wisb-Guardian-Express

Today's entry is one of those personal entries -- at least, it's related in some way to personal nonsense.  Read at your own risk.  (Note:  I will probably have some political nonsense tomorrow.  Just a warning...)

Here goes:

A quiet gap builds between the royal pair,
a prince and a prince
with imaginary titles
in an imaginary place.
A chasm, a canyon rising from a deaf sea
swirling expired blue.
The waves churn circles,
the count of the clouds
like shadow men traipsing
by with hands kneading air.

The royal pair sense the earth-born rift
in the murmur of a heartbeat,
but the prince known it only
by the flashbang terror tightening titan fingers
over his heart.

How might he let her see the emptiness
between their dreams
if she marks her knowledge
with a cat-trapped tongue?

The prince grips the air and fights the canyon
with bulldozers of hope:
          No more canyons.
          No more searching through rubble.
          An end to something no romantic poet could ever expose en total.
These he hopes for,
reaches out his whithered garden hands
to the faint sunbeam of his other side,
pleads with eyes swimming with twisty birds
in a free sky chirping contentment.

But she cannot see,
for the haze draws over her vision,
clouding her beloved
so that what she sees
is only a shadow
of the man she loves(ed).

He waits for the every-wizard potion
to burn through the cavern
like carrion birds in a graveyard,
to fill it with liquid sun,
make a new world from the ashes.
And he hopes only for the strength to hold on
long enough to find the world he used to know.

Today's entry was inspired by this article.  Read it before or after if you so choose.

Now for the poem:

He dreamed about being a doctor --
or a writer, or an actor, or maybe something else --
does it matter what he dreams
as much as it matters that he dreams at all?
For is not the dream where all of us find
a better world?
The world we want to live in.
The world we wish could be real.

So he dreams that he might meet a man --
become a father, have a house, a career,
all the things the rest of us hope for --
and he's told by those whose mouths
are too big for their feet:
No! Never! Ever! Ever!

No...who would have thought two letters
could become the discourse of a nation?
To overshadow every other way
we can conceive of the future?
That two letters could destroy that same future,
like cannons against a matchstick wall...
That dreams could become the self-serving devices
of a dying empire...

Are his dreams empty gestures from a forlorn soul?
The candle-lit whispers flickering
in the drafty tomb of someone else's life?
Stolen by the specter of a gnarled tree yet to bloom...

The new religion:  a curled path up the mountain of man,
through the spider's den of glass spires.
To steal his dreams, to replace them
with the facsimile of a self.
Is it any wonder that his wrists turn into mouths,
speaking blood letters to the constricted face of the rope?

He dreams for the relief from the last breath
in a body wracked by doubt.
He dreams because
that is all he has left...

Unlike last year, I have been eagerly anticipating the second season of HBO's Game of Thrones.  Now that it's here, I have some of those same mixed feelings that made season one slightly uneven.  Yet, it doesn't seem to matter much anymore.  I will watch this show until the end, even if the characters turn into giant rabbits with swords.

The first episode of the second season is a transition episode.  It's one of those "hey, here's where we've been, and here's what everyone has been up to since we left."  That means, more or less, we're inundated with a lot of information, new characters, and so on, just so we'll get a sense of
what is to come.  After all, Eddard Stark is dead, and that means a hell of a lot of bad shit is coming our way.  What follows, as such, is a somewhat disjointed review.

In this episode, we are shown the following:  King Joffrey's continued psychological abuse of Sansa Stark; the arrival of Tyrion Lannister as the new Hand of the King (and the family politics involved); Bran Stark's reluctant position as Lord in his brother's stead; Danaerys' desperate attempts to save herself in an increasingly hostile wilderness; Robb Stark's continued rise to the mantle of King of the North; Stanis Baratheon's rejection of the old gods in the hope to steal back his throne from Joffrey; Jon Snow and gang beyond the wall; and Arya Stark's trek north.

If that sounds like a lot of stuff, then you understand my apprehension to call this episode anything but a confused mess.  GoT is still brilliant, mind, but there is something to be said about the writers biting off way too much in this episode.  Who exactly are we to care about here?  It's one thing to bring back some of our favorites, crammed together in one space, but to add new ones?  There's simply too much going on here.  Sadly, the overwhelming number of plotlines impacts the casting, as so many of the new additions get short thrift here.  Stanis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) spends most of his scenes glaring at the camera, looking altogether not like I expected him to look.  Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham) at least gets a few extra lines, with some emotion thrown in, but his character is as undeveloped as the rest of the newcomers (especially Maester Cressen, played by Oliver Ford Davies, who seems to come on the screen just so the writers can kill him off).  Simply put, the writers desperately need to break up these story lines to develop the characters more efficiently.

He's important.  Really.  He is.  Trust me...

That said, there is a lot to admire about the episode.  One of the most chilling moments in the entire series acts as the climax.  I won't ruin the moment, but you'll know it when you see it -- and you'll be as disturbed as I was.  What I can say is this:  it made me turn away from the screen, even though the act itself was never shown.  And it also shows us something we've known was coming for a while:  that the wicked really are wicked.

Additionally, HBO has done a fantastic job rendering the small cast of CG characters (in this case, one dragon).  The worst thing about TV is that networks make series which need a lot of CG, but they aren't willing to pay for quality material.  HBO didn't fall pray to that all-too-common weakness.  Instead, the creators have done what smart people do:  only use CG when absolutely necessary.  And that means that unlike most television, this show forces us to pay attention to characterization, which GoT usually does quite well.

Yes, I am God.  Hear me roar.

And then there's Peter Dinklage, who every single moment reminds us why he won an Emmy for his work on Season One.  What more can we say?  He's brilliant.  In some respects, he outshines everyone else who is made to work alongside him.  His expressions are nuanced in the way only a great actor can muster.  I hope we'll see more of him this season than last, but we'll see.

That pretty much sums up what I thought about this episode.  Future reviews will likely delve a little deeper into the story.  This review doesn't, in part because this episode is less a story than a giant placeholder.  Every major plot point opens up here, but there's not much that can be said about those various threads until we've seen where they are going.  That said, we're off to an interesting start, even if the first episode isn't the best of the lot.

Directing: 2.5/5
Cast: 4/5
Writing: 2.5/5
Visuals: 5/5
Adaptation: N/A (haven't read the book yet)
Overall: 3.5/5

Another entry?  Yup.  I'm taking this National Poetry Writing Month thing seriously.  This week's poem was inspired by a book by Jamaica Kincaid called A Small Place.  I recommend it to everyone; it's a biting critique of tourism in the Caribbean which draws upon, in my mind, the discourses of tourism (pamphlets, brochures, etc.).

Here's the image and poem:

To visit the island --
whose white sands shimmer beneath
the treasure hunter's sun --
is to forget the conquest.
The magazine-spread sands
pull the shadow of the damp-backed crab men
who rake the earth to keep up appearances.

Kincaid's oceans, impossibly blue,
impossibly anything but normal,
can be nothing more than simulacra,
imaginary ideas made real
so only their artificiality can be discerned.

Pull back the green screen to see the gears
manned by buffalo men with juvenile growths
squirming like maggots on their backs,
to entrap the long-haired baboons
with plump fingers prying and plying
the cottonswab sheets you cover in dead skin cells.

And then remind yourself that they are not
buffalo men, maggot growths, or hairy baboons,
but people trapped beneath a glass jar,
like creatures kept for a child's benefit...

And that it is only a black curtain that rests
between the prostitutes and the societies they serve.
To visit the island --
the curtain drawn back
to reveal the hunter's game --
is to remember a history not your own.

I'm playing catch-up again.  Way too much stuff has happened since the last time I posted a roundup.  Articles.  Episodes.  More articles.  More episodes.  Phew.

So here's a roundup of all that stuff.

First:

• Guest Post:  "Superhero Ethics" by Myke Cole
• Guest Post:  "Tackling Other Cultures in Fiction" by Stina Leicht
• Episode 94a:  An Interview w/ Stina Leicht (a.k.a. Mrs. Irish Cream)(On Urban Fantasy)
• Episode 93:  Defining Urban Fantasy, Plus Doctor Who Companions and Dying American SF

• Episode 4 -- Trayvon Martin Recap, GOP Budget Woes, School Prayer, and Bunnies
• "The Race Problem:  STFU about the post-racial society; it's bullshit..."
• Episode 5 -- Bombing Planned Parenthood, Supreme Strip Searches, the China "Threat," and More!

And that about does it.

What have you been up to?

Before I get to the poem, I thought you all should see what inspired me to write what follows.  The following images are of the same tree, though not the tree that originally inspired me, as I did not have my camera with me while I was on campus.  In any case, I hope the images inspire you too (if not, then that's your problem, meanie)!

I am participating in the National Poetry Writing Month.  No, this is not an April Fool's joke.  I am seriously going to write one poem, every single day for all of April.  That's 30 poems.  And it's entirely possible I am going to post them here.

John Keats = poetry boss.  Worship him.

If you're inclined towards poetry, you should join me.  Or not.  It's up to you.  But this is what I'm doing this month, on top of all the other crap I have to do (final papers, grading, syllabus creation, etc.).

Anywho!