Is It Just Me, Or Is This Hilarious?

Wikipedia on Johnny Thunders:

"With Thunders leading the band, the Heartbreakers toured America before going to Britain to join the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned on the now-legendary Anarchy Tour, replacing the Ramones, who had quit the tour due to a lack of organization."

Bassem Sabry

The first song from of Montreal's next album, Aureate Gloom, has dropped.  I must like it, given that I've replayed it multiple times today.  I'm kind of surprised by the rather explicitly political title and lyrics (and, for that matter, not even on American politics but on the Arab Spring, unless the Arab Spring is being used as a metaphor for American politics?), though.  That isn't really what I would have expected from Kevin Barnes.

Self-Forgiveness for Repetitive Water Imagery

On the other hand, I should keep in mind that I wrote all of those poems at boring meetings (etc.) where it is literally the case that I was genuinely writing poetry at least in part to keep myself from falling asleep.  Honestly, it's pretty understandable that oblivion was kind of on my mind.

Water Imagery Count

Poems posted today: 4
Poems without water imagery: 1

At least only two of them have water imagery that's being used for exactly the same purpose. . . .

I have a problem.

Unfinished

Oh, yes;
He is waiting.
I had nearly forgotten him, darkness in a hollow cylinder,
A firm body, a slight sword, something I want.
I had nearly forgotten.
Earlier it was his hand on my skull, gripping my head,
Keeping me in place, but then some stranger stole his space
And something else was holding me down in its grasp
So that only one point was in my line of sight,
Only one tune echoed in my brain.
Some things are caves,
Some things cover up caves.
Everything I want is empty.
Substance can just leak out now -
I want to be taken over,
And, whether it is enthusiasm or ecstasy,
I want to lose myself.
Sometimes you are subsumed in a pool,
Sometimes you rush out as the wind.
Either way, it is suspension.
I want to jump in the pool right now,
Because the water is warm and could
Protect me - I want to even if I can't.

If Only In My Beginning Weren't My End!

Imagine tying up all of the strings
Into one tight rope -some scattered ones
Would hang loose of the bundle,
The waving flags of imperfection,
But the rope remains more important.
This is the season to sow and not to reap.
Perfection is a star sometimes hidden by a cloud.
The light is dimmed, and then the cloud passes.
It shines again, and, like starlight,
Something very far away illuminates what is present.
We are submerged in a bath from a source
We can never reach; the tap switches on and off
Of its own accord.  We have no power
But must accept the light and the shadow.
Tie up the rope in a season of darkness;
Trim all the threads only when the stars appear.

On Writing Doggerel with a Headache

A dull flame burning softly,
A coal that can't be found,
The kind of cunning presence
That wraps itself around

All weak and harried branches
Insinuatingly
And squeezes them quite lightly
With vicious subtlety -

This thin, electric nightmare
Is haunting my poor brain,
And, as I seek in caverns
The source of all my pain,

I feel it coursing through me
(If "course" is the right word -
In this context of dullness
It seems rather absurd).

I guess I'm lost in caverns
And hearing water flow.
I'm searching for it somewhere,
But where I do not know,

Or if I want to find it
And sink into its grip,
Peer down into the water
And from the bank then slip

Into the endless darkness,
Not once more to be seen,
A dimly fading image,
A soon-forgotten dream.

The other choice is fighting,
Trying to shed some light -
To rip away the darkness,
Annihilate the night,

But light is so elusive
Enclosed in all this gloom.
I don't think I can find it
When all I see is doom.

I can't stand, have no power,
When inundated so.
This is a tale of sadness,
A true maelstrom of woe.

Boring Meeting (Etc.) Poetry

I had a lot of boring meetings and other things last year, and wrote a lot of poetry during them.  The one about how all surfaces are veils and "Polemic, "which I just posted, were the only ones I wholeheartedly liked, but there were a lot of other ones that had some really uninspired sections and some, maybe only a few lines, that I quite liked.  Right now I'm in the mood to post them all, just for the sake of those parts that worked - so please forgive me for the uninspired sections!

Polemic

Could I ever have been, in any world,
That kind, who boldly ignored and would not
So easily forgive, whose patience was more
Like a tissue than a cloth?  Was there
Any myself elsewhere who could not see
So easily outside her own windows,
One who perhaps had no windows,
And, thus doomed to a certain weakness
Of the imagination, took no other into account,
Held herself a thing above, brooked no dissent?
I view myself as thoughtful and creative,
A woman fully capable in her imagination,
But no such strange creature can I find
When my spirit throws open the doors
And goes for its habitual stroll
About the public streets.

_A Handful of Dust_

I am working as a teacher of English in a context where I do not, generally, have much say over what texts I teach.  This can make for awkward situations, as, obviously, being unable to make my own selections about my content can lead to confusion or a lack of focus in my teaching, if I myself don't understand the rationale behind the choice of a specific text (and, believe me, most often very little effort is made to convey the rationale behind text choices at my institution).  A case in point would be that, this year, I was told to teach Evelyn Waugh's novel, A Handful of Dust.  Now, naturally, I've heard of Evelyn Waugh before, and even saw Bright Young Things, the movie version of his Vile Bodies, although I've never read even Brideshead Revisited, let alone any of his less famous books.  But I'd never even heard of A Handful of Dust prior to starting work at this school, so it was certainly somewhat intimidating to be asked to teach a book I knew almost nothing about.  And when I read it, frankly I was mildly confused by it and had to skim a bunch of articles that were shared documents from the department in order to get even the barest sense of what to think about the book.

Now, however, I must say I'm really re-evaluating my initial reaction towards the book and even feel like it was a very good choice.  On a professional level, I'm finding this text much more exciting to teach than the other texts I taught last year.  My school has an odd way of teaching literature to high-school-aged students - we are expected not only to teach texts and close reading but to explicitly teach "theory."  However, because these are high-school-aged students without much background in literary studies, we are teaching them relatively simple theories, which ultimately boils down to teaching them a few theories of tragedy in their first year (Aristotle's, A. C. Bradley's theory of Shakespearean tragedy, Arthur Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man") and teaching them about different forms of comedy in their second year.  When we were doing tragedy last year, I found this remarkably frustrating.  I didn't see that teaching them A. C. Bradley really added much to their study of Macbeth, and in fact it may have detracted from it, since they became more focused on using the theory as a way to simplify the text than actually putting any effort into reading Macbeth.  Similarly, although "Tragedy and the Common Man" is useful for establishing Arthur Miller's intentions in writing his plays, reducing Death of a Salesman to the theory again seems to close down inquiry or take what could be a relatively accessible play on its own merit and reduce it to an example of a broader theory.  I don't think studying the theory along with the play adds very much, and it was frustrating in that it seemed to be a way of protecting the students from having to think on their own.

A Handful of Dust, which we are explicitly teaching as a satire, is a different matter.  The text has a nice mix of being stylistically fairly accessible, so that the majority of my students are able to understand the prose, while at the same time being rather difficult to grasp as a gestalt.  Without understanding specifically that it is a satire, what satire means, and what the purposes of Waugh's satire were, it is difficult to grasp the text fully.  Thus, in teaching the students about the nature of satire and exploring the specific ways in which the theory of satire applies to the text, I feel that I am genuinely doing something useful, helping them to appreciate and get value out of a text which would, without the theoretical elements, be very opaque to them.  Moreover, the discussion of the students' confusions about the text and how the concept of satire may explain them intellectually even as their emotional responses to the text may conflict with what the satirical purpose would gesture towards is interesting and educational for both me and the students; I feel like in our class sessions they're actually learning and doing more thinking because they have to process their emotions and see how they interplay with the actual text (perhaps because the students read the text before they had much idea of what satire was, or because the targets of the satire may seem rather distant to them, they are much more emotionally involved in the text than I was when I read it).  Teaching it, then, becomes educational for me to as the process of dealing with student reactions and squaring them with the theory helps to give me passages into the text and articulate my own intellectual understanding of it.  So it's really enjoyable.

But that's not all.  I can't say I enjoyed the book that much when I read it, as much as I enjoyed coming to a better understanding of it via the process of teaching.  However, on a personal level, teaching this text has also been really rewarding to me because it's brought me to a very Eliot-centric moment in my life.  Of course, A Handful of Dust is named after the line from "The Waste Land" (quoted in an epigram).  There are also key thematic and symbolic resonances between the texts (eg, the use of fortune tellers in both, the travel over the course of both from urban London to a non-Western wilderness landscape) that help to ground my understanding of A Handful of Dust (since, contrary to my expectations when I first read "The Waste Land" back in college, I now have a fairly tolerable understanding of the poem, without, bizarrely, having any clear idea of how I developed it, since I don't remember ever either discussing it in class or reading much analysis of it, and I certainly had no idea what was going on with it when I first read it).  I had an amazing experience privately meeting one of the more passionate and dedicated students in my class, who had finished the text long before the rest of the class had, to discuss the poem with him as a way into the novel, and we ended up spending a couple of hours texting each other that night in order to continue the discussion - it was very rewarding and reminded me of how much Eliot meant to me.  Then this led to me being inspired to think about Eliot in an exciting conversation with reader Abangaku, which was also very inspirational and exciting for both of us, I think, and led me to read "Ash Wednesday" in more depth than I ever have before, which was also very meaningful for me.  In addition, I'm currently on a committee that's working on setting up a program for especially talented middle-school-aged students in English, and so far the most likely name for the program would be the "Eliot Program," although admittedly part of the reason for this is that we're mostly pretty leery of using the name of a white male, and Eliot is nicely ambiguous - which is a shame because, as much as I too am leery of using the name of a white male, I really do actively dislike George Eliot.  But it's probably made up for by the T. S. aspect.

Eliot for me, unusually, is not a school poet.  Most of the poems and poetry I care about are those that I studied in school - even Shelley I took a course on.  I think Blake and Eliot are the only real exceptions to that rule.  With Blake it's obvious that it's the Gnosticism that draws me in.  With Eliot, I have to say, it's Diana Wynne Jones.  Just as Shelley was, Eliot was a huge personal influence on DWJ and was something she drew on in her books - I've mentioned previously my speculations about the Dalemark series.  I think that I was indoctrinated in Eliot's concepts and ideas at a very early age by reading DWJ without even having needed to read Eliot - I really do see Eliot's ideas as being presented and discussed in DWJ's work such that, as rushthatspeaks once wrote, "the emotional logic felt strangely familiar."  Read rushthatspeak's essay on this point for more details.  So, given that I've been reading and loving DWJ since I was eight and the way she thinks has become a fundamental part of my worldview, having this Eliot moment this past month has been a great experience for me - it's one of those moments where my conceptual understanding of the world seems justified, to see Eliot come up everywhere.  But of course it's all a coincidence, a resurgence of a mode of thinking sparked off by a particular text - so I really have to pay tribute to that text and the person who is forcing me to teach it, because it has added a lot of value to my students' and my own lives.

Sometimes I Know Things about Obscure Music

I saw The Wolf of Wall Street the other day.  I was leery, because my father had previously said that he had found it tedious and because my previous, somewhat limited experience of Scorsese had not prepared me to look forward to a three-hour Scorsese movie.  As it happened, I hadn't realized it was a comedy and found that to be a pleasant surprise, and, in addition, I went to see it with friends who quite liked it, which led me to be positively inclined towards it as well.  It was very long, but I found my interest picking up again towards the end for the oddest reason - because of the soundtrack - and not even because it was playing songs I am particularly fond of but because it played, in two scenes directly in a row, one after the other, two songs that are related to songs I'm particularly fond of.  First, the original Italian version of "Gloria" - I had not known there was an original Italian version of "Gloria," but I had been aware of the English version as an influence on "Disco 2000" (it is a pretty clear influence, even if I like the latter better because Pulp).  And then, following on that immediately, right in the next scene,"Ça Plane Pour Moi", which for some complicated reason has the exact same backing track as "Jet Boy Jet Girl" (ummm. . . NSFW).  Considering that they're musically almost identical, I sometimes wonder if I prefer "Jet Boy Jet Girl" for purely purient reasons - I mean, it's awesome to be barely able to resist screaming out, "He gave me head," because the song is just stuck in your head so badly - but it is the one I heard first (on Internet radio).  At any rate, it's an amazingly catchy backing track, and when "Ca Plane Pour Moi" came on, nearly at the end of the three hour marathon, I started literally bouncing around and dancing in my seat, I was so excited.  Good musical choices, Scorsese, or whoever else is in charge of that.