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.