I Sing My Group Eternal

Hey dudes and dudettes I just thought that while I'm sitting here blogging my face off I would take the opportunity to thank my whole group for their efforts in bringing our project together. Everybody came over to Zach's pad and everyone was very punctual(high five). Why did everything go off without a hitch you ask? Due to the awesomeness of everybody in the group, and when I say everybody I'm not talking about myself, everybody probably got sick of me asking for favors or grab me this or grab me that. Or my usual holywoodesque temper tantrum. That never happened, just for the record. But back to why things went so smoothly, things went well because everyone worked hard and we all got along beautifully. And so there is nothing left to say but, THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH.

What in the Hell am I Thinking?

So I'm writing my capstone paper and I'm kinda cruising through my Neruda poems that I have selected, and suddenly a song comes to my mind and I can't get it out. I try and I try but I just can't shake it. Here it is the past and the past fighting in my mind in the present. Sound stupid? Well it is, but I can't get this fight to stop and so as I wrap up my conclusion of the Canto General I decide I must put part of this song in my paper so that my brain doesn't explode(what's left of it). The song is called Last Resort and it is performed by the Eagles. Some of you may not know who the eagles are and that's okay, wait no it's not listen to the Hotel California album, anyway here's a piece of the song I couldn't get out of my head and if you've ever read the Canto General you'll probably see the connection. If you haven't read the piece of literature or heard the music, well something is wrong with you! In short go read it or listen to it.

…They even brought a neon sign, Jesus is coming. Brought the white man’s burden down, brought the white man's rage. Who will provide the grand design, what is yours and what is mine. There is no more new frontier, we have got to make it here, we satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God. And you can see them there on Sunday morning they stand up and sing about, what it’s like up there. They call it paradise, I don’t know why, you call some place paradise kiss it goodbye.

More Connections

As I did research for my Scandinavian research project I found another poem, by Eeva-Liisa Manner that relates to class straight up, her is the poem:

Kassandra I

Are you angry because you don’t understand me?
I insult you, because you don’t understand me?
Divinely inspired is my prophetic madness,
I’m filled with it,
but I control myself and speak plainly.
Towers that you built to woo the gods
have fallen down.
Who’re you wooing now? Helen’s no longer handsome.
To own female beauty, you dreamt a form for marble,
you gave stone an opaque complexion, a virgin breast,
but the eyes for ever empty repulsed you.
Whatever you achieved, you gained only emptiness.

And now, Orpheus too is dead, thrown to animals,
head for monkeys, sex for dogs to share,

and Greek’s only fit for birds,
the beasts appear,
Knowing sensing
from damp warm woods
for which he gave peace, with the music of his mind,

beasts that have broken loose from the lyre’s reins
sneak like spirits into chambers,
cry for glowing dreams on perfumed beds, in milk baths,
in the atrium, by the fountain or the book, by cool and
lovely style
claiming an empire. Aren’t you afraid?

And so if you recall the first of her poems that I posted you will she that Manner truly does believe, much like we do now, that "the past possesses the present."

Emily's a Honey

As it is the end of the semester I have three books that need to be read by tomorrow, of course they do why wouldn't I have to have things like that done with just one week left in school. So I'm reading some of Emily Dickinson's poetry as well as her letters, I hope you're ready for this quote and I know I'm not going to have to explain this connection: "God is sitting here, looking into my very soul to see if I think right tho'ts. Yet I am not afraid, for I try to be right and good, andhe knows every one of my struggles. He looks very gloriously, and everything bright seems dull beside him, and I don't dare to look directly at him for fear I shall die" (Emily Dickinson, Heath Anthology of American Literature 3164).

A New Late Segment

This is a new addition I like to call deep thoughts with Pat. Pat is one of the guys who works in the warehouse at my work he is nineteen and he is a sophmore at MSU, this is where I give him his chance to rant and rave; with an off chance that it will relate to class, and I bet it will because lately I'm finding that everything relates to this class.

Whats up people of English 213? This is Pat here telling everyone out there to keep it safe, clean and sassy. Here at the work place we like to discern upon deep thought and words of the wise. Everybody talks the talk and some people even can walk that talk like its their dog. Unlike everyone else we at the workplace go beyond walking the dog.... we ride the ship. Like a crew bound for a voyage into the unknown, we ride. This voyage is a voyage like Jason and The Argonauts, filled with trials and tribulations. Speaking on the depths of the mind and the unfortunate journey we call life; my friend Notorious BIG has something to say, "First comes the cash, then comes the ass, then come big blunts with chunks of hash." That's the rhythm of life much like the movie layer; The actor Burn Gorman says, " You're born, you take shit. Get out in the world,you take more shit. Climb a little higher,you take less shit. Until one day, you're up in the rarefied atmosphere......and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son." That's the facts of life and that's how we all operate. The question is do we all accept it?
Thank you Pat that was very enlightening. As to the layer cake: "Best thing that can happen to us is to never be born." Then we don't have to go through the layers. Pat Really has some deep thoughts. Um and he pretty much just did a homework assignment for me.

Back at it.

So I'm back at it and blogging my night away because I was slacking earlier in the semester, probably because I'm taking five English classes. I want to re-open the idea if it never being the worst as long as you can say "this is the worst." The other day I made the mistake of telling someone "you're the worst" when in reality she isn't the worst she may be the best, but I was continually getting frustrated with her because I couldn't convince her to see things from my perspective. Gosh I'm selfish, but we all are, maybe I should try and see things from her perspective, I will. Why is it that sometimes when people have minor conflicts they avoid talking about them and then let the small issues fester until they snowball into something larger? I don't have the answer or else I wouldn't be asking the question. Maybe someone could help me out and explain it to me.

Finding Links All the Time

I was recently doing a research project for my English 440 class, which is a study in Scandinavian Literature. When I came across this author who as we can see has told us what we already know: That we are not original so post your papers online, I promise nobody's going to rip them off and make a bunch of money off it so get over yourself. But here we see Eeva-Liisa Manner (a Finnish poet) putting into question several of the things or topic I and many others talked about in their papers. Here is a qoute from her as well as a poem, enjoy:

“The war years shadowed my youth. I was seventeen when the Russian planes started bombarding my home town of Wiborg on 30 November, 1939, damaging it badly. At armistice, Wiborg had to be yielded, it remained behind the border- an endless source of nostalgia for one who had a catlike, preserving fondness for homestead. Even as a ten-year-old, I had spine-chilling dreams about the destruction of Wiborg, and from those times onwards I have been haunted by reflections about the nature and mystery of time. I believe we have a false conception of time; everything has already happened some-where in an unknown dimension. Intuitively I knew it quite early, even as a child I was a Spinozistic determinist. Now that quantum physics has revolutionized our world picture, such a belief- in fact it is an experience- may appear hopelessly old-fashioned, but inevitably there are fractures in determinism, just as there are ossifications in irrationalism, in its conception of time.

‘I do not believe in coincidence, at most, in the sum of chances.
Even a dream, a vision, an apparition will materialize
doesn’t it prove that what happens
has in fact happened already?
That the future tense is the present tense and the present, the past tense?
That we have stuffed time into too tight a box?
Time does not flow, is not consecutive, but
all time is around us?
We live in a falsely co-ordinated space’”(Eeva-Liisa Manner)