Corn, and the End of Corn

"It is almost over. You can feel it in the cold air: twelve degrees on Wednesday. Hard winter descended on South Dakota this week, froze the prairie potholes, and pulled a steel gray curtain over the sky. Farmers reached into the back of their closets and pulled out their insulated Carhartt overalls..."

I Don't Know How I Got Here

But I somehow found myself watching some of the many, many amateur "Deceptacon" videos on youtube tonight. This song really inspired people. There are many versions, but I think that I will herein collect only those made by teenage girls. It seems in keeping with the spirit of the music:



My favorite thing about those girls is that in another one of their videos they have a dance-off over a Jones soda. They dance to DDR music, even though they are not doing DDR. It's just that that music is so fucking great.





This one might be my favorite:



I want to make it very clear that I am not making fun of these girls. You know how in all the videos it kind of seems like one of the girls is really into the song and the other(s) are just going along with her weird little project? I was definitely that girl.

Shit gets weird when you write a really catchy song, huh Kathleen Hanna?

It Calls to Me...

Hans Wegner peacock chair

Comics Day

Emily posted a comic. I'm going to too.

Kate Beaton does a series of "History Comics" that I like. Emily M. and I were just talking about the Battle of Hastings, so I thought I'd put that one up.

Why is the date of the Battle of Hastings so easy to remember (1066! 1066!)? It just is...

Woman Posed as a Sphinx

Woman Posed as a Sphinx

From the George Eastman House Flickr photostream, via Shoot! The Blog.

This photograph has the same colors as my living room.

Also, she totally looks like Little Edie, no?

The Relic

This was definitely on my test (the formatting should be different, e.g. there should be stanzas, but blogger is thwarting me):

When my grave is broke up again

Some second guest to entertain,

—For graves have learn'd that woman-head,

To be to more than one a bed—

And he that digs it, spies

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

Will he not let us alone,

And think that there a loving couple lies,

Who thought that this device might be some way

To make their souls at the last busy day

Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mass-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the bishop or the king,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
Difference of sex we never knew,
No more than guardian angels do;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

Reading Donne, whom I had never really read before, was one of the great unexpected pleasures of all the studying I did. The line, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" is impossible for me to forget. It reminds me of Old English verse: It is alliterative, for one. But it also makes poetry out of these weird, but very concrete, images. It isn't fantastic, but it's imaginative. It's sort of pedestrian, and very physical, but also almost ghoulish and really beautiful. Donne also wrote these pretty famous lines:

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string"

John Donne, that is kind of GROSS. Also kind of sexy. It's like, I love my girlfriend so much, I think I'll pop my eyes out. I don't think that last sentence will make much sense to people other than Emily and Katie M. , but trust me, it is very funny.

This is a portrait of Donne he had commissioned a few months before his death, while he was ill:

It is how he expected he would look when he rose from the grave. I'm not sure how exactly he decided what that would look like. I can only hope that when I rise from the grave I will have such fetching head-gear. But I will probably be wearing kale. Donne had this hung on his wall so he could look at it while he was dying and be reminded of the transient nature of life. John Donne was not fucking around.

Only someone so totally unafraid of dying could have written the way that he did about death. The writing about death in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (which title I am totally stealing from him) might actually turn you religious-- it just sounds like the truth:

"...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another; as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness."

And now you believe in God. You can thank me later.

I want to go see this

Luck to Me

In honor of the GREs (I hope this is on the test. When I am practicing and I see a poem or story I like, it's like, "Hello old friend here to help me! I didn't know anyone at this party and I am so glad you are here now."):

W.H. Auden

"Musee des Beaux Arts"

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Halloween + Shoes

I haven't posted in a long time. But I am putting up:

1) My Halloween headgear

2) A picture of someone's old shoes that are going to be my new shoes (from The Selby).