Regina, Regina

So Regina Spektor is my favorite musician probably ever. i feel like that might be a sin for the same reason i think that having the "The Hunger Games" be my favorite book is a sin. Which means i don't have any reason at all. They are just so modern and it makes me look like i am only digging the lastest craze, but I am so into modern. The classicy stuff is great, but i feel like i can connect to modern forms of art better, you know? I don't know. It doesn't really make sense to me either. But here is one of her best songs:

I don't think i get this song. Is it sung by Delilah? or just someone comparing her love life to that of the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah? Also did Delilah really love Samson? Why would she cut his hair if she did truly love him? This reminds me of Judas who sold out Jesus. I think Judas really did love Jesus, but the things of the world were more important to him. Like he lost sight of the big picture.

And Samson. Why did he tell Delilah about his weakness? He totally KNEW she was going to use it against him because she had already tried it before. Samson and Delilah are totally hopeless. Why did he have to fall in love with her. He was warned not to, which makes it only more poignant. Once they chose to be with each other they were doomed to lose thier love. Anyway there is that. Enjoy the vid.

Canaries with grey wings

So here is a handy link to a wonderful article that i actually almost started a blog about almost a year ago. Thinking of all the implications of singing even without having the greatest appearance was such a cool thought to me. Singing is just serving the Lord and others and it would have been so cool to share stories of how i sang in my day-to-day life but i never got around to it. and now i have more blogs than i can handle.

Link:Canary story
Hope you love it!

The Hollow men by T. S. Eliot

I read this poem for my ENG 222 class and was blown away. I haven't read much of T. S. Eliot, but I really enjoyed this. Of course we did not actually discuss it in class. I especially love the last part, because I really feel like things usually don't end with a bang, but are almost anticlimatic in a way. The rest of the poem I don't really know what is going on... 

Something interesting about Eliot is that he believed that to read poetry you should know everything about poetry ever, so he has an insane amount of allusions and stuff which mostly all go over my head. You basically have to read his poems annotated to get all the allusions. Nobody knows that much about poetry. Unless it is their job to know that much about poetry.
Oh and I probably am supposed to say that this material is copyrighted... or something.

 

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Fred Returns

Daniel and i were surprised to find Fred sitting on the couch tonight when we got in. I remember him saying something about being back on the 8th, but we take things day by day. Things like that are not so important to us. Either Fred is here or he is gone, and right now he is here.

He was sitting on the couch watching Kyle XY with Karl with a kind of a grimace on his face. He had been gone for what seemed so long, and he had changed. I had used to wonder why I never hung out with my friends who were married, but after that moment seeing him on the couch, i'll never wonder that again. He looked so different from us in a completely new way. I walked past him and into the kitchen where his new groceries, apple juice, mouthwash, granola sat on the counter and I knew he didn't belong in that house with the dirty dishes in the sink and the video games always in the other room; these things that he did not have control over. He didn't belong with them anymore.

He was trying so hard to be young again in the way we were. I think he was only watching Kyle XY to get away from us. He couldn't live here with us anymore, and he was using the tv as an escape. Oh his face said it all. He wanted to be where we were without having to care about things. he wanted to be able to just pack up his bags and leave to Utah for no real reason, but he just couldn't. And if he was being honest he didn't want that deep down. He only wanted it for us. He couldn't live with us and not have that free spirit feeling. Not that he wasn't free to leave. Of course he could, but he loved her so much he didn't want to ever leave her. Now he only has to wait for us to leave him.

My Philosophy

This is a little bit of philosophy that i basically stole from James Derrida. Except the way i think about it is much different than him, i'm pretty sure. Let's hope i can actually make it make sense.

Basically, everything we see is a symbol. Think about words. Each letter is a symbol for a sound, and when certian sounds are put together they are a symbol for a real thing. The word money is a symbol for money, but the word money is not money. We know what it means though. So, what is money a symbol for?

K this is where it can get confusing. Money is a symbol of value, its a currency, but the materials money is made from, paper and ink, are not valuable in the way money is. Money has value because we give it value. And what did we have before money? Is money simply a symbol/replacement for gold? Where did value come from, and what has value, and why? Like words represents an object that is not present, (the word money does not have value itself) objects represent something that is not present. I really hope this makes sense.

I believe (and so does Derrida) that there is something we cannot access through our senses here on Earth. It is not present, but it is manifest in everything we see and hear. Some things are closer to this essence than others. For example, money is a symbol of value and the word money is a symbol for money which is a symbol for value and the Symbol $ is a symbol for the word money which is a symbol for actual money which is a symbol for value. Make sense? Also i think that natural things are closer to the essence than man made things. Man made objects take natural objects and make something different out of them. A house may be made out of wood which is made out of trees, but trees are not made out of other natural objects. They are closer to the true nature of the essence.

This idea of bringing things to thier base origin or nature is called deconstruction. It looks at the elements of a building and determines where they come from and what those natural elements mean. Because everything is a symbol though, everything can be interpereted in many different ways. I believe that literature and words  are a way of trying to understand the essence by drawing father away from it, and that the same deconstructionist approach would reveal things about life and the essence, which is why it is so hard to pin down what a good work of literature is saying. Its talking about a facet of the essence which we cannot fully understand using our symbols. Because even people are a symbol of the essence, we can come to understand it by understanding ourselves.

Because of this symbol thing, i believe that everyday occurences and things that happen are symbols for something greater. One point of this blog is to relay these events in a way that make them meaningful and important. When i feel like sometihing that happens means more than a simple event, i want to portray that meaning, that facet of the essence, and maybe understand it better myself.

So what is the essence? I think its an all encompasing truth and presence that means the whole of everything. That doesn't really make any sense though. I believe that the essence is literally God. He created everything, and he even said that "All things testify of me." I think it totally makes sense. He is in everything. Don't write this off just because i got religious all of a sudden, if there is an essence, it makes sense that it would be a greater, all-encompasing being.

Anyway, thats my philosophy and I hope actually makes sense, even if you don't believe it. Its just a different way of looking at things.

Fred Leaves

This is a portrait of my house, my roommates, and our unnamed roles. As a writer i am not supposed to tell you what a piece is about. You are supposed to just guess be reading it. You are just supposed to feel it. The meaning of a really good piece of writing cannot be put into words. This will not be a very good piece of writing.

Since Fred left, the hierarchy of our house has been turned upside down. At thirty-one he was very much the head and father type in the house. Not that he was in charge of us, but he got things done. He was the one with a job, he was the one working on the landscaping in the front yard, even if he never actually finished it. And he owned the house.

The rest of us, college students, lived the social, stay-up-until-three-wake-up-at-noon type of life. Nothing steady, nothing definate. We had our own little corner of the house that was very much ours, and we took turns owning the whole thing, presenting it to friends, having parties. When Fred left, the ownership fell to us for whatever amount of time it took for him to return. We fought over the house without words, without conflict. Little things that said more than a slap in the face might have. The pain of pysical fighting increases with the intent.

It centered around the tv, usually. Marshall playing video games on the tv all day. Daniel and i offering to host unannounced movie nights. The television was a thing of power. We wanted it to be ours, wholly and permenantly. Of course this was impossible, but we tried anyway.

It's funny that Karl left with Fred. Karl who had classes, tests and finals to worry about just up and left the college life to go with Fred. Don't get me wrong, Karl is 27, older than the rest of us, but that doesn't put him in the same league as Fred. Karl is a freshman at the college if that gives you the right idea. So anyway he left with Fred and i guess he thought he was important enough to the house to leave it. The way he went though, one day he was sleeping in class and the next day he decides to pack his bags and go with Fred to Utah or wherever. Didn't even tell wnyone hardly, just went. I can't imagine that was the case with Fred, not showing up to work one day, nobody knowing where he's at. I'm sure he told everyone he was getting married.

That was another thing, Fred was engaged. To the rest of us marriage was so far away. None of us were even twenty yet, except Karl. And for him, i think, marriage isn't right around the corner either. The way he just dropped everything and left for Utah, that doesn't seem like the married type. It's funny it always feels like Karl is so much closer to my age than Fred's. We were talking once in class or something and you know how old Karl was on September 11, 2001? He was a senior in high school. i don't know, that just really put it into perspective for me. A senior in high school. That was me one year ago, and that was Karl September 11, 2001.

I was so surprised one time when Kevin and Marshall and Daniel and i were all talking one night. Fred had been gone maybe a week and It seemed like we had been fighting over the house the whole time and never would be friends or anything. Like it was Daniel and me versus them. So it just really surprised me that night to see us all joking till midnight, not caring about who would claim the tv tomorrow. I guess that's just us college type.

Karl got home first, i don't even know how, but there he was one day with all five seasons of some tv show from abc family and suddenly it was a Kyle XY marathon 24/7. You could wake up at three in the morning to take a dump and there would be Karl out there starting another episode and eating his microwave popcorn. Marshall  and Nephi tried to follow the series for about three seconds, but Karl had a rigorous schedule. No class, no friends, just him sitting in front of the tv all day. The thing that really got me, though, is that Karl had his own tv right there in his room. I don't know why he wasn't using that one.

Nephi seemed to be over constantly. Nephi and that one chick, i don't even know her name. They're friends of Marshall's, but they come in here all the time and act like they own the place. They're even worse then us who live here if you can belive that. Like this one time Nephi was sitting on the couch soaking his feet and this chick was on her laptop next to him and they're flirting. They have this viscious way of flirting where they just fight each other, it's all very mature. And don't even think that they are going to be quiet about it. So anyway they're over here sprawled out on the couch practically and Daniel and I are supposed to be hosting a party. They were just over there picking at each other and we practicalyy ahd to beg them to leave, they were so disruptive. We asked them if they wantedd to join, honestly we did, but that chick just gave me a look i would not want to repeat and Nephi simply could not cut his foot soak short. They migrated to Karl's room, adn the whole time they were walking in and out like we were invading on thier privacy. It did not do much for my opinion of them, that's for sure.

There are no Words for this

In my world of art class we have been learning about Salvador Dali and it is a little known fact that in the sixties, Dali worked with Walt Disney on an animated short to introduce surrealism to the mainstream public. They never finished as it was deemed inappropriate for children.

A few years ago, the Disney foundation finished the film using modern animating technology. You can see it on youtube. Or right here on this blog. Anyway i watched this video and really loved it. Except for the music. So i thought: what if the soundtrack to this movie was an Eric Whitacre Song? Whitacre, Dali and Disney all in one video?? How cool right? I tried it out and the result was profound. I know nothing about technology at all so i am giving you the chance to do it the ghetto way i did.

Mute the Destino video. Then make sure both the 'Destino' and the 'Sleep' videos are loaded. Then start 'Sleep' about fourty seconds after 'Destino' Don't try to understand it too much, Just feel the music and the images. What you see and hear might amaze you.

Now you are set to go. Enjoy!