Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson

POETS Day! Dickinson and Hopkins as a Control Group

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week is gonna be over now, or it’s gonna be over in a few hours. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done. Cut it out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

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I’m re-reading David Foster Wallace’s essay, “E Unibus Pluram.” If you aren’t familiar, he discusses the impact of television on his generation of fiction writers, as well as those subsequent. He makes the case that we’ve been roped into an irony trap – too post-modern for our own good – and served a side of warped empathy to boot.

The idea that we’re shaped by consumed drama has nagged at me. Frankly, I feel bludgeoned by it. The saddest scene I’ve seen on video is one lost to channel surfing. It was one of those true crime investigative documentary series. I can’t find or recall the name of the show where I saw the original, but plenty of similar scenes exist. A young woman’s mother was murdered. She’s giving her victim’s impact statement before a judge as part of the pre-sentencing procedure. This should be unprecedented in someone’s life. There should be no proper way of doing things. There should be no blueprint. But she has one.

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POETS Day! Emily Dickinson, The Myth [Updated!]

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[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Baseball is over for the year. They’re still playing games, but don’t let that fool you. In a particularly cruel twist of plot the Orioles went down in three straight after coaxing long suffering fans into a state of disarmed expectation. Was it better than the old days where we would enjoy a few games at the beginning of the season but tinge that enjoyment with guarded detachment expecting we’d be mathematically eliminated from the postseason by the end of April?

At least knowing meant a stress-free summer. This year was hectic. I had to check standings a lot. Did you know there’s a team called The Devil Rays?

I guess you can call a POETS Day. I don’t know what you’ll do, though. Disillusioned baseball fan grousing period length is dictated by local custom but outside of the Pacific Northwest it’s at least a week so you’ll probably just lay around and eat Wheat Thins. Give it a shot if you want. Get out of work and try jumpstarting the weekend. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday, but you can sit around and do nothing at work too.

I don’t care. Either way, try reading a little verse. It can make things better or worse, depending on what you pick. A vector is a vector.

Also, I told you so.

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