Actuality

Before watching the entirely dissapointing Be Kind, Rewind last night, I saw an ad for truTV.com where they broadcast “Not Reality. Actuality.”

Leeann and I laughed for about ten minutes.  Actuality?!

I guess Reality TV has officially taken reality from us.  Now we have to live in the world of actuality.  I don’t even want to guess what implications this has for metaphysics.

Leeann wanted to imagine the first dissertation on actuality.  I really (or wait, make that actually) don’t.

Clinton on Clinton

From the CNN website:

Bill Clinton added his voice Thursday to a growing chorus of those who say Hillary Clinton must win both the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4 to keep her presidential chances alive.

Campaigning in Beaumont, Texas, the former president bluntly told a crowd it’s up to them whether his wife’s candidacy continues.

“If she wins in Texas and Ohio I think she will be the nominee,” he said. “If you don’t deliver for her then I don’t think she can. It’s all on you.”

Really, Bill?  You see, it’s this type of paternalism that failed to get me excited about this campaign at all.  I’m one of those people who look back (for the most part) on the Clinton years as years of prosperity, despite all of the scandals and the partisanship that continue to eat away at the core of our democracy.  But the way you and your wife have campaigned has left a bad taste in my mouth.  I’m sick of your wife’s sense of entitlement.  I’m even more sick of yours.

Isn’t it true that if she doesn’t win Texas and Ohio, then it’s all on her? and you?  If neither of you can inspire Americans and galvanize your party, then you have no one to blame but yourself.  It isn’t the fault of the many people who sacrifice their time (and their pay) to help you.  It isn’t the fault of voters.  It isn’t the fault of the media, or Barack Obama.  If you can’t win the democratic primary, it’s your fault.

Cinematic Betrayal in Joe Wright’s Atonement (2007)

(Cross-posted at Long Sunday) 

Atonement is too pretty.  I liked most of the film, but couldn’t take my eyes off of Keira Knightly.  She was too elegant.  Her language was too perfect.  I didn’t pay much attention to Briony, and focused instead on the budding picture perfect romance between Cecilia and Robbie.  Joe Wright’s new film has all of the visual elements of a Jane Austen novel, something that made his Pride and Prejudice so compelling (or so I am told) and his adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel a little too polished.  The movie included a scene depicting 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk that Roger Ebert called “one of the great takes in film history.”  I agree, and this is precisely the problem.  Wright’s adaptation of McEwan’s novel is too enamored with its own beauty and sacrifices the complexities of the novel for an obsession with its celebrity proponents.

Wright’s choice to direct a McEwan novel after his adaptation of Austen is somewhat appropriate, as Atonement begins with a quote from Austen’s Northanger Abby. McEwan’s novel is concerned with the themes Austen employs in her novels, including the negative side of unbounded imagination and the need for maturity and rational thinking instead of Romantic enthusiasm.  While the book focuses on Briony’s journey towards adulthood and understanding, the film focuses much of its attention on the twin stories of separated lovers.  Briony as an adult is portrayed in the film by the frumpified Romola Garai.  Garai fades into the background, demurely accepting the harsh criticism of Cecilia and Robby’s failed love.  This aspect of Atonement could almost be read as an allegory of celebrity culture.  Briony looks like a World War II version of Tina Yothers compared to the beauty of Cecilia and the neatly rough-hewed masculinity of Robbie.   

Obama’s new ad.

I got a little teary-eyed.  But I can be a sucker for pretty celebrities.

If…(1968)

 The first in a trilogy of films directed by Lindsey Anderson, If… stars Malcom McDowell as a disaffected boarding school student named Mick Travis.  The film was shot during student uprisings in France during 1968.  In fact shooting of the film started just two weeks before the uprisings began.  The feature vacillates between color shots and black and white ones, reflecting the shift between reality and fantasy.  While lodging in a particularly oppressive and violent boarding school in Britain, Mick creates fantasies of revenge.  These fantasies find their apotheosis in the denouement of the film, where Mick and his friends attack the school with machine guns, grenades, mortars and explosives.  It was rated “X” for violence and sexuality.  Some thoughts:

1. The movie has elements of surrealism, but these are jumbled together with revolutionary fantasy and visceral depictions of corporal punishment.  This, coupled with the shifts from black and white to color are extremely jarring and particularly effective. 
2. Anderson makes interesting links between the social environment of the school, and the hierarchy that allows older boys called “whips” to terrorize younger students, with a faltering post-imperial British culture and its desperation to cling to tradition.  The fact that the school merely trained young men to become soldiers is Anderson’s commentary on how tradition and education can be used for militarism.    
3. It’s difficult to watch this film and not be reminded of Columbine and Virginia Tech.  It was interesting to contrast that anachronistic feeling with the spirit of ‘68 that is revered in my discipline (the protests of ‘68 were central in the development of many strands of literary and cultural theory that are still influential today).  
4. One of the dignitaries in the final scene wore a full suit of armor.  When the bullets started firing, he had to run as quickly as he could.  How surreal was it to see people running from bullets and a man in full body armor (with the beaver down) shoving his way through the crowd? 

Mary Wollestonecraft on Romanticism

Mary doesn’t like Romanticism.  from A Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

 From observing several cold romantic characters I have been led to confine the term romantic to one definition–false, or rather artificial, feelings.[...]In modern poetry the understanding and memory often fabricate the pretended effusions of the heart, and romance destroys all simplicity; which, in works of taste, is but a synonymous word for truth.  This romantic spirit has extended to our prose, and scattered artificial flowers over the most barren heath; or a mixture of verse and prose producing the strangest incongruities.  The turgid bombast of some of your (Burke’s) periods fully proves these assertions; for when the heart speaks we are seldom shocked by hyperbole, or dry raptures. 

  

Cloverfield

 

The movie was fun, despite being entirely derivative.  Some highlights.  (Slightly spoliery)

1. If a monster is attacking your city, releasing small little grommets whose bites cause you to explode and your best friend wants to travel a few miles in the path of the monster to save his “best friend but once we had a one night stand” person, let him go and you run like hell in the other direction.   
2. Let me just reinforce that the stupidity of the main characters in this movie defies belief.  I’ll leave it at that. 
3. The shots are very interesting.  Sure, The Blair Witch Project already did the “scary film from the camcorder point of view,” but that movie didn’t have a huge monster shooting stuff everywhere.  It must have been difficult to plan out the storyboard.
4. What camcorder has night vision?  Just asking.
5. I’ve always wondered what causes giant monsters to attack urban areas.  I mean, sure, it’s fun to gobble up a human or two.  But consider that the monster has to fight all those pesky army and tank divisions and withstand a nuclear blast.  Are a few meat-bags truly worth it?
6. Is anyone else getting tired of obvious allusions to September 11?  I wonder why no one said anything about terrorist attacks before they knew it was a monster?  
7. Oh and J.J. Abrams’s next film?  Don’t you know?  

 

BRB

I’m in the middle of a chapter on Ken Russell and the Haunted Summer of 1816 for my dissertation.  The due date is either at the end of the month (if I go hardcore) or the first or second week of February (if I decide to be realistic).  Ergo: I won’t be making many posts in the coming weeks.  I will, perhaps, write short pieces.  As of today, note the del.ic.ious feed I have on the right side of the blog page.  I’m copying my friend Jason and posting some interesting articles and webpages I’ve found while surfing.  Feel free to comment on any of them. 

 Oh, and Happy New Years! 

Literary Questions

A thorough literary survey I took and altered from Dennis Cozzalio via Cinephile:

1)  Your favorite opening to a novel or poem…Quote and explain.
The beginning to William Blake’s hallucinatory poem Milton:

Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poets Song
Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your Realms
Of terror & mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions
Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose
His burning thirst & freezing hunger! Come into my hand
By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise,
And in it caus’d the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms
In likeness of himself. Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated
Beneath your land of shadows: of its sacrifices. and
Its offerings; even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God
Became its prey; a curse, an offering, and an atonement,
For Death Eternal in the heavens of Albion, & before the Gates
Of Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah

I love how this poem perverts yet maintains the epic poem commonplace of the muse.  In Blake’s poem the Muse literally becomes part of the poet, descends into his arm like a drug delivered through a hypodermic needle or some kind of a disease.  I also like thinking about what could hunt Jesus like he was a kind of prey.

MLA: Chicago 2007

Some reflections/advice on MLA:

1. Chicago is cold. So when you have a nice girlfriend who demands you wear a hat she gives you, you listen.

2. Make sure you pack light. I need to buy those suitcases with wheels. The ones I own currently have no wheels and weigh 70 lbs. This is not fun when you have to run half a mile from baggage claim to the one bus that will take you to your hotel.

3. Books are everywhere. Do not buy unless: A) You have the money and B) It applies to your dissertation. Okay, so I might not EXACTLY follow either of these, but I am trying to abstain from the shopping spree I planned when I first saw them.

4. Be careful what you say and how you say it. You never know who the person you are talking to knows, nor do you know who might be sitting right beside you. It could be anyone. I’ve met mentors from Drury, SLU, UF along with scholars like MacKenzie Wark, Saree Makdisi and Barbara Johnson. It’s a weird conjunction of multiple realities, and could easily cause you to lower your defenses when you shouldn’t.

5. Take care to remind people who you are and what you’ve done. But don’t spill all of your anxieties about your writing to them. It only highlights your shortcomings and your insecurity.

6. Don’t be dumb like me and forget your business cards. I’ve met numerous people whom I could have given them some kind of card and didn’t have one.

7. Finally, don’t be overwhelmed. It’s all too easy with famous scholars roaming all over the place. Just calm down, remember that you are a smart youngin, and show them who you are.