Archives for February 2013

Ke$ha, Caution

Yeah, Ke$ha has a quasi-Satanic orgy in a church in her video for Die Young.

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These things happen. Of course, it isn’t really Satan she’s worshipping, it’s just the sad old flesh. Because that’s all she’s got (at least in the song), and she knows it ain’t gonna last. The word “die” shows up 17 times in the lyrics for this pop ditty, and that’s not counting the part where the word repeats like a stuck record: Die, die, die, die, die. Hell, the thing opens with the shot of a hearse arriving at the church.

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Girl is haunted, yo. “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young.”  Oh, did we mention that she wrote Britney’s minor hit, “Til the World Ends”? “Keep on dancing til the world ends” is just a cosmic version of “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young.” And her big breakthrough? “Tik Tok.” “Tick tock on the clock but the party don’t stop, no.” Time’s running out. She’s gotta be the most death-obsessed pop starlet going right now. The bacchanal starts to make more sense.

Stuff Covered in Snow, Part VI: Unrealized

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Today in NJLNJ (Now Jesus Loves New Jersey): Rino Edition

rino

Now that’s the Garden State I remember…

Because a long time ago, God loved the Republicans; now, if the 2012 election was any indicator, God loves the Democrats and so, naturally, Republicans must also love Democrats… So, I repeat, this is the diminutive mid-Atlantic state once inhabited by the Lenni Lenape which I knew so well in my youth.

Even nature groans to give birth to such an oversized pacakage as Mr. Chris Christie offers to midwife – as NJ now has a place to throw all the good money following this tom-foolery.

Which brings us to the slow browning out of America – and to that end a quick Browning out of Mr. Christopher Christie:

Christie Crashes

The pigs’re on the wing,
And Christie’s on the horn;
The presser’s at seven;
The surrender-flag unfurled;
The buzz has a sting;
The cynic yawns with scorn;
God’s lost in heaven—
All’s left in the world!

Up from comments: anticipating the Pope’s words…

XIR166390

Because that’s what we do here at Korrektiv.

Yesterday, in response to Mr. Lickona’s post, there was a comment quoting at length from the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Pope Gregory VII. In that entry, the following account of the Church’s decadence is included: The tenth century, the saddest, perhaps, in Christian annals, is characterized by the vivid remark of Baronius that Christ was as if asleep in the vessel of the Church.

Now, lo and behold, today the Pope picks up on what obviously became an outrageously viral meme started right here at Korrektiv:

Stuff Covered in Snow, Part V: Doppled (Things)

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Incidentally, this gets its name from this and is home to this.

Yeah.

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Colbert calls it.

Stuff Covered in Snow, Part IV: Suppressed

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Writing at Dawn

seaside shack
I hobble up the seaside lane
Where shambled shack and tepid tea
And penciled papers wait in vain –
But something still remains with me:

You put a mango in a bowl
To give to dawn its rounding shape;
You give the rest a profiled whole
To shed some light on yawning sleep.

Disturbed exactly at the time
I reached for rhythm’s textured tone
And shadowed logic in a rhyme…
And almost touching – vanished, gone.

The mango, though, you gave to me
And sleeping silhouette deferred
Were gift enough to stop the sea –
And break each wave upon a word.

Stuff Covered in Snow, Part III: Clad

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The Muse v. The Reading Public
    Richard Wilbur v. Philip Larkin
    (or: A Study in Writing Habits)

Kompare & kontrast:

‘Advice from the Muse’
Richard Wilbur
for T. W. W.

How credible, the room which you evoke:
At the far end, a lamplit writing-desk.
Nearer, the late sun swamps an arabesque
Carpet askew upon a floor of oak,
And makes a cherry table-surface glow,
Upon which lies an open magazine.
Beyond are shelves and pictures, as we know,
Which cannot in the present light be seen.

Bid now a woman enter in a mood
That we, because she brings a bowl of roses
Which, touch by delicate touch, she redisposes,
May think to catch with some exactitude.
And let her, in complacent silence, hear
A squirrel chittering like an unoiled joint
To tell us that a grove of beech lies near.
Have all be plain, but only to a point.

Not that the bearded man who in a rage
Arises ranting from a shadowy chair,
And of whose presence she was unaware,
Should not be fathomed by the final page,
And all his tale, and hers, be measured out
With facts enough, good ground for inference,
No gross unlikelihood of major doubt,
And, at the end, an end to all suspense.

Still, something should escape us, something like
A question one had meant to ask the dead,
The day’s heat come and gone in infra-red,
The deep-down jolting nibble of a pike,
Remembered strangers who in picnic dress
Traverse a field and under mottling trees
Enter a midnight of forgetfulness
Rich as our ignorance of the Celebes.

Of motives for some act, propose a few,
Confessing that you can’t yourself decide;
Or interpose a witness to provide,
Despite his inclination to be true,
Some fadings of the signal, as it were,
A breath which, drawing closer, may obscure
Mirror or window with a token blur—
That slight uncertainty which makes us sure.

Wilbur, Richard. Collected Poems, 1943-2004: 104-105. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2004.

‘Fiction and the Reading Public’
Philip Larkin

Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don’t care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
Choose something you know all about
That’ll sound like real life:
Your childhood, Dad pegging out,
How you sleep with your wife.

But that’s not sufficient, unless
You make me feel good —
Whatever you’re ‘trying to express’
Let it be understood
That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads,
Makes ‘all for the best’,
That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be ‘depressed’.

For I call the tune in this racket:
I pay your screw,
Write reviews and the bull on the jacket —
So stop looking blue
And start serving up your sensations
Before it’s too late;
Just please me for two generations —
You’ll be ‘truly great’.

Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems: 170. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

How Jess writes.

http://korrektivpress.com/2013/02/23567/

One less thing for Potter and JOB to worry about…

YES!

Stuff Covered in Snow, Part II: Cambered

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Stuff Covered in Snow, Part I: Spavined

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Rachel Toor

The watch that rests near angels dancing
Upon–around–your nimble wrist
Tells more than time at every glancing
When even demons giving blist-
Ers notice your released endorphins
Undoing pain, unnailing coffins,
And resurrecting running shoes
For one more run in search of clues
To what makes Academe’s demented
Professors tic, what makes us fall
Into profound abstracted fol-
Ly: tenure tracks down halls cemented
With chalky dreams and clocks that click
Their heels to run on time, and quick.

Is NOTHING sacred…?

anne upped

Apparently not.

A Little Vaguely Valentinish Irony…

irony in headlines

…from across the pond.

And a bonus poem – in the spirit of Potter’s blotter:

The Anti-Valentine

Outside your zone
Away from my orbit
Out of your shadow
A moment alone –
No, rather – apart.
It’s what we know:

Alone.
Apart. A–
Lone. A–
Part.
A lone.
A part.

Our life has been
A mutual eclipse
Of heart from heart,
And the difference it
Makes between
These two distinct and lonely partings of lips.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Vampire Valentine

I gave my love a valentine
And a bottle of blood-red wine,
I sunk my teeth into my love
And said, You will be mine.

Zombie Valentine

A plate of brains helps my migraines
But darling you’re the one
Who makes my feel like my own meal …
Please put down that shotgun.

Philsopher’s Valentine

I made my love a heart-shaped pizza
And read to her from Nietsche,
She said Oh Fred now God ain’t dead,
As Kierkegaard could teach ya,
But I do adore — please give me more! —
Your pepperoni pizza.