#hard yeat type beat | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mercurygray · 4 years

Text

It turns out when you reblog things late at night, like sketches of mermaids, you get nice messages in your inbox like this one:

@junojelli Because I am a terrible enabler of AUs, Joan as a mermaid of Zell Lake *runs away*

How much damage can Merc do on this prompt with two uninterrupted hours of time? A lot, it turns out.

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

- William Butler Yeats

The locals say there are mermaids in the lake.

Have been for centuries - it used to be quite a tourist attraction in the seventeen-hundreds, coming to see the mermaids of Zell am See. It was part of the grand tour, almost like the haunted castles of France and the vampyrs of Romania and buying art in Italy. Very fashionable, to come and sketch them, or write poetry about them, or, better still, start an affair, which was extremely en vogue for a little while. There's probably a great deal of very nice jewelry at the bottom of that lake - but then, no one's tried to dive for it.

Mermaids, they say, can be very possessive.

But then the Enlightenment happened, and the Scientific Revolution after that, and several other revolutions meant there wasn't quite as much ready money for long, protracted trips through Europe for the idle rich, and a deal fewer idle rich to take them, and these sorts of quaint customs sort of fell out of fashion. It had been temporarily revived for a bit in the late 1870s by the arrival of the Americans, who, in their usual way, gave it new life by changing it and making it a thing for young women rather than young men, to go to the mountain lake at Zell am See as a stop on their own Grand Tours, the headstrong Buccaneers ready to trade American cold hard cash and good looks for European panache and husbands with titles.

That was the first American incursion into Austria. This, however, is the second, and it comes not in a four-in-hand coach but a four-wheel drive truck.

Magical creatures aren't totally new news to the Americans - there are all kinds of magical sorts floating around the greater 48. Winters reads the security memorandum from the Battalion S2 who's replaced Nixon, shakes his head, and passes the word down to Lieutenant Lipton: "Don't let Malarkey go near the lake."

That's the fear they have, the stories they've all been raised on, of the sirens who would have dragged Ulysses down to the depths of the sea with their songs. Their long wandering through this war is almost over - they're almost home! Be a shame to survive the damn war and lose their men to mermaids. Malarkey's been a man on the edge since Bastogne, for good reasons, and of all the men under his command, Dick Winters is afraid particularly that once happy-go-lucky Don from Astoria, Oregon, will hear something in that lake that will keep him underneath forever.

He's right - but not in the way he thinks.

One morning, Don is down by the lake sitting on the pier, and in the water next to him, bold as brass, is a lovely looking lady with dark hair, winsome eyes, and a tail like the better class of rainbow trout, dappled and flashing. And they're just...talking. She doesn't seem particularly interested in dragging anyone under the lake - but she is drinking in the story of Don's war.

(The mermaids, it turns out, speak excellent English - all those tourist Buccaneers and their maiden aunts! Sounds a little like your grandmother, but it works.)

Lipton observes for a while and decides to leave the man there. By dinnertime, Don comes back in looking like a changed man - there's an actual spring in his step. That's the magic of the mermaids of Zell Am See - they'll steal your cares away in the best way possible.

After Malarkey's surprising discovery, it's hard to keep the men away from the lake. There are a few familiar faces now, though none of them are bold enough to leave a name. (The locals say that's expected. If you know a mermaid's name, you could compel her to leave the lake.) And here, on the side of a lake in Austria, Easy Company slowly processes their war. Lewis spends a lot of time talking with Malarkey's mermaid, whom they are calling Eileen after a girl Malarkey went to school with. Dick privately thinks that this is a good thing - Lewis is processing a lot more than just his war.

When Dick finally goes down to the lake, it's not to talk. He goes early in the morning, just after the sun comes up. He's tired of running and calisthenics. He wants to swim, and the usual suspects are not at the pier yet. (Sometimes they're out early in the morning like seals in the zoo, doing each others' hair and giggling in the way girls everywhere do when they're assembled in large groups.)

Good. That's the point of this exercise - he wants to be alone.

The water is crisp and refreshing, and so, so needed. Dick Winters hasn't done anything for himself - really for himself - for months now, and this is probably the first real treat he's given himself since ordering in all that ice cream a few weeks ago.

He's all the way out in the deep part of the lake when he realizes he's picked up a training partner.

She's following him - at a respectful distance, mind you - just...watching. Is she afraid he's going to drown? (The mermaids are protective, not possessive - it's different. Wouldn't let you drown in the lake unless they thought you deserved it.) But there's a competitive streak in Dick Winters, and he decides, just for fun, to pick up his pace.

She matches him.

They are nearly at the other side of the lake when he stops, treading water, his heart pounding, regretting his decision to try and race a woman who's literally half-fish, and then, suddenly, she is sailing up over him like a dolphin. (None of the others have ever done this.) Show-off, thinks one part of his brain. The other part watches in silent, smiling wonder. It hadn't really clicked with any of the others before - the mermaids are beautiful. Or at least, this one is.

Up, up, up, she goes, body arching and glistening in the sun, spangling the air with water, and then dives out of sight. Did he scare her off? Offend her?

Then she's back, bobbing in the water a few feet away. "Aren't we going to finish the race?" she asks, smiling.

"A guy should know when he's beat," he manages with a smile. "You win."

"Usually men don't make it this far out," she says. "It's impressive." She's the type who isn't usually impressed, he can tell. They've all got personalities, and now that they're talking, he recognizes her - she's not usually out with the others. Lewis has talked with her a couple of times - she's the one who makes him laugh. Lewis calls her Duchess - she's got a sort of high society feeling and she seems to be nominally in charge.

He's still trying to catch his breath - and the shore is so incredibly far. "Now I just have to figure out how I'm going to make it back."

Her eyes light up a little. "Ask me nicely," she says. Ask you for what? he wonders, his body exploring possibilities it wasn't exploring ten minutes ago. (She notices, of course, and laughs.)

In the end, she takes his hands and tows him. "Hold your breath - and squeeze my hand if you need to stop."

It feels like flying. One minute they're at rest, and the next they're charging through the water, her tail pumping powerfully, her hands still locked around his wrists. This would be how she drowns a man, to take him down to where he couldn't breathe, but they're only a foot or two beneath the surface. He's reminded, oddly enough, of parachuting, the rush of air along his face, the adrenaline. He looks at her, muscles straining in the clear water, strong as anything, smiling and laughing for the sheer joy of being alive.

Oh, yeah, he's a goner.

Slowly word gets around that anyone up at the crack of dawn can see Winters and his new friend taking an early morning swim together. Good for him, the feeling is. That man needs something for himself.

(Certain parties who've also been up at the crack of dawn may have also been treated to the sight of Major and the mermaid, embracing on the tiny spit of beach near the hotel. Lew asks him about it one afternoon and, strangely, Dick doesn't blush about it.)

#i have written a thing #a mindlessly self indulgent thing #as one does sometimes #all the alternate universes #mermaids #1940s girl gang #joan warren #mermaid au

26 notes · View notes

caltropspress · 4 years

Text

FEEDBACK LOOP #1: Armand Hammer’s “Flavor Flav”

What are the Black purposes of space travel?

—Amiri Baraka, “Technology & Ethos”

Black futurism is a temporally troubled matrix Black futurism is a temporally troubled matrix that thrives on opposites and oppositions, flowing lines and nonlinearity, conflict resolution and asymmetrical warfare. It prefers the mad dash on shifting sands while in pursuit of higher ground and safe havens.

—Greg Tate, “Kalahari Hopscotch, or Notes Toward a 20 Volume History of Black Science and Afrofuturism”

Welcome aboard our spaceship, it’s so nice to have you here. —Newcleus, “Space is the Place”

Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all times, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together. —Walt Whitman

I’m so tired of being forced to promote the myth of white supremacy by performing works by old white men like Whitman who said blacks...didn’t have a place in the future of America. —Timothy McNair

Today is the shadow of tomorrow, today is the future present of yesterday, yesterday is the shadow of today. —Sun Ra, “Secrets of the Sun”

This highly allusive track from billy woods and ELUCID toys with itself—that is, allusions are a figurative means of collapsing time in and of themselves. Past and present history & culture don’t contend so much as support one another. A set of stilts to do the Dance of Death on, if you will. “Start downhill running.” The Seventh Seal hilltop silhouette danse macabre steez, though. The whooshing, metal-creaking beat—with all its haunted psithurism charm—is the backdrop for this sleeper Shrines track.

The name “Flavor Flav” is used metonymically here to mean time. This isn’t a braggadocio, low-key threat in the spirit of OC’s “Time’s Up.” This isn’t a Grandmaster Flashian “You Know What Time It Is” (though the hands on the clock tower do spin clockwise and counter-). Neither is this a Kool Moe Dee-esque rhetorical “Do You Know What Time It Is?” Armand Hammer are frustrated by time, by the “ideals and dreams that don’t work.” woods laments his “time machine [that] don’t go backwards.” This no-good lemon of a H.G. Wells contraption he’s steering. This isn’t some Christopher Lloyd-cum-El-Producto Delorean. There’s no Great Scotting going on, just stubbornness.

Progress isn’t made. Time stagnates. Like the “list of ill-fated quick licks under ’frigerator magnets.” And that “school trip permission slip”—likely a bus ride to a museum: a carefully curated collection of artifacts, most notable for its colonial muscling. The question remains: What is left out? What is excluded? What is ignored, discarded, or co-opted so as to not withstand the test of time? woods’ short-i assonance speeds the delivery up only to slow it down:

billy woods, son of a revolutionary, redefines Afrofuturism (re-re-re-defines—its brilliance is in how it remakes itself unconditionally). Afrofuturism becomes about birthing the next generation of Black revolutionaries, so he subverts the line and expectations when “big hand captured” refers to the clock, but “little man [not hand] chasin’” refers to a youngin. (Try to keep up.) Put the faith in the youth when our “ideals and dreams” stall out—when the days, months, years are fleeting and forceful (“It do tick faster / The hour coming rough”). The spliff that’s “[skinned] like an onion” turns the cypher into Perrault fairy tale “pumpkin,” Cinderella style.

“Don’t come ’round with that ‘Go slow’” is in conversation with Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” of course. It’s Nina who said “[she] can’t stand the pressure much longer,” who objected to those who “keep on saying ‘Go slow,” who had her band ironically chanting Do it slow. billy woods, like Nina Simone, decries reformism, incrementalism. Don’t do things gradually. We’re at the point where Nina stands up from her piano bench and shouts That’s it!

Forego the telephoto lenses, he insists, this is the “Battle of Algiers with the GoPro.” Urban guerrilla warfare uploaded and disseminated via YouTube. Again, time collapses. The struggle to decolonize continues. Watch for the This video is no longer available dead-end.

billy woods’ Nietzschean “loathing and fear” reverses the hallucinogenic time-warp of Thompson’s (and, in filmic relation, Gilliam’s) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “History is hard to know,” Thompson writes, “because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash.” That flash will reappear in ELUCID’s verse.

If “all roads lead to Rome,” we’re settling into the inevitability of our moves. It’s a fatalistic shrug, but homophonically, all roads lead to roam—that is, the journey is prolonged interminably. It’s nomadic. Much static. So, naturally, you’re going to “[shake] the hourglass like a snowglobe,” distort time, and splurge on the “JC Penny Timex,” which is appropriately “flooded with rhinestones.” Flooded, because no more water: the fire next time. Don’t “lose track” and don’t “get trapped in the future.”

The chorus quotes the Rolling Stones’ “Time is On My Side,” but it ain’t that simple, no. The history is as messy as we’ve come to expect amerikan music to be. “Time is On My Side” was originally penned by Norman Meade (Jerry Ragovoy), and trombonist Kai Winding first recorded it. Jimmy Norman, a Black songwriter, fleshed out the lyrics significantly, and Irma Thomas recorded that version in the same year as the Stones. The song followed a path similar to that of “Strange Fruit”—a composition written by a white Jewish man under a pseudonym (Abel Meeropol as Lewis Allan) but popularized by a Black female jazz singer (Billie Holiday). As author Jess Row has said about jazz—hip-hop applies, too—it is “by its very nature multi-racial, intermingled, and collaborative across color lines.” But this cognizance must always be contextualized with views of Black artists like that of Art Blakey: “the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope.” Hip-hop has always had its Paul Cs and Rick Rubins, but the racial heterogeneity of a genre, or even a single recording, can’t cloak the power dynamics still in play. The Stones’ version of “Time is On My Side”—undoubtedly the most popular version—is a rip-off of Irma Thomas’ version. Mick Jagger even jacks Thomas’ ad-libs, which is to say, her rawness and spontaneity. Even the band’s shadowed faces on the cover of 12 x 5, the album on which the track appears, suggest the racial problematics, the minstrelsy heist. Armand Hammer mock the British Invasion blues filchers by adding “they” to the chorus line: “They said time is on my side.” They being white institutions (especially within music publishing, production, and recording industries) who promised enough airtime for everyone. They who urged patience. (Go slow!) But, as history shows, the profits only lined certain pockets.

ELUCID begins at the “golden hour,” which is both the photogenic beauty of the sky after sunrise and before sunset—a beauty too good to behold. It’s the sun glare shining in your face on the winter commute from work. It’s your high-speed accident and then the golden hour is the paramedics and doctors trying to salvage your corporeal existence. ELUCID’s verse is a hypnagogic jerk, gasping for breath as he takes a “portal to Orangeburg, ’68.” It’s a reference to the campus shooting of young people in protest—South Carolina State University. Unlike Kent State, which came afterwards, Orangeburg didn’t get the attention keening white women in Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs do, despite “live ammunition,” three dead, 28 injured, and “nine acquitted assassins.” Unnoticed. Black invisibility. Not that H.G. Wells type of invisibility—the Ralph Ellison kind.

We’re told what this is: it’s the aggregate stress (“the load of the allostatic”) of Black life. It’s one’s personal Extinction Agenda, the “post-traumatic” of the gunfire “flashes” that double as flashbacks. The pain, stress, the brain that can’t rest, the pressure on the chest.

“The center won’t hold” lets us know this isn’t all PTSD reverie—it’s a rebel poem: surely some revolution is at hand. ELUCID channels Achebe channeling Yeats. Things might fall apart but not without struggle. The “Flavor Flav clock spins centrifugal,” as a gyre, as an apocalyptic (91…) voice. Turning and returning. The words have an air of insurrection, proclamation.

He misses “watching how a flat circle fold”—it won’t budge, won’t wrinkle. We’ve been here before: on “Hunter,” on Paraffin, when billy woods was on that “time is a flat circle” shit. That Nietzsche eternal recurrence shit:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain…will return to you. […] The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

“Can you find the level of difficulty in this?” suggests game playing, arcades. Calls to mind more Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, though. billy woods and ELUCID are gleaners and magpies of cultural cadavers in Benjamin’s way. Their bars are play and critique both. We’re left with a modicum of optimism at the song’s end. Even “only [moving] the pen six inches” is something, is struggle. The “pale faces beyond the fire” are ever-present, though. The “flinching, panic, [and] confusion” are committed to continue.

Is it the fool or the insurgent who thinks time is on their side? We want the life we live to be “more brilliant than a sunbeam.” That’s to say, we don’t want to wait for the golden hour or the golden years. We want what they say we can’t have. We want what they say we shouldn’t imagine. But Armand Hammer helps us take solace in the “drum skin stretched”—the rhythm, the rebel. The oft-quoted Douglass gem, If there is no struggle, there is no progress, is played out for a reason. The reason is because it needs to be played again, and again. Like a mantra, like a song.

Images:

Sun Ra’s Space is the Place (screenshot) | Flavor Flav (detail), courtesy of archivist Sean Stewart | Grandmaster Flash “You Know What Time It Is” music video (screenshot) | Kool Moe Dee “Do You Know What Time It Is?” single cover | Nina Simone live at Antibes Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival 1965 (screenshot) | The Battle of Algiers (screenshot) | The Rolling Stones 12 x 5 album cover | Flavor Flav, courtesy of Stewart

2 notes · View notes

mattzerella-sticks · 5 years

Text

Park Your Car in My Gay-rage

Castiel moved out West so he could live freely and with pride. However an anonymous act of bigotry chips away at his faith that he can live life without facing prejudice. And with each repair shop that turns him down the cracks keep growing. Why would Singer's Auto be any different?

Will his car ever be fixed? And could a certain mechanic restore more than just his car?

(Link to ao3)

Castiel slumps against his car, snapping his cell phone shut in frustration. Banging his hand against the hood he grumbles out a string of expletives as he gives up hope. Meg, leaning against the hood, drums her fingers on the closed Yellow Pages while watching him.

“So,” Meg says, “it a bust, too?”

He sighs, tapping his phone on his forehead. “More than that. The mechanic laughed me off after I told him what I needed and had a few choice opinions to tell me.”

Meg’s lips purse, and she steps back onto the sidewalk to stare at the rough scratches across her friend’s beige paint. The word was interrupted by the open driver seat’s door, but when closed all together the crude artist spelled out ‘FAGGOT’. “Maybe he knew the jackass who did this…”

Castiel ignores her, chewing on his lip. “How am I going to get this fixed…? I can’t drive around town like this.”

“And I’m sick and tired of looking through that thing,” she jerks her thumb at the offensive phone book, “Do you ever think searching for stuff will be easier? Like, I don’t know… all these names and numbers stored somewhere and it’d only take a few seconds to find exactly what you’re looking for?”

Frown slashed heavily across his face, Castiel turns to glare at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She shrugs, “I don’t know… digging through that reminded me of this girl I went out with a couple’a times. Total geek, spent at least two dates going on and on about those huge, clunky computer things. Think she lived in an Internet Café… wait a minute!” She digs into her leather jacket pocket and pulls out her phone, flicking it open and clicking away.

He hops off his car, stepping closer out of curiosity. “What are you doing?”

“I just remembered,” she starts, not even looking at him, “she mentioned how she works at this garage –“

“Meg, we’ve tried all the garages in the area –“

“C’mon, trust me,” Meg continues, “place has to be good if they hired a lesbian.”

Castiel rolls his eyes. “Forgive me if I don’t trust straight men’s views on lesbianism.” At that Meg stops staring at her phone to shoot Castiel a flat look. He hisses out a breath and runs tired fingers through his hair. “Sorry, I’m just tired and frustrated about all this… why is it so hard to find somebody for a body job?”

“Because unfortunately most people today are ignorant, Clarence,” Meg tells him, holding her phone against her ear, “And we’re not going to see any real change for years… maybe not until we’re all old and shriveled and grey.”

Huffing, Castiel crosses his arms against his chest and spins on his heel. He lets Meg talk to his back, done with their bleak conversation. Still, a part of him agrees with her opinion of the future for those like them. It wasn’t too long ago Castiel was trapped in his old hometown in Illinois, looking over his shoulder every weeknight to make sure no one followed him home. Fearful that one day his face would be a blip in the newsreel, another name to add to the wall like Matthew Shepard.

“I moved here to escape all that,” he mumbles to himself, “but apparently hatred can grow anywhere… even in California.”

Meg hops onto his back, interrupting his musings. She chokes him, forcing him to twirl her around until Castiel can pry her arms off of him. After wheezing in a good-sized breath, he asks what that was about.

“They’d be happy to take a look,” Meg says, “Free of charge!”

Castiel blinks at her. “What?”

“I told you this was a good place, Clarence. Hurry up though, they’re not gonna keep the shop open for you.” She rattles off the directions, having to repeat herself once Castiel shakes away the dazed look in his eye. “…And when you get there you’re supposed to ask for Dean,” she finishes, “Dean Winchester.”

“Why?”

“Guy overheard us talking and said he’d take care of it personally.”

“But… why?”

She shrugs, “Who knows, but he’s waving his fees. Don’t look a gift mechanic in the mouth, my gorgeous unicorn.” Meg pockets her phone and skips backwards, waving goodbye.

“Wait,” Castiel follows her, “you’re not coming with?”

“Band practice,” she says, “I’ve gotta swing over to my place and pick up my bass. You’ll do fine!” With a loud smack of her lips she disappears behind a corner, off on her own way.

Castiel waits a beat before he actually leaves. He starts the engine, idling some more to switch out the CD in the drive, so instead of blasting Indigo Girls he could drive to the music of the Cranberries. Skipping until he reached ‘Zombie’, Castiel nods his head along as he begins his journey over to Singer’s Auto Repair.

It wasn’t too confusing following Meg’s directions. Halfway through her second explanation Castiel realized he was familiar with the route. He’s driven that way countless time to visit a small bookstore he loves. The only one he’d been able to find that stocks trashy romance novels of more diverse backgrounds. Perks of living near West Hollywood, Castiel always knows where to go to find shops catered to others like him.

But he would have remembered seeing a car garage there.

Rounding the final corner, Castiel slows down and crawls along the street, head swerving left and right while ‘Yeat’s Grave’ plays on. After passing his bookstore, he spots a faded sign a few storefronts down.

“How have I never seen this before?”

Unassuming from the front, with faded brick and rusted steel, Bobby’s Auto Shop sits next to a leather shop and spans all the way to the corner. A single rainbow flag hangs from a pole jutting off the side of the building. Castiel pulls into an open garage, parking near the front and cutting the music off before the next song could begin. He steps out of the car and looks around.

There are at least five vehicles stationed inside the building at the moment. He sees one hefted up on a lift, a burly man inspecting it from below. Across from him two other mechanics argue over the exposed engine of a truck, long hair pulled back into tight ponytails. At a lounge area a black couple share a bag of chips.

Looking to the other side at what Castiel expects to be only a blank wall he spies a cluttered corkboard.

Castiel walks away from his car and over to it, scanning the different fliers tacked on. Notices for events like poetry readings and charity brunches to raise funds for AIDs research. A picture of a drag queen hangs next to an ad selling a lounger with a few of the tabs ripped off. There’s even a poster for Meg’s band, ‘The Demon Queens’ that he recognizes, having done the design for them.

“You find something you like?” a rough drawl from behind startles him. Castiel spins, coming face to face with a man who shouldn’t look so handsome streaked with oil. He stares into sparkling green eyes, the color only highlighted by the dark marks on his cheeks. The mechanic smirks, cocking one brow higher than the other. “You all right there?”

“Yeah-yeah-yes,” Castiel clears his throat, “Yes I am, sorry I… what did you ask?”

He chuckles, running dirty fingers through his light brown hair, coloring it darker. “You here for some work?”

Castiel nods. “I’m supposed to ask for a Dean… Winchester?”

Mechanic’s gaze widens, glancing back at Castiel’s car before returning to him. “You’re Meg’s friend?” he asks, grinning.

“Yes…?”

“Hmm… not what I was expecting,” he says, holding a hand out, “I’m Dean.”

Castiel flushes, cursing his luck. Of course the only mechanic who would work on his car would be the man who stepped off the set of a calendar shoot.

Pretty boys have always been Castiel’s weakness. From high school when he first understood where his attractions laid to now, something about them makes his brain shuts down. His tongue works against him and sweat pours out from everywhere; thoughts bottleneck behind the embarrassing urge to blurt out ‘you’re pretty’. Castiel ceases to function normally when presented with a pretty boy.

It’s been an uncomfortable amount of time where Dean’s hand hangs in the air. Castiel realizes it when the smile on his face slowly starts to fall.

He jerks his hand out in a panic, latching onto Dean’s with as relaxed a face he can force. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dean.” His handshake is tight and fast, quickly pulling away as if burned.

Feeling something wet coating his palm Castiel prays Dean didn’t notice his sweat. However looking at it he belatedly remembers Dean’s hands were covered in oil.

“Shit,” Dean says, “Totally forgot to clean up… that’s my bad.”

“It’s fine,” Castiel tell him, “I’ve had worse… my hands are usually messy and covered in whatever.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Paints, clay… those types of things.”

“You an artist?”

“On my days off.”

Dean motions for Castiel to follow. He does. “You do any galleries?” he asks.

Castiel frowns, “I’ve been in one or two, but never on my own. Don’t have the money to afford a space.”

“If you ever do, feel free to advertise here,” Dean says, stopping by a large sink, “As you already know we have a place for a poster or two.”

“Duly noted.” He waits for Dean to turn on the faucet, letting him run his hands under the stream first. Once he finishes Castiel half-heartedly scrubs at the oil. There wasn’t much on his hand, and making any effort to wash it away wouldn’t fit with the cool façade Castiel tried to keep.

“Y’know,” Dean starts, hands hidden in a fluffy towel, “when Charlie told me about you, I thought you’d look a hell of a lot different.”

Castiel skews his head to the side. “How so?”

“Well I figured you’d be a girl,” he shrugs, “friend of an ex from Charlie, nine out of ten it’d be another lesbian or at least bisexual…“ Dean tosses the towel to Castiel, “egg on my face, right?”

He catches it haphazardly. “More like oil.” When Dean’s brows pinch together, Castiel mock wipes at his face with the towel.

“Really?” Dean whines, “You probably think I’m a slob.” He hurriedly splashes some more water on his face and snatches the towel back.

“Honestly?” Castiel says, “I don’t know enough about you to form an opinion.”

Dean looks up from the towel and smiles, dimples clear on his freckled cheeks. “We’ll have to fix that, then.” Before Castiel can overthink what that means Dean walks away and over to his car, Castiel racing to keep up. “So someone marked up your car?”

He sighs, “Yeah… I woke up the other day to find that – that word scratched on the side along with some… other things.” Castiel doesn’t dive in to the details of the torn up rainbow flag outside his apartment and the already painted over slurs carved onto his door. “That’s what I get for celebrating the first day of Pride, I guess.”

Dean frowns, running a hand across his car’s ugly scar. “You know the person who did this?”

Castiel shrugs. “Suspicions… but nothing concrete enough to make a claim or file a report.”

“If it were me I’d do more than that. Bastard would be walking with a limp – if at all – if they messed up my Baby.”

The threat brings a smile to Castiel’s face. He straightens out of the curled up posture he fell into. “Your ‘Baby’?”

“My car,” Dean explains, turning to him, “older model in black. A ‘67 Chevy Impala.”

“I must confess… I don’t know that much about cars.”

“Really?”

“I don’t quite know the model of my own car let alone what an Impala looks like.”

“That’s a damn shame,” Dean tells him, “Going your whole life without knowing what true beauty is? I’d take you out to see her now if I didn’t have to park so far away today.”

“You don’t have your own parking?”

He shakes his head. “Usually I snag a spot on the block but by the time I made it out of bed they were all taken. So I’m about three down in front of this deli. Anyway…” Dean kneels down again, inspecting his car closely. “This shouldn’t be tough… probably have it ready by tomorrow if nothing comes up.”

“Are you sure?” Castiel asks, “If you have other clients waiting –“

“Nah I finished up my last appointment for the day already. Don’t stress about it.”

“That’s very nice of you,” he says, “all the other places I tried wouldn’t help me and here you make it sound so easy…” Then, Castiel remembers what Meg told him. “And for no pay? I don’t mind, I have the money –“

Dean reaches out for Castiel, grabbing his wrist to stop him from taking out his wallet. “I insist. I’m always looking for ways to give back to our community.”

Castiel smiles, his skin burning from Dean’s touch. “Our – ah… our community?” he starts, “do you mean that in a friendly neighborhood sense or…”

He rolls his eyes. “In a rainbow way.”

“Ah.” Castiel glances around the garage, gaze unable to land on any one point for long. “I was wondering… this is a very progressive garage.”

“Has been since the beginning,” Dean tells him, leaning against Castiel’s car, “Bobby’s been a staple here for a long time ever since he and his wife Karen moved in years ago.”

“Bobby?”

“Bobby Singer, the big ol’ boss of this place,” he explains, “He and Karen came here when things got dangerous for them back where they used to live.”

“Why was that?”

Dean launches Castiel back into the past, where a newly married Bobby and Karen were being threatened nearly every night when one of the women in Sioux Falls discovered Karen hadn’t always been called Karen. Gangs of men hung out in front of their house, dumping cigarette butts on their lawn. Every time they went out they were watched and followed, confronted on the days when people had a little more confidence than normal. Any room they entered became so silent a cough could shatter glass. Neither Bobby nor Karen was willing to move at first, until the first rock was thrown through their window. They packed their bags and left in the early morning, not stopping until their car broke down in California.

Bobby pushed it all the way to the closest garage. “It was closing,” Dean says, “And the only one there was the owner – and he didn’t see why he should help. So Bobby grabbed a box of tools and set to work. Halfway through fixing his own car, someone pulled up and asked Bobby to look under his hood. He did and made the engine purr. Owner saw and demanded Bobby give him the money from that. Made a deal and bought the place with what was left of their savings.”

“And he turned it into this,” Castiel says, “I wish I knew about Singer’s sooner… would have saved me a lot of guff whenever I needed my oil changed.”

“I’ll admit we can do better in advertising,” Dean shrugs, “Mainly we rely on word-of-mouth… although we did get a lot of customers after Benny namedropped us in one of his shows.”

“Benny?”

Dean jerks his thumb over towards the burly man from earlier, chatting with the previously bickering mechanics by the truck. “He’s a drag queen. Performs over at the Roadhouse every Wednesday as ‘The Vamp’. I mentioned he should promote the garage in his act one night when I was helping him do his make-up.”

Castiel recalls the picture of the drag queen he saw pinned to the cork board, notices the similarities between the figure captured and the one in front of him. “Is everyone who works here a… um, on the rainbow?”

“More or less,” Dean shrugs, “Jo – the blonde – been on Estrogen for two years, has her first round of surgery coming up in a few weeks. Dorothy doesn’t conscribe to the binary but they still identify as a lesbian…” He swings his finger over to the lounge area. “Max is as gay as the next guy but his sister Alicia’s our token straight.” Turning back to face Castiel he says, “And Charlie you already know only goes for chicks.”

“And you?”

“Me?” Dean chuckles, “Why I’m bi as fuck!”

Castiel laughs as well. “Are you trying to collect all the letters?”

“Like queer Pokémon,” Dean nods, earning another round of snickers. “Nah, we all kinda drifted together. Jo and the Banes twins lived in the area – Jo’s mom actually owns the Roadhouse. But the rest of us… Bobby took under his wing in one way or another.”

Storm clouds brew in the timbre of Dean’s voice, the shiny jewels of his eyes losing their luster. Castiel feels the temperature between them dip low by tens of degrees. Whatever Dean doesn’t say must weigh heavily to flatten the good mood he was in.

It’s a familiar burden Castiel knows all too well.

“Do you know what my name means?”

Dean blinks, thrown off by the sudden shift in topics. “Uh… no –“

“It’s a bastardized version of an angel’s name,” he explains, “Cassiel. They thought the extra ‘s’ was too… feminine. But I was born on a Thursday and…” Castiel trails off, grimacing.

“Religious family?” Dean asks.

He nods. “My dad was heavily involved with our local Church.”

“So when you…”

“It was not a fun time,” Castiel says, “I didn’t go home for the first two years after I left for college but… we learned not to speak about it. Although every now and then my mother sends me pamphlets for seminary school.”

Dean barks out a rough laugh, biting his lip. A brief, charged silence stands between them where Castiel can’t breathe. He nearly backs away, tells Dean that it’s okay. They’re strangers – all he needs is a body job, not a life story. But then he sucks his lower lip under his teeth and starts.

“My dad caught me fooling around with another boy when I was sixteen,” he says, “And after the punches kicked me out on my ass. Joke’s on him, though, because I managed to snag the keys to the car. Drove around for the first year seeing the sights until I found my way to Bobby’s. Picked up shifts part-time until he noticed me sleeping in my car. Cuffed me on the head and told me to take the spare room in the apartment above.”

“Karen didn’t mind?”

“Karen died years earlier,” Dean smiles ruefully, “Cancer. But she would’ve done the same thing. Wish I could’ve met her, though, heard she made killer apple pie.”

And in that moment, Castiel finds himself wishing he had the chance as well. Dean talks about his family with so much love he wants to meet them all, or at least here him tell more stories about them. Knowing that this group of people have found each other and are happy gives Castiel more hope for the future for people like them.

Dean Winchester’s gravitation is too powerful to resist, and Castiel falls into his orbit happily.

A set of squeaky wheels interrupts their conversation, an older man in a trucker’s cap rolling up to them. “Winchester,” he barks, “I don’t pay you to stand around and flirt. Git to work on this poor boy’s car!”

They break apart, both their cheeks bright red. Dean hangs his head, rubbing his hands against his coveralls. “Right away, Bobby.”

Bobby shakes his head, leaving them. “Idjits…”

Castiel shuffles his feet, wringing his hands together. He waits until the other man is far away before speaking again. “So… that’s Bobby.”

“Yeah,” he huffs, “Bastard’s usually never this ornery… probably getting me back for walking in on him and his boyfriend the other night.” Dean scoffs, crossing his arms, “Not my fault Crowley didn’t lock the damn door…”

The past few minutes catch up with Castiel and he feels the awkwardness creeping back up his spine like a spider. “I… I should be going,” he stutters out, startling Dean.

“Really?” Dean asks, his frown confusing to Castiel’s already addled mind.

He nods, pacing backwards. “Thank you for your help and… and the talk.” Then before Dean could respond Castiel races out the garage door and doesn’t look back. Castiel makes it past the leather shop before he falls back against the storefront and gasps for breath.

“Castiel,” he mumbles to himself, “stupid… ‘and the talk’. Why can’t you talk to pretty boys without losing your head.”

He knocks his head against the brick latticework repeatedly, angry with how he blew his shot with the pretty mechanic. In between the heavy pounding she gives himself he hears a slight cough to his right.

Squinting an eye open Castiel sees Dean watching him with an amused grin across his face. Throwing himself away from the wall, Castiel turns to face him. “Dean?” he starts, “What are… what are you doing here?”

Dean steps closer, invading Castiel’s space. The smell of motor oil and cologne makes him dizzy. “You left in such a hurry, Cas, you forgot to give me your phone number.”

His heart skips over itself as a sunny ray of hope shoots across his chest. Clouds return to cover it when he remembers past garage experiences where mechanics needed it to reach him. He deflates. “Right, so you can tell me when my car’s ready.”

Dean juts his lower lip out, head bobbing as he considers Castiel’s statement. “Yeah for that, too.”

“Too?”

“Well I mean how else can I ask you out if I don’t have your number?”

A stone lodges itself in Castiel’s throat. “You… you want to ask me out… on a date?”

His eyebrows jump up. “I… I wasn’t misreading anything… was I?”

That spurs Castiel into action. “No, no! You weren't… I am… I’m interested.”

Dean relaxes, hand splayed against his chest. “Good, got nervous there for a second.” He looks to Castiel, waiting. “So…?”

They exchange numbers, Dean handing Castiel’s phone back with a wink and a promise to call later. Then he heads back to the garage to smooth out the scratches on his car.

Castiel stands there, outside the leather shop, too shocked to move. Somehow he gains control of his legs again and picks one up after the other.

When he makes it to the bus stop, Castiel pulls his phone out and stares at Dean’s number. Butterflies flutter in his stomach as the largest smile blossoms on his face.

It stays there all the way back to his apartment.

#Supernatural #Spn #Supernatural fanfiction #Spn fanfic #Dean Winchester #Castiel #Destiel #deancas #destiel fanfiction #deancas fanfic #bisexual dean winchester #tw: homophobic language

51 notes · View notes

the-end-of-art · 6 years

Text

Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism

POETRY IS THE ART OF PREJUDICE: An interview with Jack Gilbert

(Note: Originally transcribed from a tape-recorded conversation between Jack Gilbert and Gordon Lish, at Gilbert’s San Francisco apartment, July 18, 1962)

LISH: In your poem “Quality Is a Kind of Exile” you mention a lady asking what poets are like between poems. If the question were asked specifically about you and you had to give a prose answer, what would you say?

GILBERT: I’d be evasive. It’s the sort of question that can only make a fool of you.

LISH: But if you had to answer?

GILBERT: If I had to? Well, I’m a little like a mongrel dog, I guess. Not the sickly kind, or the savage or woe-begone kind. But the shorthaired, off-white type you still sometimes see trotting along in the city. Obviously on his own. The kind that survives.

LISH: Not a lap-dog?

GILBERT: Wait. Let’s not get this started off wrong, full of terse clever answers. It was my fault; that sounds pretty precious about the dog. I didn’t mean it like that, but it’s a hard question to answer quickly. I just mean that I’m not respectable. I’m thirty-seven years old and a kind of failure. I don’t really have an occupation. Most of the time I wander around looking at the trees. Or the concrete. And trying to understand and to have my life. And love. Kind of an urban Walden. I’ve never worked at a job more than six months at a time in my whole life. And most of those were in steel mills or washing dishes or selling Fuller Brushes. I’ve evaded all the adult responsibilities of marriage, a home, a car, a regular job, children, furniture, a bank account for emergencies, pipes, guns, and all the rest. While other people have been coping with their responsibilities as husbands and citizens and PhD’s, I’ve been off looking at the sea and trying to write a poem. Or living in the mountains. Or on the Lower East Side.

LISH: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?

GILBERT: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.

LISH: What do you conceive your world to be then? What audience do you write for, for example?

GILBERT: I suspect I’m like most poets in that I write with a vague audience in mind made up of a few friends multiplied and a bunch of heroes—most of whom are dead.

LISH: But certainly some poets have a more general public in mind?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but remember that the contemporary artist’s audience is not the same one aimed at by Edwardians and Victorians. One of the things that defines modern poetry is its separation from a general audience. Not because the poet wants it that way, but because what he wants to do pushes him beyond the scope of the bus driver.

LISH: All poets?

GILBERT: Well, just about all serious poets today are beyond the reader of good will who is inexperienced in current literature. It used to be there was usually something for anyone with a minimum education. If you listened to music, you could wait for the tune to come around again. Today you’d wait a long time. Or in painting, you could enjoy the way a lemon peel was imitated or be moved by the scene of a young boy saying goodbye to his mother before going off to the big city. You might not know anything about painting, but you’d remember when your boy Walter went off. In poetry you could enjoy the sense of beauty without any idea of the meaning—the lovely, hypnotic beauty-bath. But poets aren’t trying to do this anymore. Nor good composers, nor sculptors, nor novelists, nor architects. They are trying to do something different, and it involves the nature of poetry and the audience both.

LISH: What specifically is this difference?

GILBERT: In the old days, poets tried to create beauty, and to please. Most of them, anyway. Today, the major talents aren’t interested in creating beauty—not in the ordinary sense, and certainly not in the sense of providing recreation. Poetry before the First World War was usually an elevating experience taken dutifully after a good meal in the better homes; rather like going to church each Sunday to sit worshipful and empty-headed. Instead of providing instant-uplift or a passive sense of nobility, the poets now are trying to interest and disturb.

LISH: Surely this kind of poetry has been with us a long time.

GILBERT: I don’t mean it’s a new thing. However, I doubt if it’s ever been so predominant. And there is a difference between the serious art of today and art in the past in that our art is harder to misuse. You look at the painting elements in a painting today or you go home. You read contemporary poems as poetry, and actively, or you leave it alone.

LISH: I assume this would be your answer to the accusation of limiting your readers by the geographical, historical, mythological, and personal references in your poems.

GILBERT: It depends. I don’t believe in poems as cross-word puzzles—poems created as victims of the New Criticism. There should be a public level of the poem available to an educated reader who is willing to contribute a fair amount of thinking. On the other hand, there are some things you have a right to expect him to look up. Helot, for example, if he doesn’t know. But if a poem has too much of this, its function breaks down—becomes a game of scholarship.

LISH: Or of vanity.

GILBERT: Especially of vanity. Not always, though. Not all poets who go in for this sort of thing are trying to create the illusion of profundity by an illicit obscurity. Some are entirely sincere. Just as some of the surrealists are, or the word-manipulators, the logomaniacs.

LISH: Are you equating the pedant poets with the surrealists and the logomaniacs? Aren’t some of these people legitimately experimental poets?

GILBERT: Of course. But I’m tired of the kind of experimental poetry we’ve been getting. I don’t say it’s not poetry. There isn’t any one correct way to write poetry. Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists. So I’m not saying my way of writing poetry is the way. But I am admitting my weariness with the great body of poetry which is nothing more than a curious manipulation of words, what Kenneth Tynan has called literary masturbation—a sterile effort to force words to breed. After one or two pages of surrealistic poetry my mind just stubbornly refuses to be polite. Wallace Stevens put it very well when he said that the trouble with surrealism is that it invents rather than discovers. It’s a kind of trick anybody can learn who has imagination. You just throw your mind slightly out of focus so everything seems different. Or better yet, you learn to set your mind wrong so that each item is mechanically related to an inappropriate neighbor. It’s great when you’re starting out in poetry and words are a kind of fascination. But how can a poet sustain an interest in this kind of thing. Wait a minute, I was just reading something by Samuel Johnson. Here it is: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted.”

LISH: And yet your poetry isn’t devoid of experiment. For example, I’ve noticed in your poetry a peculiar distortion of line—as if the language were strange to you, new—especially this poem “The Poetry Line”.

GILBERT: All good poets today try to wrench the language, to freshen it. But my main concern with form is different. I’m concerned with how to make poems work. I think any group of my poems will show a range of solutions. Many poets have one or two ways to write a poem. The poem to them is like a cake-decorator where you put your different materials into the same bag each time and squeeze. The cake will be decorated differently each time, but the method is the same. My greatest difficulty is not finding subjects or language or conceits, but in finding the poem.

LISH: This would be a preoccupation with form rather than language then?

GILBERT: Yes, but obviously not form in the sense of sonnets or sestinas. In fact, I think the major esthetic problem in the 20th century is the attempt to escape Form with a capital Fto form in lower case. At the beginning of the century with the idea of Art for Art’s sake, with the influence of Flaubert, with the distaste for a world in which falsification had become standard, many poets went in for what Yeats called technical sincerity. They found truth in an esthetic technology. Recently poets (and artists in the other arts) have become discontent with Form as an object. They no longer are content to create a pretty, well-made thing. They want to make a poem that extends beyond the museum of perfection. Often they don’t particularly care how it looks—if it’s shaggy or messy or incomplete or exaggerated—as long as it has the effect on the reader that the poet intends. In fact, he may deliberately include the anti-poetic in order to prevent misunderstanding. He doesn’t want the reader coming along collecting jeweled phrases. I’ve talked to a number of the best writers working today about this. Some at length, like Pound, or some just briefly, like Saul Bellow, and I’ve found over and over that they want to escape the inhibiting quality of Form as a hieratic, imposed felicity. They want to devise a form that allows them to do things. Pound expressed it by saying his greatest contribution to younger poets was enabling them to get things back into poems—to make historical references, for example. This recurring groping for an open form can be traced through the whole history of European literature.

LISH: But your poetry shows considerable concern with form in a more direct sense.

GILBERT: Sure. Any poet must be concerned with it. I would expect any poem of mine to meet all the tests of craftsmanship. And obviously form in this sense can never be separated from the other concern. And still, in some peculiar way, they are separate. No one has ever been able to say exactly how, but it is nevertheless true that a preoccupation with the formal construct produces a lesser poetry. Primary poetry deals with life. This is, of course, the most old-fashioned of positions. It has been repeatedly denounced by all the best modern critics like Northrop Frye, Warren and Wellek, Wimsett, and the rest. I always have the feeling they are annoyed that poems are written by people instead of being spontaneously generated out of the accumulations of books in the great solemn libraries. It’s an inconvenience. They remind me of the people who confuse technology with sex.

LISH: How does your attitude affect your poetry?

GILBERT: I am far more concerned with content than most poets, I think. I assume I manage all the technical elements adequately, of course. But usually my poems are caused by and impulse to communicate some part of my life rather than to please. I don’t want the reader to finish the poem and say how lovely it was. I want him to be disturbed. Even miserable. I don’t envy Spenser the slightest bit. I do envy the man who wrote Lear. And yet…it’s so hard to get it straight. At the same time I am always deeply concerned with the poem as a made thing. Always. Like something chopped out of stone that won’t weaken. But not as a decoration. Not a recreation. There are two kinds of poetry finally. The kind that gives delight, and the kind that does something else. Delight is fine. But in Lear or Oedipus there is something else. It’s a delight, too, but of a kind so different that it is misleading to use the same word. The first is recreation; the second change man. It is a grave misunderstanding to come from a performance of Lear concerned primarily with technical felicities. Ideally, one should cry at a good performance of Lear. If the critic can’t cry, he should be unfrocked.

LISH: Doesn’t this kind of approach set you apart from a lot of contemporary poets?

GILBERT: Maybe so, but an awful lot of the poems I see published remind me of the correspondence between Marx and Engels. Engels was always writing elaborate letters filled with ingenious, painstaking comments on Marx’s theories equating them mechanically with some current scientific thought. And Marx (or the reader) kept writing back, Dear Fred, please send the money.

LISH: But you go beyond just insistence on a relation to life in your poems. You seem preoccupied with moral values. Isn’t it true that most contemporary poets no longer accept the ideal of right and wrong?

GILBERT: Who knows? Surely it’s an exaggeration to say most. But it is true that a great many poets now shy away from this kind of subject in favor of a kind of genre verse. Partially I think this is the result of a moral paralysis that is current. But isn’t it also because they don’t have a sufficient motivation for writing? Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

LISH: A small poem?

GILBERT: Oh, he’ll mention Charon at the end to make it seem big, but he is probably tired after a long day and he contents himself with making a respectable poem rather than trying to do anything to the reader. He’s unlikely to be what the Elizabethans admired so much, an over-reacher. You aren’t likely to get a big-boned poem straining its limits.

LISH: And you think this is the case with most poets today?

GILBERT: It seems to be true of most poetry today. Probably it has always been true of most poets. And it is only fair to say that all poets would like to write great poetry. It is also true, though, that if ninety-nine percent of the poets writing today stopped publishing, it would not be a loss. It might not even be noticed. We are in danger today of the kind of misguided tact that has so hampered modern British poetry. A kind of insidious conspiracy of courtesy. If there could be a truly unmalicious literary pogrom, it would do more for American literature than even making them publish anonymously. Or how about another way? You know how in the Congressional Record they have all those speeches that were never actually delivered in Congress? They save everybody’s time by waiving the reading and just print it so the people back home can see it and be satisfied their Congressman is making his voice heard. Suppose we publish a huge book called The Very Finest American Poetry of 1962? Everyone will waive the poems being actually published anywhere except in those thousands of pages of unreadable tiny print. And each poem who sends in something will automatically be issued a certificate saying he has published so-and-so many poems in 1962, and they have been declared to be the very finest of the year. It will be signed by all the right people. Then the poet can just turn this over to the head of his department when culling time comes around. The reward of promotion will be for the greatest number of certificates—and these will be given for assiduity, just as now. And he can get duplicates to send his mother, or to show his wife’s friends, or to send to the Fulbright and Guggenheim and Ford people. Or to have lying around when he has a girl up he’s trying to make.

LISH: Do you think these people who are involved in poetry to further their careers or who make mild poems out of trivial material are dangerous to the reader?

GILBERT: Mostly in being dangerous to themselves and other poets—in that they reduce poetry to something toilet-trained and comfortable. They pretend poetry is just like everything else, only fixed up funny. Like sex. Everybody understands now that sex isn’t really dirty. A little odd at times, but certainly nothing to be disturbed about. Like the sensible books on technique say. And it’s good for you. Rosy, reasonable sex. Well, it isdirty. And fantastically intimate. A kind of insanity. Of course, they often feel the same way about insanity. It’s kind of like the common cold now. And they can’t get over the secret feeling that their friend really knows, at the bottom, how silly he’s being. Someone once said to Blake that after all when he looked at the sun he saw a bright copper penny like the rest of us. Blake replied that when he looked at the sun he saw a choir of singing angels.

LISH: You feel the poets really don’t know the difference?

GILBERT: Who knows anything about poets? But I remember talking recently to a poet who teaches at the University of California who kept saying how it’s all nonsense to criticize professors for not having enough life in their poems. Take him for example, he said. One of his favorite things was to go walking up and down the main street of Oakland at night. Now I’m not making fun of him. He is quite intelligent and talented, and he sincerely believes he’s getting close to the brute reality of non-academic life walking up and down there in Oakland. It’s admirable that he wants to reach reality, but it scares me to think a man so intelligent can become so insulated that he isn’t even aware how far he is from the demon world of actuality.

LISH: What poets do you think are in touch with that demon world?

GILBERT: First let me take back that bit about the “demon world.” It sounds like the dark-world-of-unnamable-evil out of somebody like Huysmans or Lovecraft. And let me say that most poets have had contact with the world beyond the academy and domesticity when they were young or in the army or on their year tour of Europe. But how many of them have recently lived for any time really with hunger or corruption or danger or ecstasy or madness or the alien or romance or physical labor or poverty or anything? Or evil? Directly, I mean.

LISH: All right, but what poets do you admire?

GILBERT: In the world, or writing in English, or just in America.

LISH: Let’s say just American.

GILBERT: It’s hard to answer. I admire some things in many, many poets. You remember in The Lost Weekend how the guy is hurrying down the street full of ain and he sees a new book by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a window and he stops and crouches down to read what he can of the two pages that are half open? In the middle of his hurry and unhappiness? Well, I’ll tell you the people I’d crouch down like that to read. Pound and Eliot, of course. And Williams. And Frost. And Auden, if I’m allowed both him and Eliot. And Marianne Moore. Lowell and Duncan and Wilbur and Creeley. Shapiro and once upon a time Ginsberg. And Laura Ulewicz and Richard Hazley and Gerald Stern and William Anderson and Jean McLean. And others I’ll think of later. It’s a fine century for poetry.

LISH: Doesn’t that contradict what you were saying before?

GILBERT: I hope not. It’s exactly because I think we are in one of the great centuries for poetry that I feel so strongly. The last fifty years has been a golden age for English poetry. But it’s a constant race against being inundated with proficiency. We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre. The problem is to write the poems that matter. Too many poets are concerned with poems as art objects. It’s a clever kind of juggling. It’s beautiful, and very difficult, and even admirable. But it mustn’t usurp the center of poetry. We will never get people like Chaucer or Villon or Dylan Thomas or Baudelaire or Blake or Homer or Sophocles or Shakespeare by making merely beautiful things. We’ll get them only from a poetry that is significantly involved with life. And I don’t mean domestic life. Certainly the poetry must also be technically competent, but the important thing is to exceed this. So many poets now seem to aim at the adequate poem rather than the important one.

LISH: Doesn’t this dearth of important poetry at the moment owe, in part, to the feeling of many poets that life no longer holds significant subjects? What do you, for example, consider significant material?

GILBERT: All the conventional subjects for poetry. Love, death, man, virtue, nature, magnitude, excellence, evil, suffering, courage, morality. What is the good life. What is honor. Who am I.

LISH: But isn’t that just the point? Aren’t the conventional subjects too confused and wearied from a surfeit of examination and the blurring of values?

GILBERT: That’s why poets shirk.

LISH: They try something more manageable?

GILBERT: Not only that, but they don’t have enough experience or involvement to try the other. It’s what I was saying before. Most of the poets are trying to earn a living and support a family. That usually means teaching school. And after a while, it means teaching school comes first. Poetry comes second. You meet very few poets whose lives are devoted primarily to writing poetry. The may love poetry, and respect it; they may be competent, well-trained, well-meaning, good people. But you don’t become a great poet in your spare time. Besides, nice guys seldom write exciting poetry.

LISH: But even if that’s true, doesn’t part of the reluctance to deal with large moral problems come from the complexity of the problems today—obsessed with relativism, wanting to be fair, to be objective? No longer understanding all of anything, especially the major values?

GILBERT: That’s true, but it’s exactly why poetry is crucial now. Poetry and the novel have largely taken over the function of philosophy for us. Philosophy is locked up in epistemology and can’t get out. No philosopher asks any more: What is the good life? What is justice? They deal with technical problems about cognition and even more with a kind of verbal paraphernalia. Poetry seems almost the only device we have for persisting at problems without their being mysteriously transformed into an abstract game. It seems almost our only escape from the blind alley of sophistication where comparative anthropology and psychiatry have led us, seeing that there are so many sides to any question that it is impossible to have convictions. Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the vicious constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice. Prose is rational and fair. It works out an idea and gives all the evidence. Poetry doesn’t. It doesn’t argue, it demonstrates.

LISH: Then you do see absolutes. That is out of fashion, isn’t it?

GILBERT: I think most good poets see absolutes, but they mistrust themselves because they think they’re not being fair. Well, poetry isn’t fair. Poetry, at it’s best, doesn’t try to be fair. Poetry is one-sided, and being one-sided, it can say what truth is. As the art of prejudice, poetry eludes the modern situation where everything seems true and nothing seems to matter very much. The poet has a way of thinking that, peculiarly, breaks through the ambush of qualification and gets to the other side where you so often can see the truth all along but can’t find your way through the jungle of intellectual ceremony.

LISH: Somehow this seems a lot like the attitude of the Beat poets.

GILBERT: Well, it is true that one of the reasons the Beat Movement got so much attention (outside of their gift for publicity) was that their intellectual crudity helped them to break through the impasse of sophistication and establish some contact with subjects that mattered in a real world. Just as the Italian Renaissance was possible partly because the people in Florence were provincial. It could never have happened in Byzantium.

LISH: You say the beats were intellectually crude.

GILBERT: Yes, but that doesn’t mean dumb. Let me make it clear that I’m not attacking them. It’s pointless for people to keep kicking them now when the whole thing is in such disrepute. Five years ago, people in the universities hated the movement but were secretly fascinated. Now they are genuinely contemptuous and indifferent. It is useless to attack it or defend it now on doctrinaire grounds. It’s more important to evaluate it; not only fairly, but with knowledge. It was the most important literary movement of a quarter century in America. Why did all that talent and opportunity come to so little?

LISH: Why, then?

GILBERT: Mostly because of inadequate character and the repudiation of intelligence. Most of the poets in the movement are incapable of maturity. Any examination of the work of, say, Ginsberg and Corso (and Kerouac in prose) show a failure to grow. In fact, they are dedicated to the opposite. They apotheosize all the infantile qualities: impulsiveness, resentment of discipline, incapacity for self-discipline, short attention span with a consequent preoccupation with the moment, mistrust of authority and order, egocentricity, and all the rest. At first this gave their work the freshness and energy that’s usual when gifted children start out in any field: poetry, tennis, science, music, chess, whatever. But it also has a similar tendency to come to nothing. To predictably pass through a stage of exaggeration and a kind of hysteria, followed by bitterness, and finally a withered passivity. They are like those insects that get arrested at the larvae stage. I forget their name. They have all the parts, but they just don’t continue. If you want a case in point, read the interviews involving Ginsberg and Corso and Burroughs in the Journal for the Protection of All Beings. It’s sad and rather frightening to see people of such native talent ending up in such juvenility. And it’s not just in that one example. Almost anything they do now shows it. Look at Ginsberg’s piece in Pa’lante where he’s approaching middle age lost in a hopeless confusion of the most elementary philosophical problems.

LISH: And you say this failure of character goes along with the repudiation of intelligence?

GILBERT: Yes, in favor of some kind of intuition. I think intelligence has produced almost everything that is noble in man. Of course, when I say intelligence, I don’t mean just syllogistic logic. I mean the total capacity for perception and understanding available to man. Logic, intuition, gestalt, common sense, empathy, and all the rest. They want to rely on primitive, clumsy impulsiveness alone. Anyone who has lived where intelligence hasbeen replaced by intuition (such as Apulia or Mexico or India) knows how quickly life becomes diminished to something close to the animal. These people feel more at ease in those conditions. They evade the complexity life really has; and they can escape awareness of themselves into sensation. When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness.

LISH: But I thought the idea was to arrive at a greater awareness of the self. And to be more open to love.

GILBERT: They talk a lot about love, but they experience almost none. Neither for people nor the world. Their natural condition is unhappiness. And because they have so little genuine appetite for the world, they go in constant fear of boredom. That’s why they are quiet so little. After all, there is something radically wrong when you have to go to always more violent and stranger devices to get a response. A man who delights in the world isn’t so dependent on drugs and alcohol and novelty. And the sad thing is that even so they manage to squeeze our always less response. If you’ve been to any of their parties, you must have noticed how much it was like an hysterical woman straining for an orgasm synthetically. And the poetry is the same. Almost none of it stands up under rereading. In the first place, it all ends up sounding curiously anonymous. And in the second place, despite the cult of energy, all that violence of language and image seems curiously slack after six months. The poems just don’t wear well.

LISH: None of it?

GILBERT: Certainly some remains. Parts of Howl and Kaddish, for example. And besides, it depends on who you mean when you refer to the Beat Movement. It’s as Procrustean a word as academic. I certainly am not talking about Creeley or Duncan or Olson. And I think Whalen and Snyder will produce important poetry. But for the rest, if you travel around America, you find the reputations of five years ago washed up like great dying whales. And beginning to stink.

LISH: There’s that figure whales. Whales and elephants and Alcibiades. What precisely do you mean by whales?

GILBERT: You know without my telling you that no poet means precisely anything. It’s not a one-to-one relation. That’s allegory. It means a lot of things. For one, it’s the impossibly literal world. And it’s what you can’t reduce to the human scale. For me, trying to think about a whale, that endlessness down in that infinity of depth, in darkness, moving around—with a mind inside it…

LISH: Doing things.

GILBERT: Yes, and silent. I can’t make any adjustment to it. Like Lawrence said: “I said to my heart, who are these? / And my heart couldn’t own them.” He was talking about fish. And he says someplace else in the poem: “There are limits / To you my heart; / And to the one God / Fish are beyond me.” Whales in this sense, the sudden sense of the alien nature of the universe not translatable into human terms. But what particularly interests me is the sense of magnitude. It’s out of scale, and not just physically. It threatens my life, the formulations on which I operate. I have to redo my mind. There’s a poem by Rilke where he goes along describing a statue. All of a sudden, for no reason, he breaks off and says: You must change your life. When I think about whales, it’s the same in a way. Or elephants or love.

LISH: Or Alcibiades, evidently.

GILBERT: Or Alcibiades. He was the Golden Boy of 4th century Athenian culture. Pericles was his guardian, Plato his teacher. A fine athlete, a brilliant general, handsome, marvelously intelligent, popular, everything. A summation of the Golden Age. And what happened? He went bad. He was vain, treacherous, selfish, sacrilegious, debauched, dishonest, and a traitor twice over. His aid to the enemy during the Syracuse campaign destroyed Athens. Just about the finest product of the most notable civilization man has accomplished, and it turned out like that. This haunts me like the whales. Like the irrational East haunted the Greeks. Like the irrational still frightens the French. It is so much the problem today. It is so often our most endowed people who go wrong—become corrupt, sexually distorted, criminal, mad. I don’t mean just because of irrationality, or course. You might just as well call it Evil as it has been so often called to simplify things. But whatever the name, it is clear that Cordelia has little relevance for us except as a lost Eden. What concerns our time is Goneril. That’s why insanity, homosexuality, and semi-criminality are so common among poets. These prevent him from escaping into the obliviousness of normal life. Especially in modern times, the poet often has a built-in inability to succeed, so he is forced to associate with whales.

LISH: And you intend to continue to live with them by choice?

GILBERT: Well, I’m not crazy, queer, or crooked (Ai! Is there any group I haven’t offended?)…anyhow, I don’t know about it being by choice. Certainly after this interview I’m not likely to be tempted by either the universities or the foundations. It’s a choice in that I prefer whales and love and the rest; but then Heraclides said a man’s fate is his character. In any case, I intend to go on wandering around having my life and watching for whales—willingly. And with delight.

LISH: One final thing. Before the Yale printing of Views of Jeopardy, you were almost completely unpublished and unknown, weren’t you?

GILBERT: Before sending the manuscript to Yale, I had submitted poems to editors only twice in the twenty years I’d been writing poetry.

LISH: And now you have been nominated for next year’s Pulitzer Prize competition.

GILBERT: That’s true. And it makes me happy in a shamelessly uncomplicated way. To be nominated, I mean. I’m thinking of writing a poem, though, called “How It Feels to Be Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Competition the Season Robert Frost Published His First Book in Fifteen Years.”

(https://unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/jack-gilbert-interviewed-by-gordon-lish-1962-from-issue-one-of-genesis-west-part-one/)

#Jack Gilbert #Gordon Lish #poem #poet #poetry

4 notes · View notes

autoirishlitdiscourses · 3 years

Text

Discourse of Thursday, 29 April 2021

Opening up more room for 65 minutes at that time passes differently when you're in charge in our technologically oriented society, they tend, in which it could be executed a bit more would have been even more successful, however, I myself tend to agree/disagree rarely produces discussion effectively because closed questions seek immediate resolution. I discover by any means, and how that has changed, but what else do we define what that means and how you're going with the Office of Judicial Affairs.

These papers address to some questions and frame them. But analysis requires moving outside of my margin notes. Unfortunately, I think, however. I am of course, you really do connect them to the fact that you have a wonderful poem and its background. Incidentally, I think that having a topic. On Raglan Road, which largely duplicates ID #1 from the absolute last piece of writing, though as I said? On your grade so far, mid-century American painter Willem de Kooning's Woman series is full. It is a piece of writing to get to everything anyway, because it's been the case that two people who grow up to your address book or calr, online or offline. Your paper must be attended, in a lot of ways.

Ultimately, you'll have to set up the section, not a fair amount of time that you need to send me the URL. As I told him that he has otherwise been quite the digression from what I would like to recite and discuss can be in South Hall 1415. Have a good book. Think about what kind of psychological issues, would be to go down this road, a student who's not able to take it. Picking a selection from Ulysses is already enough to get into South Hall 2635 which is not unusual at this point, you got them saying productive things. Well done in all, who can tell you your grade without the midterm returns to Tuesday, so I'm not entirely sure that this means, and a good conversational move might just be that our sympathy is based on your recitation and thinking closely about delivery; you have any questions, OK?

Or about people of Irish nationalism and neutrality—these minor errors that don't have a full schedule this week Yeats is making. Arguably, The Song of the analysis fits into the midterm was graded correctly. You did a lot of ways, you've done your research paper will almost certainly would have helped some, here. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1. In fact, more centrally, it sounds like you were reciting and discussing the selection you picked a longer description or outline, I'm very sorry to take so long to get into South Hall 2635 which is not a member of a section you have any questions, OK? Doing this would be to go back over. Ultimately, what does it make sense? You've done a number of recitations. Don't be afraid of silences and retractions in your hand. No longer issued as a hard text, though I think that the items on the English 150 Fall 2013 Anglo-Irish Literature Section guidelines. 4 December 2013. There are some available on the structural similarity between you and ensure that you need to talk about how you're going to do that. And let me know what you want it to move forward and make eye contact in that case. But you've done quite a good decision to pick a text that you discovered that time passes differently when you're at the final, you'll have to do, and recall problems, although I think, to be more specific you're able to give a strictly accurate piece of writing. Unfortunately, it seems that trying to satisfy a literature or writing process is itself the immediate, direct, personal interest in readymades and in a way that you can let me know if you want to, then this change to concepts of nationalist identities to have practiced a bit lopsided. Either way is OK with me about your key terms more specifically. 96% this is not based on the assumption that you could take Playboy as a discussion of the texts you're examining, and there are many other things you may leave your luggage during section for those risks. So, where do you want to go for answers on earlier sections over to earlier this year. If you want any changes made I will send you an updated grade by Friday evening if you don't schedule immediately, you can say more than you have some very minor alterations; at this point, but I'm not familiar with either play though I've pointed to in my office hours, or the viewer is understood or affected by a bus or abducted by aliens over the line.

I've attached a copy of the poem itself, you have any other questions, or just her conscious thoughts? You've done a strong delivery. Let me know that a contemporary English poet might be interesting ways of reading the few remaining lines of the quarter a very good topics buried in there that it's less successful than it should turn into a regular rhyme scheme, and may be that Mary sees love's bitter mystery as being the natural outcome of the Irish see femininity, rather than a B-for the actual facts behind some of my head this afternoon, so I can just bring it to take so long to get to all questions about them; and invented a few avenues that might be the bearer of good ideas for when and where it will help to mitigate your anxiety. To put it in my box South Hall 2432E. Travel safely and enjoy the company of your paper you had thought about your topic before you went through a series with which they are aware of areas where your ideas. I'm not trying to complete a COMMA specialization, seniors trying to get people warmed up if they want to attend those classes and do not think that your pacing was quite good in many places where I can if you don't already know her, and that her motivations are likely to get some pointers on this you connected it effectively to larger-scale issues and give everyone their preferred text/date combinations. I'll see you before the paper may help you to leave. Either choice is absolutely nothing wrong with this by dropping back into lecture mode and/or may make other types of documents in addition to doing it for the final. Another student from your large-scale details and making sure to send your lecture orientation was motivated by nervousness, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, all in all, you would be to find. On poems by Eavan Boland, White Hawthorn in the assignment handout. Mp3 of the recitation assignment or the barbarity of poetry after Auschwitz. I saw you on time. This is a hard time constructing a satisfying analysis of a text that they should not be penalized for falling short by one letter and a half overdue on this assignment.

If this is not just show up that night for you. Yeats, When You Are Old. If you need to pass them out, and create a separate workbook for each paper is going well, and then look at last week's presentations has taken me so long to get back to you. You had a good student this quarter, depending on which of the things the professor is not one of these ways, and you write very effectively and provided that you should definitely talk to me. Finally, I would like to have a thesis statement, and what your specific readings as a whole it ties together multiple sources to produce your good readings and the argument itself, I think that you need to indicate the sources in their papers, so that my work has paid off for you never quite come out and say, none of the room. If you have already left campus. My worst grades as an effective vehicle for your section tomorrow night! You may find that asking questions that you have previously requested that I gave you, or slide it under my office hours. 61% based entirely upon attendance I won't be assessed until after the final: you need 94% on the final, is not that you would need to focus on your grade is OK with me in my office SH 2432E, provided that you score at least take a look at British regulations of the Flies, and I've just been crazy and I'm certainly not obligated to look it up until 7: General Thoughts and Notes 16 October discussion of Rosie's attempted seduction of TA for English 150 TA, and that's perfectly normal and acceptable at this point. If you do have some good ideas here, I think that you could go with this by dropping into lecture mode and/or not effectively support the overall understanding of a specific understanding of what the nature of the pieces of evidence: a they were sick. It's a two-line chunk; pick a text that you've thought closely about it a more fluid in the text, despite the strike. Get An A paper; I still think that even this was still a bit lopsided. I think that your paper, because in my margin notes. Another potential difficulty is that if someone else beat you to give them by title in your paper grade. You will notice, regarding the text itself and to speak can be a stronger link between the selection. Again, well done. It is your specific point of analysis conclusion that broadens and shows larger-scale points as every other B paper one day late unless you explicitly say it's OK in unusual circumstances, you can take the final analysis. Hi! If you have any questions, and you touched on some important feminist concerns through a concept on your grade, assuming there are a couple of things would have helped you to be a productive way to get me a couple Rosie and Fluther, after all, you've got a really good, perceptive, very few students this quarter, and shown, in fact, everyone! As I told him that not doing so. —I will hold up various numbers of people haven't done the reading process, though, I have you down for Dec. Again, this is conjectural, but th' silk thransparent stockin's showin' off; dropping warm from Out in th' park in th' pan for remember you said it was never distributed in class to be spending time thinking about, but you really have done some very minor preposition substitutions. You dropped or from investigate or do not do this or anything else gets covered in the term, although it sounds like it, is to call on you before the quarter.

I really mean it when you argue that a you have two options. Good luck on your group for several reasons, including absolutely everything in the day before Thanksgiving. One way to clarify your own ideas and ask what is it the burning bush of Moses. It's just that your situational and historical texts might support that negative value-judgments about the text quoting, including class, and bought yourself some breathing room. Again, thank you for doing such an excellent performance unless you file an informational report with the sweatbeads as big as berries moment in your section to begin, for being such a good set of additional typing, at the beginning of Ulysses in particular texts, how do they set up yours and demonstrated that you need another copy of Word and work it can. If you attend section every week except Thanksgiving and a thoughtful rendition of the section as a piece of elevated political rhetoric. —I am willing to make sure I can plan for section this week: have several options: 1. I think that O'Casey's portrayal of the soul, freedom, the sympathy of the texts you're working with, and showing that you want to say, and exhibiting solicitous concern for emotions that they can take a more accurate translation of the Triffids, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Jose Saramago's Blindness, and not quite right to me that is also an impressive move you might start by asking questions that ask people for general comments people can still pull your grade to you with comments at the end of the cease to do it while still scaling up each part of the text itself and seeing what is off limits from those poets: Eavan Boland reading White Hawthorn in the formula by which I say not to castigate you, and to your recitation.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

0 notes

emmagreen1220-blog · 6 years

Text

New Post has been published on Literary Techniques

New Post has been published on https://literarytechniques.org/caricature/

Caricature

What Is Caricature?

Caricature comes from the Italian verb caricare, which means “to load.” As a technique, caricature is defined by an exaggerated description of a person or thing, very often used in drawing and painting, usually with the aim of creating a comic or satiric effect. For example, in the image below, the caricature of Mr. Bean exaggerates his facial features, such as the eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips, and ears.

In literature, caricature can be used to exaggerate a character’s personality traits as well. For example, Charles Dickens is renown for the creation of uniquely eccentric characters by using this literary technique. Miss Havisham, one of the characters in Great Expectations, shocks the readers through her caricatural appearance, bordering on the grotesque: Imagine a fifty-something-old lady who was left at the altar some twenty years back and is still wearing her wedding dress, keeps the wedding cake on the table, with mice crawling in and out of it, and stopped all the clocks in the house at twenty minutes to nine, the time when she had received her fiance’s letter announcing her that he would not show up. Moreover, Dickens goes beyond physical appearance and uses caricature to define Miss Havisham’s purpose in life, that is, to take revenge on all men and make them suffer, regardless of whether these men happen to be represented by a nine- or ten-year-old boy, Pip.

ExamplesQuizFlashcardsWorksheets

Caricature Examples

Caricature in a Sentence

“His hair was long and encompassing as a cape that would cling to his ankles when the wind became more than a breeze, making him fall flat on his flat nose.” – We can hardly imagine a person whose hair is so long as to trip him over. This exaggeration, with both comic and satiric effects, is known as caricature.

“His bulgy eyes almost jumped out of their sockets when I told him the news. He began sputtering and turned his back on me, leaving trails of saliva behind.” – This caricatural description makes us imagine a man resembling a snail.

“The girl dragged her feet toward the blackboard, as slow as a condemned person might walk his way to the electric chair, her eyes sheepish and as round as saucers, begging for mercy from the teacher and for help from her classmates: ‘I don’t know how to solve the equation.’ ” – The feelings of a school girl are caricatured in this sentence by exaggerating her fear of going to the blackboard and solving a mathematical problem.

Caricature in Poetry

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

“The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones;

The MILLER was a stout fellow indeed;

Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones.

He was very strong of muscle, and also of bones….

Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre,

There was no door that he would not heave off its hinges,

Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed.

Or break it by running at it with his head.

His berd as any sowe or fox was reed,

His beard was red as any sow or fox…

Upon the cop right of his nose he hade

Upon the exact top of his nose he had

A werte, and theron stood a toft of herys,

A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs,

Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys;

Red as the bristles of a sow’s ears;…

His mouth as greet was as a greet forneys.

His mouth was as large as a large furnace.”

The characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are all typologies, as illustrated by the names under which they appear: the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, the Monk, the Friar, the Host, and so on. The most exaggerated features are those of the peasants. The Miller represents the stereotypical peasant physiognomy the most clearly, being round and ruddy and with a wart on his nose. The Miller appears rough and, thus, suited for hard, simple work. Caricature is evident in Chaucer’s description of the Miller as a man who could take any door out of its hinges or break it with his head and in the comparison of the Miller’s beard with the bristles on a pig.

“Tower” by William Butler Yeats

“An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress…”

In the poem “Tower,” William Butler Yeats uses caricature to describe old age. By referring to old people as worthless “things” and shabby coats on sticks, the poet also makes use of self-caricature since he was in his late years when he wrote the poem.

Caricature in Literature

Caricature was a preferred technique in the comedy of manners, a witty form of dramatic comedy that depicts and satirizes the manners of the society and is, thus, more concerned with whether or not the characters meet certain social standards than with the plot. This type of comedy reached its peak in the English-speaking world during the Restoration period, with playwrights such as Ben Jonson, William Congreve, William Wycherley, Sir George Etherege, Oliver Goldsmith, and later, with Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Philip Barry, and S.N. Behrman.

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

Jonson’s The Alchemist, for example, features characters whose names contribute to their caricature: the sensualist, Sir Epicure Mammon; the hypocritical Puritan, Tribulation Wholesome; the con men, Subtle and Face; and Abel Drugger, a small-time tobacco dealer ambitious for commercial success. The characters are flat, that is, they are uncomplicated and do not evolve throughout the play. Drugger’s main characteristics, for instance, are stupidity and greed. Thus, he is easily made to believe that he will achieve success if, by following astrology-based advice, he sets the shelves in his shop in a certain way. In act III, Face says about Drugger that “he has no head/ To bear any wine,” which exemplifies that caricature can be realized through other characters’ words as well.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s use of caricature in The Importance of Being Earnest allows readers to view the true essence of the characters. The main character of the play, Lady Bracknell, is representative. Her interview with Jack, who was in love with her daughter Gwendolen, focuses on Jack’s status and material possessions, mainly containing questions such as: “What is your income?” “In land, or in investments?” “A country house! How many bedrooms? … You have a town house, I hope?”

It’s also Lady Bracknell who exclaims, “A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her.”

Wilde’s use of caricature leaves the readers think that Lady Bracknell, a representative of Victorian society, is overly shallow and materialistic.

“Rain” by Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham reduced his characters to caricatured types and stereotypes in circumstances in which they act in accordance with or against their natural inclinations, treating individuals as typological characters governed by fate functioning within the narrow boundaries of necessity. In the short story “Rain,” Davidson, a zealous missionary, recounts his success in civilizing the tribes of the barbaric South Sea Islands during one of his missions:

“ ‘When we went there they had no sense of sin at all’, he said. ‘They broke the commandments one after the other and never knew they were doing wrong. And I think that was the most difficult part of my work, to instill into the natives the sense of sin.…You see, they were so naturally depraved that they couldn’t be brought to see their wickedness. We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions.…I made it a sin for a girl to show her bosom and a sin for a man not to wear trousers.’

‘How?’ asked Dr Macphail, not without surprise.

‘I instituted fines.’ ”

The missionary’s moral authority is backed up by his legal authority, imposing fines and banning the islanders from participating in the coconut oil trade, which “meant something very like starvation,” as Davidson notes with satisfaction. In his self-blinding self-righteousness, the missionary is entirely proud at his economic and legal blackmail of the islanders into accepting customs and morals that are not their own. In this story, by caricaturing the Davidsons, Maugham illustrates his own indignation at the misguided and stubborn authorities who tend to turn people’s natural instincts into crimes and sins.

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

Caricature, however, was not aimed only at societal typologies, in general, but sometimes targeted specific individuals. Robert Shallow is a fictional character who appears in Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He is a wealthy landowner and justice of the peace, a thin, vain, and often self-deluding individual, whom Falstaff and his comrades victimize by killing his deer, beating his men, and breaking into his lodge. Shallow may have been a caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy, a justice of the peace and member of Parliament from Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace). According to an undocumented account, Sir Lucy prosecuted Shakespeare for stealing a deer from his land.

The picture below illustrates Shallow inviting Falstaff to stay for the night.

Quiz

Flashcards

Worksheets

#device

0 notes

autoirishlitdiscourses · 4 years

Text

Discourse of Wednesday, 26 August 2020

There are other possible interpretations, too. I myself am less than thrilled about this during our last two weeks. One of these is that your ideas out, it's not necessary to try to avoid a assuming that the Irish are more passionate than any other absences for any other questions! Thank you so much the case that two people who grow up to perform suboptimally on the final this counts absolutely everything except for the course discussion section is part of the concept itself central to your presentation out longer, I think you're on the same deal for you. Because the textual history of Ulysses with you. I'm sorry I didn't anticipate at the last minute and two-year college can be hard to be on the following categories best describe it: A letter to Martha, V. Despite these problems will help you to prioritize senior English majors with a critical eye and ask yourself what you need to do in order to be reserved for two hours. And, again, you will have other priorities instead of the poem. There will be on the following links: MLA International Bibliography log in via ProQuest or LION JSTOR Google Scholar The UCSB Library's advanced search. If you develop more detailed lesson plans, it will be held tomorrow SH 2635, and the Stars How would you characterize O'Casey's portrayal of home in general might mean. A paper; I think that they didn't cover but that would have most helped you make the selection in the How Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail This document has not removed the price tag from his hat. Be sure to email in just before it jerked; added that to the video on the other on your recitation from Calypso, with Dexter, it allows you to reschedule after the midterm to get fed as much as doing an excellent job! Any time after 12:30-3:30 does that tell me when large numbers of fingers at the document How Your Grade Is Calculated document to 0. Some suggestions: Georges Braque painted food-concerned still lifes quite a good chunk of the Discussion Section Guidelines handout, you did a good break! I want a recording of a play about the horror genre, so you may certainly choose Heaney poems, as well as some slang terms for various coins and brief notes on usage. So, I can see representations of the week before I go to bed late tonight, because you're going to be as specific and nuanced as you're capable of doing this so that you might appreciate knowing now instead of whenever the Registrar releases grades, preferring to leave campus before I pass it out sooner, because you don't mind the shameless self-control, etc. There are a couple of suggestions. All in all of which is harder to get other people react to Lecter and how well you're putting together an argument about a characteristic of personality and identity that are not quite enough points on the final exam/except in genuinely extraordinary/situation that results in an American work, and so this is probably not last unless some totally new narrative path through them and see whether I can point people when looking at it. I also will not necessarily mean that I think that you are reciting that week will partially serve as a team and gave a very strong familiarity with the time requirement for papers which do incur penalties is: What, ultimately, is the enjoyment that the sooner you tell him you want me to leave me with an unnamed nationalist called only the citizen, the smart thing to work, we should be watching that show off for you, and, as a source. I'll see you then! If you must email me a description of the class, overall. Let me know and we'll figure something out. However, I think it would help you to make suggestions, but I'll most likely way to push your readings are also welcome to disagree in whole or the viewer is likely to run free because the batteries in my experience, they are, even if you re-typed your email to answer messages. If you'd prefer to do that in advance, and I've noticed that none of the object itself. Updated version by Friday. Have a good job. Which is just an issue that impacts your paper's structure, and I will offer you a bit too long. Very well done yesterday. Other points for section this week I had my students are correctly identifying at least one email from n asking whether she can take some reasonable guesses. So you can deal with this, I myself don't know that you might think about the relationship between education and persuasive power in the afternoon could we meet at a bare minimum paper length, and your material very effectively to larger-scale discussions in relation to do whatever he tells me to respond to the novel, too, for instance, if I recall correctly, was supposed to have a couple of days to ask the professor. Recitations this week, but before I go to the topic you will receive no section credit; if you do, or severe problems with their mothers would be happy to discuss with the question of what you really did give quite a difficult selection, effectively, please let me know what you'd like. It just needs to be.

He talked in section. I think that considering alternate viewpoints will help you to reschedule, and it may not have started reading McCabe yet if they're cuing off of his life, you were nervous and a real bitch at the front of the phrase is not the right direction, I may overlook it if you feel better soon. My Window Yeats, and I understand it, in the library either has a clear cubist depiction of people, and the understanding of the rhythm-and-women. If I'm not faulting you here, and only three IDs instead of the overall goal is to have thought of it. Keep your overall points. A-is entirely plausible if you want to be flexible so as to cut it off with the series. The Time Traveler's Wife is perhaps one that he approves, though. I suspect will be in South Hall 2635 which is actually the more likely he is currently better developed and more than once before, to everyone's first proposal before I pass it out, so it is necessary, then send me an email letting me know if you want to know tonight instead of responding to for other reasons.

Are we getting Bloom's fantasies about Gerty?

Just a quick search. On the other group looks like there are several ways that I think that Easter 1916 is a thinking process too, and had some important introductory aspects to it, in love with someone else beat you to push yourself up to me, Yeats's phrase merely claims that unreciprocated love is perhaps one of my students who hadn't yet gotten it in contractual terms to the week before I go to the Ulysses lectures which, given Ulysses, Bacon's paintings, and I know that he spoke of it?

What I'd suggest we do have a nuanced argument. Let me know if you run out of your material if that works for you, I say thank you for that week will prevent your grade by Friday and get your main points of view from the absolute minimum standards for a specific topic with sufficient precision, but if you discover that there are several ways in which the novel. You did a very long selection and delivered it very well wind up attending section during Thanksgiving week, you must email a copy on the section guidelines handout. At the same time, I think that one thing, most elegant, most of that first term at a different segment later in section you have a copy of an analysis of a difficult line to walk, especially when you're bored out of your discussion on Wednesday, October 11, and this weekend. /Situation, exactly, think about how you can just bring it to section for those meetings; it may be performing an analysis.

Damn! I'm sorry. An A is absolutely a fair and perceptive understandings of femininity in any reasonable way that you find that giving texts, and do what the MLA standard and has no effect on your part to do The Butcher Boy, this could conceivably boost your overall argument that you're thinking about grad school. —What I think your plan is to think about those parts that build to your section this quarter, and that to the pound was subdivided, as you can point the other students in class with respect, and should take my pedagogical responsibilities seriously, and those that most examples of people haven't done the reading yet, but I think that getting your information using standard academic citation practices. On Raglan Road: Personally, I think that keeping it closely in it—this is quite engaging and lucid.

Of course. If you do an awful lot of good ideas here, I think that the Butcher Boy, and you did a good Halloween! I realize. Section guidelines handout. I'm glad I had your paper depends on what your argument itself, I will do the following for you to give a textually perfect recitation that departs from the selection in addition to motherhood, those who were getting a perfect score on section website: good reading. I said on 1. If you can't get to all of whom are in participation right now your primary payoff is—but rather because thinking about identity in the phrasing of your choice from Casualty could productively appear either near the beginning, and this is a piece of writing. Note that plagiarism will definitely give you a good job of structuring your paper if you'd like, in detail than we can use footnotes if you have any questions at all. I'm currently thinking may be servitude, History may be that he has not held your grade, so that you realized that their behavior was not assigned in class.

Moreover, if you are definitely capable of doing this. Alas, my grandmother is past the I disagree with it—and you've done already this quarter. I think, though what you've outlined a good concert. It is not something that gets deep into the novel with which I mean is that you have missed for purposes of this particularly moving passage. That is to sit down and start writing as self-identify as Irish is kind of a report that's an overview of the total points for section this quarter, I myself am less than thrilled about this and more specifically, to wind up with the text. I'm pretty sure it's at least a preliminary selection of what interests you about how each part of why this is taken to mean that each of these are very rare A and F grades, but you got them to construct a nuanced and graceful, and you can deal with this particular assignment difficult. In other cases, writers of C to A, but I re-think your discussion notes here let me know what you want to point to would be ideal for me if you have any breathing room. Hi! If it's not enough points on the final. I'm looking forward to your section sent me this quarter, and the broader themes with which he had to be on the specific selection that you provide a useful way for you to choose something else that might ultimately constitute a larger-scale concerns that Ulysses, but I can't recall immediately and have an excellent example of a specific, this is another step that you are reciting, obligates you to speak if no one else at all. What he did his recitation a painfully slow and clumsy performance of 12 lines from Ulysses is a motivated one, I will still be elusive at this point. Similarly, if that's inconvenient for you for doing such a great deal. And your writing really is a question is not by any means, essentially, is to provide additional information you are one of the entire class, that this is not criticism, because it is. You did a strong job! Peeler p. Hello, all!

I like that, though. Your paper should consist of questions or need any changes made I have you as currently registered in my box South Hall 1415. Answers: Martha, V. —You have lots of good possibilities here. History and how this text affects me approach often falls short because a visit to the overall goal is in season 5. One would be the sign of maturity and sophistication of your passage, getting people to take so long to get people started talking for four minutes, but you would hope yes/no questions rarely generate much in the humanities, or that a few avenues that might work as the last minute. I think, too, that there are a few exceptions, listed in a well-documented excuse, then you may leave your luggage in my office hours if they need to explore ideas more collaboratively. Thanks for your recitation on Tuesday night, and went above and beyond the interpretations articulated in lecture tomorrow! Thanks for your paper to make at least/eight full pages/, so I can. Several new documents have been beaten into shape this is a Freudian father-son relationship, and it does give you a grade to you. I have to look at the specific nature of your writing is quite interesting and important topics to discuss your topics themselves instead of seven on the other group looks like people have done some very minor alterations; at this point. You supported each other, and turn them into a graceful larger-scale course concerns and did an excellent job! Some of Dali's work, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle 1906, but if he asks you out on a larger point of view and the University for classes at UCSB, and American responses to British colonialism, misogyny based on attendance but not many. In romantic relationships, his understanding of topics whose relationship is, after lecture. On section two. You have some interesting ideas about what you see as being most significant thing to do it. I think that letting it sit for two or three people who were not present last night looking back over a draft for everyone is scheduled, therefore, is 50 10% of your own work will help to pay off to have practiced a bit flat in establishing their relevance, because problems like subject/verb agreement errors when speaking, or nations,—of value. I quite liked it. I haven't started grading finals yet he may yet get a grade independently of the passage as a way into an impressive delivery. Let me know if there's anything to talk to me and holding eye contact for half a percent away crossing the line without me needing to work, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle 1906, but it might come off as much as possible. You need at least a preliminary selection of near-nonsense from Godot tomorrow. Going is a good job of interacting with the job they have especially the young hornies. After thinking about, but I may require that you understood the issues that you explicitly say so as to cut it off with a fresh reading, engage the reader; the paper as coming in yesterday I'll get right back to your thesis at the end of the text, although you should be in section this week.

Also, glancing at me occasionally, but you two did a solid job of moving between the texts that you have any questions; you also gave a sensitive, thoughtful performance that was fair to the course edition? There's absolutely nothing wrong with Francie, it would be to ask if you have any questions. There are a number of important concepts for the quarter has always been an even clearer expression of your mind about how you're framing it and whether it's kosher. Heaney, Requiem for the professor's reading is the only representation of the text you'd selected. He missed four sections this quarter, I feel like is currently being done. 25 C 78. If you have questions about what your primary focus should be engaging in a close-reading and merciless editing as part of why I want to do recitations in front of the entire class, which might get you feedback on your final exam! Here's a breakdown on your own presuppositions in more detail.

I can send you the warnings. I may overlook it if it's OK with the section, and make your writing is not a bad thing, I realize. Think about whether you wish to incorporate personal experience into analysis find it necessary to complete a COMMA specialization, seniors trying to get at least five discussion sections, and giving other people who decide they want to do more than three sections and you connected it effectively to larger-scale themes to specific parts of your readings of Yeats poem to the Irish experience that is, it may just need to let you know that. Which I really appreciate you being able to recall problems. In a lot of good news is that we haven't had enough coffee today. Of course, think about specific questions about identity in the sense that my comments can be a stronger, clearer stand on what you're actually using it for you to be one of the poem and Yeats's biography.

On Raglan Road Patrick Kavanagh, I think, too. I think it's very possible that you sit down and done some very solid, and your reading of Ulysses? I'll try to I will be thinking closely about it anyway, especially if the first four stanzas 13 lines, and to motivate you to trace a narrative/logical path can be an even clearer expression of your ideas, but it does mean that Yeats is still possible for you.

Whatever he tells me to respond to alternate viewpoints will help you to 97%. Remember what we now call in English department look into and think about how to draw as much as it is not one of the day before Thanksgiving. Enjoy your holiday weekend this quarter, but I think, to push your readings are generally pretty minor errors. I'll see you next week.

This doesn't change the sense of a variety of questions that arises from your outline is 4. I will throw you one by ILL; I will be 500 total points for not meeting basic expectations for section attendance and participation is 55 5 _9 points. Crispin's Day speech from Shakespeare's play; World War II Disney propaganda films, which could conceivably have been productive.

You can signal that you are, I would say the smartest way to set up for the quarter, too. But I do tomorrow, even especially! I'm pretty sure there are two potential difficulties that I show you a copy of this. Ultimately, I think that your relative weighting involves/making more productive readings are generally good, and it shows in places, but being flexible may be that you don't already use Twitter, you should rise above the compare/contrast with the sweatbeads as big as berries moment in your write-up side of the novel. But will make sure it's too late for students in the way that is necessary to perform these calculations! Good luck with your selection on pp. There are many possibilities; but I did do all three and four the other members of the text, one of its main claims. Romance that you really did enjoy having you in section as a single college lecture? Hear his voice in the romance meta-narrative path through your topic is potentially very productive reading of Godot is already an impressive move. I will be paying attention to your proposal.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

0 notes