It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
The new film scanner works. I don't even remember looking at this one before. I kind of like it. Something tells me there may be more activity in the gallery section of the site sometime reasonably soon.
I met a really good poet tonight.
Denise Duhamel is a passionately nice person. Her sense of humor is really what I needed right about now. I went to a reading, seduced at first by Leslie's raving about her, and later by what I found of hers on the web. There's a lot out there.
But I bought a couple of books anyway. Kinky is a book of poems about Barbie. How can you resist poems with such titles as "Barbie, Her Identity as an Extraterrestrial Finally Suspected, Bravely Battles the Interogation of the Pentagon Task Force Who's Captured Her"?
Duhamel read the most appropriate one for the times tonight, "One Afternoon when Barbie Wanted to Join the Military," whose concluding lines are something worth thinking about:
As GI Joe bullied Ken into a headlock,Even when it's cracking a joke, poetry is language working as hard as it can. . . . more
Barbie told the boys to cut it out. She threatened
that if he kept it up, GI Joe would
never get that honorable discharge.
There is another noteworthy book on the way: Postmodern Poo, a not so gentle satire of the lit-crit folks. I especially loved this snip:
New Historicist Victor S. Fassell, Pooh's ill-fated visit to Rabbit's burrow—wherein Pooh eats too much honey and becomes stuck—signals the eternal return of "the body." In a deliriously wide-ranging presentation, Fassell declares Pooh a virtual "proctological exhibit protruding into Rabbit's none too capacious dining area." But the Marxist Carla Gulag believes the episode depicts "inflammatory class differences between the possessive homeowner Rabbit and the itinerant beggar Pooh."All this makes it very hard to note an idea that came up in the Milton seminar I'm sitting in on. It seemed like a great paper topic at the time: Satan suffers from an erectile dysfunction. He seems to be hard all the time, but can never manage to ejaculate. Only Dr. Yoder could come up with this stuff...
I keep thinking about poetry, and why for so many it is a special thing that they feel like they don't understand. The more I explore it, the more that I feel it is special thing, but it is special not because it is difficult or obtuse, or because it is believed that it requires a special interpretator to make sense, but rather because it is a special way of experiencing the world, of knowing. I had great teachers. They never told me what to think of a poem, or what a poem meant, but instead helped unravel possible levels of meaning. It was training the brain to think in new ways, make new associations, to create meaning inside myself, rather than requiring the rote replication of some predetermined knowledge. Poetry becomes special because of the way it makes you think, not because of the way it tells you anything.
. . . moreWhat's Wrong with Animal Rights casts the discussion of animal rights into the philosophical realm, presenting the author as a modern-day Thomas Hobbes arguing against the Rousseau-tinged philosophy of animal rights activists. Using American political rhetoric, Hearne attempts to show the philosophical flaws in the agenda of those who seek to protect animal rights.
. . . more
Would you go to a chiropractor named Dr. Klopp? Would this be considered an aptronym or an inaptronym?
Happy Birthday Russ. I've been meaning to add him to my linkbar for a while; he's another of those old friends from Raindogs, and I suppose his birthday is good enough reason to finally get around to it! Like most of us, he's hard to catagorize, so his blog name is certainly apt.
Aaro has put up some really nice pictures of Roy Harper. Oh, and a secondhand Roy/Syd Barret story came up on the Stormcock list:
Roy: I once met Syd Barrett . . . pause . . . walking down Oxford St. . . . and I said "Hi Syd How are you doing?"
Syd: [silence]
Roy: "Where are you going?"
Syd replied after a pause "Further than you could ever know!"
There are some cool Mike Watt pictures from Spokane 17 Sept.
Australia seems so civilized: I'd really like to see more public toilet maps available. A very long time ago, when I used to travel to Los Angeles for concerts all the time, a friend of mine got busted for public urination. What a thing to have on your rap sheet. This could have been prevented, if it was easier to find toilets in LA! Why doesn't the US have a "National Continence Management Strategy?"
On a more somber note, re: constructions is a fascinating look at media coverage from around the world on the recent disaster, from MIT. Personally, I think understanding the media and how they manipulate us is a big key to keeping our humanity in the face of all this. All perspectives are by definition skewed, including the indie media. Arm yourself against swallowing any of the tripe whole!
Personal note: I was just told by a graduate student tonight that "poetry makes no sense, I don't understand how they come up with that stuff!" I shrank back in the corner; further and further away from feeling normal. Uh, I like it myself...
Recapturing the natural order of Southern California?
Transactional stuff to blow by in a hurry: response to Hot and Bothered was "cliché title" [duh] "Bravo!" [thanks] "I'm not sure what genre this piece falls under: it's too long for a review, but it's not quite a personal essay" [uh, where I come from the genre label is usually Social Documentary-- but the buzzwords for photography, literature, and rhetoric are all different]. Not a mark on the pages themselves, except near the title, and a concluding paragraph which doesn't give me any ideas for revision. I'll just let it sit for a while, I'm sure I'll find something else wrong with it soon. I went to an STC [Society of Technical Communicators] meeting tonight. It was fun; I knew a few people from school, and it wasn't nearly as stuffy as I feared.
But on to more interesting stuff. I'm way behind on my quota of notes for schoolwork, and I've got too much reading to do tonight to comment at great length, but I really should note another must read for me: Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling by S.K. Langer, 1967. It's referenced in an article I'm reading, "Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing" by J.N. Britton [more comment to come later]. Britton remarks, regarding Langer, that:
From her exploration of the laws governing a work of art she makes one very interesting suggestion: that in all works of art there is a building-up and resolution of tensions and that the intricate pattern of these movements, this rhythm, somehow reflects the "shape of every living act."
Makes art sound like sex, doesn't it? Well, that's a model that's always worked for me. Britton presses further on a different road though, proposing that:
We give and find shape in the very act of perception, we give and find further shape as we talk, write or otherwise represent our experiences. I say "give" and "find" because clearly there is order and pattern in the natural world irrespective of our perceiving and representing it.
Another article pegged Britton as a Platonist, as I recall. But aside from the philosophical spin, I'm quite attracted to his view of the impulse to represent our experiences. Skipping a boring bit about the difference between man and animal, Britton continues:
When, however, he shapes his experience into a verbal object, an art form, in order to communicate it and to realize it more fully himself, he is seeking to recapture a natural order that his daily actions have forfeited.
Now that's an interesting spin on what the writing, and the art-making process is all about.
Speaking of the perspective of fallen man, it's time for me to fall into Paradise Lost books 1&2.
Caught Adema on HBO's Reverb. Kris still seems about the same. The band was about as uninspiring as I expected. It was fun scanning the crowd to note the rather minor reaction when compared with the headliner Staind. One of the most telling things was the repetion of Kris's emphasis on "doing it for the kids." I was trying to do the math; he's got to be around 30 now. The singer seemed pretty dissapointed that he wasn't setting the world on fire. It reminded me of the decline and fall of heavy metal:
C'mon now dammit, Clap!
Return of the son of boring schoolwork
The New York Post has joined a great deal of the Internet community in damning Hollywood for trying to do something good in the face of tragedy. What a sick, sad world. Neil Young was condemned loudest of all. Sorry, but I think peace is something that the world needs to imagine right now. Fuck you John Podhoretz, just turn off the TV if you don't want to see it. People do what they can. Entertainers entertain. While I think it's healthy to question the messages sent out by the media, sometimes cynicism goes over the top too.
Speaking of Podhoretz, on a lighter side there is a new book coming out October 30th: A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David M. Friedman. I don't think I need to buy it though, I know what happens in the end. They all get jobs at newspapers and on TV.
The Killing Game is fiery polemic against the sport of hunting. Using the rhetoric of the opposition, Williams highlights the absurdity of the rhetoric employed by pro-hunting supporters regarding blood sport. Using strong description and citations from hunting magazines and organizations, the piece is a sort of exposé and contrast of the idealized image of hunting versus the brutal reality of blood sport.
. . . moreA short course in how my mind works.
I've been a little depressed (who hasn't lately) and I'd started digging through my inbox, reading some articles about something other than Afghanistan. I noted a couple of them earlier. For the first time in a while, I felt like having a drink. I bought some beer, and started drinking as I watched a great Channel 4 documentary called Behind the Veil, getting really down. I checked the guide, and I noticed that Days of Wine and Roses was playing on Turner Classic Movies right then.
Alcohol, movies about alcoholics, strange coincidence, huh? . . . more
