backyard crowing
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posterity
I'm writing this for posterity.
It's November of 2005. I'm listening to a song called "Banquet" by a band called Bloc Party. The song has an eighties feel, which is becoming very popular at the moment. Kids are interested in ipods, or MP3 players made by Apple. We are at war with Iraq, only some say it's not a war at all. Madonna is still somehow popular, and singer Christina Aguilera is marrying her boyfriend. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the 4th Harry Potter movie) came out last Friday and earned an astounding $101 million. There are riots in France.
I guess that's about all at the moment. Sleep needs me, or I need it, or something. Good night.
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4:33 pm
So tommorow Dad is going to pick me up! All of my classes on Thursday were cancelled except for Astronomy, so after my ten o'clock he'll be here between noon and two. Roughly. Maybe I shouldn't have asked him if I could...I guess I wouldn't mind some alone time. I do want to go home though, I think. I'm worried I won't be acccepted. I've been getting horrible grades, I don't have friends, and...I don't know that they're very proud of me. I know I'm not very proud of me. But this is all I have to offer at the moment. I am fat and distressed and tired and I don't know what I want.
I'm hoping maybe they can assist me while I study. I don't have anyone to do that with here.
I really want to see Total Eclipse, it's one of those Leonardo DiCaprio flicks that I've never seen. I've seen Titanic (of course), Romeo + Juliet, Catch Me If You Can, The Aviator, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Basketball Diaries, and The Man In the Iron Mask. That's seven of 14, so I've seen half of the films he has acted in. Marvin's Room looks particularly interesting, too, it has a great trailer.
there's this new computer game out, and it's all over tv. the game is called "The Movies", and it seems like fun. It's fifty bucks, I'll pass. No reason to get addicted to anything else.
We have a new pool at Gregory Gym, and it's heated! I haven't been there yet, but I'm so excited there's finally a pool fairly close by.
We're learning about Hemingway in American Lit, so I'm going to quote my 2396-page thick book:
"Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. His father, a well-to-do physician, initiated his son into the rituals of hunting and fishing and bequeathed to him a way of life, and of death. In 1917, after graduation from high school, Ernest Hemingway went to work as a reporter for the Kansas City STAR. Rejected for army service in WWI because of poor vision, he volunteered to serve as a driver for an American ambulance unit in France. Hemingway then transferred to duty on the Italian front, where he was seriously wounded in the explosion of a mortar shell. He was the first American to be wounded and survive during WWI on the the Italian front. After his recovery, and with decorations for valor which he believed he did not deserve, Hemingway returned home. He worked for the Toronto STAR, covered the Greco-Turkish War as a foreign correspondent, and then returned to Paris, which, after WWI, was a city full of intellectual life, creativity, and genius.
In Paris, Hemigway--along with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce--helped create a revolution in literary style and language. He developed a spare, tight, reportorial prose based on deceptively simple sentence structure. He used a restricted vocabulary, precise imagery, and an impersonal, dramatic tone. His first book, 'Three Stories and Ten Poems', appeared in 1923. Three years later, with the publication of 'The Sun Also Rises', Hemingway became the spokesman for the men and women that Gertrude Stein had called 'a lost generation'.
His works have sometimes been read as an essentially negative commentary on a modern world filled with sterility, failure, and death. Yet that nihilistic vision is repeatedly modified by Hemingway's affirmative assertion of the possibility of living with syle and courage. His primary concern was an individual's "moment of truth" (a notion derived from bullfighting), and he was fascinated by the threat of physical, emotional, or psychic death, a fascination reflected in his lifelong preoccupation with stories of war ('A Farewell to Arms', 1929, and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', 1940), the bullfight ('Death In The Afternoon', 1932), and the hunt ('Green Hills of Africa, 1935). To Hemingway, a person's greatest achievement is to show 'grace under pressure', or what he descibed in 'The Sun Also Rises' as holding the 'purity of line through the maximum of exposure'.
Hemingway's stature as a writer was confirmed with the publication of 'A Farewell to Arms' in 1929. The novel portrays a farewell both to war and to love. Hemingway had rejected the romantic ideal of the ultimate union of lovers. He suggested instead that all relationships must end in destruction and in death.
In 1937 he became a foreign correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War. Three years later he published 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'. Set in Spain during the Civil War, the novel restates his view of love found and lost and describes the indomitable spirit of the common people. In 1952 the same judgement was reflected in his portrayal of the old fisherman, Santiago, triumphant even in defeat, in 'The Old Man and the Sea'.
Hemingway received wide acclaim for his novels and for his short stories, which include some of the finest in the English language. In 1954 he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his 'mastery of the art of modern narration'. He became a public figure whose pronouncements and adventures were publicized and scrutinized throughout the world. Numerous parallels exist between the events of Hemingway's life and those of his characters, but few were closer than those of Richard Cantwell, the hero of 'Across the River and into the Trees' (1950, whose attempts at stoic control of physical and mental illness foreshadow the struggles and defeats of Hemingway's final years, which ended when he, as his father had done some thirty years before, took his own life on July 2, 1961."
okay, that's enough telling you about the way to heming.
"Some security."
 I took the "If You Were a Poet..." quiz on gURL.com |
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I am... Gertrude Stein Do you have a thing for words? You're in good company. Gertrude Stein did too. Who else could write a line like, "A rose is a rose is a rose," and call it poetry? Read more... Which poet are you? |
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1:47 a.m. - 2005-11-21
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