maybe Karl had a point

Gotta write gotta write gotta write

Feels like I will always have a response to write for class and no time to write it in. Because really, I haven't got a whole lot to say in response to Lukacs except, maybe, what. Adorno gets a chortle, because, really, my dude, you gotta stop drinking the bitter stuff and lighten up a bit. Jameson sounds like a hippie. A Marxist hippie. It's all relative, man. We're reacting to the man, but movies are cool, ya know...

You can really only say two things, it turns out. Or one. The world used to be unified, and now it's not. That's either good or bad, depending on how you see it. Or you can say we've slipped back into the sheeple masses and individualism is over again. Or maybe it never existed. Okay so you can say more than one thing, but. It's really all the same.

Which means I'm a Marxist, I guess.

My dude Wordsworth

I suddenly had a weird epiphany. Right now, right here, sitting at this computer, I realized something. The Romantics were right. Are right. About poetry. 

(If they were going to be right about anything, it would have to be poetry, I think.)

I can never remember who said what. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." That's a good one. Coleridge? Shelley? The other Shelley?

The one in particular that they were correct about was this: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." And I realized the full truth of this just now, years after I first read it. When I first read this line, I was definitely ready to fire back with examples in myself where the best words I thought I could give came up at the time the emotions were being experienced. When I was sad, I wrote about being sad, and I called that poetry. I wrote out my anger and expelled it, and that was what I called poetry. I even tried to capture trembling joy, to bottle it up as it came to me and save it for later. That, I thought, was how one does poetry. 

I don't think I was completely wrong. There is something to be said for the first flush of fountaining phrases. You can save them for later, at least. 

But to craft something from a position of some distance lends a new perspective. It gives you the chance to try to recreate those feelings in yourself from a cold start. It lets you react as a stranger would. It makes you try to figure out what sent you to that place of overwhelming feeling in the first place. It forces you to confront the why and what of a feeling, not just its magnitude.

Recollecting emotions in tranquility isn't easy, but I think, maybe, I'd like to try.

this class is about tragedies, so i'll live one

The bitter burn of coffee

and some grating mashing taps

to grind out a few pages of nonsense.

I'm running short on minutes and the printer's out of ink.

Why type I so idly here?

I need to write a paper. A short one, yes. But a paper.

(When did four pages become a short paper?)

I'd prefer not to.

I'm very tired. And kinda blue in hue.

circle of life

slam dunk me in the trash
burn it all to ash

blow the bits across the sea
let waves carry me

wring water from the soot
let a tree take root

pulp the tree and make a page
write out all your rage

slam dunk me in the trash
burn it all to ash

muse me this

gettin' real tired of school (pronounce it shule, a la megamind)
why did i want this stupid degree
as i said recently to a friend in the wee small hours, it too is useless
will be useless
just like my b.a.

but i'll be able to put m.a. after my name. so it will read thusly:

e.m.m.m.a.

ludicrous amount of m's.




this is if i pass.