Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Our River Now Working on the poetry section of my January class, came across this poem by Li-Young Lee. What miracles poets are. I just had to share. It's from his collection called Book of My Nights. Our River Now Say night is a house you inherit, and in the room in which you hear the sea declare its countless and successive deaths, tolling the dimensions of your dying, you close your eyes and dream the king's bees build the king's honey in the furthest reaches of your childhood. Wouldn't you set your clocks by that harvest? And didn't you, a sleepless child saying to yourself the name your parents gave you over and over, hear both the ringing sum of you such sound accounted for and all the rest, the dumb throng of you, that never answered to a word, that stands even now assembled where your calling brinks, the unutterable luring your voice out of its place of rocks and into a multitude of waters? But what was it I meant to say? Something about our beginningless past. Maybe. Maybe our river, dreaming out loud, folds story and forgetting. Li-Young Lee. Our River Now. Book of My Nights. Wow... 12:39:24 PM    comment []

Urban Outfitters I felt a bit like Dorothy in Oz last night as I stood for what I think is the first time in Seattle's downtown Urban Outfitters. The postmodern is a whirlwind all right, and it's plopping people down in places that are a long way from Kansas. I'm trying very hard to be hip in my analysis of the place, though obviously analysis is the very thing the space doesn't want you to do. But I'm sure my advertising/marketing friends will tell me how brilliantly its designed. It's meant to look like a teenager's messy room, right down to the trash on the floor that nobody seemed the least interested to pick up. 20-somethings picking at piles of clothes, browsing piles of book titles mostly about sex and its illustrated encouragement, various Mamet-esque takes on the "f' word, and multiple forms of rowdy satire. I even bought a book. This Book Will Change Your Life. Now there's a title that is as truth-telling as any I've seen. I'll have to come back to it, because just now it's time for more Christmas merriment with Mom and the mall, but let me just say this: I bought the book to take to my Aesthetics class at ACU, as a beautiful example of both the wonder and challenge of postmodern style and thought forms. From a moral point of view, it's a riot of thought-life chaos. How in the world do we make sense of postmodern life? This book tells you. Like I said, more on This Book Will Change Your Life later, but for now, to investigate the madness (I'm not being pejorative, just descriptive, in a "double irony" sort of way) at their web site, titled (what else?) www.thiswebsitewillchangeyourlife.com. Warning: Mature content. More irony... 9:27:26 AM    comment []

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