- What type of poem is it?
- What is its mode? Lyric, narrative, dramatic?
- What is the form?
- Does it have meter? Does it have rhyme? Is it in free verse?
- What is the diction or vocabulary of the poem?
- Who is the speaker of the poem?
- Is there a story line or action?
- What is the setting?
- What are the images?
- Are there figures of speech?
- Are there any allusions in the poem?
- What’s the tone?
- Does the poem have any symbols?
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He is a free man,” De Laurentiis said of Spalletti. “After 50 years in cinema [as producer], and so many exclusives with directors, actors, when someone comes to you and says: ‘After all, I’ve done my best, a cycle of my life has ended, I still have a contract with you, but I’d rather have a sabbatical year.’ What are you going to do, are you going to oppose it?
“You have to be generous in life, I never expect anything in return. He gave us, I thank him, now it’s right that he continues to do what he loves to do.”
Garcia, Adriana. “Napoli boss Luciano Spalletti to leave, take sabbatical after Serie A title win.” ESPN, 29, May 2023, https://global.espn.com/football/story/_/id/37751868/napoli-boss-spalletti-leave-serie-title-winWhen Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis speaks we quote him. Might he be the most underrated owner in football? Maybe the most underrated character in football?
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My goal with this series is simply to collect and post sentences from the readings that struck me.
Sure, Chuck Dugan is AWOL: A Novel – With Maps isn’t Shakespeare. But who doesn’t enjoy a thrilling maritime adventure tale? It’s an underrated book, complete with illustrations that is worth your time.
It was hurricane hair.
pg 63The image this renders in your mind. That swirl on the crown on a young man’s head. Hurricane hair.
His kicks popped off the bone,
pg 64This adds a bit of sound to the text. You can hear the “pop” of the kick coming off the bone. It’s both audible and visible.
He was not a defeatist. But the air was poison.
pg 127Chuck keeps a positive attitude in a hostile situation. Respect.
He was a resilient person, not given over to negativity. But at a certain point, sooner or later, he was going to either:
a) freeze to death, or
b) drown.
Whichever came first.
pg.164So much of this book is about Midshipman’s Chuck Dugan’s resilience. Floating at sea, stuck on Emergency Rescue Buoy No. 49, falling into a coma, no matter the obstacle Chuck Dugan carries on.
He passed under a wave and came up reciting the Midshipman’s Table of Priorities.
“Midshipmen –” he began, his voice cracked and faint. He spat out some water. ” – – will use the Table of Priorities when determining the precedence of one activity over another. ONE. Orders to report to the Superintendent, Commandant, Deputy Commandant.”
He went under. Slowly, he returned.
“TWO. Emergency calls for immediate medical and dental care. THREE . . .”
He disappeared.
“ELEVEN. Appointment with academic advisor
during pre-registration each semester . . . TWENTY – FOUR.
Liberty. ”
pg 173More notes on the benefits of committing ideas and rules to memory. Reciting poetry, your alphabet, or the Midshipman’s Table of Priorites can help one detach in a stressful situation. Also, the Table of Priorites is another detail that Eric Chase Anderson uses to construct the world of this maritime tale.
Chuck tried to consider the situation carefully,
but his thoughts were muddled. He didn’t want to
co-operate if he was a POW. There were rules to that:
strict Geneva Convention. Don’t co-operate, don’t give out more than your Name, Rank, and Serial Number.
Since this was his first experience as a captive – –
which he assumed he was, though he couldn’t remember
whose or which war – – he wanted to get it right. pg 179
pg 179The benefits of commiting rules and ideas to memory. They’ll help you handle yourself in threatining scenarios.
Chuck sat quietly for a moment. He took a sip of the coffee — Navy-style black and boiling hot. For an instant, he felt faint, his head reeling from the on-rush of heat.
pg 180What’s the recipie for Navy coffee? Brew it black and boiling hot. Keep it that way post pour. Serve it in a handless mug. Boom Navy Coffee. Sip and smile.
More wonderful details Eric Chase Anderson uses to ground the story.
He longed – – briefly but intensely — for a tuna-fish sandwhich and a cold glass of milk. Then decided coffee was very much all right. Mainly he felt curious.
pg. 183We’ve all had those moments after a hard run, a long hike, or maybe after changing a tire, where being physcially spent brings on intense hunger.
Perhaps this paid for the sin he had just committed. The sin of condeming those three boys to their deaths.
pg 195This story, while filled with quips and diagrams and illustrations, is heavy. It has weight. Death lurks throughout the pages.
Anderson, Eric Chase. Chuck Dugan is AWOL: A Novel – With Maps. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004.
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In 1974, I took a series of train trips all across India, as my father introduced me to the relatives I’d never had a chance to meet in my faraway English schools and home. Every detail of The Hero clamored around our compartment: the faces at the window, waving tiny cups of tea; the moralists eager to lecture anyone on everything; the slightly obsequious waiter explaining that there was nothing to drink but Coca-Cola. None of us in the carriage would have been surprised that the man who pontificated most furiously on the importance of liberating women would prove to be the one most eager to exploit them; projection can take many forms.
Depths and Surfaces, Iyer, Pico, Feb 22, 2018: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5413-the-hero-depths-and-surfacesWe’ve talked about reading “upstream” with your favorite authors, but I’m finding it a helpful practice with your favorite filmmakers too. For example ask yourself, what movies did Wes Anderson watch? What movies did he love? Then go watch those movies, and you’ll soon see the inspirations reveal themselves.
Satyajit Ray was an enormous influence on Wes Anderson. With each interior train hallway shot from The Hero, I kept thinking “Oh! That shot is in the Darjeeling Limited!”
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“Impossible only means that you haven’t found the solution yet.”
– someone
Morrison, Scott. 1972: The Series That Changed Hockey Forever. Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2022. (see page 243)This from what looks to be a fantastic book on the 1972 Summit Series.
Don’t fret. I didn’t know what the Summit Series was either. It was an eight game hockey series between Canada and the Soviet Union. This was the first time NHL players filled the Canadian national team roster.
On the surface 1972 looks like a hockey book, but as I read on I discovered it’s a Canadian history book. It’s packed with historical moments most non-Canadians would know nothing of.
See the FLQ crisis. Crisis of national identity is not something unique to the last five years.
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These pamphlets in Wes Anderson’s Criterion Collections are worth the price of admission. They’re filled with drawings, interviews, and behind- the-scenes insights. An analog version of a blu-ray’s bonus features.
Here Wes shares a glimpse of his process:
When I’m writing, I keep notebooks of my ideas for sets, props, and clothes. I incorporate some of these ideas into the script, but I set the majority of them aside to give privately to the different department heads during preproduction. In the past, I have occasionally forgotten some of my favorite ideas until it was too late – – for example, after the movie is out on video. To prevent this from happening on THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (which contains more perhaps unnecessary visual detail than both my previous films combined), about three months before we started shooting, I asked my brother Eric, a skilled illustrator, to help me create a set of drawings that would include much of the information I wanted to communicate to the crew — and that would also suggest the overall look and feeling of the movie.
We had already found the house where I wanted to film (in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem), and our production designer, David Wasco, had provided us with a set of blueprints, so I was able to very specifically plan the contents and arrangements of each of the rooms, and Eric was able to meticulously render them. Eric was, in fact, so meticulous that many of the sets had already been constructed by the time he finished the drawings. Eventually, however, his illustrations became the standard equipment on the walls of the production offices and art department and in the notebooks of everyone on the crew — a sort of manual to keep next to your script. We include a copy here for you.
— Wes Anderson
Criterion Collection Pamphlet. The Royal TenenbaumsEric Chase Anderson is underrated.
Is Wes Anderson the filmmaker with the highest percentage of his movies in the Criterion Collection? 9 from 10? I’m sure the French Dispatch is lurking at the door.
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JEAN JULLIEN: Can you remember when I first started to draw?
SYLVIE JULLIEN: As far as I’m concerned, you’ve always drawn. You’ve been doing it ever since you were able to pick up a pencil. You didn’t “learn”
BRUNO JULLIEN: You drew all the time, even on tablecloths when we were out at restaurants. It was your way of expressing yourself, of describing the tiniest routine events. You did this in sketchbooks that you would carry around with you, the ones we would offer you regularly. It was a ritual.
JJ: Yes, you gave me my first sketchbook. When I was at school in Quimper (a city in northwest France), my teacher Jacques Vincent encouraged us to keep a journal. There wasn’t much in the way of rules; the idea was to get us to draw and draw and draw so that we developed a visual language. And what better way to do that than to look for inspiration in what is around you? I think that my practice of drawing every day and my interest in everyday life come from that exercise.
Jullien, Jean. Jean Jullien. New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2022. (see page 35)Having Jean Jullien’s parents share his drawing origin story is a wonderful approach. Our origin stories must look different to our parents, who if they were around, watched them manifest in real time.
The idea of keeping a drawing journal seems beneficial for developing your own visual language. Your own style.
Keep drawing.
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Some love a prompt. Others think they’re worthless. Think of this list as a jet pack. If you’re a bit stuck with you’re writing, or for that matter with your drawing, strap this on and let your imagination fly a bit.
This prompt list originated from her St. Mark’s workshop in 1971-1975.
You can download her complete Experiments List the PDF here.
H/T to Mason Currey
Journals of: * dreams * food * finances * writing ideas * love * ideas for architects * city design ideas * beautiful and/or ugly sights * a history of one's own writing life, written daily * reading/music/art, etc. encountered each day * rooms * elaborations on weather * people one sees-description * subway, bus, car or other trips (e.g., the same bus trip written about every day) * pleasures and/or pain * life's everyday machinery: phones, stoves, computers, etc. * answering machine messages * round or rectangular things, other shapes * color * light * daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc. * the body and its parts * clocks/time-keeping * tenant-landlord situations * telephone calls (taped?) * skies * dangers * mail * sounds * coincidences & connections * times of solitude Other journal ideas: * Write once a day in minute detail about one thing * Write every day at the same time, e.g. lunch poems, waking ideas, etc. * Write minimally: one line or sentence per day * Create a collaborative journal: musical notation and poetry; two writers alternating days; two writing about the same subject each day, etc. * Instead of using a book, write on paper and put it up on the wall (public journal). * and so on ... Bernadette Mayer's Writing Experiments * Pick a word or phrase at random, let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have come up, then seize on one and begin to write. Try this with a non- connotative word, like "so" etc. * Systematically eliminate the use of certain kinds of words or phrases from a piece of writing: eliminate all adjectives from a poem of your own, or take out all words beginning with 's' in Shakespeare's sonnets. * Rewrite someone else's writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism. * Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work. * Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these words (only) into a piece of writing-whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words. * Eliminate material systematically from a piece of your own writing until it is "ultimately" reduced, or, read or write it backwards, line by line or word by word. Read a novel backwards. * Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another, pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can. For example, use science terms to write about childhood or philosophic language to describe a shirt. * Take an idea, anything that interests you, or an object, then spend a few days looking and noticing, perhaps making notes on what comes up about that idea, or, try to create a situation or surrounding where everything that happens is in relation. * Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be handled in space. Print them on large cards or bricks if necessary. * Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don't stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow. * Attempt tape recorder work, that is, recording without a text, perhaps at specific times. * Make notes on what happens or occurs to you for a limited amount of time, then make something of it in writing. * Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you. * Write in a strict form, or, transform prose into a poetic form. * Write a poem that reflects another poem, as in a mirror. * Read or write a story or myth, then put it aside and, trying to remember it, write it five or ten times at intervals from memory. Or, make a work out of continuously saying, in a column or list, one sentence or line, over and over in different ways, until you get it "right." * Make a pattern of repetitions. * Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the "source." * Experiment with writing in every person and tense every day. * Explore the possibilities of lists, puzzles, riddles, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Consult the thesaurus where categories for the word "word" include: word as news, word as message, word as information, word as story, word as order or command, word as vocable, word as instruction, promise, vow, contract. * Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index. * The possibilities of synesthesia in relation to language and words: the word and the letter as sensations, colors evoked by letters, sensations caused by the sound of a word as apart from its meaning, etc. And the effectof this phenomenon on you; for example, write in the water, on a moving vehicle. * Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. * Consider word and letter as forms-the concretistic distortion of a text, a mutiplicity of o's or ea's, or a pleasing visual arrangement: "the mill pond of chill doubt." * Do experiments with sensory memory: record all sense images that remain from breakfast, study which senses engage you, escape you. * Write, taking off from visual projections, whether mental or mechanical, without thought to the word in the ordinary sense, no craft. * Make writing experiments over a long period of time. For example, plan how much you will write for a particular work each day, perhaps one word or one page. * Write on a piece of paper where something is already printed or written. * Attempt to eliminate all connotation from a piece of writing and vice versa. * Experiment with writing in a group, collaborative work: a group writing individually off of each other's work over a long period of time in the same room; a group contributing to the same work, sentence by sentence or line by line; one writer being fed information and ideas while the other writes; writing, leaving instructions for another writer to fill in what you can't describe; compiling a book or work structured by your own language around the writings of others; or a group working and writing off of each other's dream writing. * Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift. * Structure a poem or prose writing according to city streets, miles, walks, drives. For example: Take a fourteen-block walk, writing one line per block to create a sonnet; choose a city street familiar to you, walk it, make notes and use them to create a work; take a long walk with a group of writers, observe, make notes and create works, then compare them; take a long walk or drive-write one line or sentence per mile. Variations on this. * The uses of journals. Keep a journal that is restricted to one set of ideas, for instance, a food or dream journal, a journal that is only written in when it is raining, a journal of ideas about writing, a weather journal. Remember that journals do not have to involve "good" writing-they are to be made use of. Simple one-line entries like "No snow today" can be inspiring later. Have 3 or 4 journals going at once, each with a different purpose. Create a journal that is meant to be shared and commented on by another writer--leave half of each page blank for the comments of the other. * Type out a Shakespeare sonnet or other poem you would like to learn about/imitate double-spaced on a page. Rewrite it in between the lines. * Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. * Choose a subject you would like to write "about." Then attempt to write a piece that absolutely avoids any relationship to that subject. Get someone to grade you. * Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses. * Work with a number of objects, moving them around on a field or surface-describe their shifting relationships, resonances, associations. Or, write a series of poems that have only to do with what you see in the place where you most often write. Or, write a poem in each room of your house or apartment. Experiment with doing this in the home you grew up in, if possible. * Write a bestiary (a poem about real and mythical animals). * Write five short expressions of the most adamant anger; make a work out of them. * Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I. * A shocking experiment: Rip pages out of books at random (I guess you could xerox them) and study them as if they were a collection of poetic/literary material. Use this method on your old high school or college notebooks, if possible, then create an epistemological work based on the randomly chosen notebook pages. * Meditate on a word, sound or list of ideas before beginning to write. * Take a book of poetry you love and make a list, going through it poem by poem, of the experiments, innovations, methods, intentions, etc. involved in the creation of the works in the book. * Write what is secret. Then write what is shared. Experiment with writing each in two different ways: veiled language, direct language. * Write a soothing novel in twelve short paragraphs. * Write a work that attempts to include the names of all the physical contents of the terrestrial world that you know. * Take a piece of prose writing and turn it into poetic lines. Then, without remembering that you were planning to do this, make a poem of the first and last words of each line to see what happens. For instance, the lines (from Einstein) * When at the reception * Of sense-impressions, memory pictures * Emerge this is not yet thinking * And when. . . * Would become: * When reception * Of pictures * Emerge thinking * And when * And so on. Form the original prose, poetic lines, and first-and-last word poem into three columns on a page. Study their relationships. * If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one month, then turn them into a best-selling novella. * Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are conversant with). * Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions. * Attempt to become in a state where the mind is flooded with ideas; attempt to keep as many thoughts in mind simultaneously as possible. Then write without looking at the page, typescript or computer screen (This is "called" invisible writing). * Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter and don't send them. Pile them up as a book. * Etymological work. Experiment with investigating the etymologies of all words that interest you, including your own name(s). Approaches to etymologies: Take a work you've already written, preferably something short, look up the etymological meanings of every word in that work including words like "the" and "a". Study the histories of the words used, then rewrite the work on the basis of the etymological information found out. Another approach: Build poems and writings form the etymological families based on the Indo-European language constructs, for instance, the BHEL family: bulge, bowl, belly, boulder, billow, ball, balloon; or the OINO family: one, alone, lonely, unique, unite, unison, union; not to speak of one of the GEN families: kin, king, kindergarten, genteel, gender, generous, genius, genital, gingerly, pregnant, cognate, renaissance, and innate! * Write a brief bibliography of the science and philosophy texts that interest you. Create a file of newspaper articles that seem to relate to the chances of writing poetry. * Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them. * Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don't know how, I'll be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville. * Turn a list of the objects that have something to do with a person who has died into a poem or poem form, in homage to that person. * Write the same poem over and over again, in different forms, until you are weary. Another experiment: Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don't stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something. * Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not. * Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word "honesty" would be replaced by "honey dew melon." Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results. * Attempt to write a poem or series of poems that will change the world. Does everything written or dreamed of do this? * Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others. * Experiment with every traditional form, so as to know it. * Write poems and proses in which you set yourself the task of using particular words, chosen at random like the spelling exercises of children: intelligence, amazing, weigh, weight, camel, camel's, foresight, through, threw, never, now, snow, rein, rain. Make a story of that! * Plan, structure, and write a long work. Consider what is the work now needed by the culture to cure and exact even if by accident the great exorcism of its 1998 sort-of- seeming-not-being. What do we need? What is the poem of the future? * What is communicable now? What more is communicable? * Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time--from songs, from poems, from conversation: * What's in a name? That which we call a rose * By any other name would smell as sweet * (Romeo and Juliet) * A rose is a rose is a rose * (Gertrude Stein) * A raisin in the sun * (Langston Hughes) * The king was in the counting house * Counting out his money. . . * (Nursery rhyme) * I sing the body electric. . . * These United States. . . * (Walt Whitman) * A thing of beauty is a joy forever * (Keats) * (I summon up) remembrance of things past * (WS) * Ask not for whom the bell tolls * It tolls for thee * (Donne) * Look homeward, Angel * (Milton) * For fools rush in where angels fear to tread * (Pope) * All's well that ends well * (WS) * I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness * (Allen Ginsberg) * I think therefore I am * (Descartes) * It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,... * (Dickens) * brave new world has such people in it * (Shakespeare, The Tempest, later Huxley) * Odi et amo (I hate and I love) * (Catullus) * Water water everywhere * Nor any drop to drink * (Coleridge) * Curiouser and curiouser * (Alice in Wonderland) * Don't worry be happy. Here's a little song I wrote... * Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a whole page. * Set yourself the task of writing in a way you've never written before, no matter who you are. * What is the value of autobiography? * Attempt to write in a way that's never been written before. * Invent a new form. * Write a perfect poem. * Write a work that intersperses love with landlords. * In a poem, list what you know. * Address the poem to the reader. * Write household poems-about cooking, shopping, eating and sleeping. * Write dream collabortations in the lune form. * Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English. * Attempt to write about jobs and how they affect the writing of poetry. * Write while being read to from science texts, or, write while being read to by one's lover from any text. * Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own. * Exercises in style: Write twenty-five or more different versions of one event. * Review the statement: "What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems."