did anyone else read the post piece about the gunned down midget?

Thomas Greene on Shakespeare's sonnets:

"Thus we are left with two distinct sources of alleged value, the friend and the poetry, each the basis of a rudimentary economic system, each vulnerable to skepticism. The presence of each system tends to destabilize the other by casting doubt on the kind of value it attempts to establish. To cite the poetic convention behind each system does not adequately deal with its constituent presence in this work."

I think this is right. I might go a step further, too. In the young man portion of the sequence, there are really three arguments that inflect each other: the procreation sonnets which worry that Time will deface the young man's beauty; the Ovidian argument that poetry will outlast Time; and the rival poet sonnets, in which the physical fact of the young man prevents the poet from writing poetry. I'm oversimplifying quite a bit, in reducing this aspect to a sort of Shakespearean Paper-Rock-Scissors, but I do think the tropes of fullness and emptiness (or content and form) that Greene and others point out are affiliated at different times with ostensibly contradictory pieces of these arguments. Time, the youth, and poetic style are all alternately 'empty' and 'full' with regards to each other.

(Empty wins.)

macbeth is great. i wish late shakespeare had gone back and written more history plays.

next to read: antony and cleopatra.


after shakespeare: marlowe and johnson! (jonson?)

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
-ayli

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

(another from Term Paper 2000.com)

For only $28!!

Sheesh.

I've wanted for a couple months to put up flyers that say, "I'll write your paper. $200 per page." I think someone would probably take me up on it, too.

Everyone has a price. That's about mine.

---
89% Term Paper #8173 Add to Cart (You can always remove it later)

Shakespeare , 2002.
This paper discusses the life and times of William Shakespeare.
725 words (approx. 2.9 pages), 2 sources, MLA, $ 27.95
:: Click here to show/hide Paper Summary ::


Abstract
The author states that little is know of Shakespeare's life details, but it is known that he started acting in 1597 before the queen and soon became an expert playwright. He points out that one of the interesting aspects of Shakespeare's life is that he came from the farm class and grew up in a town where most of the people were illiterate. The feminist position of Shakespeare is discussed. The author states that to be a successful playwright in Shakespeare's day, a playwright had to interest many different people and that is why Shakespeare had such a wide range of play topics and styles.

From the Paper:
"William Shakespeare was born on 23rd April 1564 to farmer class parents. This is the reason why we find his life so amazing. He grew up in a town where the majority of the people could neither read nor write. It is known that about five years after he married he left his hometown, Stratford, and went to London where he started acting before the queen. It is known that his careers as an actor as well as a manger both were illustrious and he had a good many years of criticism and success. He lived the latter part of his life actively and died a wealthy man."

Circles

"The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Even though I’m carrying a pen and notebook around everywhere again and even though I’m theoretically working on two articles, I’m not writing anymore. I’m not writing for this thing; I’m not writing e-mails; I’m not writing many of the documents I really should be writing for work. And where two weeks ago the problem seemed to be moving words from my head to the page (hence my purchase of a smith-corona portable typewriter), now the problem seems to be putting words together.

They don’t fit. Nothing I write seems right, and I don’t have the patience to fix it. It’s like I’ve decided that things are inexpressible and given up.

But I really haven’t. That’s why this quotation hits so hard for me: it expresses precisely my own arrogance. At a basic level, I’ve convinced myself that anything I think or experience I can write. In addition to being someone to whom things <i>happen</i>, I fantasize a writerly self who makes sense of it all.

The power to interpret is the power to imagine yourself in control.

And I guess, part of the reason why I’m having so much trouble right now is that in trying to write about the world through my own experiences I can’t help but sound tinny. I hear the privilege in my own voice and wonder why anyone else would bother reading.

And the answer to that is of course to write something worth reading. So I imagine myself doing that. And then I’m back in control.

I’ve wanted for awhile to do some work on the passage after the rape in “Lucrece” where despair overwhelms Lucrece, until she can order her thoughts a little by writing them down. I’d argue that it’s then that she gathers the resolve to commit suicide. In <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, too, Astrophil’s sonnetry is clearly an attempt to get a grip on himself. He’s writing so as to understand himself as a unified self, despite the contradictions between what he wills and what he believes. (That’s the closest my foggy brain is going to come right now, even though it’s not at all right.)

These writers keep using the image of pregnancy, in interestingly different ways. Compare:

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.

--Sidney, <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>, Sonnet 1

Go, wailing verse, the infants of my love,

Minerva-like, brought forth without a Mother:

--Daniel, <i>Delia</i>, Sonnet 2

For Sidney, the important part of the birth is the pain and the lack of control, while for Daniel the birth is almost effortless (but followed by pain and a certain patheticness). I can feel myself losing my precision here, as I write about this, but for Daniel, verse seems to be a side effect of his love: he loves, and verse pops out of the side of his head. For Sidney, on the other hand, there’s this enormity of feeling that’s both preventing him from writing and simultaneously compelling him to it. Writing is making him helpless, but it’s also his means of discussing and contextualizing his helplessness. And, this, for Sidney, is a way to begin to talk about the moral role of fictions. I don’t have my copy of the ‘Defense of Poetry’ with me at work, and I don’t have time to search for the right passages, but he’s immensely concerned with the problem of how poetry (and fiction) can function morally.

And I guess I am, too. I want to write this article about books and economics and dematerialization and aura and the internet and reading and so forth, but I can’t convince myself there’s value in it. And maybe the only value in it is in helping me learn to be a better writer, so that I can some day do something of value.

Even that sounds too ambitious. Then again, all of this sounds miserably pretentious.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry…

--Pound

more pretention (will talk about work soon)

I really like the subway program that puts musicians in the subway. There’s something about hearing 30-40 seconds of music in every train station that breaks me out of my morning-thoughts and puts the world a little more in its place. I used to feel fairly uncomfortable in airports—from the stress, the rush, the weight of bags, my own tiredness, and so on--until I started listening to “So What?” on infinite repeat whenever I was walking through one. I didn’t expect it to work, but it makes me so much calmer. (and now “So What?” gets in my head whenever I think about airports.)

Freshman and sophomore year I spent a lot of time thinking about why I went to jazz concerts when I fell asleep in most of them. The best answer that I could come up with was that they gave me a chance to break out of cycles of negative thoughts. It was almost like I could daydream when I felt angry or sad or guilty or sorry for myself (which was a lot of freshman and sophomore year) rather than spiral through negativity.

So I keep thinking about the opening of twelfth night:

Duke : If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

It’s a totally different fuction for music. It’s wallowing music. I know that feeling, too—occasionally I’ll go listen to loud, bangy music or to love songs or to whatever else, but these two functions for music seem vaguely opposed to me. It keeps you from dwelling on thoughts but allows you to wallow in them?

Perhaps what’s happening is that the music breaks the repetitive pattern of your own thoughts precisely by generating feelings of its own. (Doesn’t it feel a little artificial when you /make/ yourself sad or happy or whatever by listening to the right kind of song?) That makes sense given another metaphor for music’s effects: if a song transports you, it takes you from the mental state you’re in to a new and different one.

A comparison to writing: in that passage of “Lucrece” that I can’t stop talking about, Lucrece uses the letter she’s writing to shape her own thinking about her rape and her ability to act in response. I’m almost certainly reading too much into that passage by saying this, but I’m convinced that Shakespeare is talking about the ways in which writing is a way of structuring thought, of breaking emotions and feelings and concerns into units that can be considered, reproduced, analyzed, and discarded.

I’m sorta half working on a poem now that’s rapidly becoming different from most things I write. Usually in the past I’ve written about internal confusion and excitement and love and so forth and about the fragmentation of one’s internal world in response to another. (I know that’s an unbelievably pretentious sentence; four people know about this journal, and all of them can deal with my pretention.) I’ve been able to use various kinds of puns and rhythms and nonsense to create reasonable objective correlatives for that confusion. But more recently, all I seem to be able to write about is a stable-I getting banged around by a world that doesn’t make sense. I feel incredibly narcissistic writing like this, but it’s what I can do right now, so I’m doing it.

The problem is that most of the things I want to write about are only important to me. Or rather, I can’t get the density or intensity that I need in the lines. So I search for personal feelings that are communicable to stand in for ones that only mean something very personally, and end up sitting there trying to make myself shudder and then writing down the things that make me do it, to see if I can get them to work as stand-ins for my own feelings. It’s terrible work. I hate doing it. It reminds me of all the times I’ve felt awful over the past few years.

It’s like that study that showed that simply making various faces—smiling, frowning, laughing, sneering—produces those emotions in your mind. I try to make myself smile now, when I’m most upset. It works. (Have you ever repaired a broken six-year-old by ordering him not to smile? “Don’t you smile now. Don’t smile. I see you about to smile there. Don’t. Hey. Hey, stop. Ohhh kay. You can smile a little….”)

All of these things are sorta ways that we program our brains, to do what we need them to do. What’s amazing about it is that not only has my brain learned how not to be sad in airports—by listening to Miles Davis—it has learned how to program itself not to be sad. And that level of learning will soon acquire a symbolic significance of its own. I don’t know how to better explain this thought, but it’s a current obsession of mine:

The brain is exactly like a dog’s brain, with incredibly powerful abilities of abstraction.

Repeated rewards lead us to learn behaviors. But our powers of association make the rewards get steadily more abstract and the behaviors get more and more complicated in ways that produce ridiculously complicated results. Emergence, anyone?