listen to the man himself: "A Person is a whole person only where he plays." Like his Marquis Posa says, "Sire, give Freedom of Thought". Well, therein lies the core of a writer, the Might of the Word as against the Words of the Mighty!

We are around the bend at marking his 200th death anniversary. For a detailed celebration of this genius of freedom, hang in there till 9th May 2005. Oh, shall provide a timeline of his life, shortly. Until then... Vive la Freedom!

Film Review: GOD IS BRAZILIAN

Title: God is Brazilian (Deus É Brasileiro)
Language: Brazilian (Portuguese)
Year of Release: 2003
Director: Carlos Diegues
Cast: Antônio Fagundes, Wagner Moura, Paloma Duarte, Bruce Gomlevsky and Stepan Nercessian
Genre: Picaresque, Travel, Comedy, Adventure, Fantasy

What happens if God is bored! With his own creation - Man. A comic adventure fantasy, God Is Brazil is a conceptual comedy. God (Antonio Fagundes) decides to take a break. Wants to go on vacation. Comes to earth, lands up in Brazil. The country is supposed to be the most religious country with most believers and more church-goers and many more missionaries than other countries. And he finds that a certain 'Quinca of the Mules' is a person worthy to be canonised so that Quinca can take His place until He returns from the vacation. God is joined by Toaca (Wagner Moura), a conman and a cheat and a fisherman son of a guy who owns a tire puncture shop on the beachside high-way of the picturesque north-east Brazil. And the two are appended with by the beautiful and young girl Mada (Paloma Duarte), who decides to join them on their way through Sao Paulo to the Bacuta Valley. This is one helluva pleasure ride both in physical sense as well as psychological sense. Deeply refreshing and really redeeming in its quality, it is really touching as well as infinitely funny. You would want to own a copy of the transcript.

Owning the transcript would not suffice simply because a transcript would never capture the cinematography or the beauty of the locales or the changing scenescapes. The movie courses through a truly poverty-stricken Brazil, but never for a moment does one feel the alarming horror in a very irkingly realistic sense to leave you feeling you have watched a stark exposition of the darker side of life. Picture this scene... God and Toaca are walking through the streets. God naturally does not feel hunger or fatigue. Toaca is a jolly go lucky guy who has no scruples when he want food or pleasure. And suddenly he hears music. Death wail... someone has died. The implication: there would be food for the mourners who come to condole. Unceremoniously he enters the house, turns his nose in the direction of the right information and joins the mourners... The almost surreal nakedness of his frivolous act of absurd seeking for food in a tragic circumstance takes the edge of what would otherwise had been a serious moment in parallel cinema! Instances are many.

And finally God does meet Quinca. Surprise surprise, the latter does not believe in God. A moment of anagnorisis leading to a personal hubris for God who gives vent to a fury unabated that makes God human in our eyes. After all, He is our Creation.

The movie comes from the man who gave us Bye Bye Brazil, back in 1979. What a romp, is all I can say!