Wednesday, June 22, 2011

RPG Idea and a Word I Remembered

Holy crap my friends!  It seems inspiration has hit us in these past couple of days.  Here is the long-ass post I composed for you!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

"OMG basedgod, you can fuck my bitch basedgod"

 swag

swag swag

get cooking

swag out the ovaries


I just poisoned you, have a good day.
-Blue Ranger

Monday, June 20, 2011

Reboot

Here is some notes I transcribed from a text outdated though still relevant. Following it is an essay I wrote with some notes on it. You will find an essay on Melville's Bartleby on my other blog www.heteroglossia.wordpress.com, which should again be updated soon with more poetry, and hopefully after that some more writing. But not neglecting this venue, let me say that it is a project and pride can be put in and had from, for we are centers of attention each of us.

Also, I just finished Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Classics for Meaning in a Secular World. It is a joy of a popular book of philosophy by a leading philosopher in Existentialism (Dreyfus) and I recommend it to anyone with a yen for David Foster Wallace or Melville's Moby Dick, another book I am 200ish pages deep into.


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A Short Guide to Writing About Literature 9th Edition, edited by Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain. San Francisco, Longman: 2003. Print.




Characteristics of a Good Interpretation



Even the most vigorous advocates of the idea that meaning is indeterminate do not believe that all interpretations are equally significant. Rather, they believe that an interpretive essay is offered against a background of ideas, shared by essayist and reader, as to what constitutes a persuasive argument. An essay (even if it is characterized as “interpretive free play” or “creative engagement”) will have to be coherent, plausible, and rhetorically effective. The presentation as well as the interpretation is significant. This means that you cannot merely set down random expressions of feeling or unsupposed opinions. The essayist must, on the contrary, convincingly argue a thesis—must point to evidence so that the reader will not only know what you believe but will also understand why you believe it.

One important way of helping readers to see things from your point of view is to do your best to face all of the complexities of the work. Some interpretations strike a reader as better than others because they are more inclusive, that is, because they account for more of the details of the work. The less satisfactory interpretations leave a reader pointing to some aspects of the work—to some parts of the whole—and saying, “Yes, but your explanation doesn’t take account of . . . .”

This does not mean that a reader must feel that a persuasive interpretation says the last word about the work. We always realize that the work—if we value it highly—is richer than the discussion, but, again, for us to value an interpretation we must find the interpretation plausible and inclusive.



• Interpretation often depends

• on making connections not only among various elements of the work (for instance, among the characters in a story, or among the images in a poem), and

• between the work and other works by the author, but also on

• making connections between the particular work and a cultural context.



The cultural context usually includes other writers and specific works of literature, because a given literary work participates in a tradition. That is, if a work looks toward life, it also looks toward other works. A sonnet is about human experience, but it is also part of a tradition o sonnet writing. The more works of literature you are familiar with, the better equipped you are to interpret any particular work. Here is the way Robert Frost put it, in the preface to Aforesaid:



A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do. (1954). 86-7



Thinking Critically About Literature



Usually, you will begin with a response to your reading—interest, boredom, bafflement, annoyance, shock, pleasure. Then, if you are going to think critically about the work, you will go on to examine your response in order to understand it, or to deepen it, or to change it.

How can you change a response? Critical thinking involves seeing an issue from all sides, to as great a degree as possible. As you know, in ordinary language to criticize usually means to find fault, but in literary studies it does not have a negative connotation. Rather, it means “to examine carefully.” )The word criticism comes from a Greek verb meaning “to distinguish, to decide, to judge.”) Nevertheless, in one sense the term critical thinking does approach the usual meaning, since critical thinking requires you to take a skeptical view of your response. You will argue with yourself, seeing if you response can stand up to doubts.

Let’s say that you have found a story implausible. Question yourself:



• Exactly what is implausible in it?

• Is implausibility always a fault?

• If so, exactly why?



Your answer may deepen your response. Usually, in fact, you will find supporting evidence for your response, but in your effort to distinguish and to decide and to judge, try also (if only as an exercise) to find counterevidence. See what can be said against your position. (The best lawyers, it is said, prepare two cases—their own and the other side’s.) As you consider the counterevidence, you will sometimes find that it requires you to adjust your thesis. You may even find yourself developing a different response. There is nothing wrong with that—although of course the paper that you ultimately hand in should clearly argue a thesis.

Critical thinking, in short, means examining or exploring one’s own responses, by questioning and testing them. Critical thinking is not so much a skill (though it does involve the ability to understand a text) as it is a habit of mind, or, rather, several habits, including



• openmindedness,

• intellectual curiosity, and

• willingness to work. 89-90

 
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Love as Ideal Disease




Looking over only the offered poems in our textbook Literature: A Portable Anthology one finds an interesting development of the idea of love. Beginning with Edmund Spencer’s “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” in 1595 love is seen as an ideal to be strived for in life and life-after-death, which faithful love will grant. This spiritual and immortality-granting concept of love is also in other poems of the period until John Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” in 1633. Then beginning with Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in 1650 love’s idealism became “infected” with mortality and an attention towards the body (versus the spirit) as most formalized in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1917. Then, still keeping with the limited scope of the anthology’s offered poems, love enters a stage of recovery beginning with W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening” in 1937 and comes closest to a healthy love in Louise Erdrich’s “A Love Medicine” in 1984. Looking at several poems from each of these three stages we find that love undergoes mutations along two trends, as if a disease: the im/mortality of love and the medium of love (spirit versus body).

In Spencer’s poem the speaker confronts head-on the Reaper disguised as the ocean as he immortalizes by inscribing his and his lover’s love in verse. While “baser things . . . die in dust, [his] shall live by fame” through the speaker’s act of inscribing upon the sand and “the heavens [his lover’s] glorious name” (10, 12). Love in this poem is understood as something that can be immortalized, or survive past “whenas death shall all the world subdue,” through “fame” (13). William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” embodies the same thing: “So long as men can breathe [ . . . ] / So long lives this [‘eternal lines,’ or verse (12)], and this gives life to thee” (13-4). The common point from these is that love can exist entirely in spirit and that it does not shrink at the loss of the body. Yet love is still empowered in Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear and Loving Husband” when love is also given the power to sustain the lover’s themselves in its immortality: “Then while we live, in love let’s so persever, / That when we live no more we may live ever” (my italics, 11-2). In the preceding samples it was just love that survived (respectively, the lover’s “glorious name,” and Shakespeare’s “thee”), but now it is “we [the lovers]” themselves that do. As to the aspect of the spirit, nothing so far suggests a necessary bond between body and love. Even in Lady Mary Wroth’s poem the main subject is “My pain” (1), and the main agent is the abstract “love[, which] will not falsify,” or that which will immortalize joy and hope, not the spirit (14). Finally, in Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” both immortality and the spirit are stressed and brought together. Though “immortality” or any of its permutations are not literally written in the poem, one need only infer from the title and the first stanza that it is immortality that is really at stake, since “mourning,” “virtuous men pass mildly away” (1), and “The breath goes now” (4) all suggest literal death, and that the speaker’s prescription will grant immortality not to the body, but to the “souls [ . . . ] which are one” (21).

But then only seventeen years later “To His Coy Mistresses” undermines this classical notion of the immortal and spiritual love. In the very first line love is corrupted: “Had we but world enough, and time,” or had we but health (which essentially is the body as the rest of the poem shows) and immortality. Soon, with “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near [ . . . ] / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity [ . . . ] / Thy beauty shall no more be found” (21-25); time and the body will not last and love becomes lust against “our sun” (45). These general themes are reflected also in other poems of the period, especially in William Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” and the poems of John Keats. One, however, may argue that there remained in this period examples of surviving classical sentiments, such as Robert Brown’s “A Red, Red Rose” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the way.” Yet in Brown’s poem no mention of love or “life after death” is given; the closest is, “And I will come again” in line 15. In fact, death is admitted as inevitable in line 10: “O I will love thee still, my dear, / While the sands o’ life shall run” (14-5); death will overtake, but even more precisely love will exist only “While the sands o’ life shall run,” not beyond (italics mine). Browning’s poem is more nuanced. Though love is great, and I am charmed by it, the speaker is almost suicidal, or at least completely open to the idea of dedicating one’s life to love, which means willing to give it up for love. But the speaker is not serious to begin with, or if she is then she has in mind acts of love “after death” and life, for she is willing to give up life for love; one must be wary with the speaker’s belief in a God without saints. It is, then, a strange and impossible, or unimaginable, love that Browning has in mind, and which, because of its strangeness, cannot be used to refute our main thesis. Love since Marvell is still mortal and bodily. These morbid tendencies in the period is most perverted in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” when the speaker, in order to recapture the old ideal of eternal love, “lie[s] down by the side / Of my darling [ . . . ] / In her tomb by the side of the sea” (38-40). The speaker is either sleeping with the corpse or dying with the corpse; in either case, the old ideals are unattainable.

As extreme as Poe’s poem is, to me T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is this corrupted love’s best expression. The poem basically illustrates the painful self-consciousness of man growing uncomfortably old who is, presumably, in love. It is important to note that the speaker is one who is around people who can afford “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,” is around women who talk of Michelangelo, and soliloquizes of Hamlet; in other words, he is a well-off man who should be confident and healthy. By creating this awkward and weak character as the speaker of a “love song,” Eliot is obviously mocking the establishment of past, idyllic love poetry. Eliot’s poem is one, rather, of mortality and the body. These obsessions riddle the poem: “etherised upon a table,” “for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,” and “I grow old . . . I grow old” (3, 48, 84, 120). The final line encapsulates the obsession of death over love: “and we drown.” Love, according to this love song, is an ironic cause for death. In “Etherised Upon a Table: T. S. Eliot’s Dissertation and Its Metaphorical Operations” Donald J. Childs points to the first three lines in order to make sense of the morbid. He argues that the splitting of the “us” into “you and I” expresses nostalgia for “pre-consciousness” when the self is not yet defined as the subject as something against object, or in fact anything at all, and that “The Love Song” is a poem of “nostalgia for the state theoretically preceding or following the fall into consciousness” (383) According to Eliot’s dissertation he and F. H. Bradley believed in a reflexive, or circular, self: “The self [ . . . ] seems to depend upon a world which in turn depends upon it.” This self furthermore depends as well upon other selves; it is not given as a direct experience, but is an interpretation of experience by interaction with other selves” (146). To become “etherised upon a table” then is to ask for an ignorant experience free of the pain of overbearing consciousness, as if a disease one wants to be rid of, so that when “human voices wake us, and we drown” it is not “you and I” that drown, but rather the desired pre-reflexive and peaceful subconscious “self” (131). In this “love song” the subject is a sickness.

As for the theme of the body, the poem treats it grossly. It opens up with the abstract “you and I” and ends with the concretized drowning of the lovers beside the ominous “sea-girls,” while all throughout the middle attention is diverted from abstractions (e.g., the questions) to the physical aspects of love: “time yet for a hundred indecisions [ . . . ] / Before the taking of the toast and tea” (32-4). The most striking evidence of this is the creepy evolution of the template phrase “And I have known . . .” of lines 49-67 where the first object known is the abstract “them,” which quickly transforms in the next stanza to “the eyes,” then finally the “arms,” which is imagined with so many material accessories. The climax is this object becoming the subject when the speaker writes, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws,” now obsessed with the fingertips. It is this pinpointing of love’s subjectivity that best characterizes “The Love Song,” and in which immortality and the spirit collapses.

It isn’t until twenty years later that a process of recovery begins with “As I Walked Out One Evening.” In it the speaker walks out one evening and overhears a lover sing of love’s wonders, all of which initially are of the classical, timeless, and spiritual type. Yet “all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime” and the lover’s song turns modern, yet of a different and ultimately affirmative type of modern than from the previous era’s sick poems. The lover warns “let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time” (23-4), and that “Vaguely life leaks away” (31). It is almost all doom, but then there are lines 51-2: “Life remains a blessing / Although you cannot bless.” But what’s my point if it is “life” that remains a blessing and not love, which “shall [be given to] your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart” (55-6)? The answer is in the fact that it is a lover that says all this; it is love reassuring, or giving hope to, itself: despite mortality and crookedness, there is still love to instill hope, and in this gesture the poet sees love as a conceptual vehicle capable of self-rejuvenation. Yet times are different, difficulties remain, and love is already damaged, as Richard Wilbur writes in “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” In a sleepy reverie the speaker’s soul ascends to survey its position: “The morning air is all awash with angels,” but eventually “They [must] swoon down into so rapt a quiet / That nobody seems to be there,” from which then “The soul shrinks / From all that it is about to remember” (5, 13-6). But remember it must and, like the sun, it “acknowledges” and “descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body” (italics mine, 21-4). Love here is no longer in perversion, denial, or in spirit; it is in the world with its “ruddy gallows,” “backs of thieves” and nuns “Of dark habits, / keeping their difficult balance” (26-30).

Erdrich’s “A Love Medicine” is an interesting culmination of the trends so far described. Whereas our first poems were explicitly about love, most literally writing “love,” this last poem is exclusively of love, since it does not mention “love” at all, but rather is an act of love from one sister to another. The “love medicine” of the title, I believe, is the poem itself, since in it the speaker’s sister, Theresa, is subjected to abuse in all her nights-out from men whose “boot[s plant their grin] / among the arches of her face” (19-20), all in secret since Theresa is constantly found sleeping outside “in the park” or “in a burnt-over ditch” (27, 29), and of which all is betrayed by the poem’s telling of them; or in other words, poetic justice is a medicinal act of love towards the speaker’s sister Theresa. What is most remarkable, however, is the poem’s innuendos to express the violence done to Theresa: the gross, phallic “trees lean[ing] down aching and empty,” “The river slaps,” a field “that is gagging on rain,” “sheets of rain sweep up down,” and “the river held tight against” (25-32). Besides the boot planting into Theresa’s face, the poem expresses strong implications through the pathetic fallacy, which is “the attribution of human emotion or responses to animals or inanimate things” (Oxford English Dictionary). At then end of the poem the pained speaker, after seeing the horrors of her sister’s situation, identifies with Theresa by sharing subjectivity (“We see” [italics mine, 33]) before intervening mirror-like with “Sister, there is nothing / I would not do” (36-7), giving voice to her “dragonfly” sister with “chains / that flitter at her throat” (4-5). Underlying all this is a recovered concept of love that is mortal and immediate, or modern, while at the same time immortal and spiritual, or classical.

By looking at the many ways poets across the centuries have expressed their own ideas of love I have hopefully shown that as strongly as each has written their verse, the idea of love survives all their efforts as it continually develops in history into something unexpected from preceding ages. First it was a total abstract ideal, then it became something like a physical problem, and then finally beginning in the mid 1900s it was recovered as something healthy and more faceted. In the end, though, I have to say that there is one concept of love better than any other, which is common in all those changing expressions discussed above: love is that which is best felt in the heart that is both soul and body.

Work Cited

Gardner, Janet E., Beverly Lawn, Jack Ridl, and Peter Schakel, eds. Literature: A Portable Anthology 2nd Edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. Print.

Childs, Donald J.. “Etherised Upon a Table: T. S. Eliot’s Dissertation and Its Metaphorical Operations.” Journal of Modern Literature 18.4 (1993): 381-395. Web. 1 May 2011.

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Your essay pretty much argues that the idea of love, the way that the poets see love, changes throughout the history of what is given in poetry in your anthology. In other words, according to the poems given in the anthology, the conception of love changes across time. There are three stages: classical, modern, and recuperated/rehabilitated/recovered (these are my terms so they are original, which should give you extra points). In your essay these three stages are expressed through medical metaphors: love is healthy in the classic stage, then it is infected in the modern phase, then it is in recovery in the third stage.




classical stage: the idea of love is spiritual and immortalizing. Read John Donne’s poem again. Notice how the poet proclaims that love is best when wholly of the spirit. Read Edmund Spence’s poem and William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18—notice how and why they both claim that love will live forever.



modern stage: Marvell’s poem is hilarious. It’s a poem in the “carpe diem” mode, which means “seize the day.” Basically, Marvell is trying to get some. He does this by arguing that we all die so let’s get it on while we can. Love to Marvell becomes lust and it is wholly of the body and mortal (death is involved). Read Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. It is the extreme sick poem of love, since in it love conducts lovers to spend eternity together in suicide, attrition, or lethargy, depending on the interpretation of the last stanza.



READ T.S. ELIOT’S “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” One of the most important poems of Modernism. Notice the irreverent tone of it and the novelty of its technique. It is pretty anti-establishment. For the sake of the paper, notice how love is never said, yet it is a “love song.” What is Eliot trying to ironically trying to say? Also, notice how love is not so great and ideal here as compared to how it was with the classical poems.



third stage: read the three poems. This stage of poetry acknowledges fully the damage or sick condition of love, and they all try to rehabilitate it somehow. Auden recognizes that life is a blessing nevertheless; Wilbur sees it as keeping a difficult balance; and Erdrich sees it as a positive instrument of love: she uses poetry as a medicine to cure the vices of the world, as with what happens to her sister.