Green in black-and-white times : conversations with Douglas Livingstone / Michael Chapman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chapman, Michael, author.

Contributor:

Chapman, Michael (Michael J. F.), interviewer.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Livingstone, D. J. (Douglas James), 1932-1996--Interviews.

Livingstone, D. J.

Poets, English--20th century--Interviews.

Poets, English.

South African poetry--20th century.

South African poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (266 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pietermaritzburg, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016.

Summary:

In conversations - serious, humorous, ironic, ribald - internationally acclaimed poet-scientist Douglas Livingstone and leading literary critic Michael Chapman struck up a warm, at times iconoclastic friendship. Over lunch they exchanged opinions, insights and anecdotes, not only on poetry, science and society, but also on personal aspects of modern life: love and loss, sexual and spiritual intimations, and city living; generally, on the value of our 'uncommon humanity'. Their conversations - recollected in this book - take readers through the black-and-white times of political turbulence in South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s to a climate, after apartheid, more attuned to Livingstone's abiding concern: how, as both scientist and poet, to heal the Earth, our only home. Along the way, we meet a cast from Jan Smuts, Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Luthuli to Alan Paton, Mazisi Kunene, Breyten Breytenbach and the 'Soweto' poets. We shift abruptly from Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to the TV soap, Dallas. With clarity and wit, Michael Chapman intersperses the conversations with a fresh consideration of a unique achievement: Douglas Livingstone's journey into the 'two cultures' of art and science.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Obituary: Douglas Livingstone (1932-96)

Works by Douglas Livingstone

1. 'Our Uncommon Humanity'

Interlude 1: 'The Well-Wrought Urn'

2. Grimstown

3. A Ventriloquist's Voice

4. Berea Rd Hotel

Interlude 2: Black and White

5. 'An Unredeemable Colonial'

6. 'Wind of Change': Sjambok, and Other Poems from Africa

7. White-by-Night City: Eyes Closed Against the Sun

8. 'Inappropriate Social Manners!'

Interlude 3: Knowing the Man, a Poet of Islam

9. On First Looking into Chapman's Livingstone

Interlude 4: 'Bread and Circus' from Dallas to Soyinka

10. Salt! Campbell, Smuts, Gandhi, Luthuli, Campbell

11. 'Cracking the Cane at the End of the Day': The Anvil's Undertone

Interlude 5: Marching from Pretoria!

12. Casanova in Modern Dress: A Rosary of Bone

13. Livingstone and Gwala

14. Footnotes for . . .

15. 'The Passions / of Dolphins'

16. The Science of Poetry, the Poetry of Science

17. 'Sometime Starmen'

18. Circling Back to Earth

Interlude 6: An Ordinary Bloke?

19. Anxieties of Influence: Livingstone, Breytenbach, Soweto Poets

20. A New South Africa?

21. The Dean of Humanities Invites Two (or Three?) Poets to Lunch

Interlude 7: In Praise of Mazisi

22. South Beach Transients

23. 'Green' Livingstone: A Littoral Zone

Interlude 8: Two Ordinary Blokes? Paton and Livingstone

24. Beyond the Biologist's Microscope

Interlude 9: 'Who's this Greybeard?'

25. Modernism in the South

26. Mafika Gwala (1946-2014)

27. A White African?

28. 'We Poets, We Try to Entertain'

Notes.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed October 28, 2016).

ISBN:

9781869143206

1869143205