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This is an old wordpress blog, usng the classic Hemingway template, I used to combine some words and photos.
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This is shattered fragment of a stumbleupon blog, long since now defunct, where I used to store favourite images, and attach poems to them (or vice versa). Just goes to show that for all its claims of ubiquity, the digital domain doesn't give you much of a purchase in permanence.
PeterJukes's revi
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UPDATE: this site might be a bit quiet for the next few months as I act as the Newsweek/DailyBeast correspondent on the Leveson Inquiry and the ongoing News International revelations unfolding in London. I'll try to cross reference as and when I can, but my work can be followed by clicking the pictu
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My CV was probably my first great work of fiction, and I've been constantly inventive trying to keep despair and insignificance from the door by trying to recompose my variegated and frankly unreliable career into some kind of compelling, believable and progressive narrative. I'm not sure it really
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This redesign of my site brings together various different blogs and postings under one banner. I've been writing about how computer technology and the web revolutionises the means of production, distribution and exchange for 20 years or so now. Finally, thanks to Joomla, the software is simple enou
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Inspired both by the digital revolution and the capacity for computers and the internet to 'electrify the word', I first created a website in the mid 90s (at some social space I don't even remember) and then uploaded my own website to demon around 1997. Of course this was genuine mixture of va
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Ancient sound - the inspiration for my website in 2006. See the old version here
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Displaying items by tag: Duende
Lorca and Duende
From Theory and Function of Duende
Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.
In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’
In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’
Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.
La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters...
Lorca translation's on this site