Category: Uncategorized

Saw the movie Jarhead last night. I liked it a lot. One of my friends, having seen it, described it as “the closest you can get to being a Marine without actually being one.” Having been a Marine, I’d have to agree with his statement. The idea of waiting around (hurry up and wait) was breached in the movie, but I don’t think the experience of it could actually be conveyed in a 2.5 movie. However, the director and actors and script writers did an excellent job in their roles for this movie. It captured the gung-ho, the hoorah, the interior torment that I believe all Marines (and military, for that matter) go through in their career. There are excrutiating moments of both exuberance and depression that the movie captured well. This is the Full Metal Jacket for the 09/11 America.

There are some things that I wish the director approached more directly, however. The questioning of why? was brought up, but only briefly. While this was not the story of an unwilling Marine, I just think this is an important issue. I know from personal experience that Marines are not just dumb robots. They are in fact more highly educated and capable of critical thinking than perhaps ever before. They are constantly questioning why. Why are we in a foreign country? Why are we upsetting the fragile balance of an entire world region and population? Why are we just waiting around here? So I would have like to see more on this topic. I would also like to have seen more in the way of commentary about the current situation in Iraq.

The director brushes against these topics, just barely. On the other hand of this conversation, he is quite successful in preventing the movie to become the soap box it so easily could have become. That is an admirable accomplishment. The movie focuses on the story of one young Marine, and it portrays both the Marines and the war very accurately and fairly. This I admire very much. The only demographic I would not recommend this to is that of the Mothers and Fathers who have young Marines in the service.

4.5/5

To enjoy successful figures of your chosen profession. I had the great opportunity last night to see Campbell McGrath and Mark Halliday read at the Folger Shakespeare Library downtown. These are two poets who enjoy rather great success in the public eye, both publishing several volumes of poems, as well as teaching at the university level. The subject of the reading was comedic poetry, and both writers read poems that had the audience laughing whole-heartedly. There were poems of a light nature, like McGrath’s Free Cheese, and more critically funny poems, such as his Benediction for the Savior of Orlando (a poem about the ubiquity and terror of Chuck E. Cheese) Mr. Halliday’s poems tended on irreverence for the daily doings of the academic poetry world, from the haplessness of poetry workshops (The Lost Glove) to daydreaming oneself out of board meetings (which I missed the title of).

Following the readings, the poets sat down to a short, mediated discussion on the intersection of comedy and poetry, focusing on the difference between stand-up and poetry. They touched on the role of slam/spoken word poetry, as well as the historic position of the poet of comedic societal commentator that comics so often occupy in our society. Both McGrath and Halliday brought up the absurdity of the current American culture, and the compounded absurdity of being a poet in it. McGrath went on to say that he rarely ever sets out to write a ‘funny’ poem, but rather finds that “the more serious a subject, the more I find that comic voice emerges” to paraphrase him. He also noted that most, if not all, humor “to be successful, needs to be self-effacing.” Halliday agreed with him, and added that “In any poem, what you want is a human truth…”

This reading certainly gave me a lot to think about as I continue my quest for bettering myself and reaching my goals.

One other thing that caught my attention was a question one of the audience members asked. In clarifying himself he wondered if “poems happen by mistake?” This is something for me to think more about.

Small Dogs

They say small dogs
were bred to hunt rats
and that makes sense
They rather resemble
the intended prey:
low to the ground and wiry fur,
but rats have a certain
intelligence their
pursuers lack
and furthermore are
rather more quiet and calm.
It seems we should breed
some large cats
to rid us of these
canine rats.

04Jan2004

—
Yeah, it’s old. Funny-poem Friday?

I’m half-way to my quota for today (the 2nd), so here’s a break. I can think of two really good things that might happen during these 29 days: One, writing makes one a better writer, and two, at the inevitable breaks from sitting in this chair, I’m going to get a lot stronger. I find myself doing pushups and stretches on break, getting the blood flowing, and to just distract myself from the frustration or the story.
I can’t say the story is going to be good, but it will be completed. It feels good.

And I haven’t started my novel for NaNoWriMo yet. It’s almost Nov. 3rd actually, so I guess tonight I have to get going.

Plus I have homework, but grades are nothing!

see yuns later.

I figure I have to write about 2000 words a day to win this thing now. Or complete the challenge, anyways. Wish me luck.

Somebody once said,

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who walk into a room and say, ‘Okay, here I am,’ and those who walk in and say ‘Oh, there you are.'”

I saw it on a quote site, but can’t find it again, so there you are. I think it’s interesting what this says about people. Sometimes I feel like I’m one, sometimes the other. It’s impossible to put someone in either category all the time, but we are always either one or the other.

Also we have words today:

subfusc

felicity

These words are pretty opposite in their connotations, although thanks to the tv show, felicity has a certain connotation of a pretty, curly-haired, hare-brained female.

Discuss!

I think I’m going to make this a regular Wednesday thing.
“Words of Wednesday” Or “Wednesday’s Weekly Words” or something else like that.

The following to The Atlantic Monthly’s Student writing contest. So I’m taking them off the blog for the near future, at least until I get the rejection letter.

Japanese Steel I
Keep On
Sonnet II

Also, I’m listening to John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane right now. It’s awesome.

Sonnet III
On Becoming Aware of Death

Maybe it was the year the Challenger failed
on TV, maybe the year they showed the standing
man in front of the tank, his hand pale
against the olive-drab paint in the square in Beijing

and he refused to move. He’s crushed under
tread and they showed clips on the news
for a week, or maybe two, but over and over
again. These were not it, but I still had curfew

at dark, and my parents watched ABC
because they knew and trusted World News Tonight
with Peter Jennings. It was the night he
showed the men kneeling down blindfolded in line

and said something about gross images,
then black and white exploding blood and heads.

–NOTES–

Yes, it still needs work. Especially in the metrics. But it is much farther along than how it started out:

I think it was fourth grade
the year the Challenger failed
or maybe later, the man standing
in front of a tank, unmoving, slowly
crushed down under treads in Beijing.
They showed these on the news, but
these were not it. It was when,
on ABC (my parents were Jennings’ fans)
they showed the men, blindfolded, on
their knees, lined up straight, heads bowed,
hands tied, grainy black and white,
each shot in the back of the head
by his own AK-47-wielding executioner,
that I knew Death’s face.

Which not only poorly fits the form, but also makes a poor poem, being circuitous and too laden with my own realization when it is so obviously stated in the title. Plus, ‘Death’s face’ sounds trite to me. Also, anyone who has seen these clips will recall them in detail without my forcing those details on them. The final image in the current revision is sudden and shocking, definite, while the last line of the draft is unoriginal and forgettable. That final punch is important to this poem, and reinforces the impact seeing this clip had on me. It made me throw up, all the dinner I had just finished into the toilet, and I felt sick for some time.

The finalization of the story of the saturday party, how about a bunch of poems out of my journal. Unedited, as always, with the exception of notes made in the margins.

Rifle

When held in hand,
this eight and a half
pound plastic and metal
loaded machine
does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.

Even when pocketed into
the shoulder hard
and strapped to arm
and targeted to paper
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.

Even when trigger pulled
so slightly
and recoiled through to feet
and body returned to rest
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.

Until the sight of blood
blooms on a chest
and the iron scent
drifts on two-hundred
meters of flat desert breeze,
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.

–08 May 2005