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8th of May 2012 13:12
... I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, And standing by these characters disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men. (Ego Dominus Tuus)
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5th of May 2012 21:52
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21
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30th of April 2012 22:00
Where is the Stanislavski of poetry.
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30th of April 2012 00:28
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} nightspore's lines about the metaphor being always false while the simile always true, and the thought that a metaphor is two objects linked by distance. But I've been using similes almost exclusively these days (in description), and I wasn't quite sure why, and I think now it'sit precisely because the simile is weaker. The metaphor transforms one thing into another, or rather the metaphor is a transformation, and what a metaphor transforms is not two things but two metaphors. There are no objects in the metaphoric world, everything is a surreal landscape where anything can be and will be anything else, a hypnagogy of forms. But the simile is meek. It does not attempt to transform. It does not even attempt to approach. It is a deliberately limited scattershot of hints. One says one metaphor and it is done, the world is transformed, one cannot then say another metaphor without once again transforming the world. But there is no end to similes, you can keep attempting them one after another, each one hoping to get closer and closer to a description, to encapsulating a thing, without ever quite achieving it, achieving anything beyond tracing a space which reads "something like this, and these, and more." "Like" has both reverence and distance, it hints at something past description, some thing maybe contained more in the word "like" itself rather than the objects being likened.* not unrelatedly, in thinking about topics for modernism, I noticed that the difference between surrealism and dada is that surrealism invokes the uncanny whereas dada does not: Surrealism destroys sense to create, invoke, import, some sort of ur-sense, a quasi-spiritual unconscious; dada destroys sense in the other direction, towards post-sense, the nonsense emptiness of being cleared, cathartic, colonic. There's not that much I want to be thinking about surrealism or dada but it does seem that these are also two different approaches in poetry, or at least the Romantic tradition. One can glorify youth or glorify death. Secular spiritualism or secular hedonism. Shelley vs. Keats? No, that's a little too simplistic a thing to say, and also ignores how much the surrealists glorified death as well. Basically I wanted to find a way to compare Stevens to Cummings (even though that feels a little like comparing apples and much smaller, less interesting oranges). "Since Feeling is First" seems like a dangerous, if (lowercase-r) romantic, notion, but one that Stevens refutes daily --- feeling is not first. If sex were all, etc. |
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29th of April 2012 23:51
See the sand swept in the sun! See the sand swept as the sun sets! Sun and sand and sky and sea! See the sea sparkle! And sky! See the sky's slow setting! See the sun's soft settling! See sand swept by sunset steal circles of sky! Steal the sea's spirals! See! Sunset and sandy sky! Sunny sky and sand and sea! See!
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11th of April 2012 22:51
Some say this is what separates it from the mind. I say no.
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31st of March 2012 23:28
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30th of March 2012 00:56
There were honors program presentations today, of delightfully useless cross-curricular seminars about some fluff or other, the professors enthusiastic, gushing even, myself wondering how they can stretch what sounds like an interesting if brief essay into a full semester course, with student participation. How does one even participate in such a class? I am being encouraged to take a look at these high-level courses because they apparently will look good on grad school applications. The whole idea still fills me with a mix of bemusement and dread. Bemusement that someone might think I would care about such things; dread that I might soon have to care about such things. Or pretend to. I still feel like a wild animal among livestock at such events. It was supposed to be a chance to meet professors and hobnob and plan for recommendation letters and such; I found that few people were partaking of the free wine so I hovered around there and partook. I am going to have to start thinking about these things. I attended a workshop on the difference between doctoral programs and master's programs and I still really don't know the difference besides that one is more expensive and the other harder to get into. With my checkered academic history I doubt I'll be much good for a doctoral program, even if I maintain the pretty-good average I'm coasting on at Hunter, but I'm also poor and don't want to pay for an MFA. The professor leading the workshop went from an mfa to a doctoral program and seemed happy about it. Though that was some time ago. f I think of the future, and I try not to, I imagine it would be much more fun having to teach literature classes for the bread-and-butter than it would be to teach creative writing classes. There is only so much one can teach about creative writing. Mostly it's the matter of prodding at the bad habits til they're sore and saying "now come back in five years." There's so much more to learn about literature, and more rewardingly. I'm going to have to take the GRE, aren't I. I feel like I've washed on the shore of a foreign land, shoeless, clothes full of seawater, and I'm trying to learn the customs and demands and how to blend in, before someone tosses me back into the sea. I asked one of the girls that attends the writing workshops I set up where I belong, and she said I should be in a large, sparsely crowded lecture hall, asking everyone to hold their questions until the end. Which is also how I imagine proximoception.
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24th of March 2012 14:46
Writing is so much easier than film. You don't have to rely on anyone else. Ever. Anyway, it's a strange little black comedy, and I was more concerned with the rhythm of it than in getting laughs. Go see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-upx6THiB
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20th of March 2012 14:42
* There's been a lot of walking around at night. Because, apparently, people have had things to talk about. But there aren't enough places to walk through. A walk should be continually new and I keep ending up places I've been. When there's nowhere left to walk is when you should leave a place. I will keep looking. * I was in the (empty) fountain outside of the plaza hotel yesterday looking up at the star(s) and we realized that the trees all around us were full of sleeping birds. Some slept better than others.
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11th of March 2012 00:42
Batsheva Dance Company presents Hora at BAM: I know nothing about modern dance, a fact which I tried to keep in my mind as I watched, because I think it's important. The most depressing thing I hear, often, in the workshops we've been hosting, is "I don't know enough about poetry to try to understand it" — when that feeling of not knowing, at least in the beginning, is an important one, and if you relegate everything not-know-yet into the category of other people's problems, that's when you fall for charlatans and academics. Why not be in the not knowing, ask why one doesn't know and what one doesn't know and what, if you knew, would make a difference to you in the watching. The first thing I thought was that anything in time is a narrative. And if there is no narrative then we make a narrative. And so narrative exists, but why, and where? The dancers, eleven, five male, six female, began in almost frightening unison (given how un-alike their bodies are: this is not a group chosen for uniformity, some are tall, some are small, they wear variations of black). But the unison quickly broke into a single dancer moving about the stage, utterly free, unnaturally free, not given to easily understood movements, intensely playful. More dancers joined him until everyone was moving with a sort of chaotic grace either entirely improvised or fantastically difficult. There was no differentiation in form or gender. It was just bodies, selves. But as the hora progressed recognizable things began to emerge, cued by recognizable music — first a silly synth version of the star wars theme, which emerged in the dancers not quite as a joke but almost as a reaction to something that might be a joke. Many more recognizable songs followed, usually from movies, and what it felt like most was a reaction, not to the music itself, or to the movies alluded to ("Ride of the Valkyries," "Thus Spake Zarathustra," etc): but a reaction to the memories, in the audience, raised by this music and these movies. As it progressed and the dances became more recognizable, the dancers themselves became more recognizable, as male and female, then as pairs (one lone female sitting out). As the dance became easier to watch, the bodies themselves became less interesting. It ended with one dancer, almost lost, lingering as the others returned to their spots along the wall, unsure of where or who she was. It was the jokes that were heartbreaking. I never thought to laugh. The second thing I thought was dance is the body. There are two things to do with the body in performance (that is, as an object and a tool). One can infantilize it and one can sexualize it. On one side the circus, on the other the bordello. On one side, "Look what I can do," on the other "Look what I could" do. Both are promises without fulfillment — more obviously in the case of the sexualized body, but also in the infantile: the promise is that what is being performed is difficult, what is not fulfilled is seeing it fail. The infantile and the sexual are both tied to play, they are both aspects of play, but what I'd say is the difference is the intention: the sexualized body is a doing. The infantilized body is a becoming. The sexualized body moves downward, toward the earth, onto the body of the watcher. It yearns to catch and fall. The infantilized body moves upwards, it yearns to evade. It cannot even be pursued. Its direction is at right angles to desire.
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