opfvideo.blogg.se - Ts eliot reading the wasteland

Eliot’s manuscript, scrawled upon by Ezra Pound. O restless fingered, O serial clickers, fear not, for you do not have to spend much time sitting still listening to scholars and writers expound on Eliot (though Seamus Heaney’s memories of encountering the poet for the first time are worth listening to): in addition to the full text of the poem, the app easily allows users to flip between the final version and T. As Jeannette Winterson said in a brief commentary video, accessible by orienting the iPad horizontally and turning on the “Perspectives” feature, the radio is “the beginning of us being in a very noisy world… where there’s at least six conversations happening, and you’re always eavesdropping.” In the 90 years since the poem was published our eavesdropping has increased exponentially whether we like it or not, the clamor in our heads comprising not only the voices of radio, television, and bloggers but the woman on the bus yapping into her cell phone, the incessant mundane status updates beamed to every ready device.

I learned, via the app, that part of Eliot’s inspiration for the many voices in the poem was the new technology of his time, the radio. It turns out the The Waste Land was not an arbitrary choice for an upgrade.

I was curious, then, to explore The Waste Land app for iPad (published by Touch Press), to see how it addressed this issue: how would it adapt a rather long, rather difficult poem for the medium on which I recently caught two scenes of Tron: Legacy over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me on the subway? And it’s hard to find that perfect moment to return to the poem when there is an ever-growing pile of headlines, posts, emails, and alerts pouring in. While less active reading time is required than, of course, a novel, or even your average short story, in my experience most poems require several re-reads, a ponder, a reconsideration in a different mood. In our culture of distraction, in which I find myself unable to sit through the entirety of a one-minute video of a dog taking tiny steps on its hind legs to flamenco music before wanting to click on to the next thing, poetry occupies a strange purgatory of time-commitment.