Valentina Lisitsa

Out of loyalty and gratitude to her worldwide following Valentina Lisitsa is running a live webcam inside her practice studio at home until the 4th of July (midnight to be exact).

The use of technology to connect with an audience, like no other pianist Valentina Lisitsa knows how to do this. Her live-rehearsals involve working on recital and concert programmes that she has to perform next month. The number of pieces she’s working on in these rehearsals: 55 ! That’s FIFTY-FIVE, yes, and more than half of the material is brand new for her. She’s rehearsing this material 13-14 hours a day, from around 9-10AM EST to midnight. She adds: “Nothing exciting otherwise :-)”

Watching Valentina rehearse is a unique opportunity for anyone interested in how one of the world’s finest pianists is working and getting prepared for bringing her art on stage.

Free TV : Ustream

Compulsively Allergic to the Truth

Compulsively Allergic to the Truth


I'm sorry I was late.
I was pulled over by a cop
for driving blindfolded
with a raspberry-scented candle
flickering in my mouth.
I'm sorry I was late.
I was on my way
when I felt a plot
thickening in my arm.
I have a fear of heights.
Luckily the Earth
is on the second floor
of the universe.
I am not the egg man.
I am the owl
who just witnessed
another tree fall over
in the forest of your life.

























I am your father
shaking his head
at the thought of you.
I am his words dissolving
in your mind like footprints
in a rainstorm.
I am a long-legged martini.
I am feeding olives
to the bull inside you.
I am decorating
your labyrinth,
tacking up snapshots
of all the people
who've gotten lost
in your corridors.


"Compulsively Allergic to the Truth" by Jeffrey McDaniel, from The Endarkenment. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.

From The Writer's Almanac

80

The writer who couldn't read

The Writer Who Couldn't Read

by Robert Krulwich

June 21, 2010

"In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz. You can hear Engel describe his problems in greater detail in our NPR broadcast. Click Here.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely "Serbo-Croatian or Korean," or some language he didn't know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book he knew was in English, and it too was in the same gibberish.
















Engel had suffered a stroke. It had damaged the part of his brain we use when we read, so he couldn't make sense of letters or words. He was suffering from what the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls "word blindness." His eyes worked. He could see shapes on a page, but they made no sense to him. And because Engel writes detective stories for a living (he authored the Benny Cooperman mystery series, tales of a mild-mannered Toronto private eye), this was an extra-terrible blow. "I thought, well I'm done as a writer. I'm finished."

What To Do? What to do?

In his letter to Oliver Sacks, Engel describes his stunning solution, or rather, his painfully executed semirecovery, which you can see in Lev's video.

Briefly put, Engel discovered that if he traced the printed gibberish on a page with his hand, if he simulated the movements that a writer makes as he writes, he could gradually get back the meaning of the words.

Try writing "cat" 20 times, and then on the 21st try, write "cat" in the air with your finger. You know as you write in the air that the motions you make equal "cat." This is called "motor memory." This specific set of strokes triggers the idea of "cat" in your brain. Howard holding a pencil that 'shines' Engel couldn't see words with his eyes. His visual cortex was broken. But he could "see" when he used the motor part of his brain, first by tracing letters on a page, then by "writing" those same letters in the air, and then, strangely, when he shifted to copying letters with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Tongue-copying was the fastest.

Over the years, says Sacks, Engel has learned to read with his tongue, flicking the shape of the letters on his front teeth. Engel has reached the point where he can almost keep up with the subtitles in a foreign film. He says he can get about half the words before they flash off.

Sacks describes Engel's struggles in a forthcoming book, The Mind's Eye, to be published later this year. The surprise here is that brains are more plastic than one would suppose; even if one part of a brain is compromised by a stroke, a person can sometimes improvise and get another still healthy part of the brain to substitute and help out.

Engel is writing again. He continues to write Benny Cooperman novels and in 2007 published a memoir, The Man Who Forgot How to Read.

"He has found a way to remain a man of letters," Sacks writes. "That he was able to do so is a testament to many things: the dedication and skill of his therapists in rehab, his own determination to read again, and the adaptability of the human brain."

Lev Yilmaz has created cartoons for us before. His last effort recounted an early attempt to discover how much heat a person, a dog and an egg can endure. The dog won.

Oliver Sacks' newest book, The Mind's Eye, will explore different kinds of blindness, including his own loss of sight in one eye.

The size of the Gulf oil spill in relation to Portland

Click to Enlarge

http://tinyurl.com/29lxaoe

Requiem

Epilogue to Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

1.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.

[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]





















Background:

Requiem, Akhmatova's poem-cycle, was a literary monument to the victims of Stalin's Terror. The earliest poem dates from 1935 and the remainder was apparently written in 1938-40. In 1957 Akhmatova added a prose foreword. The work was first published in 1963 in Munich. In Russia it did not appear until 1987. The central core of Requiem consists of ten short, numbered poems. Originally the first reflected the arrest of her husband Nikolai Punin in 1935 and other close friends, but primarily the poems deal with the author's experiences and her agony following the arrest of her son Lev Gumilyov in 1938. Lev had been arrested first time in 1935 and released after Akhmatova wrote a letter to Stalin, ending with the words, "Help, Iosif Vissarionovich!"

The point of poetry

"The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away."

Paul Muldoon