I came across this short film in a blog by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, the Unlocked Wordhoard. It’s a 6-minute adaptation of an Old English elegiac poem, “The Ruin,” done by some students at the University of Oxford. I hadn’t read the poem before (Old English and modern English text here), but it’s hauntingly beautiful. The film is done in Old English with modern English subtitles, and the language is beautiful too. Maybe someday I’ll learn it. But that day may be a ways away. Anyway. My favorite thing about the film is how it applies the poem’s description of a ruined Anglo-Saxon mead-hall to an early industrial-age cement factory…good literature resonates throughout the ages, doesn’t it?
I feel like writing something, for whatever reason, so I guess I’ll write about William Cowper, since I’m giving a presentation on him tomorrow. Of course, the time I spend writing about him here would probably be better spent working on my handout and stuff, but hey. I’ve got like seven hours tomorrow to do that.
William Cowper was a familiar name to me as the author of some of the hymns we sing in church: “God Moves in a Mysterious Way” and “Sometimes a Light Surprises” in particular. But in terms of a poet to be studied in a European Romanticism class, not as familiar. Over the last three days I’ve read two biographies, skimmed two books of criticism, and flipped through his poems, letters, and spiritual autobiography. (This is what we do in grad school, you see. Or this is what I do in grad school, meaning, wait until the last few days and then cram. So really, not much different than undergrad, just MORE OF IT.) And his life is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.
He was a witty, intelligent young man, but always given to shyness and depression. The biographies try to psychoanalyze him, and it’s hard to avoid it, really…he seems to have been greatly affected by the death of his mother when he was six (and perhaps the fact that of the seven children born in his family, he was one of only two who survived infancy), and the patterns of his later bouts with severe depression and despair seem to indicate an inability to deal with the loss of loved ones, exhibiting itself in paranoia and fear of abandonment. The thing is, he mapped all of this into a religious model, wherein God had turned his back on William and abandoned him. He vascillated between thinking of himself as a fallen archangel, deserving God’s punishment and unworthy of His forgiveness, and as an innocent Job, tormented by Satan and not saved by God. In either case, he felt abandoned by God.
But what about all the hymns? During his stay in a mental hospital from 1763 to 1765, he was converted from Anglicanism to Evangelicalism, following a cousin enamoured of John Wesley’s preaching. In 1765, he felt that God had rescued him from depression, and redeemed him. He met John Newton and wrote a hymnbook with him. Everything was sailing along fairly well, except his religious zeal started to fade (his reserved personality couldn’t keep anything at the high level of intensity that his religiousity was in 1765), and his sense of losing a second mother figure increased (ironically because he nearly married the woman in question, who he saw as a mother figure, but was only about seven years older than himself), he again fell into paranoia and depression. This time, evangelicalism didn’t help–it had failed to keep him out of depression, and his depression showed (to him) that once again God had deserted him.
He had happy times after that…in fact, virtually all of his poetry was written between 1779 and 1790…but he never again felt that God could or would accept him and forgive him for all sorts of perceived sins, and he lived out his days at varying levels of despair and indifference, just waiting for what he perceived as his inevitable damnation. The letters from the last four years of his life are absolutely heartbreaking. And really, he never seems to have abandoned his belief in God’s existence or even in the doctrines of Calvinism. He was just convinced that in the predestination process, God had predestined him for destruction instead of salvation. And he had even read George Herbert, the 17th century poet for whom the doctrine of predestination was a glorious comfort. Reading about his life made me really get a new perspective on people who suffer from depression…how difficult it must be at times to continue believing in God’s love when the whole world seems against you.
Interestingly, I like his poetry more than a lot of poetry I’ve read (you’ll remember, I’m not a huge fan of poetry). Most of it isn’t depressing at all; a lot of it is delightfully comic and even the poems he wrote recalling his depression are beautiful. Certainly he was an important prefigure to the Romantic movement, in his love for nature and attention to everyday, common subjects, and his use of natural language. He’s said to have been one of the most popular English poets throughout the 19th century, though his reputation with critics has gone up and down. Yet again proof that I fall into the “popular” class of readers rather than the “critical” class. See, I am in the wrong business.
Haven’t said much of anything lately except American Idol stuff, and I don’t really have a good reason for that. (If I have a reason, it’s that I have too much time, and thus don’t need to use blogging as a procrastination tool.)
- I am taking two classes this semester instead of the four I had last semester; most grad students only take two, so this is normal.
- One class is on European Romanticism–basically a sort of comparative literature survey course, using texts and translations from England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Norway, Hungary, Denmark, etc. The professor is a little intimidating just because he knows EVERYTHING about everything, and when you present on someone, he expects you to know EVERYTHING about them. (I present for the first time next Monday…so I will be researching today and tomorrow for that.) But he is also British, so there’s that. I like him a lot, but he really does KNOW EVERYTHING.
- The other class is on the Harlem Renaissance, and it’s actually more interesting than I was expecting. I’ve never read any of these writers (1910s-1920s black writers), and we’re getting a good interdisciplinary chunk of the contemporary politics, music, art, etc. as well as literature, which suits me perfectly. Of course, not knowing anything about any of the works meant that I kept my mouth shut when people were choosing presentation topics until the end, so I got poetry. *sigh* Oh well.
- I hate presentations. Grad classes are all presentations. What’s that about?
- But in comparison with last semester, when I wrote upwards of 80 pages of papers and assignments for class, this semester I only have something like 40 pages maximum to write. In European Romanticism, we have three papers, and he gave us 2000 words MAX. That’s like, six and a half pages. MAX. Score.
- Also, I am a research assistant this year, which is actually a good bit of fun, I think. The professor I work for is in the rhetoric and composition area, and I don’t want to talk much about her research because she’s doing a fairly large project right now for publication this summer or fall. But she’s working with multimodal writing…basically, using other methods of conveying information than your standard academic essay–pictures, video, interaction, etc. It’s fairly interesting, and is making me consider a lot of things I never thought about before.
- For part of the project, I’m transcribing interviews, and she gave me this transcription machine, which is sorta cool, in a old-tech sort of way. It plays the tape and you run it with your foot, so you don’t have to stop typing to run it back a bit or stop it playing while you catch up. Seems like we ought to be getting pretty close to good enough voice recognition technology, though, to render the whole manual transcription thing obsolete. Not that I mind. I enjoy typing and copying things. One thing that’s interesting though, is how automatically I translate the conversation into proper writing. I’m supposed to keep it pretty much as it is on the tape (though she said to leave out “ums” and stuff like that), but I also tend weed out “you know” and “like” and other interjections that I really want to leave in to show when the interviewee was hesitating or backtracking. It’s harder to type exactly what you hear than you would think!
- I drove down to Austin last Saturday pretty much exclusively to see Pan’s Labyrinth, and it was totally worth it. Probably the best movie I’ve seen from 2006. Although Brick is still a really close second. But if Pan’s Labyrinth is playing where you are, I suggest you go see it. But don’t take the kids. It may be a fantasy, and it may have a young girl as the protagonist, but it ain’t a kids’ movie. I’ll probably write more about it later.
- I just finished the second season of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, and it BROKE ME. Now, to find the tape of this season…
- I’ve been reading David Bordwell and Kirstin Thompson’s blog pretty regularly (and if you’re interested in film studies, you should be too), and when I was working for my professor in her office the other day, I saw she had their textbook Film Art, which I’ve been wanting to read since I found their blog. And she let me borrow it! She’s pretty awesome.
- Apparently I’m not meant to get allergy shots down here. I went to start them today (after having been cleared by the doctor here a couple of weeks ago), and they had to call my allergist at home before giving me a shot because it’s been so long since I’ve had one, and they wouldn’t let me get one until I’d seen my doctor! At home! IN ST. LOUIS! Woulda been nice to know that when I was home at Christmas. Because I’m not planning to be back in St. Louis again until May. I don’t know why it was okay in November for me to get shots here without seeing my doctor at home, but it’s not now. Ah well. I’ve been fairly fine without them. Just annoying is all.
- Speaking of annoying. A few rules for cinema patrons, brought to you due to the two morons in front of me today. 1) Even if there’s only one other person in the theatre (i.e., me), you still shouldn’t treat the movie like your own private Mystery Science Theatre. 2) If you must talk to each other, don’t sit with a seat IN BETWEEN YOU, thus forcing you to use normal voices. Use your quiet voices. 3) Turn your cellphones OFF. Both of them. 4) And, if your cellphone does happen to ring, DO NOT ANSWER IT. 5) If you must answer it, STEP OUTSIDE and DO NOT CARRY ON A CONVERSATION IN THE THEATRE ON YOUR CELLPHONE. People complain about the state of moviegoing these days; sometimes it is the theatre’s fault. But more often, the reason going to theatres isn’t fun is because the audience is boorish. Sometimes audiences are great–first night audiences at fan favorites (like Lord of the Rings) are awesome, and generally art-house/indie audiences are enjoyable. But multiplex audiences are horrible and should be banned from ever leaving their own homes.
- I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1, and it now autosaves posts! Hell yeah.
So Netflix doesn’t have a set-top box yet for downloading rented movies and playing them on your TV screen, but this is the next best thing. They’ve started rolling out a WatchNow feature, where subscribers can watch movies on their computers. That is, the movies stream, you have full fast-forward and rewind capability, and no commercials. You’re limited to a certain number of viewing hours (18 if you’re on the 3-at-a-time plan), but it goes strictly by time–that is, if you watch five minutes of a movie and decide not to watch any more, you’re only down five minutes, not the full length of the movie. They’ve got 1,000 movies in the program so far–compare to iTunes’ 250 movies available for download–plus some TV shows.
DID I MENTION THIS IS FREE FOR SUBSCRIBERS? In other words, if you’re already a subscriber, you pay nothing extra for this. You continue to get your three or four or however many DVDs a month by mail, PLUS you can watch these streaming movies for 18 or so hours, depending on your plan. I have four-at-a-time DVDs. Add 18 hours of streaming which I calculate to be roughly 9 movies a month. Extra. Free. Immediate.
Granted, they’re not full downloads. Granted, you can’t watch them on your TV (unless you have a PC-to-TV connection). But it’s still a heckuvalot better than anything else out there, especially if you’re already a Netflix subscriber. It’s only out to a limited number of people right now (not me, *pout*), but they’re supposed to release it to everyone by June of this year.
See a screencast of it at Hacking Netflix.
Okay, when Clint Eastwood wins the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film (a category in which Mel Gibson was also nominated, along with actual foreign directors like Guillermo del Toro and Pedro Almodóvar), it might be time to rethink the purpose and effectiveness of the category. The Foreign Language category has always been a sort of afterthought, an “oh yeah, other countries make pictures too” sort of thing. At the Oscars, anyway, they’re rarely considered for the Best Picture award, since they have a whole category of their own! But doesn’t that highlight an undercurrent of feeling that a non-English Language film isn’t really worthy of a Best Picture award? Which is so silly. SO SILLY. I’m the first to admit that there’s a difference in sensibility between American films and foreign films, but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other. They should be judged equally against each other. Especially when both Letters from Iwo Jima and Apocalypto are AMERICAN films, and they’re only getting put in the Foreign Language category because Eastwood and Gibson chose to use Japanese and Mayan rather than English. Independent, limited release films are finally starting to get their due (all five Oscar-nominated films last year were limited releases), and it’s time foreign films do as well.
BTW, Meryl Streep is awesome. She pointed out that everybody had seen her film (The Devil Wears Prada) because it was a wide release, playing everywhere, and encouraged everyone who didn’t have the chance to see the other nominated actresses’ films (Sherrybaby, Volver, Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, The Queen, Running With Scissors, Little Miss Sunshine, Miss Potter, Dreamgirls, all limited releases, though some more limited than others) because it wasn’t playing near them to go speak up about it to their theatre managers. I’m sure this wouldn’t have any immediate effect, because a lot of the release schedules are determined by the studios, but if enough people made a fuss about not being able to see independent, foreign, and limited release films, maybe it would filter up.
Warren Beatty, dude, your wife is a way better actor than you are. But she’s not a director, so I guess you still have an edge.
Wow, this year Helen Mirren was the first person to ever play both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Elizabeth II, and last night she won Best Actress awards for both of them. Incredible. I haven’t seen Elizabeth I, but she totally deserved it for The Queen (Even if I was chanting “Maggie…Maggie…Maggie” at the screen, just because I love Maggie Gyllenhaal that much.)
Guess I’m going to have to start watching “Ugly Betty,” huh. Can you imagine being America Ferrera and winning a Golden Globe over all those other people? Especially Felicity Huffman. My gosh. I watched half of the first episode on ABC’s website, but then the site choked on me. ABC, you might want to have that looked after. NBC’s site works better, I was able to watch the last several episodes of “30 Rock” with noooo problems. Except that at Christmastime they had the whole series up, and this week, they only had the past five or six eps. I wanted to watch them all! Networks are so annoying sometimes. But that’s by the by. Also, Hugh Laurie’s real voice sounds totally different from House’s voice. Not only the accent, I knew about that, but it’s deeper. Threw me a loop, because I don’t remember his voice being that deep on Blackadder.
A little surprised by Babel‘s win. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t honestly say whether it was appropriate or not, but I figured The Departed had a lock on it. Guess I should’ve seen Babel in St. Louis when I had the chance, instead of talking myself out of it.