A Black Swan Lake (warning: spoiler)

About a year or two ago, there were talks of Darren Aronofsky directing a movie about Irish boxer Micky Ward with everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Mark Walhberg starring as the lead. When I read that he was not directing this film, I was initially disappointed. After seeing Black Swan, I could care less. Aronofsky's brilliance never ceases to impress me. His unreliable first person narration confronts the audience with the same melee of psychological challenges that made Pi such a brain teasing classic. However, the answers to these plot related questions in Black Swan take a back seat to the breath taking performance of both his overtly symbolic imagery and Natalie Portman's stunning performance. Portman ironically performs the role of a lifetime playing a talented ballerina who, despite her perfect form, can't act. Her inability to capture the seduction and darkness of the black swan in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake drives her to insanity. By abandoning reality completely, Nina Sayers (Portman) finds a pscyhologically thrilling loophole in order to overcome her own diffidence. Instead of suspending reality on the stage in order to embody the duality of a suicidal "sweet girl" and her twin, a pernicious temptress, Sayers goes mad making herself all of these things. Black Swan is visceral, poetic, and ultimately awe-inspiring. Portman was impressive enough when Hugo Weaving enlightened her conception of reality in V for Vendetta. In Aronofsky's movie, Portman's character does it all of her own accord, all in her own pursuit of perfection. Perfection drives all of its pursuers crazy. It's a tragedy whenever an artist sacrifices themselves for their art. Aronofsky captured this tragic beauty wonderfully, and all he seems to have sacrificed himself was a chance to teach Marky Mark how to act.

Reflections on Procrastination: in lieu of examinations, final, and deadlines.

With regards to procrastination, a couple of things have currently struck me as interesting. First is how uninteresting the word "interesting" actually is. As a writing tutor or a teacher, I am quick to point out words that say something without meaning anything at all: good, bad (evil*), fun, exciting, thing(s), important, sad, or interesting. Formally, I disapprove of language that has been repeated or embraced to the point where it's ability to operate as a distinguishing, and therefore signifying, term has been lost. Nonetheless, when talking or thinking to myself I use the word quite often. "Interesting" even seeps into my conversations as responses to the thoughts of others. This isn't to say I'm not interested in these thoughts, but just that I privately allow for a term which I must formally disapprove of. Such are the hypocrisies of teaching something, of being paid to correct habits that we may ourselves possess, which regardlessly have snuck through the education system without considerable harm to our own development (we hope). The word "interesting" is one of these things. Even though I must resist the urge to describe how "interesting" certain scholarly articles are in light of a research project, and instead continually search for more accurate or succinct language, I am personally entertained by the allure of the simply Interesting.
There is a danger in interesting, its ability to inhibit is very real. For exampe, if I like a movie or a book because it is interesting than I have committed the first step towards authentic investigation. Something spoke to me, I am attentive, at least for a short period of time. Interest is a gateway to continued study, pointing the way but not revealing anything of value. If something is interesting long enough then the investigation will ensue. The next question becomes then, how long does it take for matters of the heart to switch gears from interesting to worthy of invested consideration? What will we dedicate our time to? This is an interesting question, but it is a question that often prevents us from making a second point.

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* What's interesting about Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is, as well as its claim on morality, its insight into the workings of vocabulary. Perhaps "good" and "evil" had merely come to be words which were overused and lacked substance. Not to say that the search for a more apt word or group of words should be abandoned, but that "good" and "evil's" forms were being grossly misrepresented.

A Little Larkin

Embracing poetry more and more, I thought I would share a new favorite of mine by Philip Larkin.

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he's fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives -

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,

And thought, That'll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

(1968)

Is Criticism Worth It?

I read an interesting chapter in Stanley Fish's book (something about free speech...I can't remember the title, nor the title of the chapter for that matter). He was arguing that much of the New Historical Criticism of literature, particularly on John Milton, was misguided. He had noticed a trend (I believe he wrote this around 1993) where random historical information which was (quite) loosely associated with Milton or his writings was being published under the title of historical criticism. The critical trend was justifying pointless archival work and the failure to actually make valid connections which could shed light on Milton. I enjoyed the article, largely because I have similar convictions concerning criticism...as a whole.

Don't get me wrong. Nothing gets me hard like reading some arduously translated, loquacious account of how the margins, or what is not said, in a text holds some philosophical insight not only into the writer's soul but into an ideological reality of things. And, (yes, I'm starting a sentence with a conjunction) I have found myself in an accredited English program reading more of what people think about written works than the written works themselves. How have academics made a career of showing people what's really important about what they read? Even Stanley Fish's contribution to Reader-Response criticism is guilty of over thinking how people read. The meaning of a text is a result of a reader's participation with it. Of course, he goes into much broader detail than this, but is is somewhat commonsense, isn't it? People read books and make what they will of it. I suppose criticism is just one more example of this.

I suppose I'm realizing more and more that I don't necessarily care about half the shit that critics think. It's a battlefield. If Stanley Fish is right about meaning being a product of interpretive communities (ie I identify a main character in some text as a champion of Catholicism simply because I grew up in the Church-which is the interpretive community that has laid hands, so to speak, on my imagination) than criticism turns into class struggle. Perhaps my Marxist communal interpretation is showing. Nevertheless, why fight? Is it possible to write anything of substance if I'm concerned about how things will be interpreted? Is creativity or art or beauty of any kind furthered by pointing out that a Nobel Prize winner is an example of Freud's Oedipal complex? Read Freud than! I can't help but wonder if the goal of fiction isn't to inspire grandiose critical speculations on fiction, but to inspire more fiction. I can't imagine Milton or Faulkner getting some perverse satisfaction from a smart guy associating their work with some other smart guy's writing. I don't know.

Perhaps I'm getting frustrated with my end-of-the-semester projects.

Elizabeth Bishop/Kanye West=Confessional Poets?

This blog has a two fold mission: to ventilate pre-draft thoughts before I write papers, and to ventilate my obsession with Kanye West. My teacher probably doesn't want to hear about the new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but Kanye correlates to the confessional spirit in Bishop's poetry. Although, Bishop is much more reserved with her confessions.

The first song of the album MBDTF, to the horn melody from the Rocky movies, is titled "Turn on the Lights". This light that Kanye is talking about invokes stadium lights, concert hall lights, club lights perhaps, but most importantly is the light that Kanye invokes of the reader as he turns the lights onto himself. Kanye is exposing the "twisted" "dark" and consequently the "beautiful" parts of his own fantasy, or of himself. Ye wants us to see him, all of him. His album is in many ways a confessional.

My favorite poem of Elizabeth Bishop's (at the moment) is "The Man-Moth". The Man-Moth is a Promethean monster that crawls from the underground and scales buildings to reach the moon. To the Man-Moth, the moon is a hold in the canvas of the sky. He wants to escape the night. The Man-Moth never reaches the moon, his escape, and is disappointed every time he fails...but not as disappointed as he would be had he reached it. The final stanza reads as follows:

If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention

he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Exposing the monster creature to light reveals his tears, which for the careful observer are "pure enough to drink". These are the lights that Kanye begs his readers/listeners to hold up to his own eye. In so doing, we may see the "beautiful" in his dark, twisted fantasy. A rough or controversial outer image is only a facade. It is a filtering process, asking only the attentive to receive the confessional honesty of his poetry.

I'm Batman

I was having a conversation with some friends today about crime fighting. The conversation had come to dreams, and I mentioned that I'm usually Batman or some kind of vigilante killing bad guys when I dream. This goes back to my childhood. Fortunately, as an adult, I've learned to tame my instincts for violent justice. However, kids seem to have a harder time divorcing reality from fiction.

Case and point. I remember getting beat up by a group of kids a couple houses from my own in Old Friarsgate (The Gate). I'll try not to overly romanticize this scene. First, I was seven. Second, it wasn't a group of street hardened thugs, but your standard snot-nosed, middle-class smart asses. I had inadvertently aggravated an older friend of a friend of mine. The friend (once removed) attacked, and his siblings helped him as he dog piled me. There were three or four of them, at least one was a girl. Sure, my aggressors were more "Focus on the Family" than the crypts and the bloods, but I felt I was a victim of gang violence nonetheless.

I'd like to mention, as a side, that my Father was watching the entire time that I was being pummeled. Now, you can interpret this as a tough love, what doesn't kill him will make him stronger philosophy. In reality, he probably didn't consider the Brady Bunch to be a serious threat. Regardless, the ass kicking did serve to teach me a lesson in hard reality.

When the shit heads were done roughing me up, I ran home. This was not a sprint of shame, however. I don't give up that easily. On the contrary, I went to my room and got the bat cape my Maw Maw had made for me. I put the cape on, got my mind right, and ran down to where the Seventh Heaven Hooligans were celebrating the spoils of war. I yelled something along the lines of, "I'm Batman Bitches!", and got my ass kicked again.

My Dad watched the second act as well. This time, not only did he not intervene, but he prevented my brother Nick from running to my aid with a baseball bat. Nick brought a sense of practical reality to fighting that I lacked at the time. Never bring a knife to a gun fight, and you should always leave your bat cape at home.

The fictions we observe have a very profound affect on our realities, even in their ineffectiveness. The lesson I learned that day wasn't that Batman isn't real. That's fucking ridiculous. Batman is real. We make him real. I allowed Batman to exist in a very real sense in that fight. So I wasn't disappointed by Batman's absence, but by the ineffectiveness that Batman brought to the situation as a solution. My reality ceased to be a place where Batman could solve my problems, and he took shelter in my dreams. I'm still Batman in my mind, that won't change. I just have to hide my cape.

All in all, I still kinda wish Dad had let Nick go Barry Bonds on those punks.

Lil Wayne Has A New 'A Milli'?: RapFix Dissects The Orignal

Revision. I can't remember where I read this, but the quote went something along the lines of, "a text is never finished, only published." Katherine Spivak wrote, concerning Elisabeth Bishop, that it wasn't out of the ordinary for Bishop to revise a poem over one hundred times. Tolstoy continued to work on War and Peace even after its initial publications. Lil Wayne, by creating a new version of his old hit song "A Milli", is demonstrating the necessity for revision in truly blatant fashion. It would be nice if more artists, instead of producing the same crap over and over again, re examined a song and recognized that a piece of art is never as good as it still has yet to be. "A Milli" wasn't a bad song to begin with. Again, true artists obsessively revise, and Lil' Wayne is demonstrating that he takes his art seriously.

Lil Wayne Has A New 'A Milli'?: RapFix Dissects The Orignal

Confederacies of Dunces

I'm doing research on the late author John Kennedy Toole, mostly concerning his novel A Confederacy of Dunces. There are tons of competing interpretations as to the meaning of this work. Before winning a Pulitzer, the novel was rejected by Bob Gotlieb of Simon & Schuster because it didn't have "meaning". After the death of the author, and the critical attention that follows winning a prize in fiction, meaning has been more than created. Interpretations of the rogue, comic, not quite anti-heroic protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly have quite a range. Some say he's a symbol for the struggling Roman Catholic Church in a modern world, others argue that he's inspired by acquaintances of Toole or Toole himself, and a strong case is made for Ignatius as a queer satire on hyper-masculinity. Regardless, meaning has been found if not created.

I talked with my class today about where meaning is found in a word, sentence, or work of art: the writer, the work, or the reader. Lil Wayne is constantly alluded to during class time so I suggested that an awareness of the likelihood of being 'misrepresented' by the written word informed Wayne's aversion to recording on paper (in more or less words). Back to Toole, he was certainly disappointed with Gotlieb's reading of his "masterpiece". Many relate Toole's suicide to this disappointment. However, I wonder how Toole would respond to the meaning of his novel thirty something years after its miraculous publication. Does it matter?

Ye

How related are mania and brilliance? The Rolling Stone really pushes that point, that it's Ye's demon wrestling that produced the great art of Fantasy. How much of this is production? image? The [Stone] article is so flattering that I'm having a hard time taking it seriously. What rules are being broken? How is Ye changing the game? His dedication is mentioned. He and Wayne both seem to demonstrate this obsessive determination to making music. Is it true that if you try enough you'll be acknowledged for your effort? Even if it isn't, it does seem to make sense that time spent equals lessons learned.

http://www.yk2daily.net/2010/11/09/kanye-wests-my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-gets-5-stars-in-rolling-stone-magazine/

The Alien

What is Lil' Wayne?

Word is that Lil' Wayne was hunched over a writing pad to lay down his first rhymes at his post-incarceration studio recording session. Being confronted with the inability to simply record every thought he had, and using mix tapes as his primary form of rough drafting and revising, Wayne sacrifices a reputation of sorts by "writing" music. What is the significance of not writing?

On one hand, Lil' Wayne represents a rhetorical strategy that goes back to Athens and Galilee. Brilliant minds that are capable of influencing millions without having to write anything down are significant. Socrates never wrote, he merely had a habit for dialogue that engaged countless minds. Socrates' revision was in his conversation. One can imagine Christ establishing a similar ethos. Granted, Plato created the legend that is Socrates, so who can say for sure if such a man intended to be a rhetorical masterpiece. The point I am trying to make here is that Milton's Paradise Lost stands alone as a textual phenomenon; how much more impressive is it that he was blind and had to dictate the entire thing to his daughters? Despite the accusations of child abuse, it's impressive that a man is capable of the mental fortitude and memory that revising such a piece demands.

Now, substitute Wayne's studio mic for Milton's daughters, and imagine the disappointinng turn Milton's reputation would take if we found evidence of written manuscripts suggesting Milton had his sight all along. I should probably, of course, be crucified for comparing Lil' Wayne to Jesus, Socrates, and Milton, all while presuming at least the pretext of a serious conversation. Nonetheless, a blow has been dealt the romantic image of the writer. Is the Muse dead?

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1651905/20101109/lil_wayne.jhtml#more