I almost finished a bit of writing last night. The computer kept crashing, I decided it was time to call it a day.
The writing job, I finished early this morning. Then I cat-napped and binged The Blacklist. The subtext I read now into the show interests me.
"Desperate Men Committing Desperate Acts" received another rejection:
Thank you for sending us your writing. We were pleased with the strong response to our call for submissions, and receiving far more high-quality pieces than we could feature in this issue. We are sorry to say that yours was not selected this time, though we are grateful to have had the opportunity to review your work, and we wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. We also hope you will consider submitting to Ponder Review again in the future.
To thank you for being one of our submitters, we'd like to offer you a discount on our next issue, so you can get to know us better. Please use this link below.
You can also view free back issues in the archive on our website ponderreview.com.
We wish you the best with your writing and hope to see your work again soon!
Sincerely,
The Editors
Ponder Review
Some fun for the day: Pink smoke, pigs and Pixar: a dozen movie Easter eggs to feast on (The Guardian), Grand Tour review – engaged couple’s sweet, strange colonial era hide-and-seek (The Guardian), and Julie Christie at 85: her 20 best films – ranked! (The Guardian).
Perhaps, not so much fun: Faulkner and Plath Go to a Play (The Hedgehog Review). The play was Tennessee Williams' Camino Real; not one that I have read.
It got worse on stage. Gutman, the man in charge of what can only be called an asylum, announces what could happen to even the bravest and most privileged risk takers: “Adventurers suddenly frightened of a dark room. Gamblers unable to choose between odd and even. Con men and pitchmen and plume-hatted cavaliers turned baby-soft…. When I observe this change, I say to myself: ‘Could it happen to ME?’—The answer is ‘YES’ And that’s what curdles my blood.” Camino Real showed William Faulkner and Sylvia Plath that their agony was not theirs alone, and that only art could address that agony.
I think I need to read this play.
Great writer talking about a great musician: Zadie Smith on the magic of Tracy Chapman: ‘She didn’t just look like us – she was singing our songs’ (The Guardian).
Back in Willesden, we were pretty stunned too, although perhaps for different reasons. For us, it was the shock of the familiar. She was dressed just like the young activists you saw on the marches – black cowlneck T, black jeans, black boots – and she even looked like our mother: no makeup and the same three-inch dreadlocks. She was so … familiar. We also recognised the musical lineage. That rich alto timbre. It was like listening to the daughter of Joan Armatrading.
***
Chapman’s sheer melodic beauty and committed, generous lyrics are a gift to her listeners. But I feel that her career – which started with this extraordinary album – has also served as a startling and humbling example to artists. She reminds us that an artist can pursue an individual course without being individualistic. That she can speak to many without necessarily speaking to the press. That there is such a thing as privacy, and that every human being has a right to it.
How I Learned About Great Literature from Comic Books (Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker) - another person who first met the classics through Classics Illustrated comic books! Another source - believe it or not - was Mister Magoo, where I first learned of Cyrano Bergerac.
I respect David Cronenberg, even though I am not much of a horror fan. His The Fly still gives me the willies, as does Videodrome. Pedro Almodóvar is more to my taste, which was formed from seeing too many screwball comedies when I was young. However, Film Comment puts them together in Premortem and Postmortem.
To speak of David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodóvar in the same breath is not as much of a stretch as it might seem. With a morbid theatricality on the one hand and flamboyant histrionics on the other, both have played around with the permutations of the flesh. Almodóvar’s body-horror efforts include reincarnation via live-skin grafting in The Skin I Live In (2011), and Talk to Her (2002), in which two men become obsessed with the comatose women for whom they are caring—a premise as creepy as anything in Cronenberg’s filmography. Even more to the point, both directors are on the far side of 70—or 80 in Cronenberg’s case—and in a retrospective mood. Almodóvar hasn’t staged his own death, but the woefully impaired director played by Antonio Banderas in his Pain and Glory (2019) comes close.
Maundy Thursday is nothing I knew of when growing up in the American Baptist denomination, so I learned much from Bijan Omrani's The revolutionary meaning of Maundy Thursday (Engelsberg Ideas).
To have one’s feet washed by a person of great estate at first makes one contemplate one’s own unworthiness, but also it demands an equal response of service. It also is a challenge to the ideas of power. Christianity sees the highest power vested not in an unrestrained expression of will or vaunting grandeur. Instead, it is seen in a man broken and nailed to the cross, who, a little before, had humbled himself by washing the feet of his followers. The fact that Christianity is still an established part of the British state embeds that idea of humility and service in the heart of it. Even if the king no longer washes the feet of the poor, the fact that one of his royal officials still expresses his dignity not through fine robes or a chain of office, but rather by carrying a towel intended to dry the feet of others, speaks volumes for the Christian message and the way its influence has over many centuries moulded the state for the better.
History always catches my attention; spies have always fascinated me. Therefore, I chose to read Martin Neuding Skoog's Joachim Burwitz, spymaster of the Baltic world (Engelsberg Ideas), and found it delightful in exposing me to a bit of history I never knew.
The only politics I want to post about: Why everyone should listen to Josh Shapiro (Chris Cillizza; So What).
Down this road lays inhumanity. And we will never get where ANY of us want to go by heading down that road.
We should ALL listen to what Shapiro said in the wake of the arson attack on his home and family. Here it is:
“We don’t know the person’s specific motive yet. But we do know a few truths. First: This type of violence is not OK. This kind of violence is becoming far too common in our society. And I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another or one particular person or another. It is not OK, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.”
Yes to every word of that.
Okay, I am linking to another political post: It Can Happen Here… (Sheila Kennedy). Are we really going to do this?
And I end the night with news that turns my stomach, Trump has reached into Muncie to my alma mater: Ball State terminates DEI programs to comply with state and federal orders.
According to an email sent out to university students, the vote was unanimous.
“We have consistently, irrespective of the [presidential] administration, consistently aligned our policies and practices with directives from the administration,” Mearns said to IPR News.
Mearns expressed worry that not complying meant the federal government would pull research grant money and federal student aid.
Mearns explained that as a result of terminating any programs the school thinks are now “unlawful,” some employees will be reassigned.
Per IPR News, he also told students that the university would continue “to guide them, and to provide them with the individualized support that each student needs in order to graduate from our university, fully prepared for that fulfilling career and for that meaningful life.”
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment