The author explained how Ichiro's dad, a serious Buddhist, purchased the young Ichiro the best, most-expensive glove he could buy at the time, to his wife's initial horror. How could you spend so much on a toy? she wanted to know. 'It's not a toy, it's a tool of education,' he calmly responded. And he taught his son to treat it as such, respecting it, oiling it regularly and otherwise tending to it as he might a central tool of his trade (which of course it soon would become). After having learned in childhood to treat his glove with so much respect, the author concluded his story, "it makes it hard for (Ichiro) to come into the dugout now, put it on the seat, and watch Brett Boone sit on it."
Some intriguing concepts of irony and postmodernism and cover songs from Jane Dark:
What I want to suggest is that the particular form of irony we'll call "cover irony" is indeed deeply relevant to the postmodern, but often as a counter-strategy. That is to say, by producing a form which refuses the literal meanings of the original lyrics and/or/via a shift in the understood emtoional tenor of the original sounds (Frente's "Bizarre Love Triangle" would one example), it's a strong assertion of, rather than an effacement of, authorial power.
Being a resident of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I thoroughly enjoyed Paula's House of Toast's thorough thrashing of Mitt Romney and his blatant sucking-up to the right wing:
I had no idea I was such a miscreant. We're talking three strikes you're out territory here. I, by all accounts, am a habitual criminal. I'm planning to turn myself in later today, to throw myself upon the mercy of the Great And General Court of Massachusetts, oyez oyez, God Save the Governor, God Save the Commonwealth from the Governor, but first I will make a public confession.
A fellow Massachusettsan, Jim Behrle, uses his considerable drawing talents to render the Stages of a Poetry Reading. Since I can't replicate the drawings, consider these symbols as depiction enough:
?!? &&& **%% (!+&=!!!)
George Wallace wrote one of the better eulogies for Thom Gunn:
Some poets -- Dryden springs to mind -- emerge as primary eyewitnesses to their period. It was Thom Gunn's fate, surely unlooked for, to become one of the foremost chroniclers of the AIDS pandemic as it had its way with countless friends and acquaintances in the San Francisco gay community. The poems from that time -- most notably in his 1992 collection The Man With Night Sweats (also included in the "Collected") -- tie in to the centuries-long line of English elegists.
There are many others that I've failed to list here, like lime tree's continuing series. I'm not sure if Jonathan Mayhew was referring to these when he wrote "I could do close readings of individual poems on my blog too. If I've avoided that, it might have something to do with the notion that this is considered by many to be a fairly routine skill." That may be true for those with PhDs and MFAs but there are those of us with only MAs in American History who lack that particular skill and appreciate it in others, especially when involving a genre of poetry they may know almost nothing of. And I'm sure Jonathan's close readings would be anything but routine.
No comments:
Post a Comment