Click here for a nice article on a recent "translation" into English prose of Paradise Lost.

The comments are good, too.  One in particular quotes a poem by Nabokov, on having translated Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" into English:

"I travelled down your secret stem,
  And reached the root, and fed upon it;
  Then, in a language newly learned,
  I grew another stalk and turned
  Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
  Into my honest roadside prose–
  All thorn, but cousin to your rose."

I agree more and more with the sentiments described in this article:

tinyurl.com/6rmxrl

Not just about Disney of course.  It could be Whole Foods or any consumer products or entertainment company.

Pest Control

      The problem with using a match-and-hairspray flamethrower at 3am in the house you just moved into, is that zombies are stupid.  Well, of course they're stupid, they've really only got a hindbrain and a visual cortex, but the thing is that they panic.  Then you have a crazy burning moaning zombie running up and down the hall banging into the walls, scorching your new paint (which doesn't matter that much because it was latex over oil and isn't sticking, so at least it'll be easier to peel now that it's all bubbled up), and the kids are screaming "Put it out, daddy, put it out!" and the wife is going "I told you this wasn't a good idea" and trying to get through to 911 and you finally just throw a quilt over it and it collapses into hot goo right through the hardwood floor.  Three thousand dollars of just-got-it-refinished hardwood floor.  How do you even fix a hardwood floor?
     So now there's a piece of plywood nailed down in the hall with a throw rug over it that the kids keep tripping on, and I'm trying to find someone that can tent *and* handle subterraneans.  You'd think in a city this size there'd be exterminators all over the place, but everyone's booked out until spring and we don't get cold enough down here for hibernation.  And no, the previous owner didn't tell us about the zombie closet.  Obviously something was up, since they wanted to sell as-is, but in this economy, you gotta take what you can get.

 

This is not a drill.

This is an electric screwdriver.

If this were a real drill

Your eye socket would be deeper.

 

7/17/08

 

(Okay, okay, it's icky -- but I'm in a cheerful mood!  Really!)

From a review of a book called "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die" in the NYT:

"In his novel “Changing Places,” David Lodge — not on the list — introduces a game called Humiliation. Players earn points by admitting to a famous work that they have not read. The greater the work, the higher the point score. An obnoxious American academic, competing with a group of colleagues, finally gets the hang of the game and plays his trump card: “Hamlet.” He wins the game but is then denied tenure."

Well, after a long (baby) break, my writing brain seems to have turned back on. I've written two little poems in the past couple days, plus a story fragment (which I may post later) a week or so ago. Not much output, but something! Yay!

Yes, they are both rather snide, but at least there's one for each side!

--------------------------
--------------------------

"transgressive"

a good safe word
for what we used to call sin
suitable for print in a family newspaper

if there were newspapers
these days

or families


5/23/08

--------------------------
--------------------------

Barack Hussein, 2008

"I don't like that Hoo-sane"
Said the woman on CNN
Summing up her West Virginia
"We've had enough Hoo-sane"
Primary demographic
Warm and round-faced
White grandmotherly
Working class under fifty-thousand
No college
But what's in a name?
Can't be Christian
With a name like that
Exotic enemy overseas
A little too black
Like coffee or chocolate
Without enough
Good white
Milk
For us folks

5/24/2008
--------------------------

The following is by Roger Ebert, from a review of a movie that's probably very worthy but that I'm not at all interested in watching called "Starting Out in the Evening."  The first two paragraphs I've included are to set the background.  The third is the one I love, because the last sentence really hits what writing is like.   (In my case poetry rather than novels, but it still rings true.)


Ebert writes:

"The story involves a 70-year-old novelist named Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) and a 25-ish graduate student named Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose).  He wrote four books that were acclaimed as important and still are, although he's not much read anymore. He's been working on a fifth novel for a decade.  She plays a graduate student who wants to write her thesis about him and has hopes that she may inspire a revival of interest in his work, and maybe blast that fifth novel out of his grip.

"They are not alike. He puts on a coat and tie to sit down at his desk and write.  He speaks with care and reserve.  She is filled with all of the brashness and confidence of youth and believes she's just what the doctor ordered.  He almost recoils under her first onslaught, but she is bright and verbal and, let it be said, attractive, and he doesn't send her away.

"Soon she is discovering what every interviewer learns from every novelist:  He doesn't know what anything in his books "stands for," he doesn't know where he gets his ideas, he doesn't think anything is autobiographical, and he has no idea what his "message" is.  I am no novelist, but I am a professional writer, and I know two things that interviewers never believe:  (1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next."

Got nothing written on Monday (no excuse, just flaked off :-) but did my best yet yesterday, with 359 more words.  At this rate it may take decades to finish a book, but it still feels good to be writing again!  (And semi-regularly, for the first time ever.)  It helped that my spouse watched the kids last night so I could sneak out to a coffee shop with some fellow NaNoWriMo-ers and do nothing but poke at my story for a couple of hours!  Next I shall cheat and work on tidying up the last bit I wrote, before I forget the changes I want to make.

Well, I'm not hitting anywhere near the 1667 words a day needed to actually produce a 50,000 word novel in a month, but I've actually written for 2 days in a row, which is better than I've done any time in the last year!  I only managed one paragraph (about 80 words) of my story yesterday, but whacked out another 200 words or so today.  Yay!

To whom am I married, my lover, my love?
To whom am I married, my love?

You've married the master, my lover, my love,
You've married the master, my love.

And who is that coming, my lover, my love?
And who is that coming, my love?

Our master is coming, my lover, my love,
Our master is coming, my love.

And who will run faster, my lover, my love?
And who will run faster, my love?

You know who runs faster, my lover, my love,
You know who runs faster, my love.

And who shall be victor, my lover, my love?
And who shall be victor, my love?

Oh I cannot answer, my lover, my love,
Oh I cannot answer, my love,
For swift is the hound and swift is the hunter,
And swift is the master, my love.

And oh, I did love you, my love!


10/03/07
(while reading "Privelege of the Sword")

Interesting article about a new trend for single-sex classrooms in middle school.  I work with enough teens to see the benefits, BUT...

when it comes to the different "learning styles" being assumed, I sure would have hated being in one of the girl classes they describe, and would have loved the style of the boy class.

You should be able to find the article here.

I'm looking forward to see what my favorite education blogger has to say about it.

I'm happy.  It's the last of the sampling of reader responses, but they did add a Shadow of the Colossus picture.

Here's the link.

--Sharon

He won't read it, but...

I wrote the following "letter to the editor" today to Roger Ebert, in reponse to this article in which Ebert responds to comments by Clive Barker about video games as art (or otherwise). I doubt it'll be read, but I had to write it!


Dear Roger Ebert,

In your article responding to Clive Barker, you write:

"Ebert: If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time, I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?"

I've sampled dozens (maybe hundreds) of video games, played a few through to the end, and have only encountered one that might meet this definition.

While some games are more like "Choose Your Own Adventure" books than like novels or movies, most modern video games are really just short B-grade action movies with very frequent intermissions -- that is, you hack your way past a bunch of monsters and are rewarded with a "cut scene" (mini movie fragment) telling you the next bit of the plot. Guy gamers seem to think of the movie bits as interruptions in the real action of running around and shooting things. Girl gamers sometimes think of the video game part as an interruption in the movie. Rarely do the two aspects work together all that well.

And yet... I know one game that might approach art in itself, even in your definition. It's a strange title called "Shadow of the Colossus". "Shadow" begins the usual way -- a little introductory movie showing the protagonist arriving in some strange place, where a disembodied voice tells him to slay some monsters in order to bring his dead girlfriend back to live. Then the game begins, and the player runs the protagonist around seeking out and then slaying a handful of gigantic monsters. As expected, there are occasional (fewer than usual) movie tidbits interspersed with the action.

Some riders on horesback approach the temple. They are in a hurry. They are worried about the protagonist and what he's up to.

Meanwhile, the players have an odd experience. We start worrying too.

Why are we killing these enormous, unique, almost gentle creatures, who've done us no wrong and don't seem to be harming anyone or anything else? Why are the approaching riders so frantic? What's with the black smoke that escapes when the creatures are killed, and what's with the shadowy black smoke men that appear around the protagonist each time he kills a beast and is re-awakened in the temple? Are we doing something bad?

There is a subtle, but ever-increasing, sense of dread and wrongness. Yet the player is caught up in the action and the challenge of the battles (and spent $40 on the game) and keeps playing. It all leads to an inevitable conclusion that still manages somehow to be a surprise.

The whole game probably has less than 10 minutes of "movie", but without the extended fights (and long spans of travel by horseback across barren, sun-streaked wilderness), those bits of movie wouldn't have the impact they do. The end is puzzling, cathartic, frustrating, and satisfying. People who played it a year ago still talk and argue about it.

I think it might actually be art.

I can't decide if this is more wrong or more funny:

http://images.stage6.com/channel_images/refuselife/e987763852794255c7ca819ebad358a9.jpg

I like Linus the best of them, but CB is sort of weirdly believable!

Today, a friend received a spam email with the best subject line:


Subject:  Inappropriate lifeline


Makes one almost wish it had been a real email....  It really deserves a poem!

Ratio

Where are the poets of this war,
This war of which I do not approve?
World War One had its share:
Wilfrid Owen and Vergissmeinnicht
Cool and distant in 9th grade Lit,
All busted eyeballs and pointless end.
Or History class, the wasteful Somme,
Half a million hurt or dead
Just to prove we could take it.
The Germans lost more that time,
But nobody's counting them.
Nobody counts the men we kill,
Names their girlfriends, shames
War itself in elegant couplets.
The Great War began
Far sillier than this,
And we've been at it longer.
If we lost a million men,
Would we find more poems?

June, 2007

http://incrediblehulk.blogspot.com/

Hulk not want to smash. Hulk watching Dora the Explorer. Hulk happy. Hulk stay home.

Not everyone will agree, but for me, the following is the most intelligent and concise thing I've ever heard about getting over bad things that happen. This is from an article about students recovering from injuries from the Virginia Tech shooting:

Anne Lynam Goddard, whose son Colin was shot three times during the attack on his French class, sees his trauma the way doctors see the shrapnel embedded in the tissue of his wounded leg: trying to remove it would cause more pain and might make matters worse, so it's best to leave it be.

"Your body forms a cocoon, so it will always be part of you, but it won't hurt. That's how I started thinking about this early on," she said. "My biggest hope is that this is how my son will remember this. I hope he can form a cocoon around it and not let it be his defining moment."

I remember the whole 70s/80's/90's thing of everyone being really pushed to talk about and deal with anything unpleasant from their past, because obviously you couldn't get over it unless you brought it out and talked about it. I remember how I already disagreed with that in junior high, when my parents were divorcing and I certainly was not in the mood to talk out how I felt about it. Obviously being shot is a bigger deal than that, because everyone else knows too, and their are physical scars, but the lastingness of it may be the same. I've since dealt with all that, but... some of it is still really better not being thought about and messed with!

The cocoon idea actually seems really healthy to me.

(I do think there's a difference when there's a problem with some other person that leaves an emotional wound, that may mean dealing with someone else about. But for the Va. Tech kids, obviously the other person is beyond the reach of discussion and resolution.)

Here's the whole article for those who are interested in the rest of the discussion:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070428/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_the_wounded_3