Posts Tagged ‘ arthur is my holmboy ’

Tragically hip

Today I learned that the real reason Tybalt had to kill Mercutio was because he was about to take over the play.

I learned that, much like Hegel, John Cage is the answer to almost everything.

I learned that Walter Benjamin is superhip right now, despite the fact that he’s not a great illumination and his name isn’t pronounced the way it looks like it is. I learned in writing that post that the other most famous Benjamins are Benjamin the saint, Benjamin the paint, and Benjamin the beanie baby.

I learned that “when the avant-garde conforms to what’s expected of it, it adapts itself to worthlessness”.

I learned that it’s one thing not to mention lepers in your book about elephants, but it’s another not to mention female elephants in your book about elephants. “That’s just an unmitigated attack.”

I learned that novelty is unpopular and that you will only squeak by if you have a constitutional sugar daddy.

And I learned that “you can no longer terrify the bourgeoisie, because now that’s very chic and very popular.” Well, shit.

2012
02/08
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Barthing up the wrong tree

Today was a day of much learning. Or, as I like to call it in grad school, “learning”.

I learned from cracked-out final-week-zombie undergrads that “studying makes you simple”.

I learned that a work of art is not the same thing as someone who goes out and buys milk and cheese and bread.

I learned that “he’s not an idiot, Eliot. I just want you to know that.”

I learned that the Mona Lisa was the Kim Kardashian of the 16th century.

I learned that in the 19th century, the idea that a young girl would invent sins was very scandalous to people.

I learned that Emma Bovary is just Don Quixote in a skirt.

I learned that “your life is not a novel by Sir Walter Scott”.

I learned that

Insignificant notation (taking this word in its strong sense: apparently detached from the narrative’s semiotic structure) is related to description, even if the object seems to be denoted only by a single word (in reality, the “pure” word does not exist: Flaubert’s barometer is not cited in isolation; it is located, placed in a syntagm at once referential and syntactic); thus is underlined the enigmatic character of all description, about which a word is necessary: the general structure of narrative, at least as it has been occasionally analyzed till now, appears as essentially predictive; schematizing to the extreme, and without taking into account numerous detours, delays, reversals, and disappointments which narrative institutionally imposes upon this scheme, we can say that, at each articulation of the narrative syntagm, someone says to the hero (or to the reader, it does not matter which): if you act in this way, if you choose this alternative, this is what will happen (the reported character of these predictions does not call into question their practical nature).

That is one sentence. ONE SENTENCE, out of the mind of this jerk, but it’s ok if I don’t understand it, because it is tinged with the language of linguistics and he said it before he became a post-structuralist. PHEW.

And I learned that you can achieve a transcendent emotional experience only through art. It is wrong to look in life for what you can only get through art. It is also wrong to try to seek it through grad school.

2011
12/14
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Anarchy in the Bard

Today I learned that anarchy cannot produce art.  You have to have form.

And yet “there’s a kind of anarchy in the Marx Brothers.  Particularly Harpo.  He’s running around with his horn…I mean, he’s basically a rapist.”

I learned that it doesn’t count to take off all your clothes if you leave your jock strap on.

I learned that you can’t teach someone to be talented if you can’t even teach him to be boring.  The best you can do is teach him to be maximally boring.

I learned that theft is theft.

I learned that everything ultimately becomes something for the media.

I learned that “Hamlet has many problems.  His mother is just one of them.”

And I learned that we have no concrete Shakespearean text because Shakespeare didn’t have a concept of a Shakespearean text.

2011
12/07
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Pole growth

Today I learned that when things get bad with a play, you should just sit in the back of the theater and eat comforting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I learned that you can barnstorm a wrestling circuit.  I didn’t learn this firsthand, unfortunately.

I learned that scotch was behind the bourbon renaissance.

I learned that, although we all want to murder theater directors sometimes, only security guards actually do it.

I learned that before Houston’s Alley Theater got its own building, it put on its productions in a space that had a tree growing through the roof.  This was clearly a predecessor to Houston’s Minute Maid Park, which features not only a retractable roof to accommodate potentially overgrown flora, but also a man-made hill, a flagpole in centerfield, a choo-choo train, and the souls of countless oompa loopmas buried underneath home plate.

I learned that the Alley Theater ‘s subsequent home looks like a building that Stalinist architects designed on shrooms.  However, they forgot to put a statue of him on top.

I learned that Boards of Directors would be better off if they were comprised of drug addicts, homosexuals, and college students.

I learned that everybody fails at romance.

I learned that you have to be careful in the timing of your Grotowski admiration, because it can be a bad cultural move to admire someone who “at this point is just walking around hugging trees”.

I learned that one day Hegel is not going to be the right answer. I keep telling people that this day is going to happen at a kegger, but no one seems to care.

I learned that if you turn to your internal world, “you end up with people like Kafka”.

I learned that the best way to see character is to force someone to make an impossible choice, and that character growth happens between poles.  You’re telling me.

And I learned that you can create whatever world you want within the world, but you have to believe in it.  And that you never have to apologize if you’re culturally alive.  I wonder if blogging counts.

2011
11/16
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Protiki

Today I learned that you don’t get to the White House unless you have signed a contract with Mephistopheles.

I learned that Golda Meir knew that everybody loved a bargain because she wore a $10 hat to meet the pope.

I learned that if you want to start a utopian society, “something hippie theater crap always gets in the way”.

I learned that kontiki are carved wooden or stone idols that you pray to for happiness. Having once spent a weekend at the Howard Johnson’s Tiki Resort in Lake George, New York, I’d say people who pray to anything tiki-related for happiness are probably onto something.

(Note: I cannot find anything on the internet that relates either contiki or kontiki to anything but some famous raft. Perhaps I was misinformed. Perhaps I have bad hearing and/or spelling.  Perhaps I should have left this tidbit out of today’s lesson, but perhaps I will use any excuse I can to reference Howard Johnson’s Tiki Resort in Lake George, New York, at any opportunity.)

I learned that capitalism is a censorship of money.

I learned that there are distinctions between realism and naturalism, but their literary strategies are the same.  I learned that romantics cannot deal with contemporary society.

I learned that “there is nothing wrong with dinner theater.  People want to go and get a good meal.  Of course, very often the meal is terrible.”

And I learned that a commodity fetish is something imbued with a belief in a magical quality it does not inherently possess.  From now on, I will refer to grad school as my commodity fetish, because I feel like arbitrarily throwing around the word “commodity” may somehow help me pay back my student loans one day.

2011
11/09
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Frankenmarxism

Today I learned that if you squint, Karl Marx looks a little like Frederick Douglass.

(Like two sides of the same border.)

I learned that Marx had a Marxist phase.

I learned that there is no Darwin, no Marx, and no Freud without Hegel.  You know who I had never heard of before I got to grad school?  Hegel.  You know whose name is never, ever going to get me out of an awkward pause in conversation at a party?  Three guesses.

I learned that comma placement determines the presence or absence of coitus.  You can bet that this one will be getting me out of one of those awkward pauses at some point.

I learned that everybody loves Joan of Arc.

I learned that you can be alternately mumbly and shouty only if you’re Marlon Brando.

And I learned that the environment in which you live turns you into a predatorial Frankenmonster of capitalism.  I wish someone had told me this before I got all judgy on the kids a couple of days ago.

2011
11/02
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China blue

Today I learned that you’re allowed to veer off traditional plot structure in individual scenes if you include Expressionist tendencies. But philosophy never dramatizes well.

I learned that if you make port in the Greek isles on a humanities cruise, you want to try to avoid the striking dock workers.  For the record, the last vacation I took was to Worcester, Massachusetts.  Unless you count the day I spent at Kennywood last summer.

(If you squint, it looks just like the Acropolis.)

I learned that it’s sad to cultivate anything without a producing arm at the finish line.

I learned that if you’re going to have a festival, you have to have a festival.

I learned that a good writer should be present everywhere but visible nowhere.  I think this is pretty much also what you’re supposed to do to be a good grad student.

I learned that “Greek gods were immoral.  They were like movie stars.”

I learned that the middle class destroyed men’s fashion, and that decadence is a war cry.

I learned that it gets harder every day to live up to your blue china.

And most of all, I learned that if you lose your tiny shining diamond pendant, probably one of two things on earth that carries the most sentimental value to you, the one place you don’t want to do it is the building that is perpetually coated in millions of tiny shining pieces of glitter.

2011
10/26
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Citizen insane

Today I learned that social ills are too euphemistic.

I learned that France loves Julius Caesar even when he’s boring.

I learned a lot about Orson Welles, including but not limited to the following:

  • He permeated organizations with his air of insanity.
  • He decimated plays to get to the heart of them, i.e., his role.
  • He paved the way for the playoff beard by refusing to shave in anticipation of a role, which forced the bankrupt director to produce the play out of respect for said beard.  By the time the play opened, Welles was so convinced the director was trying to kill him that he threw a phone at the director and spewed milk all over the stage.  This presumably did not bode well for the performance, nor for Welles’s playoff beard.
  • He nevertheless pleased the soupmakers.

I learned that unspoken poetry is an aberration.  And that semiotics has an entirely different vocabulary.  I don’t know what it has a different vocabulary from.  I don’t know what semiotics is.

I learned that the reason that the mother in The Glass Menagerie is an effective character is because she is a vampire.

I learned that “Providence is a wild city when it comes to sexual ambiguity”.

I learned that one of the six design components of poetry is sound, which is formulated by a combination of tone, attitude and movement.  To which I say: here’s my poetry, bitches.

 

This blog is one year old today.  I did not start the blog until several months into school, and I have seven months to go until graduation.  That means I am celebrating the blog’s birthday by basking in the knowledge that I have so little time to go in comparison to time already served, which means I CRUSH GRAD SCHOOL.  Provided I do my thesis.

2011
10/12
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iQuote

Today I learned that 1964 is the year of the day.

I learned that if you want to find a woman, you should find a woman, because your professor is not going to do it for you.

I learned that it’s important to have a locket in stories about a lost bastardized child.

I learned that “if you’re a playwright and you’re tone-deaf, you should get out of the theater.”

I learned when you’re charged with finding a love letter from a Civil War soldier, you may not want to go with the first letter you find.  Especially when the first letter you find begins, “Dear Dick: I must stick my pot stick in everything.”

I learned that “squoosh it” is the best command.

I learned that “a broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.”

I learned that “people don’t usually speak when they’re alone unless they’re insane.”  (The converse of this does not hold true, because I’m surrounded by people who speak in my presence all the time, and they are all insane, because they’re in grad school.)

It was a day of quotable learning.

Most importantly, I learned that a very lovely professor will be baffled by an ipad, asking its owner “What is that very thin thing?”  But said professor, at 84 years old and having paid $11K for his first word processor in 1959, is nonetheless handy with an iphone.  Well done, Steve Jobs.

2011
10/06
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Foxy meditations

Today I learned that a meditation on a cemetery can be very beautiful.

I learned that Christopher Marlowe was a double agent. “He was playing a very dangerous game.”

I learned that a random kid with an American accent can wander around Cambridge, MA, and declare without a trace of irony that the only sports he finds tolerable are “hockey, soccer, and cricket”.  What, no lacrosse?  Whither water polo?

Most importantly, I learned that “you have to earn your ‘tude.”

2011
09/21
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