schmevil

These are things I've recently purchased, and need to get through before the September grind starts in full. Oh shiiiiiit.

comics
28 Days Later: London Calling, by Michael Alan Nelson and Declan Shalvey
The Fate of the Artist, by Eddie Campbell
Haunt of Horror, by Richard Corben and various
Chicken With Plums, by Marjane Satrapi

poetry
The Immigrint Suite: Hey xenophobe! Who you calling a foreigner?, by Hattie Gossett


What are you crazy kids reading?

This month I've been spending a lot of my free time tweeting about racism and sexism in comics. I've spent the last week and a half arguing with Erik Larsen directly. Twitter is such a time sink for me. I've got access to intelligent and admirable people, as well as deplorable ones. I can spend hours reading up on the unfolding disaster in the Gulf, or talking about DC Comics' treatment of characters of colour. It's incredible for the scope and nature of access it grants and encourages. I mean, I'm talking back and forth with a comics publisher, and sometimes when I follow cool people like Jay Smooth, they follow me back. (HOLY SHIT, HOLY SHIT, FANGASM!)

But I think what I like best about Twitter is how simple a tool it is. Obviously the code is deterministic, insofar as how people are able to talk to each other, access information, etc. But it's downright bare bones, as social networking sites go. I really think that the simplicity of Twitter is what makes it so flexible and organic. Because Twitter is just a 140 character miniblog, with only a few additional organizational functions (direct messages, @replies, hashtags), users are freer to do whatever the hell they want with the service.

Contrast with technocratic Facebookialand, where users have less and less control over what information they share, and how it's shared. Where, it seems to me, Facebook is working hard to shape your experience as a user, so as best to monetize it. Of course this could all be my base hatred of Facebook as an organization, and my affection for Twitter showing. idek

***

Anyway, have a poem:

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Oh you are coming, coming, coming,
How will hungry Time put by the hours till then? --
But why does it anger my heart to long so
For one man out of the world of men?

Oh I would live in myself only
And build my life lightly and still as a dream --
Are not my thoughts clearer than your thoughts
And colored like stones in a running stream?

Now the slow moon brightens in heaven,
The stars are ready, the night is here --
Oh why must I lose myself to love you,
My dear?

There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping
The last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in,
Under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished.

The moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. We undressed,
then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. We knelt in the leaves,
kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.

Didn’t we? And didn’t I see you rise and go deeper
into the woods and follow you still, till even my childhood shrank
to a glow-worm of light where those flowers darkened and closed.

Thorns on my breasts, rain in my mouth, loam on my bare feet, rough
Bark grazing my back, I moaned for them all. You stood, waist deep,
In a stream, pulling me in, so I swam. You were the water, the wind
In the branches wringing their hands, the heavy, wet perfume of soil.

I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.

Rose, harsh rose
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem --
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?

Someone needs to go on an iconing spree through Stina Persson's gallery of watercolours.


***

Although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal

Sappho

Down the hill, through the alley,
left then right, my love. Pass the crying

women in shrouds. Let your friends have
their gospels. Leave Judas to his knots.

Tonight, we will make our heaven,
though the stars have turned their backs on us,

though the air is crowded with howling.
I have room for all of your questions.

A bottle of wine, plate of dry bread
and me on the table or under it,

against the night or under it.
Mourning can wait until sunrise.



via breathe_poetry

Obama's speech was a cliched dud

Put him on a platform and Barack Obama can take any string of words and make them sing. He's the best speech performer of our day.

His voice has charm and power. He has an instinctive sense of the lyric and rhythmic underpinning of language, those surplus properties that impart a power beyond sense, beyond just what the words say. He has mastered the timing of public address, when to pause, when to rush a phrase, how to link gesture and stance to moments of emphasis. This is the full package.

Barack Obama could read a string of fortune cookie messages and some people would come away thinking they'd heard the Gettysburg address.

He gave a great performance Tuesday. The speech itself, however, was a dud. So much skill operating on so lifeless a text. It was Vladimir Horowitz playing Chopsticks. A speech that has hardly begun gives us clouds that are "gathering," storms that are "raging," a fear that is "nagging," grievances that are "petty," interests that are "narrow" and decisions that are "unpleasant" displays an alarming hospitality to cliché. Is there a dull-adjective shop in the new White House?

If they carve this one in marble, the appropriate subscript will read: Bring me your poor, your tired, your hackneyed phrases - your obvious descriptors yearning to be twee.

Rex Murphy for The Globe and Mail
January 24, 2009

Aside from the somewhat alarming suggestion that Obama failed to fulfill the Dr. King shoutout requirement, I find myself agreeing. The speech was impressive because of the man giving it, not because the speech itself was impressively written. Sort of the inverse of Elizabeth Alexander's performance of Praise Song for the Day, which I posted here, for those of you who haven't given the text a second chance. Separated from Alexander's halting, amateurish delivery, it comes off as a much better poem. I hardly recognized it! Still, some of Murphy's criticisms could apply here too. Like the speech it leans to much on cliche, and could stand to lose a word here or there.

Inauguration day in general, was rife with cliche. I had hoped to see a little more risk taking, but I suppose you can't blame them for playing it safe, at least when it comes to the symbolic stuff. It's a shortcut to some kind of shared understanding, which is sorely needed.

Unlike Rex Murphy, Stanley Fish writes about the speech here, with appreciation for its style.

Obama's Prose Style

Of course, as something heard rather than viewed, the speech provides no spaces for contemplation. We have barely taken in a small rhetorical flourish like “All this we can do. All this we will do” before it disappears in the rear-view mirror. But if we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.

There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”

The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.

Of course, no prose is all one or the other, but the prose of Obama’s inauguration is surely more paratactic than hypotactic, and in this it resembles the prose of the Bible with its long lists and serial “ands.” The style is incantatory rather than progressive; the cadences ask for assent to each proposition (“That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood’) rather than to a developing argument. The power is in discrete moments rather than in a thesis proved by the marshaling of evidence.

The comparison to Biblical prose is a helpful one, for me at least, because it helps to clarify exactly what I didn't like about the speech. There was a sense of invoking the imagined character of America, and thereby reasserting its truth. Sort of the form of prayer, or a creation story, but with such hackneyed phrasing that it failed to fly. There was no imaginative spark, just a tired call and response. America is great! America will be great again. I do want to read and reread the text of the speech, because there were some awesome bits of rhetoric in it, but that's a project for another day.

The Walrus advertised a contest for fictional love poems. I've never been one for love letters, but I'm reading up on them, to see if it's something I might try my hand at. Not to say that I'm interested in entering the contest (it would be a bit foolish, for someone who's written maybe two love letters in her life), but I've been giving epistolary fiction a lot of thought lately. Probably because of all the Austen I'm reading, and the great use she makes of letters.

Do any of you write/read love letters? if so, what are your favourites?

***

Abigail Adams (to John Adams)
December 23, 1782

My Dearest Friend,

...should I draw you the picture of my heart it would be what I hope you would still love though it contained nothing new. The early possession you obtained there, and the absolute power you have obtained over it, leaves not the smallest space unoccupied.

I look back to the early days of our acquaintance and friendship as to the days of love and innocence, and, with an indescribable pleasure, I have seen near a score of years roll over our heads with an affection heightened and improved by time, nor have the dreary years of absence in the smallest degree effaced from my mind the image of the dear untitled man to whom I gave my heart.

***

XLI Through Death To Love, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee
From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,--
Like multiform circumfluence manifold
Of night's flood-tide,--like terrors that agree
Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,--
Even such, within some glass dimm'd by our breath,
Our hearts discern wild images of Death,
Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.

Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar
One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove
Sweeter to glide around, to brood above.
Tell me, my heart,--what angel-greeted door
Or threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor
Hath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?