Drawing by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of Hot Teen Slut.
Night before teaching, and here's what I am up to:
-- I am looking up, for what seems to be the thousandth time, mise-en-abyme. Or mise-en-abime, wherein the i has a little chapeau thingie on it. One thought I had: Why, oh why, in tarnation is this image linked from that Wikipedia article? I know not. But there are super discussions on this rather malleable term here and here. But it's here that got me looking for images of old Quaker Oats logos. WTF?
-- Linked from some then I end up reading bits of Freidrich Schiller's essay "On Naive [also: Simple] and Sentimental Poetry"; copies here and here.
-- Queen and Paul Rodgers have arrived in Chile. Photos here.
-- Speaking of Brian "is God" May: Really, Alex Ross? Copland Will, Copland Will Rock You? Read and listen here.
I don't hear it--and what's more it seems it's just another rock critic's stab at making Queen out to be a pastiche factory. My wife sliced and diced Copland for months while working as the music
editor for this movie--for which she should have gotten an Academy Award nomination, IMHO--and never once did I listen to "Fanfare for the Common Man" and say to myself, "wow, that
sounds like the Red Special." Even when I rocked out to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer one, yo.
-- Read a little bit about Leaping Poetry for classes tomorrow; here's a little nugget from Robert Bly's essential Leaping Poetry: An Idea With
Poems and Translations:
In ancient times, in the “time of inspiration,” the poet flew from one world to another, “riding on dragons”.... They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke. ... This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.
Dragonsmoke. Awwwwww, yeah. That's what I am talkin' about.
-- Has everyone read the Lewis Hyde profile from last Sunday's New York Times? Yes? OK.
