Rachel's Sing-Along Blog

A/N: sorry about the wall of text…

This post’s song is on YouTube, since I can’t find an embeddable version on the first page of google hits. If you’ve watched Firefly, you’ll understand that this fits because, Jayne, like Charles Foster Kane, is a hero to people who don’t really understand that underneath it all, he’s kind of a jerk. If you haven’t watched Firefly, and are intensely confused about what I’m talking about – go watch some Firefly. Seriously, you’ll thank me. Anyway, here’s a version of the song

Charles Foster Kane is a douchebag. This is unquestionably, undeniably, his number one characteristic – if his entire personality had to be summed up in one word, that would definitely be one of the major contenders (though maybe not the final winner, I’ll admit). But we feel sorry for him anyway, so there’s got to be something else going on.

He’s got everything, in most physical senses of the word. He has money, he’s got fame, he has a sort of generalized love of the people, and he has power. He does not, however, have friends or family, so he is very unhappy. The last time he was happy was when he was playing in the snow with his sled, Rosebud – a time when he presumably had both friends and family. So through Mr. Kane we see that just because you appear to have everything you could ever want, doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. He could have been – he had people who would have been his friends, was married twice, and had a son, but somewhere along the line something – all that money, or being taken from his family, or something else – stunted him emotionally, and turned him into a needy, domineering wreck who’s too proud to do anything about it.

Both Kane and Willy Loman want something they don’t, or maybe can’t have, and they each have what the other wants. Willy, surrounded by the love of his wife and two sons and a impressively devoted friend, Charlie, wants fame and fortune. Kane, with his piles of riches and fame, really just wants to be loved. And they’re both so preoccupied with making the world how they think it should be that they can’t be bothered to make the best of how it actually is. Basically, they’re both idiots, and kind of jerks, but we have to feel sorry for them anyway, because they’re just so pathetic. (Hooray for my character analysis!)

I was under the impression I had already posted this – as of several minutes ago, however, it was still listed as a draft, so apparently not. Anyway, here it is.

Willy Loman is sort of a contradiction. It’s easy to look at him and say, here is a man defeated by life – he has lost his job, lost his boys, lost even most of his sanity, and lost all hope of attaining his dream. The man commits suicide – it’s hard to get a stronger “defeated” vibe going. But at the same time, his dreams are sitll going. He believes, the entire time, that better things are just around the corner – or at least he appears to believe this. Even when Biff confronts him with reality, he believes that Biff is going to make it big, soon. He may not be quite delusional enough to believe that he’s still going places, but he keeps the dream alive for his boys – and it might be that, more than anything else, that kills him. Instead of accepting, and trying to be happy with, reality, Willy Loman looks at how he thinks the world should be, and tries to convince himself and the rest of the world that that’s how it is. What’s interesting is that this is often pointed to as a positive characteristic – in successful people. But for our salesmen, all it leads to is tragedy.

I’m sure there’s more to say on the subject, but that seems like a good stopping point for our overview of Willy Loman – the man who could be a romantic dreamer, or just kind of a jerk.

So, which of the poems presented did I think was most effective, imagism-wise? (You like that restating the question? I do.)

Before we answer that: this post’s song! Because it’s practically an imagist poem itself – except, y’know, more fun, and with a catchy tune. (Were this one of the options, it would totally be the most effective)

Ummmm, listen, folks…. my internet appears to be angry, and I do not have patience for trouble shooting, so, if the little song embedded here isn’t showing up, just YouTube “What a Wonderful World”. Listen to the version by Louis Armstrong. I promise it’ll be just as good, and you’ll feel great about accomplishing something for yourself!

Now, with an absolute minimum of further ado… I think it was Landscape with the Fall of Icarus!

So, um. Justification. Well. I just like it, guys….

No, seriously. It works well to convey the meaning because we know the poem is about Icarus falling, thanks to the title and the last two stanzas, but the image in the poem doesn’t focus on that at all – it’s an image of life – a farmer planting his field, plants growing – that has nothing to do with Icarus falling. This contrast does a great job of conveying the theme of the poem, which is, essentially, that life goes on regardless – that yes, Icarus’s fall was a tragedy, but it’s pretty inconsequential to the larger picture of life.

So, love fest over. I think it was pretty effective. Hooray?

I can’t remember the last time we didn’t have a prompt for a blog entry. Actually, I’m not sure if this one is with or without a prompt – looking at some other student’s blogs, it seems to be all about imagism, but our class definitly never got that assignment so I don’t know if it’s class specific or not, and it’s not on the moodle… (I put in all this rambling to clear myself in either eventuality). So, to cover both bases, I’ll give you a paragraph about imagism, and then talk about other stuff.

So, imagism. A movement in poetry, pretty much over now (it only lasted a couple years), but incredibly influential none the less. Basically, you were supposed to make your poem conjure a concrete image in the readers minds that was clearly representative of something, with a few words as nessecary to convey the meaning. Needless to say, I approve heartily of this style – the fewer words to sift through, the better. So, in summary, hooray for imagism – it was probably cool while it lasted.

Now, a song. This week we have the theme from Moonraker (the James Bond film). It was incredibly tacky, and I don’t actually like the song that much, but it has space (or the Moon), Russia (the bad guys are always Russian in the James Bond films – always.), and espionage. Plus, this Bond film was almost as trippy as the news in the rest of this post. Really, it’s a perfect match.

Moving on, we have perhaps the most exciting piece of new this week – Russian regional president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was abducted by aliens, or so he told the world in a recent television interview. This (not shockingly) concerned MP Andre Lebedev, who has written a letter questioning the president’s fitness for office. First, he expresses his concern that the president might have reveled privileged information or state secrets when abducted. Second, he mentions that if this was not an elaborate hoax, it was an event of historic importance and should have been reported to the Kremlin. And finally, he asks whether there is a state protocol for state officials to follow when contacted by aliens. (The article I’m getting all this from is here)

Yes, my friends, a Russian official reports being abducted by aliens, and the first concern is that he gave the aliens state secrets. And the second is the fact that the government has not yet come up with guidelines for it’s officials to follow in this eventuality. I’ve never really paid attention to Russia before but – I think I’m in love. Either that or terrified for the future of our world. The two are proving surprisingly difficult to distinguish. And all my emotions are clouded by how strongly this situation makes me think of this video (Jump to 0:35 or, if you have a short attention span, 2:15).

In short, this situation confuses all kinds of things out of me. On the one hand, who am I to go around declaring people incompetent right and left? On the other, I really, really, feel like Russia would be better off if Ilyumzhinov was not in charge of the running of one of it’s regions. The verdict on the other man depends on whether he was trying not to offend the people who believe in aliens, or if the state of the state regulations on how to respond to alien contact were really his first concern. Because that really, really, seems like one of those situations that can be left to the officials discretion. Just sayin’.

Of course, as a side note, I hoping prehaps more than I should that this actually was some enemy country kidnapping the president and convincing him they were aliens to try to gain state secrets from him. Because that would be the Best. Espionage. Ever.

It seems my titles are getting less and less creative as time goes by…

So, this week’s song relates on two levels. One, Howl is a pretty anti-establishment poem. And De Do Do Do De Da Da Da is a pretty anti-establishment song. (Or at least anti-politician, which, whatever, it’s close enough) Also, Howl mentions dadaism. and De Do Do Do De Da Da Da pretty clearly references dadaism – it is, in fact, that only reason I knew what dadaism was when reading the poem. So, yup. That’s what I got. Plus, I like The Police – so just listen to the song.

Onto the poem Howl. My thoughts, my reactions. All that exciting jazz.

Honestly, my first reaction to the poem was this is awesome – and it really, really is, for a lot of reasons. First, the obscenity. I know this is a turn-off for some of my classmates, but it’s really what makes me like the poem. Not, I hasten to add, because I feel any particular need to dirty poetry, it’s just that this is a poem with guts. It’s not some wishy-washy, “let’s be angsty in meter” piece of pretension. This poem is no better than ought to be, and it is rocking it. So, yeah, the obscenity actually makes me really happy.

Second, I actually get a lot of the references! I know that it’s really my own fault if I don’t know enough to recognize the allusions in a lot of poetry, and that I really shouldn’t hold it against a poem if it takes a lot of effort for me to get it, and that just because there were one or two lines where I said to myself hmm. That’s kind of a strange statement – not really what I’d call intuitively obvious to the casual observer – but I totally understand what he’s saying there anyway, it doesn’t actually mean that this poem is any better than any other. I know this. But that stuff matters to me anyway, so I really like Howl.

Sadly, those few flashes of recognition do not actually mean that I understand everything in the poem – for every line that I “click” with, there are probably fifteen that are completely foreign – but I don’t mind so much. Because Howl is good. It’s so angry you can’t help but like it (I know that sounds strange, but it’s true), and it’s messages speak directly to my own world view (even if, just looking at my actions, very few people would be able to guess this). And, best thing of all – it totally makes fun of hipsters in the first stanza. (At least I think Ginsburg’s making fun of them… I’m not actually sure – but I want to like him so badly…) So, in summary, Ginsburg was a cool dude, and I really like his poem.

This song works on so many levels for today’s post. First off, it’s complaining about modern society’s choices, just like The Wasteland. Second, the robot appears to be one thing, but is actually another, just like The Wasteland!! (In Mr. Roboto’s case, he seems nice, then turns into Killroy. In the poem’s, it seems like an ordinary poem, but is actually a secret conspiracy’s coded message, as per my last post)

So, last time we talked, I told you all about the massive conspiracy behind the inclusion of The Wasteland in the English curriculum. I still stand by that, though I haven’t quite cracked the code yet. We’re going to have to move on from that for the sake if this post, though – I’m afraid if I spread the truth too vigourously, Eliot’s enforcers will come looking for me. (I know he’s dead. That doesn’t have to stop him running a major underground organized crime ring. Might even help.)

So what’s the The Wasteland cover story? Basically, that society is falling apart due to lack of morals (way to be super-hypocritical, Mr. mafia boss Eliot).

We are, according to this poem, lacking all sorts of morals. We are lustful, we’re greedy, we don’t care about love and have turned away from God. (For evidence of this, since I don’t feel like incorporating it neatly into the flow of information, or elaborating on it at all: the whole “lustful” thing can be found all over section three. The greed in primarily from section four, with the drowning of the merchant. The not caring about love comes primarily from sections two and three, with the “game of chess”, and he talks about religion during the fifth section, and a little during the first, when he talks about the dry rocks versus the life-giving water of Jesus)

Basically, Eliot’s saying people are terrible, and becoming more so by the minute, and we can only be saved by turning to God. Is it an accurate depiction of society? Pretty much – and always has been. I don’t agree with his conclusions at all, however – society’s not going to fall apart just because not everyone conforms to one view of morality. To be honest, the entire poem left me with an impression of T.S. Eliot as a judgmental rude word. Besides, this movie has already clearly shown us that when the apocalypse comes, there will be lots of water – it won’t be dry and barren at all! Way to get your facts wrong, man.

(Oh my goodness. I just thought about this after I put that picture in here – Waterworld could totally be inspired by The Wasteland. I mean, for the the first half of the poem, water is a bad thing, and we’re all either drowning in it or in a boat above in in the fourth section. And Waterworld decidedly portrays the collapse of civilization…. It’s perfect!)

What’s going on here is sort of like 99 Red Balloons, but in reverse. You see, in the song, they think something harmless is sinister. But with The Wasteland, we’ve been spending almost a century thinking something very sinister is harmless – and it’s got to stop.

My friends, I have a theory about The Wasteland, by T. S. Eliot. About what it really means. Because it’s not what you think – I mean, it’s not a poem written expressly to torture high school students, I know no one actually thinks there’s a theme here in the style of most poetry, that would just be ridiculous. No, my friends, The Wasteland is a code. I mean, think about the facts. World War 1 had ended just four years before the poem was published. Egypt was in the process of gaining its freedom and the Irish Civil War began that year as well. Who knows which of these Eliot was tied up in – or if it was (what I think more likely) something else, that hasn’t made it to the history books. But whatever it was, Whitman had to get the word out to his confederates. So they arranged a code – a code that would look like complete nonsense to anyone reading it. And then, to ensure that his fellow schemers could obtain it without looking suspicious, he published it, under the title “The Wasteland”. It makes so much sense – it explains everything. The odd typesetting, the nonsensiscal subject changes, the random capitalization, everything. As to why we’re still reading it in class? My theory is – don’t tell anyone I told you this, they might be watching – my theory is that whatever the code is talking about, it wasn’t just relevant to the early 20th century. It’s still going on today, and the government still hasn’t cracked the code. So instead of devoting their own time and resources to it, they’re utilizing the minds of college and high school students around the country to try to crack it for them – setting us loose to “analyze” it. It’s the only way that makes sense. Because, I mean, there’s no way that anyone would publish that and expect anyone to understand it unless they had a very specific and detailed key. No. Way. T. S. Eliot couldn’t have been that stupid.

Just sayin’.

And for this weeks song, we have Pink Floyd channeling Herman Melville. (They might be surprised to hear it, but whatever. I think the two themes are totally related)

Anyway, onto Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. Yes, reader, I know what you’re thinking: Bartleby the Scivener. What an awesome name. This story has to be about someone really awesome and hardcore. I want to name my first born child Bartleby the Scrivener. Well, I am in complete agreement, and yet we are wrong! (not about that being a great name for anyone’s first born child – it is – but about the story being about someone awesome). As it turns out, this story is about the importance of human

connections. Bartleby, the title character, completely isolates himself from humanity in all its forms – he never talks unless spoken to, he eats barely enough to live, he “prefers not” to do any work that another person asks him to, he rarely emerges from behind his little screened-in corner, and he is frequently described as nearly mechanical. And because Bartleby has no personal contact with anyone, he is essentially dead – dead inside at first, and then physically dead at the end. He is described as a ghost (or phantom, or haunt) more times than can be entirely due to chance, and he is constantly falling into “dead-wall reveries”, which are another hint at the theme. The prevalence of walls in the story – all the windows are blocked by walls, Bartleby is walled into his little corner, and he only stares at the wall while in prison – indicate all the barriers that people (particularly Bartleby) put up between themselves in the story. And when, at the end, the narrator cries “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”, it’s a pretty clear extrapolation from Bartleby’s lack of connections killing him from the inside out to the constant barriers everyone puts up slowly killing us all.

So how is this a story of Wall Street? Well, with that name, how could Melville not set it there? I mean, if you’re going to write a story

using walls as a symbol of isolation, and you have a well-known place with the name “Wall Street” available to you as a setting, then if you don’t already think poorly of it you’re going to start just so you can set the story there. Since “because he could” isn’t really an acceptable answer as to why it’s set in Wall Street, though, we’d better come up with something else. Luckily, it’s pretty clear what Melville was trying to tell us (I hope…). The business world isn’t always the most touchy-feely of places – not even back in the 1800s. Not only was Wall Street full of business, it was the logistical center of the business world. The people who worked there weren’t impacting people lives directly through their work – they were making a lot of money, sure, but they weren’t helping people. The things they did – writing out contracts, tallying money – may be important parts of business, but aren’t exactly people-oriented. So if they didn’t have close ties with their co-workers (which the people in the story, at least, do not – they don’t even know each other’s names!) and their jobs didn’t really help anyone, then Wall Street must have been a pretty dry, egocentric sort of place. And while I don’t mean to say business people are bad people – they weren’t even back then – Wall Street, at least, continues in much the same way. It deals with stocks now, but it’s still full of people doing fairly abstract number crunching that might serve to make them or their clients money, but isn’t going to really impact the lives of the starving poor. The completely mindless jobs may have been taken over by computers, but Bartleby the Stock Analyst would probably work just as well as Bartleby the Scrivener.

As for what to take away from all this? Just this: connect with others. Help them. Impact them in some way, and let them impact you.

We are defined by our connections – there are all sorts of very wise quotations to the effect that you can know are person by the way they’ve touched other’s lives. If you aren’t involved in the world, if no one knows that your alive, then it’s really questionable whether or not you are.

listen, folks, since I’m posting this less htan three hours after my last one, you can just go to the other one for a song. It doesn’t fit this one as well, but whatever. You get “meaningful pictures” in this post, that should be enough. Now, to begin – or at least move on to a different introduction.

Mr. McGarry, you seem to be begging me to talk about all my random teenage angst here. You give me three poems about being scared of life, not being accepted for who you are, and living a boring life, and ask me to talk about which one speaks to me? I sense some sort of diabolical trap. Like you have some machine that is fueled by people talking about how they’re outcasts, and you need it running full blast tonight. But I will not fall into the trap! No sir, this post will have no angst at all, because I am on to you. (OK, that’s a lie. I mean, I am on to you, but this post will be full of teenage stress and hormones, because anyone who asks for that deserves to get it. Also, please don’t make fun of me if all of the stuff I say about the poem is wrong. It might make me cry.)

So, which poem did speak to me? The answer here is going to have to be the Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock. Not the whole unable to relate to women part, but the idea of being too timid to make waves, being inadequate to control your own destiny, not being the star of you own life, let alone anyone else’s. This certainly isn’t my constant state of mind or anything (personally, I like to think of myself as full of appalling self-confidence) but everyone feels this way occasionally, no matter what, particularly high school students.

This is a stressful time for us, no one’s going to argue that – college is coming, admission is harder than ever, it’s going to take half your life to repay the debt but no one will ever hire you for anything if you don’t have a degree, in fact come to think of it you’ll probably need a PhD too, you should start planning for that now as well, and oh by the way figure out what you want to be for the rest of your life I need to you to write a twenty-page paper on your career aspirations tonight and we will be checking up in ten years to see if you’re still on track, so make sure to get it right. And, just as an afterthought you understand, if you don’t have time that’s fine, I’ll just be taking notes here, could you cure this man of Alzheimer’s for me? Don’t worry, it will count as community service! Under all this pressure to be perfect at everything lest you wind up an insane homeless person on the streets of New York, feelings of inadequacy are quite natural.

I’m not going to say that inefficacy is the modern condition – it’s not, any more than it was the condition of the 1930′s, or the 1500′s (no, those dates don’t mean anything, I just picked them out of the air). But it’s certainly as much a part of life now as it was when the poem was written. Honestly, who does dare disturb the universe? We all want to be inoffensive, well-liked, and not to noticable in case someone nasty comes along looking for a target. Everything is a risk, and the fewer you take the harder they seem. The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock may be a rather extreme case – most people do not find it necessary to consider deeply before enjoying a peach – but it certainly serves as a good example of an all-too-common state of mind – I can’t do anything big, so why bother trying?

One of the big differences today, of course, is that now psychiatry’s come up with a term and medicine for chronic cases of this – dysthymic disorder, or depression. My psychology textbook informs that one of the causes of depression is learned helplessness, and that learned helplessness results from experiencing too many unavoidable adverse events. Which, to my mind, sounds a lot like our friend J Alfred Purfrock, who doesn’t dare disturb the universe, because if he did, some woman would just tell him he was doing it all wrong. And of course we’ve all seen enough Cymbalta commercials to get the idea that depression is a pretty prevalent thing in our society at the moment. So that one definitely applies to modern life.

And then we have the sense of inferiority to someone else. In most people’s lives, they are definitely the main player. I don’t care how lame your life is, you are Prince (or Princess, as the case may be) Hamlet in your own internal monologue. But just because everyone’s the main character doesn’t mean they think they’re the best. Where do eating disorders come from, but an unhealthy comparison of one’s own, slightly imperfect, body to the impossibly fit airbrushed magazine models? That sort of inappropriate comparison is the reason perfectionism is unhealthy and coaches are always telling you that the goal is just to be your best.

Because no one will be the absolute best all the time, and, what with the various stressors of modern-day life – going back to my target high schooler group, the pressure to be top in everything – or at least in something – so you can be successful for the rest of your life – sometimes you have to make the comparison, and sometimes your going to come to the conclusion that really, you should stop trying to be the star and just be the person on the sidelines taking down a transcript of the speech, because then at least you’d be useful, right?

So, the point of all that random, unfortunately rather incoherent, rambling is that The Love Song of J Alfred Purfrock expresses the inferiority and uncertainty we all feel from time to time. It represents an extreme case, certainly, but the phenomena it talks about – social isolation, the feeling that your actions could not possibly matter – are just as much part of life today as they were when the poem was written.

Yeah, so this post is a little late… but i wasn’t there when it was assigned, so I’m going to assume it’s OK.

Alright, guys, I’ve been waiting forever to put this song in a post. And I can’t come up with a good peotry song I haven’t already used (Seriously, Mr. McGarry, you running me out of music here – we should probably stop doing poetry hint hint), and this song sort of connects to the theme of the poems I’m supposed to be talking about. Because, you see, all these poems are about people who are competely boring and don’t take chances and are pretty much unloved and afraid to dream. And this song is from the musical Man of La Mancha, at the point when Don Quixote is trying to convice this “kitchen slut” (the song says it, not me!) that she’s his Lady Dulcinea. In the song, she’s pretty much saying, no I’m not, I’m worthless, stop being an idiot, no one loves me, I’ll never amount to anything. So, she’s like the impoverished female version of all the people in our poems! Listen folks, it’s not perfect by any means, but it’s late, and that’s the best I’m going to do. It’s a good song – be glad of that. (And it’s from a musical – that makes it, like, automatically school appropriate. Right? I hope so.)

So, onto what I’m actually suppose to be writing about: “Of the three poems Disillusionment of 10 o’clock, Anyone lived in a pretty how town, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfrock, which do I think was moe effective at conveying the theme?” I’ve looked at a couple other people’s posts, to get a feel for what’s supposed to be going on here, and it looks like I’m going to be bucking the trend, but I’m going to have to say that Love Song wins. This is partly, I’ll admit, is its use of the word etherized, but there are other reasons that actually relate to how well I understand it. Part of the reason I understand it better may be that it’s longer. It doesn’t have that much more going on than the other poems, but it gives you longer to figure out what it’s driving at. It also requires fewer random leap of intuition than the others – I mean, the blind connections are there, but you can understand the poem without making all of them. Whereas if you miss the whole “catching tigers in red weather” thing in 10 o’clock (which I did the first couple times around) or happen to get stuck on trying to figure out what in the world he could possibly mean by “up so floating many bells down” in pretty how town, (which I may have also done), then your pretty much doomed. Whereas, with Love Song, after the fifth or sixth repetition of “do I dare?”, you get the idea that the narrator is probably a touch indecisive, and it sort of follows that here is a man who has lived out a great deal of his life and it’s now so late in the game that he really does not have the temerity to actually connect with a woman, and so will probably die alone. So, anyway, opinion done. Hope you liked it.