|k| clippings: 2014-12-19 — but you...

WORK

“Kelp”

Slowly it blackens
on the yellow shore;
a hardness thickens
more and more
in leaf, bulb, flange
and rubbery stem
along the fringe
or scalloped hem

of surf-surge. Time
turns all opaque,
including these
straps, grapes, trees,
fan, tress and rake:
gone their soft prime.

—Chris Wallace-Crabbe
—from The Amorous Cannibal

WORD(S)

aposiopesis. noun. Stopping short. Leaving something unexpressed. Rhetorically: intentionally leaving a sentence or thought incomplete for stylistics or rhetorical purposes. From Greek siōpan, to be silent.

Six pages before the end of the third volume, she has smiled at him for the first time. And the novel’s final line, from inside Valentine’s head, is a typical and brilliant Fordian aposiopesis: “She was setting out on…” (The Guardian)

“This [‘Is Chrysis then—’] is an instance of Aposiopesis; Crito, much affected, is unwilling to name the death of Chrysis. It was deemed of ill omen to mention death, and numerous Euphemisms or circumlocutions were employed in order to avoid the necessity of doing so.” (Henry Thomas Riley)

WEB

1. On the world’s most confusing sentence → “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

2. Shakespeare’s Curtain theatre, which preceded the famous Globe theatre, unearthed in east London.

3. @UlyssesReader, tweeting James Joyce’s famous novel, one bite at a time. Six times so far. Some of the found poetry therein is amazing.

4. See Lincoln, JFK, Thatcher, And Other World Leaders As Hipsters Via Reader C.

5. Today in 1843, inspired by a a visit to see the terrible working conditions of child miners and vowing to “strike a sledge-hammer blow … on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child,” Charles Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol (originally titled A Christmas Carol in Prose). It also didn’t hurt that Dickens’ previous work, Martin Chuzzlewit had flopped. Written in a furious six-weeks, the tale helped revive many of the Christmas traditions common today after a period of decline following the Puritans making such celebrations illegal and did, in fact, have a positive effect on working conditions in England and America.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader D. writes in about Reader N.’s question of film and celebrity ‘half-life’: “I saw Gone With The Wind when it was first-run, and I saw it on TV recently. I’m pretty sure the Marx Brothers, Glenn Miller, W.C. Fields, Astaire and Rogers, Greta Garbo, Sarah Bernhardt and Charlie Chaplin were much better than Gone With The Wind. Maybe that’s the difference in memorability.”

• Reader J. also jumps in: “When I was 25 I knew a lot about film; five years earlier I knew nothing whatsoever: I took a lucky stumble. As to ”pop culture,“ I think it means something much different now than it did even thirty years ago, when it was spread on television, or fifty years ago, when it was still a tabloid phenomenon. The culture that produces pop culture is commercial culture, not pop. There was nothing like the architecture of production and distribution (of ”fame“) then that exists now. (I’m just reading Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, a fictionalization of the life of Marilyn Monroe and a very sharp analysis of the apparatus of fame during the late forties and early fifties. It’s a painful read, but worth a look.) I also spoke with a group of young people recently—a class full of beginning poets—and one person in that class of fifteen had seen Blade Runner. I regularly teach film, and while plenty of kids have been exposed to Citizen Kane, they haven’t seen Taxi Driver, Klute, or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. They’ve never heard of 8 1/2 or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Kagemusha–or even Seven Samurai. My school has a thriving Moving Image Arts program, yet even those kids haven’t seen any—hardly any—films made before 2010 or even 2012. I think that two things contribute to this: first, their own intense focus on the present, their sense that only what’s happening at this moment matters either to their ”knowledge“ or to their ”art.“ It’s worth noting that this is true of my colleagues as well–they tend to know and show current, ”relevant“ films in their classes as supplements to their book-learning. So these students never hear, at least with any sense of urgency, about Cries and Whispers or Mash. And second, outside a few major cities there’s next to no commercial distribution—what a risk it would entail!—for non-commercial film. If these exist at all, they’re so poorly financed that their voice can’t be heard in the clamor of big-money advertising that dominates the lives of everyone–especially the young, perhaps. Fear not, though—in thirty years fifty-year-olds will be complaining that no one remembers the movies of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and RZA.”

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