The pacifist pull of W.H. Auden

I recently pulled my Collected Poems of W.H. Auden from the shelf. For the last five or six years, my favorite poem by far has been the achingly horrifying O What Is That Sound? With its two voices suddenly reduced to one, its lilting refrain and strict adherence to verse form, this poem demands to be read out loud or even set to music. It is a picture of abandonment that is dramatic, dynamic, and enormously effective.

On this recent evening, when I returned to Auden for the first time in several months, I stumbled across the poem James Honeyman, a poem which illustrated to me again what I loved so much about O What Is That Sound? Both works, penned in the mid-late 1930s, are indisputably political products of Auden's deep-seated pacifism in the face of the Spanish Civil War and impending Second World War. Unlike many political poets, however, Auden remains deeply invested in form, and in a prettiness of language that never bows to the ugliness of content. In fact, it is this tension, between appealing form and repulsive content, that is the key to Auden's power. James Honeyman, in particular, makes use of simply formulaic verses. Like O What Is That Sound, it disarms the reader with its tripping rhythm and attractive images (a "ten-shilling chemistry set", or a small child who sits at a party dreamily dissolving sugar in his tea), pulling said recipient toward a moment of terrifying violence, which the poem's protagonist must confront alone.

After the idyll of content and form established in the early verses, that moment of confrontation shocks the reader, takes her by surprise and abrades her sensibilities, which have been finely tuned to the peaceful opening stanzas. This switch, contained in rigorously designed verses, portrays the fiendishness of violence, and its embeddedness in society, with unsurpassed accuracy. As we know all too well, violence is not a breaking of societal forms or norms, but the result of conforming to them and pursuing them to their natural conclusion. If we do not pay attention, we too must die (and we know why) by Honeyman's N.P.C.

48 HOUR FILM CHALLENGE THURSDAY 6:30PM

If you're in the Seattle area, come check out films made for the 48-hour film project this past weekend - especially this one. The screening is this Thursday, July 17, at the Neptune Theatre.

The address is 1303 N 45th St, Seattle.

See you there!

Local Sightings Film Festival

Hey Northwest filmmakers! Are you from WA, OR, ID, MT, AK, or BC? Submit to the Northwest Film Forum's Local Sightings Film Festival by Friday, July 18!! All necessary info in the link provided.

All the world's a bubble

I stumbled on this photo, and many more like it, via BoingBoing yesterday.

Photographer Jason Tozer was commissioned by Sony to show off its schmancy new camera line, in a stunningly beautiful collusion of art and commercialism.

These brought to mind a question I ponder on about a fortnightly basis: does everything really look the same, or do we just see it that way because we understand our perceptions in our own lived contexts? Do soap bubbles look like planets, or beer bottles like the human form? Is there an underlying, a priori pattern governing the shape of things, or is it an a posteriori imposition of our own narcissistic brains?

In any case, I want to live on this planet.

Is my blog ALL WRONG?

Once again, I mine Slate for a thought provoking meditation, this time on how we read on the Internet.

Professional Dreamers

Werner Herzog's new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, is my favorite of his films yet.* Commissioned by the National Science Foundation, the film is Herzog's attempt to make a movie about Antarctica that isn't "just another penguin movie". On countless levels, he succeeds.

First and foremost, he succeeds by turning the spotlight not on the stunning and terrifying Antarctic landscape, but on the peculiar folk who choose to make that landscape their home. The real fascinators here are the bus drivers, greenhouse keepers, maintenance people, whose biographies could put many a Nobel laureate to shame. Herzog's editorializing ("her story goes on forever") adds a delightful touch to these remarkable narratives.

When Werner does get to the nature, it is tear-jerkingly beautiful, accompanied by swelling music that will give you the sensation of having your heart extracted with an ice cream scoop. That is, for the most part - in fact, some of the most intriguing footage is of the town and NSF research station McMurdo, which Herzog unflinchingly films in all of its ugliness. The prosaic and mundane have a place in Antarctica, too.**

In Herzog's Antarctica, penguins can be gay or deranged; diving scientists are rooftop rockstars; seals make noises like an army of robots; and humans are well advanced on the long path to extinction. Musing on what the future dominant beings on this planet will be like, Herzog remarks that they may wonder what human beings were even doing in Antarctica; for the moment, we should at least be glad that this human being went.



*I haven't seen them all - but I'm working on that.
**Until I saw this movie, I thought those neon CGI fish in "The Life Aquatic" were a joke.

TweedleDum and TweedleEvil

Check out these bad boys:

Swan song, here we come.
(The short one is Silvio Berlusconi, BTW)