quote: "... it seems to me that life is just a series of long, jagged peaks of joy -- accompanied by a brooding and enduring sense of a loss -- of powers, of love, of favorite shirts, of moments and opportunities and notebooks that together constitute the passage of one human, me, bobbing floating skipping like a flat stone down the river of life. It's massive, this sense of things; it's anonymous yet it feels personal from "here." (Eileen Myles, "Lost in Canada: a 3,600 word advertisement for my missing notebook.")
Insomnia Poem #8
Loners. Insomnia. Club Crackers.
The day has exhausting expectations.
Then sky breaks black, light goes slack --
oh and -- there, smack, smack
my mind's alert for empty violent/violet hours,
no one expects anything of you at 3 A.M.
so whatever you do is fine. Like Club Crackers
because they were on sale
and taste like butter.
I always wanted a book with a hole in it
so I could hide a magic key.
I always wanted to be a delia*s catalog model.
I could roll my eyes just so.
To the back of my head and then some.
The back, where I keep things like
my brain is a book with a hole in it,
and my window looks into your living room,
which is also your room and your blooming doom and gloom.
delia*s names its pants.
morgan, alex, jordin, riley, brooklyn.
people like to know what they're getting into.
especially teenagers' thighs, sky-high, bye bye.
here's my key, here's my holes, let's fly.
I wish we could still use the word "bloomers."
[Meredith_Earls]links:
1. Omg, Wtf: Annals of Crime: The Chamelon (@the new yorker)
2. Queen of Tots: "Gay men are the unsung heroes of the child beauty pageant circuit." (@radar online). fourfour's take on it here: (@fourfour)
3. My heart broke into small pieces when I saw Jack Spicer: "[Response to the Loyalty Oath]" (@poetry magazine)
4. Good Writers, Weird Voices: Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings (@wall street journal)
5. I'm gonna be a douchebag and instead of seeing Dark Knight, just read the review on n+1.
[sidenote. On Gessen's blog, he quotes an email from the reviewer: "I think it’s a work of pure propaganda, and I think every movie theatre showing it needs to be burned down.”] (@n+1)
6. The Top 10 Female TV Characters Women Want To Be and Men Want to Be With. I agree with maybe 5 of them. Holler Claire Huxtable! (@defamer)
7. More great news for ladies! Anger in the Office - it hurts women more.(@cnn)
8. My Life in Sales, by Ann Patchett: A month of living in a suitcase, eating in airports, and cracking your forehead open against hotel-room walls in the middle of the night often comes to very little. But the only thing worse than going on book tour is not going. (@the atlantic)
9. Interview with Jonathan Groff from Spring Awakening: "Not Getting Naked Enough in 'Hair'" (@ny mag)
10. What Do Crack Cocaine and Journalism Have in Common: On David Car On David Carr -- Truth Junkie? (@nymag)
11. Twitter's Business Model? Well, Ummmm...(@wired)
12. Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization (@adbusters) (thanks Stef)
16 comments:
One a.m. is a little early for insomnia poetry, no?
Hope you actually got sleep last night. (=
Oh, yes, bitches can def. be hot.
Ah yes, that'd be the time stamp messing up. Don't worry, now that I'm up at 8:45 with about four hours of sleep, I'm 95% positive that I put that up 'round 3. Ish.
Can someone explain twitter's business model to me? Who has time to build up business and wait for advertizing?
So blissed out to see someone else hated dark knight as bad as I did. I almost walked out of the theater.
I should say something positive, like that I love your insomnia poems and BUFFY. from the best women on tv. do men really want to be with those other chicks, ummmm. lol.
re: tdk review
Insert my customary complaint about link bleed, and about n+1's lumbering misuse of otherwise informative thought experiments.
The ferry problem is nothing like the prisoner's dilemma. Not even remotely. There's nothing complicated about evaluating the outcomes here...you're faced with a choice: detonate or wait. Detonate has the outcome of one boatload of people dying. Waiting has the outcome of either one boatload people dying or two boatloads of people dying.
Detonating is in no case worse and in some cases better than not detonating. Push the button already.
This is actually the one point where I took issue with the movie. You spend two hours being suffocatingly dark, and then suddenly two boats full of people are totally irrationally self-sacrificing, and everyone lives happily ever after. Dub tee eff m8.
Also, I remember the kid in Ethics 101 who stubbornly resisted simplifying assumptions; that kid was an assclown.
That review of TDK wasn't even a review of TDK. I don't know what it was. It was like a review of life, and that person hates it.
This has nothing to do with insomnia. Actually, it's the opposite. I had a dream you, Lozo and Alex were writing the L Word eps from now on and me and my girlfriend showed up to sit in on the session. You were none too pleased. I brought one of my chihuahuas and Alex said she wanted to pet him but didn't know if he would bite and I got all offended and said "You think I'd bring a biting dog to you?!" You were turning the L Word into a soap opera with medical catastrophies, such as Shane falling off a cliff, and too much outrageous dramz. I tried to give you advice, and you stormed away.
Point is you've infiltrated my dreams and that's weird.
mira: That actually came up recently. "How does twitter make money?" We couldn't figure it out. I guess they must've won the lottery? I want what they're having, and I want 160 characters of it. Perfect!
adam: See I count on you to inform me of my linking problems overnight so when I wake up I know what to fix. There were some seerrrsss issues today.
I haven't seen DK obvs but can we bring 'assclown' back? Between what you said and what that guy said, obvs I am not going to the movie.
dave "tdk" lozo: One time I read this list of the ten least funny women ever and thought this isn't really about how the author feels about women comedians, it's how he feels about women, and he clearly hates them.
JK! Actually your comment made me LOL.
leah: OMG, I love it when we're in peoples dreams. Did you know that Caitlin's dog is a biting chihuahua? Probs not, I'm guessing the dog was from Tinkerbell. Or Jenny's dog. OMG, there are so many symbolic possibilities I could do this all day.
Also if I was assembling a writing team for L Word, I'm not certain lozo would be near the top of my prospective writers list. Actually maybe he would be. We could bring Marc back and everyone would get naked and have sex all the time and never talk about feelings.
in regards to TDK.. i went to the midnight premiere and i actually enjoyed it. but then again, the major driving force for me to see it was heath ledger in his final performance.
ps - i keep reading your title and thinking it says autospy.. then i realize it says autopsy. then i say it out loud and it sounds like au-to-psy instead of au-top-sy because i can't read/speak/form real words.
happy olympics opening ceremony day.
I think this is the second or third time I've posted saying I like something, and you reply "now I'm definitely not going to read/see/listen to it" because of the way I described liking it.
I guess I didn't explicitly say I liked TDK. But I did. Because it was awesome. And (mostly) suffocatingly dark.
If I took issue with every 'review' that uses coffee-stained notes from a class the reviewer took last semester (and didn't understand) to shroud a shallow/painfully literal read of a movie (that, in this case, he apparently skipped the end to...you know, the part about how vigilantism is intrinsically bad, but instrumentally good in that it causes people to hate vigilantes and aspire to something better), I'd never be able to go out into the internets. What got my panties in a twist was all the "I'm voicing a dissenting opinion, and that makes me better than the average moviegoer, because the majority is for sheep. baa!" posturing, which just makes me want to punch him in the head.
brb, need to run to the Sev, running short on haterade
i totally went and watched the dark knight against my will. it was ok, minus the fact that i got stuck sitting next to some dude that sweat alot, and was to large for just one seat, so he took like half of mine. his sweaty hairy arm kept rubbing up against mine. i had to hold back on throwing up cause i was in a theater.
So, I'm finally gonna say this bc it's popped into my head multiple times over the past few weeks/posts.
I have an internets/commenting crush on Adam (...awkward? Hope not. We're all friends here, right?) It's just that I will read your post or something from Autofun and then have a lot of feelings. As I'm getting ready to comment, I realize that Adam has said essentially what I was thinking, but probs in a much more articulate and succinct way. (No offense to everyone else. I feel that way about a lot of the comments). I even think that I quoted him from the last "weirdo/feelings" post about meeting internet people- about the meeting being potentially pleasantly surprising and surprises being the stuff of not being dead, or something.
Ok, feeling much better now.
And so, yeah, felt the same way about the general tone of the n+1 article. I agreed with him on plot parallels to the current war on terror because...they're obvious. Just the use of the word "terrorist" in the script struck me as I was watching. But I completely disagree with the conclusion that the portrayal of our "fight" and its movie-land success affirms real-world policies.
Hopefully, it doesn't, at least not for adults. For me, it affirmed my existing criticisms of our domestic surveillance and terror policies at one extreme, and at least got me questioning, on the other. As for effects on the young ones, I think that the general tone of the movie was so, so dark that there wasn't an overall "we're gonna get 'em, us, the US of A! By whatever means necessary, bc we're the good guys!" feeling. And anything that gets kids thinking about these issues in the first place, even if it hits them over the head with it, is a good thing.
And yeah, the vigilante take-home theme was the most prominent one, as it should be, and importantly overlooked in the n+1 piece.
you know what's great about internet crushes on this site? you never know what sex most people are. is adam going to get effed in a? or will adam pound vag? no one knows.
but i'm came back for two reasons. 1, if we're writing scripts about dudes having feelings-less sex with chicks, i think we should act out the scenes first.
and 2, bernie mac died, and he said pussy a lot, so you probably don't consider him a brother. well, a BROTHUH, not a brother. is that what autopsy means? autopussy? i'm just riffing here because i'm drunk.
re: the top ten women video from defamer...I LOVE that claire huxtable, mary tyler moore and tina fey are on there, but Buffy as #1? Seriously?
vashti: I'm actually a little nervous to see Heath Ledger in his final performance. I feel lke I'll be sitting in my chair, yelling "someone give that boy a nap!"
adam: I know, but it's because you make such a good argument that I believe you. Not to bring it back around or anything, but I believe your statement about your feelings about the review are quite similar to your overall sentiments about n+1 in general, yes? yes. My brain isn't working today.
autumn m: I hope you got that throw-up out of your system after leaving the theater. I don't like it when people take up too much seat. I feel they take advantage of me for taking up less seat.
jd: Oh yes, I mean -- my friends have often dropped a "Do you think Adam will marry me?" or "I love Adam," following a particularly astute observation. We are all friends here (like the olive garen btu with friends instead of family!) Also, I think the line about meeting people being the stuff of not being dead is one of his best comments ever. I'd go on, but I don't want baby to get a big head.
dave lozo: I know, right? Remember when you thought Alex was a boy? And then you thought Dewey was a boy? I mean, all the a.s and A.s and things too. At least we all know that Haviland Stillwell is a girl. Remember when yo thought cait was straight?!
haviland stillwell: I love that those people were on there too. I was like Buffy waht? I don't know, everyone must be scared of vampires and want to slay them.
jd: I'm all sorts of flattered. I do have to admit that the me-having-already-commented thing is mostly a result of spending my days at work chain refreshing people's blogs (as some of your sitemeters can probably attest... :::shameface:::)
r: I'm all sorts of flattered, again.
And yes, I would have been way less uppity at the review if it had been posted elsewhere. That's my nasty. But I just feel like it was a prime example of what about n+1 gets me uppity: their consistent attitude of looking down their nose at mainstream philosophy without knowing anything about it.
The worst example is from way back in 2006:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/53
With Dr. Leiter's...erm...visceral reply here:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/who_is_alexandr.html
I'll be the last one to defend Brian Leiter's impossibly oversized ego, but in this case I think he has a pretty legitimate complaint.
Also, as a matter of taste, I find the artificial artlessness of their website really irksome (srsly...there's no way nobody involved in that project has a better eye than that...they had to have made it ugly and illegible/difficult on purpose). It actually reminds me a lot of the 'hipsterism' that the Adbusters article you linked complains about (though I have really mixed feelings on that article too).
The dark knight was cute but annoying.
I actually enjoyed his review even though it wasn't really talking about the movie much. I mean, well, it was a guy movie. Like in girl movies when they don't want to have a good plot/character development, there's the central love story w. the hot guy. In guy movies they have really expensive things blowing up and pretty girls running around distressed.
I kind of enjoyed it just for the production value. "Like okay I know they brought in tons in the box office already or whatever, right? But like, do you think they actually profited at all? Cos it looks like they could've spent easily that much making the movie."
wordver: listucf. List... University of California Fairbanks? (we have a UAF, university of alaska fairbanks)
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