used to love Proust but living la vie Belacqua/helped me understand I'm probably more of a Kafka
Joined February 2020
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I oppose Arkansas statehood, but it’s not unreasonable to support it. I would respect Arkansas statehood as legitimate.
Wyoming statehood is a nakedly illegal and bad faith power grab and if some future administration fails to end it, I’d consider it a genuine coup d’état.
No argument except the obvious, which is that before anti-trans bigotry became the new crusade for cultural conservatives who realized they had lost on gay rights, trans women were allowed by default for decades in many sports without ever shutting out cis women.
Carson writes lots of stuff that "lives in the page and keeps readers (inc. me) company over a lifetime," it's just that in her best work her primary units of composition are the book, the sequence, and the essay rather than the individual short lyric poem.
Pinko Wallace Stevens retweeted
Also there's a clear anxiety of influence wrt Carson as the person who made great English literature out of deliberately hyper-sparse translations and adaptations of Greco-Roman classics. Wilson is a much more "faithful" translator but she still lives in Carson's stylistic world
Aeschylus' best play is Macbeth.
Sophocles'best play is King Lear.
Euripides' best play is Othello
Aristophanes best play is, of course, The Birds, but Twelfth Night comes close
Just reread vol. 1 of WCW's collected and while I don't dislike him I keep getting annoyed he'll never fully commit to just being A.R. Ammons
One fun thing about Samuel Johnson is that both of these models are operative and in tension throughout the Lives; Shakespeare is the greatest English poet in a "craft" sense but Pope is the technological cutting-edge
"There are no gods" is a pretty straightforward way to read the mini-arc of Telemachus looking for disguised gods only to be definitively told he won't find any + the reveal of "Athena" as a manifestation of Odysseus' guilty conscience drawn from a specific woman he watched die
The Nolan hero is a man who feels Guilty because he has lost his Family via injudicious use of his Talent. Now he must overcome his Guilt in order to properly use his Talent to get back to his Family
Anyone surprised by the intensity of Wilson's takedown of Nolan clearly wasn't familiar with her game:
Many of the discouragingly drab elements of the production work better in context; we don't look at the boring costumes we look at the monumental focus du jour. Most scenes with no/only incidental dialogue were fairly compelling
