BORC, end-of-term edition
No time for substantial posting means … it’s time for Bullets of Random Crap!
- I missed the Oscars this year, but since everyone else blogged about them, I at least got in on the celebrity outfit mockery (which is the main reason to watch the Oscars, anyway) vicariously. I would like to state for the record that I love Cate Blanchett’s dress, but why did Eva Green go for the Bride of Dracula look?
- On Monday, I lost my trusty flash drive. Also on Monday, my home internet connection went kaput. Two successive tech support guys have been stumped. Why is it that these things always happen a) in multiples and b) at the worst possible time?
- I did manage to pull out of the Murphy’s Law-induced slump long enough to notice this article on poetry and cities by Cole Swensen, a poet whose work interests me quite a bit. It’s an extended comparison between the (modernist and postmodern) poem and the (modernist and postmodern) city. I don’t think the comparison would work as well with poems and cities before the 19th century, but it’s still a neat idea. A few lines that caught my eye:
The base structure of both the city and the poem is the labyrinth. In the city, it’s the physical plan. As in any maze, you can only see to the next corner, never around it. Nineteenth-century Paris is routinely described, in Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, and elsewhere, as a labyrinth, and as such, something that needs to be unraveled, something coiled up, convoluted, ready to spring. Meaning is often similarly coiled within a poem—not laid out directly; one must follow intricate turns of thought, and unravel. …
The city occurs in chunks just large enough to hold in the mind, just as a prose poem is usually a single gesture, whether image, thought, or impression. …
The city is always something going on ahead, something that just turned the corner, that just slipped out of view. The city is posited as something unseizeable, something whose body is necessarily amorphous, and that just might be concretized by the mapping the poet does in his walking.
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