Centennial Celebrations!

This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot publishing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"!  This poem is my absolute favorite (ok, tied with the thematically similar "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats).  I've mentioned Prufrock on the blog before and even wrote a really fun, final paper on it this Winter.  It's so bizarre and beautiful and tragic and a perfect statement on the time.  

Here, from 0:00-0:24, Tom Hiddleston recites the haunting introduction [I seriously need his recitation of the whole poem!].  And here are just a few of my other favorite lines:

Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea...

Do I dare
Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

[I have this Obvious State print up in my kitchen]

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The childlike cadence used to convey the heavy, mythic philosophical themes is just marvelously profound to me!!  "Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."  If you want to (re-)revel in some mystery, I'd suggest reading through T. S. Eliot's first poetic masterpiece. 

Snippets

"The first [romantic fantasy] can hit me anywhere, though it's most often when I'm watching television or I'm looking out the window of a train or subway, and it's that there is a head resting on my shoulder that must have been there the whole time that I haven't noticed until now. And in the fantasy, or because of the fantasy--it's hard to tell the difference--I suddenly feel this surge of something like the combination of safety and elation, knowing that every sight I see, no matter how small, is now important because it's shared. I don't need to look at the head on my shoulder & I never do. Because what's so important to me is not what the person looks like, but that we are seeing the same thing.

"The second fantasy is that a small child, about 4 years old, is crying because she's drawn all over the wall with her crayons & has just realized that what she has done is going to subject her to some unknown form of justice. I put on a serious face & explain to the child that her mother & I are going to discuss what her punishment should be. Then I close the door to another room and, with relief, I drop the serious face and laugh and kiss the young artist's mother and ask her what in the world we should do about this creature we made who wanted to put colors on the walls and is scared what we're going to say about it."

- BJ Novak, "Sophia," One More Thing

Suffragette

Aside from Star Wars, this is the film I'm most looking forward to in 2015.  And the trailer is finally here:

I find this tragic, mainly for two reasons.  First off, what does it say about our society and about the industry that it's taken this long for a studio-backed retelling of the suffragette movement?  Universal suffrage (for women and people of color) is one of the most significant issues of human rights and yet we're only beginning to tell their stories with films like Selma and now Suffragette.  They faced atrocious horrors in striving toward these rights--and I do say striving not achieving as we still have work to do.  But that leads to the second reason this is so tragic: because we're still struggling over the same basic questions.  As Dorothy Sayers so bluntly put it Are Women Human?  And, though it's 2015, Suffragette reinforces, "I'm worth no more, no less than you."

But I also find it so very beautiful.  For the United States, August 18, 2017 will mark 100 years that women will have had the right to vote--making 2016 only the 25th presidential election women had any say in.  Long and not long at the same time, the right to vote can never be appreciated enough and the sacrifices it took to earn should never be forgotten. 

"Sometimes the night was beautiful 
Sometimes the sky was so far away 
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close 
You could touch it but your heart would break..." 

- Rich Mullins

Been watching lately...

So if we've talked recently, Gilmore Girls has probably come up - I've fallen completely in love with it!!

When I was in high school, my penchant for reading combined with my attendance at a private school earned me many comparisons to Rory Gilmore.  As I got older, people even noted us looking alike.  One time while working retail I walked up to a customer and asked if I could help her, she turned around and then slightly gasped, saying, "Oh my gosh! I thought you were Alexis Bledel!!" Because she would work at an office supply store?  Haha... anyway, the comparisons were enough to make me want to check out the show at some point.

Well now, thanks to the series coming to Netflix, I have been able to!  I'm nearly half-way through the show and it's so good - funny but dramatic, witty and emotional.  They feel like close friends and I'm pretty much ready to move to Stars Hollow :)

Here are just a few favorite moments:

And finally... the perfect way to deal with someone you're mad at:

Classic.

[via]

It's not the end of the world and I know it will be okay... 

Going Wilde

Ok, so it's not exact but, for our Dead Author Reading, this was my inspiration:

And this, my execution:

Best decisions for this particular costume have to be the [faux, of course,] fur, parting my hair in the middle, and constructing my own cane with a wrapping paper tube & the lid to my hairspray :)

Oh, and my chosen selection was Wilde's preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

Set
     backs


Dear Spring,
For a season of new life, why so many set
backs?  Why the confusion and self-doubt? 
To be honest, why all the tears?

Mentally, I know these are not life-ending, but
they are life-altering--
so many decisions; so many do-I-dares1.
My composure is wearing thin,
my strength is waning, in their place
only well-worn seams struggling with the tension
of holding this self together.

Primavera.  "Springtime."
Prima vera.  "First real."
I think broken apart, like myself, 
those words offer a better answer
to my initial question.  
Why all the set
backs?  
Because of all the realities.
Ones I'm experiencing for the first time. 
Realities I thought would skip me.  Set
backs I had hoped to avoid. 

Yet a wise philosopher2 conjectures, "Pain is 
what you experience when you bump into reality."
For some aspects of life, this is the "first
real" of a Spring where to become whole,
one must be broken; to move forward, one must be set
back.


1 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
2 Definitions by Dallas Willard

The peony gods had mercy. 

I called around and was able to find a place nearby that at least had peonies incorporated in their bouquets. Hopefully this will invigorate my soul for the upcoming weeks - they're big ones & I've been feeling like a lazy bum. Cheers to peonies!

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

- Robert Frost 

I've reached the point of the year in which I need peonies.  Like, two weeks ago.

Preferably I'd be watching the shoots grow, the buds swell and burst with countless petals.  Then I could bring a few of those extravagant blooms into the house and inhale of that delicately sweet aroma.  And... oh.  I really need peonies!!

[via]

"And I'm learning, so I'm leaving

And even though I'm grieving,

I'm still trying to find the meaning.

Let loss reveal it..."

- Florence + the Machine

St. Jude

see you in seaside

last weekend i went on an early birthday get away 
with my two closest friends to seaside.

cruising down Highway 101 with taylor swift
dresses, sunnies, and i'm wearing cami's hat
also, i drew on a beauty mark because why not?

raspberry pie at sweet basil in canon beach
there was a live band and they sang me happy birthday :)

the sea!
it was surprisingly lovely for seaside in april
we came here last memorial day and we lucked out both times
and #sorrynotsorry for my compounding navy polk-a-dot patterns (thank you, target)

just for a comparison shot, here we are last year
#whydoesntanyonewannadancewithus
i love seeing how our hairs have changed...
but some things haven't.

so grateful for these friends
we are each really different and yet we get each other
it is unbelievably wonderful to be accepted entirely as you are - no judging!

isn't cami just too adorable back in her hat?    ^
v    and beks smile in the upper left

i love that we can be classy... and silly
the bottom right is us and our emperor palpatine hoods

and she bought us best friend t-shirts that are so accurate!
sorry if i don't look as enthusiastic as i felt...
we kinda partied-hardied the night before and zzzzz...

thank you, ladies, for such a wonderful weekend away!
i just feel so lucky to have you. lovoo!

Also.....

I'M SO

FREAKING

EXCITED!!!!

I feel like a lot of my favorite web series have wrapped up or are on hiatus... But! I have at least one mainstay to see me through right now and that is:  From Mansfield with Love.  I mentioned it briefly here, but now I can do one better.  The creators just released their own trailer:

I hope this hooks you and that, if it does, you'll share your thoughts below :)

Holy Saturday

I hope you are having a mindful and grace-filled Holy Week...

I wanted to share just a few things I've been meditating on--especially during the dark in-between-ness of Christ Crucified and Christ Resurrected.

I love what Micah J. Murray has written here on Good Friday.  In this prose-poem, "God is Dead," he explores the decimating reality of when God was dead.  The women and the Beloved Disciple at the cross must have held hope till the very last that He who could heal and He who could command the seas could and would rescue himself.  But no.  "It is finished" was the crushing blow to such hopes.  Murray writes:

Of course the earth shook when the breath that had formed mankind slipped from the lungs of the very One who first spoke it all into existence. I wonder that mountains and oceans and planets and stars didn’t all plummet together into an infinite void of darkness, when the hands that had molded them fell limp and lifeless, pierced and broken. 

“God is dead...”

And on this day, we don't get to rush ahead to the happy ending.  On this day we identify with the finality of hope lost.  And in this moment, I understand the words that my soul so often pushes against when TS Eliot said:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

- East Coker  

In so doing, we empathize with those who have lost hope in their own lives.  At the beginning of Lent, I read this beautiful reflection by Josh Ross who pointed out that, this year, Holy Saturday falls on the same day as the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As he so wonderfully puts it:

I think—as for now—April 4th belongs on the Saturday after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday. It is the day that adequately describes where we are in race relations today throughout our world...
Saturday is where we often live. It is the day of questioning, doubt, anxiety, and confusion. There is an awkwardness about Saturday; an uncertainty of how exactly this story is going to pan out.
Race in America is not where it was. Yet, it also isn’t where it needs to be. We can’t go back to the days of utter darkness, despair, oppression, and striping certain groups of dignity, yet we also can’t pretend as if we have arrived at somewhere we have not.

Holy Saturday reminds us that far too many areas of our world have yet to experience Resurrection.

And yet, today I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich and exploring the notion of felix culpa--literally "happy fall." St. Augustine said of this notion: "Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere quam mala nulla esse permittere."  Or, in English, "For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist."

Holy Saturday means Christ is in the tomb and hope seems vain, "but all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well..."

Grad School: Term 2 of 6

First week of the term: 

Last week of the term:

Hi!  Just a little late-night update on my final papers...

So yesterday I submitted my 2nd grad paper on the Lizzie Bennet Diaries - I still can't believe they let me do that.  I was writing about it for a film class, applying theories of form, gender, and reception.  It seemed a bit messy even when I turned it in, but it did give me some ideas I want to expand into my thesis project :)

I'm now working on a really interesting paper going in all sorts of crazy directions: Victorian standardization of time, Hesiod's socieconomic perspective in Works and Days, postcolonial theory, Hamlet, a bit of Foucault, and Odysseus's sirens... I told my brother: "Right now they're like a bunch of sheep running in different directions and I need to become Babe! #BahRamEwe" I'm about 1/3 of the way there and it is pretty fun.  The text I'm working with is also a favorite--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

But now I should get some rest so I can scribble out some more good ideas tomorrow. Bonne nuit!

:)

This does my dead-week soul good.

This is happening :D

It is based on the paper I wrote last term.  Here is the abstract:

Adaptation Theo(re-) and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

My paper examines the current environment of adaptation studies as applied to new media forms of storytelling.  Evolving from a word vs. image debate, the adaptation theories produced by Robert Stam and Linda Hutcheon are opening a space for dialogic exploration, with Hutcheon suggesting adaptation is about “repetition, but repetition without replication.”  Both suggest that the aim of re-telling a story is not direct translation, but re-interpretation and re-creation, and are interested in viewing these re-creations as palimpsest, investigating how adaptation allows people to see the original work in a new way.

After a review of the shift in adaptation perspectives, this paper turns to look at The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a transmedia retelling of Pride and Prejudice set as a vlog in modern day California.  Across platforms including YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, this Emmy-award winning web series spent a year re-working the 200-year-old novel in “real-time.”  While completely re-interpreting certain concerns—the Bennet’s entailed estate is now a faulty mortgage; Collins “proposal” is for a job, not a marriage—the creators of this series simply update others.  In this paper and PowerPoint presentation, I argue that far from detracting from the core narrative, these changes were made in order to better explore the question at the core of both Jane Austen’s novel and the web series.

In the final turn of my paper, I examine how centering the climax of the story on their interpretation of the Lydia-Wickham scandal, the creators of this series take Lizzie’s empathetic lesson a step further, extending her repentance to include both her misunderstanding of Darcy and of a fully realized Lydia Bennet.  In doing so, they not only work against stereotype, but also encourage viewers to re-examine their assumption of Pride and Prejudice, creating the type of palimpsestuous learning moment adaptation studies strive for. 

loving love

Today I was studying in Starbucks and within an hour, they played:

• "Wandering Back" by Sucre
• "Emphasis" by Sleeping at Last
• "Tongues of Fire" by John Mark McMillan

The rest of the day has been pretty decent, too... but those favorites were in close succession and made me feel like I had won some sort of award :) 

"Someday, I want to own a U-Park lot... just so I can spell it correctly."

- things 11 tells me

on Valentine's Day

in Portland