The art of losing

After reading a NY Times essay on the benefits of memorizing poetry, I decided to try it for myself, starting with Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” which has been a favorite of mine since college and which I just happened to be teaching that week. My experience corroborates the essayist’s—it was much easier to memorize the poem than I had anticipated. I think I chose a particularly appropriate poem to begin with, since the prominent rhyme, rhythm, and repetitive structure of “One Art” facilitate memorization. And once I felt fairly secure about the lines, sing-songy declamation did indeed transform into a performance that allowed me to appreciate nuances that I had never noticed before, despite having read that poem, often aloud, but always guided by the printed lines, probably 100 times in 10 years or so. So, yes, I am now in favor of memorizing poetry, and—for my next trick—I’m thinking Emily Dickinson.

All of this to say that during the memorization process, I recited the poem to Daniel several times so he could check my accuracy. I figured he had probably learned the poem accidentally by hearing me and reading it, so I asked him to try reciting it. He didn’t quite have Bishop’s poem memorized, but he came up with a poem that I enjoyed almost as much.

Here’s Bishop’s “One Art”:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their lost is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

And here’s Daniel’s version:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost some scissors once.
That was not a disaster.

I lost some houses; the first of three.
The art of losing is a plaster-caster.

I lost a realm, continents.
The art of losing is a broken toaster.

Even losing you, your joking voice, a gentle gesture:
the art of losing (write it) is a tisket-a tasker.

From boats to fishes

More cookies for my students:

I was trying to use up some icing tubes, so some of them are a bit wonky, but I like the red stars. I wish I had done that on all of them instead of the waves.

In other news, why does it always come as a a surprise that In Utero is totally brilliant? Bleach is my Nirvana go-to, but Alistair Taylor the 3rd (a.k.a my iphone) reminded me during my daily shuffle yesterday of the unstoppable force that is “Tourette’s,” so today I listened to the whole album. I think I conflate In Utero and Unplugged, and I rarely feel like listening to Unplugged—even though it is a stunning album—because it makes me so sad. But I really need to disentangle those two albums in my mind, because In Utero blends the heaviness of Bleach with the melody of Nevermind in a highly satisfying mix, plus it sounds fantastic. The drums are phenomenal. “Frances Farmer,” “Very Ape,” “Radio Friendly,” “Milk It”—basically all the non-singles: yes.

Flowers are pretty before they get shitty

Flowers are pretty before they get shitty, originally uploaded by fishplotvengeance.

Neutral Milk Hotel

Good lord. Even though it’s insane, it’s actually a good kind of insane until he turns into Bruce Springsteen around 1:41. And is he wearing a Muncipal Waste shirt?

Logan Airport

Logan Airport, originally uploaded by fishplotvengeance.

So I’m still in Boston, which sucks, but at least there are rocking
chairs. And at least only one of the engines on my plane yesterday
failed and we just had a horribly scary emergency landing instead of
both engines failing and us crashing directly into the ground. And at
least I got a free chocolate sprinkle donut this morning. Bright side.

I’m eating a boat

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while:

I made boat cookies for my class to celebrate our finishing the first unit, on sea narratives. They were a big hit.

Also, some highly relevant and current thoughts on Foo Fighters.

I love Dave Grohl, but it has always bothered me that he and Krist (mainly Krist, I think) decided to pin all the blame for any profiteering off of Nirvana on Courtney Love, whereas they were concerned only with preserving Kurt’s legacy and giving the fans what they wanted. I imagine it’s becoming tougher and tougher for Dave Grohl to maintain that image of purity and artistic integrity when he’s writing songs solely with the intention of licensing them to Gillette.

Moreover, if he thinks “Learn to Fly” would be out of place on Celebrity Skin he is delusional. If anything, it might be slightly too sappy for Hole, and that is saying a lot. Maybe Dave Grohl has Billy Corgan helping him write songs, too.

This Week with George Stephanopoulos

I was awake at 10am on a Sunday for the first time in months, so I got to watch This Week. Pelosi’s long interview was interesting. I like watching her. I’m not really sure why, since her conversational style is not exactly pleasant. She’s always slightly scattered, or jittery, with an acerbic edge. Her mien is the opposite of all those smooth-talkers like Joe Biden (seriously, yuck) and it is somehow very female even though she’s certainly not feminine or ladylike. She comes across like a powerful woman who’s neither trying to do a male impersonation nor hiding behind a girly-girl veneer (a la Sarah Palin).

The roundtable was the most fun, though. Paul Krugman was not standing for Sam Donaldson’s gibberish. Normally Donaldson yaps incoherently, generally making offensive comments at a rate of about 1 per minute, and AT MOST Donna Brazile or Cokie Roberts will raise their eyebrows and say, “I don’t really know about that,” or George Will will come up with some pithy idiom that gently and almost undetectably contradicts what Donaldson is rambling on about. But today, on more than one occasion, Donaldson was spouting nonsense and Krugman said, “That’s actually not true” and then explained, very clearly, with no euphemism, why it was wrong. And cited sources! And relevant data! I am not one for the notion of transcendent Truth; I am aware that knowledge is contextual. But I also know that sometimes people are wrong. And those people need to shut up and not be allowed to assault my ears every Sunday morning. The point here is I hate Sam Donaldson. And also Paul Krugman is adorable.

Two observations

1) I love Paul so much. Only he would think this is dancing. I especially like when he says “feel the thunder” and points at you. It’s like a motivational Powerpoint presentation set to music.

2) I’m pretty sure Tracey Jordan and Kool Keith are the same person. Really “The Girls Don’t Like the Job” is his best song, but there’s not a video for that on YouTube.

David Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace died I had read only one of his stories, the one about Jeopardy! in Girl with Curious Hair. I had meant to read the whole book, but I didn’t care for that story and gave up. It felt cold and sterile to me, and it seemed like it was supposed to be clever-funny, which almost always just comes off as pretentious.

All the glowing eulogies for him, especially this thoughtful and illuminating one, convinced me to try again. Most people recommended starting with an article called “Tense Present” on the continuing struggle over English-language usage. Again, I found the piece insufferably pompous and aseptic, and again I gave up.

A bout of insomnia last night led me to try yet again, but this time I read “Shipping Out,” about his 7-night luxury Carribean cruise, and I finally got it. He’s more than just a brilliant writer; he did things with the English language that I’ve never seen done before (as Griselda Marchbanks said of Albus Dumbledore’s wandwork during his Transfiguration NEWT). Not only was the article hilarious, but it was acutely sensitive to the quirks and foibles of his fellow passengers without ever seeming cruel or even snooty. Like Jane Austen, his language is as sharp and precise as a scalpel, but Wallace replaces Austen’s deeply-ironic veneer of gentility with Woody Allen’s or Steve Martin’s microscopically-observed absurdity:

“By midweek it starts to strike me that I have never before been party to such a minute and exacting analysis of the food and service of a meal I am just at that moment eating. Nothing escapes the attention of T[rudy] and E[sther]: the symmetry of the parsley sprigs atop the boiled baby carrots, the consistency of the bread, the flavor and mastication-friendliness of various cuts of meat, the celerity and flambe technique of the various pastry guys in tall white hats who appear tableside when items have to be set on fire (a major percentage of the desserts in the Five-Star Caravelle Restaurant have to be set on fire), and so on.”

“Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it’s a game played on the skin of a void, and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit.”

Those are just two of the choicest quotations—the ones that worked the best out of context—but every word in the article is as carefully weighed and every sentence as delicately sculpted as those above.

The single flaw in the article was the conclusion, which was slightly over-wrought and incommensurate with the deliberation of the rest of the piece. In fact, Wallace had a fine conclusion buried about 2/3 of the way through, when he was speculating on why the cruise experience, which promises unadulterated luxury, turns out to be ultimately unsatisfying for him:

“In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.”

Wallace doesn’t pursue this observation in regard to other passengers who adore cruising and who return year after year, but I wonder whether they have a firmer upper limit on their desire or whether their pleasure is compounded by the opportunity to feel dissatisfaction at the mildest, most inconsequential inconveniences imaginable. Perhaps for some people, this is what luxury means: the chance to become enraged that the cold water in their bathroom won’t get any colder than 65 degrees.

Milk and Millionaire

Two new movies have fallen victim to the problem of raised expectations. I was eagerly anticipating Milk, in particular, not only because I’m interested in Harvey Milk’s story and glad it’s finally being told on film, but also because I love Gus van Sant (My Own Private Idaho = genius). It’s gotten tons of rave reviews, including spots on several Oscar lists for Sean Penn, but I was not impressed when I saw it the other day. The storyline felt forced and scattered; the film concentrated heavily on Milk’s political career, but the reality of his multiple failed runs for office seemed too difficult to bend into a satisfying dramatic narrative and the narrow focus ended up reducing him as a person.

Slumdog Millionaire, too, was quite disappointing after being heralded as the best movie of the year. I guess I was expecting more of a feel-good movie, but I certainly did not leave that theatre feeling good. Again, the characters were as thin as the confetti that covered the Millionaire set, and the ending, in particular, made little sense because the characters were so sketchily drawn. The film’s slightly intriguing conceit (flashbacks reveal the dire circumstances under which a destitute Indian kid collects the scraps of information that enable him to win Millionaire) perhaps could have been taken as a fairytale or a slice of magical realism in another film, but Danny Boyle does his utmost to transform it into something both more horrifyingly real and less believable—or, if credulity is beside the point in this movie, he manages to push his audience far enough that they’re not even pulling for Jamal (the Millionaire contestant) to win anymore, because no sum of money could rectify a life this atrocious. Without the obvious dramatic arc of the contest to sustain the movie, the whole thing unravels and feels like a pointless exercise in shock and terror.

Now that I’m comparing the 2 movies, they seem weirdly related, in that they’re both based on the contest story arc—one of the most satisfying dramatic archetypes. I mean, just think about Cool Runnings, or Teenwolf, or Hoosiers, or a million other movies that follow the same arc. Most of those movies have very little going for them (Teenwolf excepted, of course) aside from the overwhelmingly compelling human desire to watch a group of seeming losers work hard, pull together, and scrape a victory at the buzzer. Maybe the difference with these 2 movies is that both Harvey Milk and Jamal Malik are individuals, and the sport/contest plot demands a team. But it’s more than that—I think van Sant and Boyle were trying to reference and then twist the storyline, in the one case, to show the tragic fall of the winner, and in the other case, to reveal the insignificance of winning. Well, fine, but if you’re not supporting the movie with a powerful archetype like the contest, which generates its own coherence, then you need to give us some developed characters to care about, with some recognizable human motivations and feelings.