shakespeare, 106
When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing.
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
i recovered the sonnet assignment i did in steve farmer's british literature class. not being very much a fan of shakespeare's sonnets, obnoxious, at once trite and complicated, and self-obsessed as they are (i wrote: Shakespeare's Sonnet 106 could borrow for a title from Carly Simon's song: "You probably think this song is about you."), i picked the least irritating one from our reading to commit to memory. it was this, 106, because i understood that feeling of every ancient and excellent verse being only about one thing. (one thing? i also found that terry eagleton essay!) perhaps it was the study of literature itself that can convince you of such a proposition; of the timeless; the transcendental. or maybe that universality-shaped truth is close enough to this other (--fractal-shaped?) truth, that love was everything they said it would be..
but memorizing the sonnet was not the point of the exercise, entirely. or it was and i didn't care: we talked in class about lacunae (and also about little rooms)--how they often revealed more to a memorizer than the parts that were remembered. so i have bolded those spaces left empty or mis-remembered in my exam: an entire line tightly focused on the body; the conclusion drawing in the eight foregoing lines; the substitution of "lacked" (lacanian? did i want it to be generative?) for "not enough". am i making something out of nothing; reading into the blank text--employing my dad's old msu model of human communication--making shit up? it might please terry eagleton, who writes: "The unpalatable implication of all this is that jealousy is not a form of sexual desire: sexual desire is a form of jealousy." and "It is in the nature of such Eros to override the measure, generate delusion, squint at its object." bad fundraising idea: win a date with terry eagleton!
ps, why is everyone obsessed with castration?
from the future dictionary:
hilarian [huh-layr'-ee-en] n. a feminist, specif. one identified with feminism's so-called thirteenth wave, which achieved fame for having laughed certain politicians out of office (the laughter itself being variously described as "shrill," "hysterical," "shrewish," or "cackling") and whose actions resulted in the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, stating that civil rights cannot be denied to any American on account of sex, duh.
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing.
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.
i recovered the sonnet assignment i did in steve farmer's british literature class. not being very much a fan of shakespeare's sonnets, obnoxious, at once trite and complicated, and self-obsessed as they are (i wrote: Shakespeare's Sonnet 106 could borrow for a title from Carly Simon's song: "You probably think this song is about you."), i picked the least irritating one from our reading to commit to memory. it was this, 106, because i understood that feeling of every ancient and excellent verse being only about one thing. (one thing? i also found that terry eagleton essay!) perhaps it was the study of literature itself that can convince you of such a proposition; of the timeless; the transcendental. or maybe that universality-shaped truth is close enough to this other (--fractal-shaped?) truth, that love was everything they said it would be..
but memorizing the sonnet was not the point of the exercise, entirely. or it was and i didn't care: we talked in class about lacunae (and also about little rooms)--how they often revealed more to a memorizer than the parts that were remembered. so i have bolded those spaces left empty or mis-remembered in my exam: an entire line tightly focused on the body; the conclusion drawing in the eight foregoing lines; the substitution of "lacked" (lacanian? did i want it to be generative?) for "not enough". am i making something out of nothing; reading into the blank text--employing my dad's old msu model of human communication--making shit up? it might please terry eagleton, who writes: "The unpalatable implication of all this is that jealousy is not a form of sexual desire: sexual desire is a form of jealousy." and "It is in the nature of such Eros to override the measure, generate delusion, squint at its object." bad fundraising idea: win a date with terry eagleton!
ps, why is everyone obsessed with castration?
from the future dictionary:
hilarian [huh-layr'-ee-en] n. a feminist, specif. one identified with feminism's so-called thirteenth wave, which achieved fame for having laughed certain politicians out of office (the laughter itself being variously described as "shrill," "hysterical," "shrewish," or "cackling") and whose actions resulted in the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, stating that civil rights cannot be denied to any American on account of sex, duh.