in Life's name and for Life's sake

Fuck, you guys, Berkeley is going up in metaphorical flames: The Police Riot At Berkeley: If They'll Beat A Poet Laureate, Will They Kill A Student?

At another time I'll have something to say about how strange it is to feel closer to events happening on the opposite side of the country than those happening just half an hour's subway ride south of where I work and live, but that's not what this post is about.

This post is about the queasiness I felt when I realized that one of the women at the front of the linked-arms line of protesters, one of the first people to be pulled aside and forced to the ground by the police, was Celeste Langan, my romanticism professor, who wrote me letters of rec and sponsored my SURF project last summer and gave me incredibly cogent and compassionate grad school advice. I'd seen the YouTube video of this action a week ago. I hadn't realized that it was her -- the thought had never even crossed my mind, and I assumed, watching the clip, that since all of the students I knew had more or less graduated, the terror of the thing would be about violence happening in a place that has, for me, epitomized the grandeur and import of learning and knowledge. I never expected that it would be happening to people who epitomized the same thing. I got another shock when I realized that the Geoffrey O'Brien whose ribs were broken by the police is Joanna Picciotto's long-term partner, and Joanna is my absolute role model/future self. 

Thank god Celeste is okay, and she wrote a brief and wonderful account of her arrest -- why she protested, what it means to her, and how appalled she is (and will continue to be). I don't know yet about Professor O'Brien, though he's quoted by ABC News local describing the event after the fact, so presumably he's more or less okay:

"I said, 'if you're going to hit somebody, hit a professor,'" O'Brien admitted. "The cop said, 'you want some?' It was a rhetorical question, and I was hit viciously in the ribs and went to the ground."

I'm torn between feeling an immense upwelling of pride that THESE ARE MY PEOPLE, this is where I come from (and where I'd like to be going back to), and a visceral disgust that just about tears my innards out, because HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO MY PEOPLE. When I first heard the news I was physically sick to my stomach for a few minutes and couldn't say a word about it. It's about an hour later now and I am still feeling it (though it's mostly transmuted itself into a headache, as all my anxieties always do). 

I started this entry feeling like I had something important to say, but right now all I think I can say is that I'm disgusted and terrified and I just want to go cry somewhere for a bit, but NONE of that is going to get my state and my country and my former university back in working order. And I don't know what will.

Originally posted by gabrielleabelle at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Guys, this is outrageous and I hope I don't have to tell you why. Please, do what you can, even if it's just spreading awareness.

Because Jacqueline insisted that I "lj the heck out of" this, I figure I have to. :)

So yesterday for Father's Day my family drove up to Westwood for lunch and to see the play Farragut North. It's a political drama set during the presidential primaries that focuses on the backroom politicking that goes on over the course of two or three days leading up to the Iowa caucuses. The central character is 25-year-old Stephen Bellamy, a superstar press secretary for the fictional Morris campaign; the play follows him through a series of bad decisions (at first innocently bad, culminating with menacingly bad) that change the shape of the campaign, or at least Stephen's involvement in it. To me, it felt like a more cynical version of The West Wing with much more swearing (amazing what you can say when you don't have to keep it clean for TV), and although I missed the general optimism-under-pressure of West Wing, this definitely painted a picture of what always could happen to the good guys (and sometimes does).

Of course, the highlight of the show was that aforementioned political wunderkind Stephen was played by Chris Pine (which is basically the main reason that we went to see the show -- well, the main reason my sister went, anyway; some of us were there for the politicking). Personally, I thought he did a great job with the role, and gave it the right kind of nuance. It would've been easy to play up certain character traits earlier in the play that would have made the ending less surprising, but it's supposed to be a surprise: the point isn't that everyone in politics is an angry bastard who, when it comes down to it, will sacrifice anything to save his own skin. The point is that even intelligent guys sometimes make bad decisions and get played. I definitely still had sympathy for Stephen at the end of the play, though not in the same way as I had when the play opened.

A word for sets and stage transitions: The stage was pretty bare but with alternating blue and white-blue almost-checkerboard squares projected onto it (each big enough for a person to stand in) and looked pretty awesome. But the awesomest part was the transitions between scenes. While the hardy props team was readying each new set, the same projector that (presumably) projected the chessboard motif was used to show faked news clips. You could still see all the people onstage, yes, but personally I was focusing on the news.

But back to Chris Pine. I should start this off by saying that my sister's much more of the star-shocked one than me -- I wouldn't say she chose UCLA as a school specifically so that she could be in the middle of all the entertainment world, but it was definitely a motivating factor. She's interested in being some part of the media circus, and definitely has her actor crushes. Sometimes I think they're a little silly. This time, I can't blame her. Chris Pine is actually a good actor and not just a pretty face (though oh my goodness is he ever a pretty face).

Anyway, the whole going to see the show thing was at first largely Corinne's idea. I'd seen ads for it in the paper but not really thought about going to see it, until I mentioned it to her and her brain took off like a rocketship. Sometimes she comes off a little too naive-fangirl for her tastes or mine, but I have to give her the credit for getting my family to go see this play, and for forcing me to stick around with her afterward until Chris Pine came out from backstage. I hadn't really thought I cared too much but I will only be slightly ashamed when I admit that when I saw him standing less than six feet away from me I got the stomach tingles. There were surprisingly few would-be stalkers present (though I will say that is the great thing about small theaters -- did I mention that the Geffen is not huge at all?), so after he greeted a couple of people he knew who'd come to watch the show, Corinne and I were first in line to get some autographs. Not that you can really tell from a two-minute slice of time, but he seems like a nice guy. I forgot to ask him who his favorite English professors were at Berkeley (he graduated from there with a degree in English) but I did get this beautiful picture. And I got to see a great play. All in all a pretty great day!

Watch this movie. I don't care if you're dying in the next five minutes, spend two of them on this. You won't be disappointed.

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Is poetry ever not relevant? Since before the Bible we have been saying the things that we really mean in poetry. This semester in school I'm reading poetry spanning the years from 1800 BCE to the present and it's hitting me more than ever how important poetry is to our way of life.

This, of course, comes with a caveat. Poetry as a form of expression and a way of exploring society and tension and life is important. This does not mean that every poem is important. It definitely does not mean that it's better to say a thing in poetry. It just means that poetry as an artform is an exceedingly important aspect of modern society in ways that people don't understand. Sure, few people go around carrying copies of Shakespeare or Milton or Whitman or Eliot, but how many people go around carrying iPods jam-packed with songs? Song is just a step up from spoken-word poetry. I don't think people realize that.

I don't always (read: very infrequently) agree with the contemporary conception of poetry in the literary sense. Most of the poems that I read for my poetry workshop course don’t have any emotional impact upon me. I cannot stand the postmodern/contemporary poetic system in which poems can be so obscure. I think that the purpose of the modern poet ought to be to write things that will make the modern audience feel.

In conjunction with that, I have issues with the current ideas about the connection between a poem and its meaning. Many of the poems I’ve been reading in Hejinian’s class are so opaque that you cannot see through them to the meaning--you cannot even feel through them to the meaning. I care less about seeing the obvious meaning of a poem the first time I read it than I do about being able to sense somewhere deep in my gut that this poem has purpose. Poems should not exist to hide meaning, they should exist to present it, in a condensed way that is understood by the subconscious, or by what I more frequently refer to as the gut. I want poetry that makes my stomach shiver. I want poetry that affects the primal sense still left within me, that sense that tends to frighten the modern civilized urbanite. Howl was such an explosion in its time because it got to the guts of these people who were not used to having their guts gotten to and who did not like to think of themselves as still possessing guts, having attempted to trade them in for stock options.

I want poetry for the people. I was thinking earlier about how no one reads poetry any more. Once, it was possible to make a living as a poet. Now? People hardly read any poetry at all, unless it’s in school. People do not turn to poetry for succor; people do not turn to literature of any kind for succor, but that is another, larger problem. I wasn’t there when this happened, so I can’t state with any certainty that it is the case, but it seems to me that when people started withdrawing from poetry, poets started withdrawing from people. And that was the greatest mistake they could make.

Like Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed in their introduction to the collection of poetry entitled Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800 (okay, so I'm an English geek, so sue me), we should have a poetry that celebrates the everyday human language by using it. Language should not be about obstruction of meaning, but rather about presentation of meaning. There is no need to use language deliberately intended to make the comprehension of the poem’s eventual goal more difficult. This is not to say that a poem cannot present itself on multiple levels--there are some poems that, when approached intellectually (ex. within a classroom or analytic setting) yield very different levels of content.

To me, it is acceptable for a poem to have no discernible symbolism, or connection to literary or poetic conceits. One does not need to be able to analyze a poem for it to be a good poem. But really--one ought to be able to call it a good poem if one is to spend time analyzing it!

...and that's my poetry rant for the moment.

In other news, the reason that I was on here was to post my favorite stupidity of the day. I just received my official election guide in the mail, and was idly browsing the arguments for and against certain propositions (okay, I'll admit it, I turned straight to the "controversial" ones, mostly for the purpose of seeing what the other side was saying and then laughing/pointing/screaming in outrage at their idiocy). But for me, nothing quite beats the title of one of the authors in support of Proposition 8: Jeralee Smith, Director of Education for the California Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.

Um. Yeah. That's like saying, "Hey, faggot! We wanna be your friends!" Ex-gays and gays? Well isn't it nice that they're being inclusive. Let our ex-gays talk you out of your gay, too. You know, gay is like a country, you can leave whenever you like, like the expatriates. *fumes*

But back to the much more awesome topic of poetry! Not so awesome, because I have to write a paper about it, but still awesome, because it's poetry. Which is kind of what I ought to be doing right now -- working on my paper about Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." So I'm off to do that.

Lauren has already posted about this here, but I figured I'd add my encouragement to anyone interested in participating.

The livejournal community livelongnmarry is doing something pretty extraordinary -- they're holding an auction to raise money to support marriage equality. Users can advertise goods and services they're willing to sell, and the winning bidder doesn't get what they've bought until they can show the seller proof that they've donated the purchase price to one of a number of organizations working to defeat the CA ballot initiative that would define marriage in the state of California as a union between a man and a woman. Some people are selling art, fanfiction, original fiction, care packages, photography, baked goods, arts 'n' crafts stuff, you get the picture.

As of the moment, I'm selling some oneshot fanfics and a novel.

A serial novel, to be precise, to be delivered one chapter at a time over the course of a year, with plot and characters built to your specifications.

I really, really hope someone buys it, because I can't think of a more awesome reason to write a novel.

EDIT: Well, no one's bid on the novel yet, but I just raised $10 through the sale of a fanfiction oneshot! I'm planning to sell off up to ten of those...I figure that's something I can reasonably expect myself to manage, even if (hopefully when) the novel gets bought.

If you're not interested in reading about my personal politics right now, you don't have to, but last night I watched Barack Obama win Iowa by a margin of eight points over edwards and nine points over Hillary, and I needed to talk about it.

( Why I want Barack to win )

So I just had an idea for a story that would be fun to write, that I may or may not attempt some time this summer.

It actually came to me as a title: The Loyal Opposition. It would be a political novel, centering around the romance between two members of opposing political parties. Part of me thinks it should happen in the UK since "the loyal opposition" is the traditional title for the major party not currently in power in the House of Commons; if this were the case, the two politicians would both be MPs. If it ended up finding its setting in the US, they'd be members of the House of Representatives. Or maybe one would be a Rep, and the other would be a political consultant of some sort?

I probably wouldn't have enough information to make it into a full-length novel, but it could make for an interesting short story. At least, I think so.

It would be interesting to write because I'd like to explore the major differences between the major political parties. I think I'd be better able to do this if I set it in the States, because it would be interesting to deal with the stereotypes of each mainstream political party. I can just imagine the two politicians telling their parents that they're "sleeping with the enemy," so to speak. Anyway, it would allow for some legitimate political debate to occur. I'd also have to find some kind of political subplot -- I don't think I could write the entire thing about a romance alone. And if I did, I don't think many people would read it. I'd love to write something like First Among Equals by British author Jeffrey Archer. He deftly explored the intersection of the political and the personal...and I think that's something admirable.

Hm...it's really just a thought to keep in the back of my head until I'm inspired enough to write it. But who knows -- that inspiration may come sooner than I think...

Rachna, Katie and I are getting this shirt for Mr. Krucli (along with the syphilis and chocolate): http://www.bustedtees.com/shirt/prose/male

This one just entertains me because it's mostly sold out: http://www.bustedtees.com/shirt/stewartcolbert/male

I wish I'd heard about this shirt soon enough to buy it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seldo/424813319

Also, I like books: http://www.fatamerican.tv/shirtpage/bookpower.htm

Yes. Now I'll go to sleep.

I should be doing my math homework, or my chemistry homework. I should be making headway on one of the long-term assignments littering my calendar. I should be reviewing what I read last week in Road to War so that I don't completely fail the quiz we'll have tomorrow. I should, I should, I should.

But I'm not. This seems to happen to me a lot. I sit around thinking about what I should be doing, even when doing those things won't happen (and wouldn't necessarily be helpful if it did). I know my own limits and abilities; I know how much I can get away with. Maybe I should start trusting my own self-knowledge?

I'd really like to sit back with some knitting and watch more West Wing. And I think that might actually be what I do. It's amazing how sometimes you do what you want without thinking about what you should do. That's the feeling you should have for your entire life.

Random Recollection #1: My dreams last night

I had one really consistent dream that went a lot of places. I saved Sadie from a car accident, out-ran Rob for something-or-other, and came face to face with Julie Czerneda. (I think Diane Duane might've been there too, and she and Julie might've been arguing over something?) Anyway, I was talking to my dad about why I didn't want to be published by Random House, because they would market a story of mine as a kid's book when it's obviously not. Dad mentioned something about Random House publishing Eragon (which I don't know if they did, but I wouldn't be surprised, I have an odd memory for these things).  Anyway, Julie walked in on me and Dad when I was explaining this to him, and saying that I'd rather be published by DAW.  For some reason when Julie heard me talking about this she felt like I was being really arrogant (which maybe I was, but only because I only thought Dad could hear me).  And then I don't know what happened.  Take that, Freud.

Random Recollection #2: My phone

I have a new phone as of today.  He's sleek and black and in need of a good name.  Corinne says he's emo and needs an emo name.  For some reason I'm thinking of Tom or Carl (yes, there is a Young Wizards theme to my thoughts).  I'm thinking he needs a literary name, because all of my tech toys end up with them sooner or later.  But he strikes me as belonging to popular literature, not anything classical.  He's pretty nifty, though.  (And I've still got the same number, though nowadays no one loses their numbers when they change phones.)

Random Recollection #3: Berkeley interview?

I showed up a week early.  That's a nice way of putting it.  I think that's the phrase I'll use from now on.

Random Recollection #4: I'd like some politics

They should make more good political dramas -- books, movies, television, real life, I don't care.  I swear it's Rick's fault, but the political scene seems so dramatic to begin with, and in a way it's enticing.  I used to be afraid of the fact that I felt like I could be a politician.  Slowly but surely this fear's going away.

Random Recollection #5: Global warming

Melissa Etheridge's song from An Inconvenient Truth is really cool, and you should all listen to it.  When she performed it at the Oscars it was really neat because they had a screen in the background with all these facts on global warming, how to reduce your carbon emissions, etc.  The last phrase on the screen was "When you pray, move your feet."  I like the call to action -- don't just wish for things, make them happen.  It's always been a motto of mine, and I'm glad to see it reflected.

Random Recollection #6: And the Oscar goes to...

I'd like to win an Oscar, I think.  How this shall be accomplished remains to be seen, but I think it would be great fun. 

...and that's kinda what my life's been like lately.  Yeah.  Well, I have to wake up again tomorrow.  That's kind of annoying, but I know I'll handle it; I always do.