Feeling better now. My thanks to everyone who commented and emailed. I appreciate it. Many of you I've never met and never will. Some of you I have, if in passing (Sandra and I bumped into each a few times, for example). And fewer still are my close friends, the ones who send care packages filled with tiny Milky Way bars and chocolate chip cookies and cards. I wasn't gifted with many skills but a certain facility with words is one and even so I can't quite express how much you mean to me.
So there.
***
300 is like the intersection of video game cut scenes and some not quite porn. Hyper-buff Spartans, who apparently had no body hair, run around chopping, piercing, severing, dismembering, shouting, declaiming, and so forth.
And it's awesome. Is it about anything? Not so much, unless you consider the language of pure visual cinema enough text for a movie. And I do. It would work as a silent film. But it's not silent. The sound was cranked to almost uncomfortable levels and I'm betting this was by design, by request or requirement of the studio. Pure bombast. Rock on.
One thing: people are dumb, or selfish, who bring young children to a movie like this. I'm not one who believes children are overly influenced by violent movies or video games. I know I experienced my share growing up. But this really isn't a movie for, say, a five year old girl.
***
Next up: Zodiac. Black Snake Moan.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
3 comments:
And what will I emerge/
from this red brick cocoons?/ Teacher?/Poet?/I know not what...
However bitter it gets, remember: you never wrote the above lines.
Sometimes when I feel bitter (i.e., just got the negative on another finalist, that makes 15 with this manuscript) I remember the above lines and smile.
It's happiness by relativity, sure. But relative world or not, you're a monster poet.
Zodiac is good!
Paul, you don't know me but I've been reading your blog and poems for a while and just out of the blue today I was wondering why you haven't written a poem about Kang and Kodos from "The Simpsons"? You are the perfect poet for such a pair. Or maybe you already have and I just don't know it. But they feel like they're aching for their own poem or poems. Or maybe I'm aching to write one? I don't know. You should do it though. Also, congratulations on your second book; I'm heavily looking forward to it. Sorry if this is totally random. - Matt
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