new blog activity

I have joined a new blog site: ireadpretty.blogspot.com

Marilyn Manson and Lewis Carroll?

Marilyn Manson is apparently becoming a film director. Scheduled for 2007 is his first feature, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll. It is apparently a horror/fantasy/biopic and for it Manson claims to be using some new kind of camera developed for the film and also will be using a magician instead of CGI effects. It all sounds much more interesting that you would normally expect from a shock-rocker-turned-director.

J.S. Mill on poetry... note the date!

It has often been asked, What is Poetry? And many and various are the answers which have been returned. The vulgarest one of all — one with which no person possessed of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself can ever have been satisfied — is that which confounds poetry with metrical composition; yet to this wretched mockery of a definition many have been led back by the failure of all their attempts to find any other...

the word ‘poetry’ imports something quite peculiar in its nature; something which may exist in what is called prose as well as in verse; something which does not even require the instrument of words, but can speak through the other audible symbols called musical sounds, and even through the visible ones which are the language of sculpture, painting, and architecture

John Stuart Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties", 1833

Why I Love Horace

A lawyer, a mediocre pleader of causes, may fall short ... yet have value: but mediocrity in poets, no man, god or bookseller will accept ... The sensible fear to touch, they flee, a crazy poet, as when the evil itch, or jaundice, plagues someone, or fanatical delusions, or plain lunacy ...

He, inspired, goes wandering off, spouting his verses, and if like a fowler intent on blackbirds, he falls into a well, or a pit, however much he cries: 'Help me, citizens!' none will bother to pull him out. If anyone did choose to help, and let down a rope, I'd say: 'Who knows if he didn't do that on purpose, and doesn't want to be saved?'