Friday, September 26, 2014

Through the Window, Casanova





See what I did there? Bryan Ferry is sixty-nine today. Sixty-nine. Dang, we're old. Here, Chairman Mao covers *Virginia Plain.* Yes, I Roxy Music cascaded a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize Ferry's birthday was coming up and it wouldn't have mattered if I did. MSADI5G.

Finished my start-to-finish Deep Space Nine promise to friends last night. The series ended just as most of the episodes end (and this is my major complaint about the show): after massive build-up to a seemingly impossible to avert catastrophe a far too pat solution is found: Odo shakes hands with the diseased Founder just after the Founder ordered the murder of 800 million Cardasians and Viola! she says she will stand trial as a war criminal and galactic peace is achieved! Yes, I realize DS9 employs the same episodic formula as not only all Star Treks but all episodic shows: DS9's show endings are just too often too facile and silly.

I dig Kira Nerys. I like Odo, Garak, Ducat, Rom, Rom's mother, Zek, Weyoun, Brunt. I'm not sure what I think of The Sisko, though I hate - HATE! - his kid. I never got the point of Jadzia. (It was interesting that in the series finale flashback sequence there was no Jadzia footage - Terry Farrell, did she jump or was she pushed? Was the divorce ugly?) Quark, O'Brien, Bashir, Nog, yawn. Worf, snore. I'm glad Laura from Toronto became Ezri.

(a) I need think about it more before formulating a long-form reaction and (b) luckily for me and by extent luckily for you, I don't do long-form. I'm glad I did this. I find myself thinking about it more than I thought I would - our last Sugarloaf circuit weekend before last I knocked out the first three miles thinking about the show. What it does well it does better than what it doesn't do well - the story arcs are strong, the character development episodes are weak. And oh, don't ask me to start-to-finish Voyager or Enterprise, the answer is no.








A BUNCH OF STUFF

John Ashbery

To all events I squirted you
knowing this not to be this came to pass
when we were out and it looked good.
Why wouldn’t you want a fresh piece
of outlook to stand in down the years?
See, your house, a former human energy construction,
crashed with us for a few days in May
and sure enough, the polar inscape
brought about some easier poems,
which I guessed was a good thing. At least
some of us were relaxed, Steamboat Bill included.

He didn’t drink nothing.
It was one thing
to be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it.
And if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it:
Poke fun at balm, then suffer lethargy
to irradiate its shallow flood in the new packaging
our enemies processed. They should know.

The Gold Dust Twins never stopped supplicating Hoosiers
to limn the trail. There’s no Shakespeare.
Through the window, Casanova.
Couldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incident
of those days, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln.



2 comments:

  1. re human energy, a phrase ashbery uses, joshua corey wrote, in november 2004:


    Nothing in the aesthetic realm has any practical use, by definition—poetry doesn't get your shoelaces safely tied, let alone raise children. Nonetheless we talk about "needing" poetry and even "dying for lack of what is found there"—if you accept that human beings have non-material needs without which life seems not worth living, then poetry surely attempts to satisfy those needs. I have no wish to make poetry into a religion, but I do get some of that sense of participation that I associate with the religious from reading and writing poetry—participation in a collective effort toward the greater coherency of human energy, the larger extension of the franchise of personhood....So I'm not sure it's possible for us to take poetry too seriously, except insofar as we might come to neglect political and ethical obligations in favor of feeding our private muses.

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  2. Thank you SO much for the Maoist rendition of Roxy! complete with Eno! Best thing I've seen all week. Enjoy your hike.

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