A Lecture in Contemporary English Literatures

University of Silesia

Marcin Sarnek

marcin.sarnek@us.edu.pl

http://prac.us.edu.pl/~marcin.sarnek

Office hours:

WED. 1030-1300

FRI. after the lecture, by appointment only

room 3.54

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49…a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together like a

well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding…. she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken…

Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction iceIs also greatAnd would suffice.

Robert Frost, 1920

Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desireI hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,I think I know enough of hateTo say that for destruction ice

Is also greatAnd would suffice.

Robert Frost, 1920

pity this busy monster, manunkind,not. Progress is a comfortable disease:your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littlenesselectrons deify one razorbladeinto a mountainrange; lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwishreturns on its unself. A world of madeis not a world of born - pity poor fleshand trees, poor stars and stones,but never thisfine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if - listen: there's a hellof a good universe next door; let's go

E.E.Cummings, 1944

Angel

Beams of the dawn at the angelwith a calm, silent seawith a hundred times we write,with a chance we can open upa steady rhythm in his facesilent roomdesolate beach,Scattering remains of love.

...I

...I

recall the passion

exploding hourly at my lips

like an angel's bed

to the rest.

Dark

I am the dark.onthe nightThepast of lovegone stale.

Imagine Now And Sing

Imagine now and sing,

creating myths

forming jewels from the falling snow.

The Saxophone Player

The saxophone playerlives alone,blowslives alone,blowsa swinging doorsplendid silenceprophetic posessplendid silenceprophetic posesof a prayer and the walls.

All of Art

His canvas is all of art.There's room for a peace,room for the heart's full and rain.room for a little bit of the sea;room for it fast in a time to beroom for many things in command.for it becomes a peace,And so to behold.

Soul (A haiku )

You broke my soul

the juice of eternity,

the spirit of my lips

I Think I'll Crash

I think I'll crash.Just for myself with Godpeace on a curious soundfor myself in my heart?And life is weepingFrom a bleeding heartof boughs bendingsuch paths of them,of boughs bendingsuch paths of breezeknows we've been there

Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet (RKCP)

AARON

• created by Harold Cohen

• London's Tate Modern Galley

• Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum

• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• Brooklyn Museum

• all have purchased and diplayed art by AARON