#331 words

[hydratethewater]

Black mirror seas 3 ep 6

This episode is so good, it starts out with this lady speaking at a trial, we don’t know what she’s done wrong we just know she’s there. It then goes back to her days later in her house. She’s just sat down and started watching tv about this lady everyone now hate because she said some bad stuff about certain people. She gets a call to go to a crime scene, we now know she’s a detective. They find her body on the ground, slashed throat and gouged put head. They think the husband may have killed her, but it didn’t make sense because his stomach was slashed. We then learn that she killed herself because she sounded like she was in agonizing pain. The go to the autopsy and find a bee in her brain, a bee from the beginning of the episode that helps the economy. The episode then shows this rapper guy who was also killed because he called a little kid bad a dancing on tv. He went to get a scan of his brain when what was in his brain magnetically shot out and killed him. It was the same bee. The finally track where the bees are made and go to the place to only find out that what ever is hacking them is killing because of a hashtag and whoever is at the top of that hashtag they get killed, and the next person to die was a lady pretending to pee on a memorial. They take her to a safe house and try to protect her. But she dies in the detectives arms after every single bee gets hacked and goes for her to kill. It then goes back to the trial when they start talking about her partner and what happened to her. She killed herself after the insedent because she blamed it on herself. This episode is so good!!! Watch it all in one sitting or it won’t make sense at all.

[wordvomitlit]

Okay time for even more kunitz love (just nonstop). Lets talk about the Round, starting with its structure, two stanza's, one twenty six lines long the other four lines, and the title being named the Round is analogous of the first stanza's supposed repetition and the prominent uses of repetition throughout the poem. Also at around line thirteen in the first stanza, the tone completely changes. So lets start with the first half of the of the first stanza. This half is chock full of more positive imagery, denoting happiness and beauty, almost awe inspiring. However, most of the imagery used can also be seen as having negative hurtful aspect to it, "Blue spiked" "roses". At this point i would like to note the lines that mark a turning point in this poem lines eleven and twelve "flushed with their brandy./ A curious gladness shook me." It changes the entire tone of the previous lines, making the happiness seem like a drunk almost euphoric feeling, eliminating its genuine nature. Why else would a "gladness" shake or scare a man? The pome the falls into a lot of dank and dark imagery describing a disgusting scene of him at his desk, reading the poem he had just written, being the one the reader is reading. This transition and then repetition of the stanza talks about the anxiety of moving into the outside world. The author finds himself in the cycle of being terrified of a fake world and being disgusted by his current world. Being to scared to venture out, but feeling almost suffocated about being in the same place. This theme is really brought home with the final stanza "I can scarcely wait till tomorrow/ when a new life begins for me,/ as it does each day,/ as it does each day." It shows exhaustion in his words, being tired of the next day to come, and then the final repetition of the last line showing what's left of his thoughts

[drenegew]

"Languages in Paradise" (Umberto Eco, Serendipities)

This essay shows Eco at his best: learned and ironic, but sympathetic to his subject and never descending into sarcasm, which is sometimes his weakness. He throws in his lot with a string of patristic, medieval, and early modern literati, both Christian and Jewish, in a collaborative attempt to determine what language Adam spoke in the Garden before the Fall, and what that means for theories of human linguistics.

Eco is not only the chronicler of past intellectual controversies, but a theorist in his own right: unraveling Dante's idiosyncratic poetic ambitions and his linguistic theory as he suggests that the poet's final statement on language (its relationship to reality, its origin and universality and subjection to convention) actually grew out of an admittedly unproven encounter with 14th century cabala.

Along the way Eco showers us with his characteristic joy in the unexpected and coincidental, recounting the unresolved exegetical question as to whether or in what order Adam named the fish (undersea creatures being difficult to parade through the Garden, even for God) -- the curious fact that Dante considered Eve the first being to utter real human speech (a discomfiting notion for our medieval poet) -- that the first to conceive of Chomsky's "black box" were actually a group of 14th century grammarians and radical Aristotelians -- and the activities of a group of Jewish intellectuals in a 13th century Italy, some of whom gave public readings on the Comedia, transliterated it into Hebrew for their fellow Jews, and even traveled to Rome with the intention of converting the Pope.

In Eco's hands the middle ages are always a wild and woolly place, but here his affinity for Italian poetry and the world of Dante flings him far above the dark wood of conspiracies and hoaxes and the tangle of minds which he indulges so much in his historical fiction. That a longing for communion with prelapsarian Adam can strip the cynicism from such a knowing man is one of the delights of this chapter.

Apr 8th, 2014