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grandhotelabyss · 2 years
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An amusing flourish in the picture caption to Justin Murphy’s newsletter on Flannery O’Connor: “When was the last time you heard about Elizabeth Hardwick?” The cognoscenti have been hyping a Hardwick revival for half a decade now, to semi-avail. I got in on the game in 2017 by reading her little Herman Melville bio; I wrote about it here. For what it’s worth, I think that’s one of the funnier essays I’ve ever written:
All of the above to say that I approach Hardwick, at this stage of my reading life, with a bit, just a hint really, the proverbial soupçon, whatever that means, of suspicion—with apprehensions of fatigue. These days, for me, somehow, the New York Intellectuals, The New York Review of Each Other’s Books, have lost their luster. If I don’t care about Bloomsbury, why should I care about this even less generally relevant coterie? Their organs have been disintermediated, their politics obsolesced, in the thresher of the 21st century. The problem with ressentiment and separatism, though, is that you miss too much of relevance to yourself, because you have artificially constricted your own soul too far in advance of experience. Lady Ottoline Morrell, Barbara Epstein—sure, if you’re not in the club, who cares? But you would not want to miss a Virginia Woolf, not even in the 21st century: so to Hardwick’s Melville I go.
I suspect Murphy may have had in mind that recent survey that showed the average reader of the New York Review of Books to be, in age terms, pretty much deceased. 
I never did read Hardwick’s most celebrated novel Sleepless Nights, with all those blurbs from Sontag, Roth, Didion. I started it right after I read Adler’s Speedboat and it was too similar so I put it down. These aren’t universal writers, Adler and Hardwick, in the way that O’Connor is a universal writer. It’s a different order of being. I may have heard about Hardwick lately—and she’s okay, very intelligent, very civilized; I do think her metropolitan milieu partially liked her so much because she escaped from Hicksville, and I increasingly detest that kind of thing—but nobody would say about her what (if I recall) Robert Fitzgerald said about O’Connor: that she should be mentioned in the company not of Hemingway but of Sophocles. Which might go too far, but is in the ballpark.
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Speaking of mid-to-late-20th-century American letters: over in Tablet, at whose Substack annex I myself sometimes appear, David Mikics nominates Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Bishop as the most important postwar American writers and the antidotes to today’s over-politicized rage. No quarreling with the list—I appreciate that he said Bishop where one is probably supposed to say Ashbery—though a little Saul Bellow and a little Don DeLillo wouldn’t be amiss.
If literature can teach anything, it is patience and conviction. We mostly have neither. We lash out violently, apocalyptic and urgent, with our enemies’ lists in hand. The days of rage have returned, both on the right and the left. To weather these tantrums, we should turn back to the writers who oppose the infantile fervor of groupthink—who acknowledge the lostness of the self in the world, the first step to declaring independence.
And speaking of Don DeLillo, I spent the last week and half gratuitously and luxuriously rereading the massive Underworld—truly one of the best books there is—and I wrote about it at length here. Of DeLillo’s oeuvre, I still need to read End Zone and Ratner’s Star, both of which I’ve avoided on principles that have stood me in good stead since grade school: I don’t care about sports and I don’t care about math. And it’s been so long since I read The Names and Mao II that those readings probably don’t count. Underworld, though, is where it’s at, as I write:
For Underworld is, first of all, in the high tradition of the American novel, which, as umpteenth observers from Nathaniel Hawthorne forward have told us, has never been a novel at all, not a sober realist social survey, but a weird symbolic prose-poem, an inward voyage projected out onto the national landscape. Underworld places itself in this tradition with its first sentence: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The first thing to say about this sentence is that it pays tribute to two sentences from the Great American Novels of the early 1950s, the period when Underworld begins: the first sentence of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and the last sentence of Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”). The second thing to say is that, like a line of poetry, the sentence admits of two readings, with “American” as either a noun, which makes the sentence a direct address to the American reader, or an adjective modifying “voice,” declaring a national origin and destiny for the novel’s style. So this is an American romance, and you have to read it like a poem; and, as in Bellow’s and Ellison’s novels, or Faulkner’s and Melville’s before them, the sensibility and suffering that emerges is less the sojourning protagonists’ and more that of the organizing and presiding consciousness. As in a book of poems or in a long poem, it’s the poet you get to know best, and not for nothing does Underworld, in its final one-word sentence, echo no novel at all but the century’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. “Shantih shantih shantih,” Eliot chants in Sanskrit, which DeLillo puts into plain American: “Peace.”
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arcticdementor · 2 years
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Americans love to look on the bright side. We process our traumas and congratulate ourselves on our resilience. We like to crown ourselves winners, avoiding the stigma of the L-word deployed by a certain ex-president. The triumph of the therapeutic, as Philip Rieff called it, even applies to our anti-free-speech college students, who gain vituperative strength from the harm supposedly inflicted on them by other people’s disagreeable opinions.
But there’s a dark flipside to the story. Americans can’t turn their eyes away from failure. No one is so interesting to us as the person, preferably a celebrity, who has sunk to the most degraded, soul-crushing Marianas Trench of existence, capsized, busted, shellacked, KO’d, and wiped out. Some truer sense of things seems to come with loss. The person wholly crushed by life is the one who knows the score. In failure, reality does not evade us.
American authors of the early 20th century speculated in failure the way the tycoons of their day bet on stocks. Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Robert Frost—these writers find illumination within pessimism, and so they are permanent members of the American canon.
Twentieth-century American literature got off the starting block with the naturalist trio of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, who aimed a primitive sledgehammer at the notions of the progressive era. Progressives insisted that all human problems could be alleviated via social tinkering. Solidarity and peace would blossom, if reformers could only come up with the right formula for a just society.
But Dreiser and his contemporaries had a disillusioned sobriety that looked straight at the hard contours of reality: poverty, death, disease, sexual frustration, loss of love.
Dreiser was a Midwestern oaf, big and awkward, a man of blunt sexual cravings. His crowning work was the mammoth An American Tragedy, published in 1925, which remains the most riveting 900-page book I’ve ever read. An American Tragedy is about Clyde Griffiths, a colorless young man who kills his girlfriend and eventually goes to the electric chair. Clyde wants to be part of the glittering society of Lycurgus, a town in upstate New York—would-be flappers and their beaus having what they describe as fun. Clyde’s pregnant, working-class girlfriend, Roberta, gets in the way—Clyde has his eye on a glamorous young socialite named Sondra—and so, with perfect plausibility, the thought of murdering her steals on him. This section of Dreiser’s narrative crawls forward as suspensefully as Crime and Punishment, as Clyde becomes more and more used to the prospect of Roberta’s death. While they are boating in a desolate upstate lake, Clyde strikes her, half by accident; she falls out of the boat, and he lets her drown. The scene is an agonizing tour de force. David Denby writes that “Clyde’s consciousness, never very full to begin with, and now divided between murder and guilt, is deranged further by the dark beauty of the lake, the cry of unfamiliar birds, the empty woods.”
Willa Cather was Dreiser’s opposite number in terms of style. The inevitability of Dreiser’s prose lies in his agitated power to see inside his faulty, stumbling protagonists, and to mirror their flaws. Cather’s style is utterly distinct—everything she wrote seems perfectly done. She too sounds inevitable. No American writer has a better sense of the land itself, forbidding and enormous as it is. Cather never forgot her first sight of Nebraska when she first arrived at 9 years old, “jerked away,” as she put it, from the hills of her native Virginia and “thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron.”
This inhuman land, with its empty bleakness, was made to thwart the poor immigrants who tried to farm it. Sometimes they succeed, like Alexandra in O Pioneers, but often they are defeated.
Cather was a “strong, bossy woman,” Joan Acocella noted, and she wrote, not “fables of prairie virtue,” but “some sort of strange poetry, about the terror of life.” The terror shows up in the tragic fates of Cather’s characters: the father who blows his brains out with a shotgun, or the drifter who throws himself into a threshing machine.
Like Cather, Wallace Stevens was a high priest of clarity, despite the cryptic involution of his poetry. Those who met the poet for the first time expected to see a dandy, an ornate connoisseur. The physical Stevens stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 240 pounds. The disparity between his hulking body and his slender acrobatic imagination was noticed by all.
Stevens could easily eat a pound of sausage at a sitting. When he asked for a martini, the waitress knew he meant a pitcher of martinis. Yet this gourmand was the subtlest poet America ever knew.
Uniquely among poets, Stevens unites the sumptuous and the straight-arrow direct. He favors words like “poor” and “bare,” for these adjectives are emblems of necessity. Yet Stevens also has a fire-fangled vocabulary, ingenious and glistening. He tells us that Crispin, his “nincompated pedagogue” in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “hung [his eye] ... on silentious porpoises, whose snouts / Dibbled in waves that were mustachios.”
Stevens’ coruscating lines are not mere showmanship. Stevens’ arsenal, his word hoard, must be large and precise. He needs his stock of marvels to fend off the deprivations of reality.
Robert Frost, who survived the deaths of two children as well as his first wife, measured his poet’s imagination against harsh realities. He found resilience in practical actions like mowing, mending a wall, or picking apples. Frost’s speakers follow Emerson’s advice to “hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous.” In a barren field, they prosper.
But Frost also felt a more drastic destitution pressing against him. In “Once by the Pacific” Frost depicts an obliterating storm, coming to spite any sense we might have that the world is built to human scale:
Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before.
Frost’s words are made for efficiency, common, and simple. The more basic they are, the more cunning they seem, and the more they frighten us.
The plainspoken Frost marks a contrast with T.S. Eliot. Frost, like Hart Crane and Stevens (who called Eliot his “dead opposite”), disliked Eliot’s Waste Land, since Eliot implied that one should be gloomy about the supposed twilight of high culture, the falling off from Cleopatra on her barge to the young man carbuncular. The tawdriness of the modern age had been a theme of European literature since Flaubert, who both abhorred and battened on the bourgeois cesspool. Yet Eliot amply survives his own snobbery, since his poetry sounds so perfect:
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets ...
The invitation you receive from Eliot’s voice is undeniable, as Louise Glück (who is, along with Jay Wright, our greatest living poet) argued in her Nobel lecture several years ago. He speaks to and for you, amid scenes of loss and dereliction. Even his lacerating neuroses are magical.
Hemingway had a life of ceaseless activity, testing himself like the characters in his stories. He was relentlessly competitive—someone remarked that few men could stand the strain of relaxing with him for very long. The wear and tear on the self is Hemingway’s key theme. “He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out,” Hemingway writes of Harry in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Like Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and his story “The Rich Boy,” Hemingway is obsessed with what happens to you when you have made a botch of your life.
Faulkner’s interest in failure is just as ardent as Hemingway’s, but he is torrential rather than clipped. His prose is unstoppable as a hurricane, agonized and strident. It takes patience to fall in love with Faulkner’s fearsome gargoyles, and strength to bear the dreadful misery of The Wild Palms, Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!, his most unsparing works. There is no playful side to him. Faulkner has no appetite for anything except darkness. His down-at-heel indulgence in doom tapped into a signal fact of the American character, the despair within that gives the lie to our optimism. At the end of The Wild Palms, the jailed abortionist Wilbourne, who has inadvertently killed the woman he loved, refuses suicide and says, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief”—Faulkner’s truest statement of his faith.
America’s culture, like its authors, knows that failure is a condition, not a momentary event. The taint of loss soaks the blues and country music, genres to which all Americans pledge allegiance at least some of the time. “I tried and I failed, and I feel like going home,” sang Charlie Rich. Rock ‘n’ roll loves to rebel, but in blues and country, which speak the downhearted truth, rebellion is useless.
Despite their reputation, the American modernist writers are not rebels. They are reconcilers. When we fall short, and find both ourselves and the universe wanting, there is nothing left but to examine what remains, and make terms with it.
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witchofthemidlands · 8 months
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DOCTOR WHO || The Waters Of Mars mars crew my beloved
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mizgnomer · 2 years
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Behind the Scenes of the Waters of Mars (Part 20)
Excerpts from The Doctor Who Companion
On Wednesday 18 February David Tennant was recording pick-up shots on Planet of the Dead at Upper Boat and performing a photoshoot with Michelle Ryan, before he departed for the Waters of Mars readthrough.  This saw the arrival of guest star Lindsay Duncan who had been cast as Adelaide.  
On Saturday 21 February David Tennant got to meet up with his successor, Matt Smith, and one of his predecessors, Peter Davison, who had played the Fifth Doctor (and whose daughter he was dating), over dinner at incoming showrunner Steven Moffat’s home.
“This is the beginning of the end for the Tenth Doctor,” commented David Tennant of the Autumn Special, recording of which began with a week of night shoots, commencing at 2pm on Monday 23 February. Only David Tennant and Aleksander Mikic - who played Yuri - were required on this first day; both artists were in spacesuits (with David’s outfit having a new headpiece attached to the original suit from The Impossible Planet).
Link to [ part one ] of this post, or click the #whoBtsWom tag, or the [ full episode list ]
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teacherscrapbook · 13 days
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I feel like anthologists especially of poetry have such a delicate job because in addition to having to select good stuff, there's the choice of whether to write anything about the pieces and how much and how to frame it and those choices can really make or break a person's enjoyment of the content. I read one recently where the editor would put the poem in the middle of his own analysis which I found annoying and I didn't think his commentary added much to my experience and so I had trouble connecting with any of the poems. But on the other hand (and why I bring this up at all) there's this one entry in The Art of the Sonnet edited by Stephen Burt and David Mikics about the poem "The Illiterate" by William Meredith that I read three years ago and still think about ALL THE TIME. Like I read the poem and thought it was all right and then read the discussion of it and said oh. And now it's literally one of my five favorite poems, specifically because of how Burt and Mikics guided me in thinking about it.
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Full transcript of these pages below the cut so don't open if you're not prepared to scroll through 2k words:
"The Illiterate" William Meredith 1958
Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
[From this point is the commentary.] Now beloved of teachers, this quietly moving sonnet offers at once a tour de force of simplicity, a poem about the reading of poetry, and a hesitant, sympathetic picture of inexperience in romantic love. Meredith keeps his diction as plain as in any serious poem of his century, using only common words in common combinations, with almost no description, no sense-details. He deploys, indeed, banal phrases, such as a man unused to reading might use ("And you might think," "truth is," "what would you call"). Meredith signals simplicities further with the repetitive use of identical rhyme (also known by the French term rime riche): he fills out the Italianate scheme (abba cddc efgefg) not with rhymes, but with repeated words. One of the words, of course, is "word," or "words": the illiterate man in receipt of his first-ever letter "turns [it] over in his hand," over and over, as if that way he could figure out what it means, as if he did not yet want to find out.
Meredith repeats "afraid" and "letter," though neither occur in rhyming position. The illiterate man's unread letter, like any recipient's letter before it is opened, could disclose bad news (for example, the death of both parents). Yet this man's repeated apprehension might come from good news as well as from bad. Might the letter, once understood, solicit frightening action? Might it contain, for example, a marriage proposal? ("The dark girl" echoes the so-called "dark lady," the beautiful dark-haired and finally treacherous woman in Shakespeare's later sonnets.) Given all the uncertainty in the octave, we might expect the sestet to tell us "what [the letter] says." Instead, it repeats the situation of that octave (using "afraid" and "letter" again), without allowing any time to pass, or any potential events to take place. At the end of the poem, after one more unanswered question, the illiterate man, and the poet "touching your goodness," remain in the same situation as before: gently if nervously marveling at the letter's existence, at "your goodness," and at your mysterious "touch."
Once read, once decoded, the letter will come to mean what its contents mean. Before it is interpreted, though, the letter has another signification: it represents a gesture of human connection, what linguists call a "phatic" communication, which we might signal in person by a touch on the shoulder or hand. It shows that somebody cares what happens to this man, that somebody wants to tell him something. "Touching your goodness," the man holds on to that signal of human care.
We could say as much of a letter unopened, turned "over and over" by a recipient "proud" to keep it and able to read it at will. But Meredith's man could not read it alone if he tried. Moreover, he "has never had a letter from anyone"; even the experience of asking somebody to help him decode it would be new for him (and he has not yet asked). As much as he cherishes this "touch," this gesture, as much as he may be "proud" to have received it, the man seems "afraid" not only of what it might say but of asking for help, of revealing his weakness, his need. Rather than show that weakness to somebody else – rather than learn what somebody else wants him to know – Meredith's illiterate retains in himself a suitably nameless feeling, sad in part (because it reflects incapacity) but appropriate to the unrealized possibility, the fearful and wonderful news, that his letter may contain. So far, the unread – and to this man, unreadable – letter might resemble an unread poem, or a poem admired but not quite understood. Part of its “goodness” derives from the way it allows the man to remain in the realm of surmise. Moreover – like a letter to an illiterate man – a poem may exert its full powers only when heard. Meredith’s “feeling” includes some marveling at the potential in language generally: in familiar epistolary language, on the one “hand,” and in poetic language (or modern lyrics poetry) on the other. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet earlier in this volume, Meredith’s sonnet depends on the similarities and differences between a familiar letter and a lyric poem. Both kinds of language can embody the inner life of the author, in ways that seem exciting, but also frightening, and perhaps difficult to sustain. The familiar letter ordinarily finds just one reader, one named recipient, and refers to his or her situation alone. A lyric poem, by contrast, has an abstract or “algebraic” element (as W.H. Auden, an important influence on Meredith, put it in the 1930s). “Feeling” in poems becomes available, interpretable, in ways that leave behind the circumstances of authors’ lives and times.
But Meredith’s sonnet is not only a sonnet about lyric poetry – about the mystery and the abstraction it offers, about the personality, “touch,” or “feeling” disclosed and concealed by the “words” in poems. Though “touching” means “considering,” “regarding,” it also suggests the touch of a human hand: Meredith’s sonnet is also a love poem, a poem that ends with the illiterate man imagining himself not only rich (inheriting a farm) “and orphaned” (by the death of his parents), but “beloved.” And here the poem begins to acquire additional sense if we look to Meredith’s own life. Admired for his poetry since the 1940s, when he won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Meredith served in the U.S. Navy from 1941 to 1946 and again from 1952 to 1954. He was also gay. His sonnet describes a particular moment in the life of a lover and a “beloved,” a moment unusually familiar, perhaps, to gay men who came to adult in an era especially hostile to same-sex love: the moment when an inexperienced lover believes (but cannot yet know) that he might be the beloved, the moment when the lover finds what he thinks (but cannot be sure) is an invitation, a pointed suggestion, a hint.
Such an invitation, like all flirtations, might come in the dual sense of some action, some word – in something that might look, to a stranger, innocent, until its doubled erotic sense is revealed. Meredith’s doubled words (ordinary, but with dual meanings, and dual uses as rhyme-substitutes) stand for the double sense of any word, any gesture, used as a romantic hint. And such invitations can always be disavowed; indeed, an ardent or a merely awkward lover may see them where they are not meant, may take hints where no hints are given, and may (especially if these matters feel new to him) embarrass himself a great deal by reacting eagerly to invitations that nobody gave.
“The obstacle – effectively a double-bind,” writes the critic Tony Tanner (he is analyzing Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion), “seems to be that you cannot speak ‘openly’ and ‘directly’ about… your feelings of love, to the person you love, until you have achieved a certain intimacy… But how do you ever manage to get intimate enough to be intimate, as it were?” As in Austen, so throughout Meredith’s poem. “Touching your goodness” could mean, simply, being touched (moved) by your goodness (benevolence); it could also refer to the brush of a hand, to the discovery that within some new friendship, there might be something physical, something more. That discovery remains merely exciting – and cannot be threatening, disappointing, embarrassing – so long as it remains merely conjectural, so long as the lover does not try to follow it up, does not try to reciprocate with his own hint.
That moment of thinking that one has received a hint, of thinking that a flirtation might have begun, of feeling unable to “read” the language of love, because it is by nature never explicit, and because it feels new – that moment is the moment of Meredith’s poem. His “feeling” is not apprehension merely, not fear alone and not quite joy, but rather the mixed feelings of a lover who cannot yet know whether he is beloved, a lover who does not know how to interpret a gesture that may signify love returned – who may not, indeed, know anybody he can trust enough to ask. Such feelings are familiar to many teenagers, to many heterosexual adults, and to the characters in Jane Austen, who can also respond by writing letters (where, as Tanner says, “there may always be another message in – under – the ostensible message”). Yet that sense of shameful inexperience prolonged into adulthood, of not knowing whether a message is “double” or not, and of not knowing how or whom to ask, might seem especially plangent in this poem about hints and uncertainties if we connect it to homosexuality in the white-collar America of 1958, before the word “gay” meant in public what it means now.
During the 1980s Meredith’s poem became an anthology staple, a sonnet about inexperience (in reading as in love) whose tact and care inexperienced readers enjoyed. By that time, the poem had acquired more poignant dimensions, ones the poet could not have foreseen. In 1983, Meredith suffered a stroke that severely limited his ability to process language – to speak, to read, and to hear. He wrote little afterward, but could, in his last years, read movingly from his work on public occasions, when “The Illiterate” became an especially appropriate, and well-received, set piece.
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theruggedhuman · 9 months
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TED – Johan Rockström 2020 from Brikk on Vimeo.
We felt humbled by the request to direct this important talk for such a big event. Being a pretty lengthy script, packed with information and data that all felt equally important to communicate, it was almost like having a seven and a half minute script with only headlines that deserved and screamed for the same attention. There’s not a dead second in this talk, therefore it was with both excitement and a healthy amount of intimidation we took on the task.
Directing a collaborative project isn’t always easy. You need to put a lot of trust in your partners, not only to deliver in time but also that what they do deliver will match with all the other parts. In many ways, it can be compared to laying a 10’000 piece jig-saw puzzle. There’s so many different elements that need to fit together: colors, textures, patterns, stroke thickness, timing, etc. We solved that, both by doing a good chunk of the animation in-house, but also by handling all the compositing, to be able to have control over the final look.
The aesthetics we landed were a strong, gritty collage-style to portray the seriousness of the speech. It is still colorful, but with a dominant fiery signal orange and yellow on top of a dark cold gray. The textures work as a manifest of tactility and creativity and brings a kind of guerrilla-style feel to the communication. It’s packed with paper cut-outs and rips, grainy Xerox photocopies, silkscreen prints, and expressive charcoal and pen sketches.
Director: Brikk Executive Producer: Brikk, Sofia Bohman Art Director: Björn Johansson Script: Team Effort Storyboard: Björn Johansson Animatic: Björn Johansson Editor: Göran Andersson Animation: Björn Johansson, Alexander Lory, Emma Brinck, Clara Busquets, Emil Börner, Simon Ekstrand Appel, Joakim Areschoug, Viktor Norman, Thomas Pomarelle, Philip Engström, Bee Grandinetti Compositing: Björn Johansson Illustration: Björn Johansson, Alexander Lory, Emma Brinck, Clara Busquets, Emil Börner, Joakim Areschoug, Philip Engström, Bee Grandinetti, David Saracino 3D Artists: Thomas Pomarelle, Viktor Norman, Simon Ekstrand Appel, Joakim Areschoug
DoP: Daniel Gustafsson First Assistent Camera: David Mikic Gaffer: Daniel Keith Best boy Electric: Audio Technician: Janna Johansson Make up artist: Isabel Ztirl
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lyricframe8 · 2 years
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6 Simple Techniques For The Beginner's Guide to the Law of Attraction: Manifest Your
Examine This Report about 40+ Law Of Attraction Quotes To Shape Your Future - Kidadl
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com". oprah. com. Recovered 8 November 2010. NANCE-NASH, SHERYL (18 August 2010). "The Secret Is Out: Megahit Author Says Power of Love Will Fill Your Savings Account". ABC News. Obtained 29 August 2018. (PDF). New Idea Library. Recovered 25 June 2015. "In Tune With The Infinite, by Ralph Trine". New Idea Library.
Henry, Juliette. "How can it perhaps be that the law of destination works?". www. tameyourmind.org. Improvement guide. Obtained 3 December 2016. Redfield, James (1993 ). New York: Warner Books. ISBN 9780446518628. Chabris, Christopher F.; Simons, Daniel J. (24 September 2010). "The Pseudoscience of 'The Secret' and 'The Power'". The New York Times.
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3 Ways Science Explains How the Law of Attraction Works (Your Mind Creates Your Reality!) - YouTube
Melanson, Terry. "Oprah Winfrey, New Idea, "The Secret" and the "New Alchemy"". Conspiracy Archive. Retrieved 27 November 2015. D'Aoust, Maja (2012 ). The Secret Source. Process. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-934170-32-8. Zink, Robert (2014 ). Law of Destination Solutions, Llc. p. 299. ISBN 978-0990825036. Retrieved 20 November 2015. Donker, Gerald (2008 ). Lulu. com.
5 Simple Techniques For Law Of Attraction - YouTube
27. ISBN 978-1409236146. Recovered 6 November 2015. [] Harrold, Glenn (2011 ). Orion. ISBN 978-1409112716. Obtained 27 November 2015. James, William (1902 ). Longmans Green & Co. p. 94. ISBN 978-1439297278. Obtained manifest . D'Aoust, Maja (2012 ). The Secret Source. Process. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-934170-32-8. Braden, Charles S. "A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE NEW IDEA MOTION.( 1963 )" (PDF).
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What is the Law of Attraction? Is it Biblical? - Inspired Walk
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7 Ways To Achieve Success With The Law of Attraction - Synctuition
com. Retrieved 13 November 2015. Hedesan, Georgiana D. (July 2014). "Paracelsian Medication and Theory of Generation in 'Outside homo', a Manuscript Most Likely Authored by Jan Baptist Van Helmont (15791644), ref 52". Case history. 58 (3 ): 37596. doi:10. 1017/mdh. 2014.29. PMC. PMID 25045180. Hedesan, Delia Georgiana (2012 ). "'Christian Philosophy': Medical Alchemy and Christian Idea in the Work of Jan Baptista Van Helmont (1579-1644)" (PDF): 31.
Mention journal needs journal= (aid) "PHINEAS PARKHURST QUIMBY 1802 - 1866 Daddy of New Idea". phineasquimby. Retrieved 20 November 2015. Mikics, David (2012 ). Belknap Press. p. 6. ISBN 978-0674049239. Obtained 19 November 2015. "Mark 11:24". Bible Gateway. Obtained 5 November 2015. (PDF). The New Idea Library. Obtained 5 November 2015.
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ruminativerabbi · 6 years
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Preparing for the End
And so we finally come to the end of our festival season. Not quite, but almost! Shemini Atzeret, the next-to-last stop on the holiday bus line, looms before us in all its mysterious opacity and then, finally, we get to Simchat Torah…the last stop of all before it’s all finally really over and the “real” year really begins with all of its tasks and challenges.
All of our Jewish festivals have features that are to some degree out of sync with the modern world, but Simchat Torah is in some ways the most egregiously out of step with the values moderns espouse and which we teach our children to esteem. In a world that values efficiency, Simchat Torah is about doing something—in this case, pondering the text of the Torah and mining in its quarries for new meaning and renewed inspiration—in a way that couldn’t possibly be less efficient:  by reading it aloud slowly and precisely, over and over and over, year in and year out. In a world that values speedy attention to pressing matters, we could not possibly do our pondering more ponderously…or more laboriously. And, of course, we don’t just read the text out loud, we chant it according to a set of musical notes that, because they are not actually written in the scroll, must be memorized in advance. It’s true that those signs serve as a kind of bare-bones punctuation system, but what they really do is make it impossible to race through the text at breakneck speed even for the most accomplished reader. Instead, each word is sung out, thus of necessity separately pronounced and individually presented to the congregation for its ruminative contemplation. Most Americans, of course, are done being read to when they learn how to read in first or second grade. But shul-Jews are never done…and we never quite finish either: as soon as we get to the last few lines of the Torah, we open a different scroll to the very first column and start reading again. Again.
We train our students in school to read as quickly as possible. I remember occasionally having to read several hundred pages from one class to the next in college and graduate school, which, since I was generally taking at least four or five courses at once, meant having to develop the skill not only of reading at top speed but also somehow of retaining all, or at least most, of the insane number of pages I was attempting to read at once. I took notes, obviously. But even that had to be done according to a streamlined system that didn’t impede my progress too dramatically. The key was to find the right balance between volume and comprehension: reading without recalling content was useless, but not getting through the reading assignment before the next class was not a very good plan either! In the end, I learned how to read very quickly, which skill I retain to this day. And I remember most of what I read too. So there’s that!
But there’s reading and there’s reading…and to participate in the annual reading of the Torah requires learning to read extremely slowly, carefully, and deliberately. It requires being open to insights hiding behind the details of a confusing narrative or a complex exposition of details regarding some abstruse area of law. Mostly, it requires a level of humility that no professor in grad school sees any point of attempting to instill in his or her students: listening week in and week out to the weekly lesson, on the other hand, requires bringing a level of surrender to the enterprise that stems directly from knowing that the same text read this week will be read aloud next year (and the year after that as well), yet knowing that none of us will ever truly get to the point at which we’re done learning, at which we’ve simply managed to squeeze all the juice there is to have from that particular orange, at which there is simply no point to review the same text again again. The bottom line is that you can’t read Scripture too slowly, too deeply, or too carefully! But who in our modern world wants to do anything slowly at all?
This much I know from shul and from study. But how surprised was I to learn just recently that I’m not alone—that Jews are not alone—in their devotion to the art of the slow read.
As far as I can tell, the earliest non-Jewish author to write positively about the experience of reading slowly was, of all people, Friedrich Nietzsche, who described himself in the introduction to his The Dawn of Day as a “teacher of slow reading.” Okay, that was in 1887, but he was only the first of many who argued that the relentless emphasis on reading quickly has had a peculiarly negative effect on Western public culture. In 1978, James Sire published How to Read Slowly, a call-to-arms in which he invited Americans to learn how to read thoughtfully, not racing to get any specific book finished but instead using the experience of reading as a kind of internal gateway to ruminative speculation about the world through the medium of the written word. In 2009, his work was followed by John Miedema’s Slow Reading, an interesting book in which the author finds traces of encouragement to read slowly in classical sources and then moves slowly forward to find similar kinds of ideas in works from later centuries as well. Then came Thomas Newkirk’s 2012 book, The Art of Slow Reading, And then came David Mikics’ Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, published by Harvard University Press in 2013.
Mikics comes closest to what Jews mean by reading slow. He identifies slow reading with intensive, thoughtfully ruminative reading and approvingly cites Walt Whitman, who wrote that “reading is not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense, a gymnast’s struggle…Not the book so much needs to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.” That’s pretty much why we read the Torah over and over in shul: not because the book needs to be read but because the kahal needs to be read to…and through the experience of being read to and thus obliged to consider word by word an ancient text, and to do that same thing over and over without being bored or irritated—that is what we mean by the book being a door to step through into the world behind the world, into the space that Plato labelled “the world of ideas” but which Jewish people know as the world behind the great parochet that separates the day-to-day world of human goings-on from the larger picture of the human enterprise, the one in which we participate willingly not because we can or because we must, but because we wish to see ourselves as willing witnesses to God’s presence in history, and as harbingers, each of us, of the redemption promised by the very scroll we read so deeply and thoughtfully year after year after year.
David Mikics is a professor of English at the University of Houston. I have used and enjoyed his edition of Emerson’s essays since the book came out in 2012; when I’ve occasionally discussed Ralph Waldo Emerson in these weekly letters, I’ve almost always been relying on the text Mikics published and on his thoughtful introductions and notes. In his book, he distinguishes slow reading from its partners in insight, “close reading” (a term coined at Harvard more than half a century earlier by Professor Reuben Brower) and “deep reading” (a term coined by Sven Bikerts, the author best known for his Gutenberg Elegies, the subtitle of which, “The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,” tells you most of what you need to know about this thesis). Mikics book is very worthwhile…and worth reading slowly and carefully.  
Much of what he writes will be challenging for all who care deeply about the fate of the written word in the digital age. But large sections of the book—written in an engaging, very appealing style—will be resonant in a special way for Jewish readers. We are the original slow readers! And Simchat Torah is our annual festival devoted to the celebration of that very concept. So, as we prepare for the final days of our holiday season, I encourage you all to focus on the larger enterprise in play: the celebration of slow, intensive, deep, close reading that is the hallmark of the way Jews relate to the sacred text. Each word, after all, is a gateway to the world behind the world, to the sacred space in which the knowledge of God, for all it comes to us dressed up in language, is not language or anything like language…but an amalgam of hope, faith, courage, and dreamy optimism. The bottom line: you really can’t read too slowly…and Simchat Torah is our annual opportunity to pay public homage to that quintessentially Jewish idea.
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akiraofthefour · 3 years
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The Hebrew Bible, rather than Homer, contains the closest analogue to Kubrick's alien, untouchable god. In his copy of Kafka's 'Paradoxes and Problems' Kubrick wrote, 'The Tower of Babel was the start of the space age.'
David Mikics, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker
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grandhotelabyss · 3 years
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Now that the “dunk” cycle has passed, I do have something to say about this viral Tweet. First, like all sublimely stupid remarks, it passes into brilliance. “Allegory of what” is a reasonable and even eloquent characterization—it would be a good title for an essay—putting in the vernacular Walter Benjamin’s famous description of Kafka’s works as Haggadah without Halachah—i.e., Talmudic illustrations of the law sans the law itself. What kind of sensibility does this offend? Well, let’s not defang the modernists—it honestly might irritate anyone. I myself have a somewhat checkered relationship with Kafka; I like him short, in aphorisms and prose-poems, and I think his masterpiece might be “A Hunger Artist,” an absolutely perfect story, which I don’t quite understand, except that it’s about me and my experiences, which I don’t understand either. The longer pieces, especially the novels, don’t have the same power, because the oneiric style feels forced and willful when extended. (I should say I’ve read a lot of Kafka but not all and never systematically, just in fits and starts between my teen years and today; my major omission is The Castle.)
Still, Dawkins’s remark also illuminates a larger phenomenon. I saw the other day a social-media inquiry, with what agenda I don’t know, about whether there was some continuity between Dawkins’s New Atheist movement and today’s wokeness. The answer is the opposite: official anti-wokeness, the Intellectual Dark Web, descends from New Atheism. But they share a sensibility, since both New Atheism and wokeness can be described, maybe unfairly but not simply in jest, as puritan sects. And what does the puritan want from a text? Governor Winthrop explains:
At Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his Kingdom.
The interpretation is so insistent and indisputable that the allegorical surface, here nature itself, is wholly dispensable. The New Atheist and the woke want a text the opposite of Kafka’s, one whose narrative, drama, style, and imagery are so morally legible that no “wrong” interpretation is even imaginable. Hence to the New Atheist, anything that calls for interpretation is irrational, while to the woke it’s elitist or crypto-fascist. American literature is the struggle of the puritan interpretive impulse toward complex artistic expression. This often results in amputated allegories, which is why Hawthorne and Melville often sound like Kafka.
Yet I’m sure I go too far. “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” Georg Lukács rhetorically wondered—for the communist critic, the right answer was Mann, since he was (supposedly) a realist. David Mikics, reviewing a re-release of Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (which I’ve never read), reminds us of how Mann caught the character of the totalizing puritan by semi-caricaturing Lukács himself as Naphta in The Magic Mountain. Mann showed Naphta as a Jewish-turned-Jesuit Hegelian nihilist, which is to say that all traditions harbor their own oversimplifications. They always beckon us into the purity spiral. For nonpolitical Mann, that stolid German burgher and paterfamilias always about to melt into the Mediterranean, purity’s opposite is art:
Mann knew in Reflections that individual freedom, which he identified with the writer’s talent for playing with ideas, must stand against all political demands. It is on behalf of that life-giving freedom that Mann celebrates “art’s lively ambiguity, its deep lack of commitment, its intellectual freedom ... someone who is used to creating art, never takes spiritual and intellectual things completely seriously, for his job has always been rather to treat them as material and as playthings, to represent points of view, to deal in dialectics, always letting the one who is speaking at the time be right.”
The higher playfulness that Mann espouses in these sentences from Reflections perfectly suits his dazzling, many-faceted Magic Mountain, so different from today’s prizewinning novels, which present uplifting lessons endorsed by the socially conscious author and his or her tenure committee. In Mann, each character is right when he or she speaks, and the whole revolves in crystal.
A serious way of not taking things seriously—all those italics!—but still heartening. Mikics argues for a continuity between the early Mann and the later, though the author’s career is more customarily seen as a consistent drift from right to left. Considering Mann’s middle-period novella, Mario and the Magician, which exposes fascism in a wholly fascist way, and his almost unbearably excellent late masterpiece Doctor Faustus, a novel that criticizes the daemonic work of a genius while also being the daemonic work of a genius, he may be right. 
I am more interested in the irony that everything I’ve written above would have been considered looney-left academic gibberish at the peak of neoconservative hegemony and New Atheist ascendancy about 15 years ago, whereas now it is considered reactionary obscurantism. It’s no sign of virtue alone to be attacked by both the left and the right—three people can be wrong at once—but to be scorned by the puritans of all creeds for not writing stories with obvious morals probably means an author is onto something. To quote Lukács from before he joined the Party, “Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life.”
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jewishbookworld · 4 years
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The 49 books posted on JewishBookWorld.org in August 2020 Here is the list of the 55 books that I posted on JewishBookWorld.org in August 2020. The image above contains some of the covers.
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witchofthemidlands · 8 months
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DOCTOR WHO || The Waters Of Mars
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tuppencetrinkets · 3 years
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Below you will find links to sorted screencaps from Doctor Who (2005) specials: Time Crash, The Christmas Invasion,  The Runaway Bride, Voyage of the Damned, The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars, The End of Time, A Christmas Carol, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, Trust Your Doctor, Pond Life, The Husbands of River Song, Space Time Comic Relief Specials and Resolution for the following one time characters:
Alec Garcia - Alex
Aleksander Mikic - Yuri Kerenski
Charlotte Ritchie - Lin
Claire Skinner - Madge Arwell
Clive Swift - Mr. Copper
Daniel Adegboyega - Aaron Sinclair
Daniel Evans - Danny Llewellyn
David Morrissey - Jackson Lake
Debbie Chazen - Foom Van Hoff
Dervla Kirwan - Miss Hartigan
Don Gilet - Lance Bennett
Gemma Chan - Mia Bennett
George Costigan - Max Capricorn
Guardians
Holly Earl - Lily Arwell
Jacqueline King - Sylvia Mott
Katherine Jenkins - Abigail
Kylie Minogue - Astrid Peth
Laurence Belcher - Young Kazran
Lee Evans - Malcolm
Lindsay Duncan - Adelaide Brooke
Maurice Cole - Cyril Arwell
Michael Gambon - Kazran Sardick
Michelle Ryan - Christina
Nikesh Patel - Mitch
Norma Dumezweni - Captain Magambo
Sarah Parish - Spider Empress
Timothy Dalton - Lord President Rassilon
This content is free for anyone to use or edit however you like; if you care to throw a dollar or two my way for time, effort, storage fees etc you are more than welcome to do so via my PAYPAL.  Please like or reblog this post if you have found it useful or are downloading the content within.  If you have any questions or you have any problems with the links or find any inconsistencies in the content, etc. please feel free to drop me a politely worded message via my ASKBOX (second icon from the top on my theme!)
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milliondollarbaby87 · 3 years
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Eastern Promises (2007) Review
Eastern Promises (2007) Review
When a young teenager dies during childbirth and leaves clues in her diary that links a violent Russian mob family to child rape. This is something which midwife Anna Khitrova cannot help but pursue despite the best efforts of Nikolai Luzhin to not have her involved. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Continue reading
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dccomicsnews · 5 years
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Review: Preacher 4×04 “Search And Rescue”
Review: Preacher 4×04 “Search And Rescue”
Review: Preacher 4×04 “Search And Rescue” [Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers]
Director: Kevin Hooks
Writer: Mark Stegemann
Starring: Dominic Cooper, Ruth Negga, Joseph Gilgun, Pip Torrens, Julie Ann Emery, Lachy Hulme, Noah Taylor, Tyson Ritter, Mark Harelik, Ditch Davey, David Field and Aleks Mikic
Reviewed By: Steve J. Ray Summary
Preacher Season 4 Episode 4, “Search And Rescue”…
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