The papers are in, the classes are over. Admittedly I've got that pesky Hellman exam on Friday, but that's pretty much a joke. I'm going to start reading and writing and living like myself again, starting right now. That doesn't entail a long, rambling post here (not yet at least), but rather a nice bike ride up the mountain to read.
For the moment, however, I am posting this fantastic video here, because it's fantastic. Like Whedon says, the whole reason for distinction is the fact that it still is a distinction, and that's inherently the problem. Gotta love feminism.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Williams's 'rose poem'
Below is today's post on Silliman's blog. I don't know the title of the poem, but it's about roses, and I really like it. It vaguely reminds me of what I once tried to say with "Glass Rose," in all my misguided pretension. Admittedly I don't know Williams at all, but I have the first half of his complete works, ready to be read this summer, and through Silliman's introduction to him I'm really starting to like his style and ideas.
Jo and I briefly discussed his idea that "the first impulse behind any traditional writing is plagiarism" last night during a talk about lyrics and poetry, and the more I think about it the more I side with Silliman, that the position is unassailable. At the same time, I'm also coming more and more to think that it's not necessarily as cynical as I first read it, and that the impulse of plagiarism isn't necessarily the horrible thing that education has led me to instinctively see it as.
As long as there's honesty and passionate sentiment behind the plagiarizing action/creation then what's the problem if it isn't intrinsically unique/revolutionary? Everything has the influence of everything that's come before it within it, whether in content or form, and I don't believe that recognizing that is a bad thing. Also I'm too in love with traditional forms to completely abandon them, so this melding of Williams's doctrine and the contemporary writing of traditionally influenced works really jives with me. If it's a sonnet, let it be a sonnet, just don't force it to be, let it be.
Haha, slightly juvenile rant today, just an interesting drunk discussion Jo and I had. Good times had by all.
"Friday, April 17, 2009
And, then, of course, there is this, what I’ve already noted once in the past month just may be the finest poem William Carlos Williams ever wrote:
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air – The edge
cuts without cutting
meets – nothing – renews
itself in metal or porcelain –
whither? It ends –
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry –
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica –
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses –
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end – of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness – fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact – lifting
from it – neither hanging
nor pushing –
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space"
Jo and I briefly discussed his idea that "the first impulse behind any traditional writing is plagiarism" last night during a talk about lyrics and poetry, and the more I think about it the more I side with Silliman, that the position is unassailable. At the same time, I'm also coming more and more to think that it's not necessarily as cynical as I first read it, and that the impulse of plagiarism isn't necessarily the horrible thing that education has led me to instinctively see it as.
As long as there's honesty and passionate sentiment behind the plagiarizing action/creation then what's the problem if it isn't intrinsically unique/revolutionary? Everything has the influence of everything that's come before it within it, whether in content or form, and I don't believe that recognizing that is a bad thing. Also I'm too in love with traditional forms to completely abandon them, so this melding of Williams's doctrine and the contemporary writing of traditionally influenced works really jives with me. If it's a sonnet, let it be a sonnet, just don't force it to be, let it be.
Haha, slightly juvenile rant today, just an interesting drunk discussion Jo and I had. Good times had by all.
"Friday, April 17, 2009
And, then, of course, there is this, what I’ve already noted once in the past month just may be the finest poem William Carlos Williams ever wrote:
The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air – The edge
cuts without cutting
meets – nothing – renews
itself in metal or porcelain –
whither? It ends –
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry –
Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica –
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses –
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end – of roses
It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits
Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness – fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
What
The place between the petal's
edge and the
From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact – lifting
from it – neither hanging
nor pushing –
The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space"
Bon Iver - Skinny Love
This song is amazing. I just wanted to say that. Been listening to it on heavy rotation of late.
"Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order's tall
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different "kind"
I'll be holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines
Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?"
"Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer
I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in the moment this order's tall
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
In the morning I'll be with you
But it will be a different "kind"
I'll be holding all the tickets
And you'll be owning all the fines
Come on skinny love what happened here
Suckle on the hope in lite brassiere
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full; so slow on the split
I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?
Now I'm breaking at the britches
And at the end of all your lines
Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?"
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Further evidence proving the inadequecy of Darwinism in modern society
I don't want to bother wasting space here by including the actual text of the article that's inspired me to write this post, so I'll just link to it:
www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_12110560
The fact that this Lisa Kennedy person is able to both find work and get published in today's economy fills me with hope for my future, and despair for the field of journalism. Clearly I have what it takes to succeed, being a fairly intelligent, critically minded human being with a University education, because Kennedy seems to be doing jut fine without any of those qualities. I mean really, come one, she actually takes issue with Wall-E's vision of the future and how it will influence developing minds? The whole point behind it is to give them hope that we can turn things around in the bleak reality they're faced with! Did she even finish the movie? She quotes Patty Greer at the end, saying that "We need to believe in our ability as a race that we can turn things around," and so I find it highly dubious whether or not she managed to focus her attention and sit still for the entire duration of Pixar's modern classic. Not finish the movie is a rookie mistake that has already been apologized for by the likes of Robert Ebert, so Kennedy doesn't have much wiggle room between being an idiot and a hack, if not a comfortable mix of the two.
Basically the entire piece is a thoughtless conservative puff piece about how movies are too dark, and actually spends a significant portion of the article attacking the thematic similarities of Roland Emmerich's body of work, as though he's in any way relevant on an intellectual level. That's like calling Michael Bay highbrow, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy took issue with The Rock for providing terrorists with good ideas and motivations for attacking the American people. If this article were merely an anti-"2012" rant I would be fine with it, it wouldn't be any less stupid but at least it would have some sort of validity, if only a subjective one. As it is, though, the piece attacks all modern film making, actually referring to its own points as "pleas for the sanctity of the imagination" without the slightest hint of irony, completely misunderstanding many of the films it takes issue with that actually reflect her desires, and essentially calling for a classically insidious form of censorship under the banner of "good taste." It disgusts me.
Really though, I didn't need to write this rant to demonstrate the profound idiocy of this journalist, she did so herself many times throughout her own article. In closing I just want to call attention to the film she extols in her conclusion, Greer's "2012: We're Already in It," which won the the award for Best Feature Film — UFO or Related at the International UFO Congress Convention in Nevada. Admittedly I haven't seen this documentary, but since that apparently isn't a necessary requirement for making sweeping and possibly outright invalid claims about a film, I'm going to assume that it's probably as much of a crackpot as it sounds, and take this alone as sufficient evidence for Kennedy's fundamental inability to reflect critically. Even if the movie's good, the fact that Kennedy presents it the way she does serves to prove my point anyways.
I don't know why I bothered wasting twenty minutes writing about this stupid article, I guess I just needed to get a good rant out of my system, it's been a while. Who knows, maybe I'll use pieces like this to get myself hired one day by demonstrating my ability to, you know, think. Clearly there's a need for that in modern film criticism.
I need to get more sleep at night, clearly two hours isn't enough...
www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_12110560
The fact that this Lisa Kennedy person is able to both find work and get published in today's economy fills me with hope for my future, and despair for the field of journalism. Clearly I have what it takes to succeed, being a fairly intelligent, critically minded human being with a University education, because Kennedy seems to be doing jut fine without any of those qualities. I mean really, come one, she actually takes issue with Wall-E's vision of the future and how it will influence developing minds? The whole point behind it is to give them hope that we can turn things around in the bleak reality they're faced with! Did she even finish the movie? She quotes Patty Greer at the end, saying that "We need to believe in our ability as a race that we can turn things around," and so I find it highly dubious whether or not she managed to focus her attention and sit still for the entire duration of Pixar's modern classic. Not finish the movie is a rookie mistake that has already been apologized for by the likes of Robert Ebert, so Kennedy doesn't have much wiggle room between being an idiot and a hack, if not a comfortable mix of the two.
Basically the entire piece is a thoughtless conservative puff piece about how movies are too dark, and actually spends a significant portion of the article attacking the thematic similarities of Roland Emmerich's body of work, as though he's in any way relevant on an intellectual level. That's like calling Michael Bay highbrow, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if Kennedy took issue with The Rock for providing terrorists with good ideas and motivations for attacking the American people. If this article were merely an anti-"2012" rant I would be fine with it, it wouldn't be any less stupid but at least it would have some sort of validity, if only a subjective one. As it is, though, the piece attacks all modern film making, actually referring to its own points as "pleas for the sanctity of the imagination" without the slightest hint of irony, completely misunderstanding many of the films it takes issue with that actually reflect her desires, and essentially calling for a classically insidious form of censorship under the banner of "good taste." It disgusts me.
Really though, I didn't need to write this rant to demonstrate the profound idiocy of this journalist, she did so herself many times throughout her own article. In closing I just want to call attention to the film she extols in her conclusion, Greer's "2012: We're Already in It," which won the the award for Best Feature Film — UFO or Related at the International UFO Congress Convention in Nevada. Admittedly I haven't seen this documentary, but since that apparently isn't a necessary requirement for making sweeping and possibly outright invalid claims about a film, I'm going to assume that it's probably as much of a crackpot as it sounds, and take this alone as sufficient evidence for Kennedy's fundamental inability to reflect critically. Even if the movie's good, the fact that Kennedy presents it the way she does serves to prove my point anyways.
I don't know why I bothered wasting twenty minutes writing about this stupid article, I guess I just needed to get a good rant out of my system, it's been a while. Who knows, maybe I'll use pieces like this to get myself hired one day by demonstrating my ability to, you know, think. Clearly there's a need for that in modern film criticism.
I need to get more sleep at night, clearly two hours isn't enough...
Great Lake Swimmers - Your Rocky Spine
So Kat played me this song by Great Lake Swimmers, and I just cannot get enough of it. I'm including the lyrics here because I'm so profoundly struck by this love song to the wilderness (in my mind the Canadian one, specifically Ontario since Great Lake Swimmers are from there, I think).
It just reminds me of everything I love about the natural world, especially the humbling sense it instills that we're nothing more than the animals, mere inhabitants of this ecological accident that is existence. That, I feel, is the meaning of the first half of the second to last stanza, which "reduces" the singer to animal through the reference to his "claws." Admittedly the next half makes it a bit religious, but I'm selectively ignoring that.
Beyond that, though, it manages to hit all the affecting love-song tropes (body imagery, possession, embrace, passion, etc.), while simultaneously effecting the sense of a journey. The whole thing ends up being extremely Romantic, in both the Hallmark and Wordsworthian senses of the word, and I really like that about it.
I really need to give Great Lake Swimmers some more attention. Despite some of the negative reviews I initially heard about them they are constantly impressing me. Between this song and "Various Stages," I feel myself inclined to agree with that CBC Radio 3 podcast announcer I heard: the singer-songwriter at the core of Great Lake Swimmers might be the best Canadian poet currently making music. That's big praise, in my books.
Lyrics:
I was lost in the lakes
And the shapes that your body makes
That your body makes, that your body makes
That your body makes
The mountains said I could find you here
They whispered the snow and the leaves in my ear
I traced my finger along your trails
Your body was the map, I was lost in it
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you, and now you're mine
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you, and now you're mine
I was moving across your frozen veneer
The sky was dark but you were clear
Could you feel my footsteps
And would you shatter, would you shatter, would you
And with your soft fingers between my claws
Like purity against resolve
I could tell, then and there, that we were formed from the clay
And came from the rocks for the earth to display
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind blows a venomous rage through your hair
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind rages through your hair
It just reminds me of everything I love about the natural world, especially the humbling sense it instills that we're nothing more than the animals, mere inhabitants of this ecological accident that is existence. That, I feel, is the meaning of the first half of the second to last stanza, which "reduces" the singer to animal through the reference to his "claws." Admittedly the next half makes it a bit religious, but I'm selectively ignoring that.
Beyond that, though, it manages to hit all the affecting love-song tropes (body imagery, possession, embrace, passion, etc.), while simultaneously effecting the sense of a journey. The whole thing ends up being extremely Romantic, in both the Hallmark and Wordsworthian senses of the word, and I really like that about it.
I really need to give Great Lake Swimmers some more attention. Despite some of the negative reviews I initially heard about them they are constantly impressing me. Between this song and "Various Stages," I feel myself inclined to agree with that CBC Radio 3 podcast announcer I heard: the singer-songwriter at the core of Great Lake Swimmers might be the best Canadian poet currently making music. That's big praise, in my books.
Lyrics:
I was lost in the lakes
And the shapes that your body makes
That your body makes, that your body makes
That your body makes
The mountains said I could find you here
They whispered the snow and the leaves in my ear
I traced my finger along your trails
Your body was the map, I was lost in it
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you, and now you're mine
Floating over your rocky spine
The glaciers made you, and now you're mine
I was moving across your frozen veneer
The sky was dark but you were clear
Could you feel my footsteps
And would you shatter, would you shatter, would you
And with your soft fingers between my claws
Like purity against resolve
I could tell, then and there, that we were formed from the clay
And came from the rocks for the earth to display
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind blows a venomous rage through your hair
They told me to be careful up there
Where the wind rages through your hair
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