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Tempi duri per I vampiri | Sarah Smiles :: Sarah Bites |
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12/31/2001 Some more thoughts on Harry Potter. [Please don't read this if you think you might be upset at what I have to say. This is not an open challenge or attempt to hurt the feelings of HP fans. Though I will respond to and encourage comments and disagreements, I doubt I have anything to say to hostile comments.] To start with, I was uncomfortable with HP from the hype, going back as long as I can remember. But a neighbor who tutors me with my writing suggested that I should be supicious of any idea I have that is not based on some experience. She said if I wanted to be a writer (and I do!) I need to suspend my hostility and 'try' to experience something as honestly as I can. So, I've tried to leave my opinions behind. Of course, as you are saying right now... "Too late. You're already biased against dearest HP!" I admit that I am. Too late. I'm left with a choice. Do I sit with my bias... and just be a boor ranting from the corner? Or should I 'engage the text' as she put it. To try to see how my bias meets the story and the movie head-to-head. And if I fail to overwhelm my bias with the experience, I will at least see if the experience matches the bias... or if there are new unrelated problems. Well, I read the fucking thing, and watched the movie! And I just heard that J.K. Rowling just married today. A lord? I wasn't sure on that. Anyway... man this book is thin. Thin, thin, thin. And I don't mean its length. Though I did read Lord of the Rings a couple of weeks ago. Thin, thin, thin. Narratively, descriptively, conceptually. Harry Potter is nothing. A no one. All he ever does is persevere. He doesn't study. He doesn't learn from experience. He doesn't over come struggles. He sits quiet, like an abused child, all his childhood. He goes where he's told and does what he should to get to school. Then he acts like he's expected to, filling in the famous shoes of his father left on the sports team and among the school faculty. The people who struggle are all secondary, and relatively unimportant. Those who sacrifice themselves are marginalized. The victims are punnished in their weakness. Someone told me, and I can agree more... harry potter is a Margaret Thatcher wannabe. Pre-famous. Inactive. Passive. Self-centred (no one else's stories are important here). And sure that the world now shines out of his ass. Close your eyes. Can you see harry potter land? If you've seen the movie there's nothing to see except the most stereotypical wizardly scenes... common with a million descriptions and movies... from Indiana Jones to Wagner to Willow to that Brit witch school show. So so So derivative. And there's nothing there. Everything looks exactly as you would expect it to work. No challenging of any preconceptions. Now extension of any issues. Bloody unicorn is still just a bloody unicorn. Evil is as evil does. The mere fact that Harry can't figure out the difference between a competitive and homicidal hatred is not too shocking in itself. As his plan to go home for the summer to terrorize his family suggests. I get the feeling that HP IS a mugwump. Finally, it is basically just a video game with humans. Like Q-whatever. Or running through school late at night. Not even humans, as they are just narrative contstucts. Look at the all important room on the third floor. They get from one action to the other UNCHANGED themselves, but merely getting through each section by the mindless application of a simple set of memorized rules. No growth. Harry just adopts his birthright. Everyone is what they're suposed to be. Baddies are bad, or worse. Bumbling types bumble. Bookworms are brought into line. Women and 'coloreds' are given secondary roles supporting the buildungsroman of Harry's rise to eminance... without really ever trying. I pity the muggles. With wizards like that, who needs devils? 12/30/2001 All is Vanity And it ended in tears. I watched Babette's Feast last night. I wish I had written down my feelings, as the tears dried on my face and my breath came in joyous sobs. But I wasn't the only one crying. I have never seen anything, or experienced anything, that brought me closer to what I imagine a deeply spiritual experience can be. How can I remain the smasher of all illusion that i seem to be? How can I contiue to question the divine spiritual beauty of a religious truth? And how can I stop writing such bombastic prose? Get Serious! Babette's feast forces me beyond pain and struggle and failure. If all is vanity, why is it that we can find meaning in the artistry of living? How does the artist transcend vanity by embracing it in her art? The movie almost says that the art is in the service of others... but it doesn't. Perhaps vanity is in the service of others, and how we are seen. But the artist does it for herself, for its own internal beauty and struggle to perfect the art that drives her on. God. I feel that I write for praise. What does that make me but a vain poser. Nothing new. All is vanity, but absorbing yourself in writing, in self expression for the self of your own art; what is that? Babette's Feast Story and Film Links Oh, and I did have a very nice time. Got some books too. 12/28/2001 Oh, and I forgot... I have updated Posie des Vampires on the right. It is now up to date with all my poetry between April 1, 2001 and December 28, 2001. As with the new design I'm working on, which will fix up all the stupid problems caused by having my blog at a level above my archives, I'll make a new pop-up poetry page. But it is presently over my head... ccs wise. I'm leaving NOW. Back in a day or 2. H.P.'s plain fucking weird. If you ask me. It feels like it was written by someone who learned about the world from TV and about reading from a magazine. I'm sure she's very nice, but it is very scary. SO FLAT. SO devoid of mood, atmostphere, narrative, anything. And I'm not referring to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. I'm going awol to write for a couple of days. Be well, and I love you all... Sar 12/27/2001
Blogger was down, due to hackers... so I dumped my thoughts on HP and then this response to a response on Sarah Smiles' LiveJournal Something I wizzed off when I was teased for my excess verbage. Chide me not, cryptkitten fair, 12/26/2001
Ok. I figure I have to start looking francaphone for my links. Maybe my french will improve. I doubt it. But we can try: A ditty I posted to vda-newcarthage The text is flat, the mind is blank, The words they have no bearing 12/25/2001 Updating the site, with a new design, and pulling all the old stuff together... just figured I'd sign up for as well. Have to place it on the page now, then I'll figure out how I'll design these into the site soon. 12/22/2001
Ravien's journal on Live page explicitly says that SHE is madonna... so I took the test, and came out as follows:
12/21/2001 What is it? I just don't rightly know. But I saw some, and was blowed away. But then again, Issey's like that: 'a-poc making'. issey miyake and dai fujiwara Jerry's having fun at our expense on VDA, and I like it: SARAH PRIME: Like a well written encylopedia. Open up any page and there is something to like, something to learn and something that you didn't have a clue of it's existence. SARAH SMILES: Her wit and charm are like a razor blade. Rubbing her the wrong way will result in a rash. An error in judgement will result in heavy bleeding. Yet most people depend on their razor. 12/20/2001 12/19/2001
vda-newcarthage again... sarahPrime doing most of the jawing >Anyway, I've never known much about christianity in the personal spiritual There's two of us. For the record, let it stand: SARAH PRIME: Christian, vampire, list mod, notorious person (mad, bad, and dangerous to know, it would appear). Redhead. I do NOT look like madonna. 12/18/2001
Danny, the god of stupid tests, found the Rocky Horror character test. I came out as: Which Rocky character are you? A retrograde disfunction of the mind.
12/17/2001 Ok. I have new comments function. I'll spruce it up. But that's even less news than the cool new poem 'sub Urbs' below. THe news is... and get this NOOR!... Beth's agreed to blog. Finally. Since only one or two people have been following this show from the beginning... I'll tell you how momentus this is. I've been trying forever to get first Noor (the sensible one) and Beth (the other than sensible one) to get online and blog. Especially as they complained for the first year plus that they could never get through to me cause the phone was always busy. Anyway, I failed in the case of Beth... but someone else... called Libertine... succeeded in seducing the wench to HP Slash (I still don't understand it) and from whense the step to Blogging was somewhat minor. And there was much rejoicing. 12/16/2001 sub Urbs
12/15/2001 Not Enough Vamping Green blood envy mocks you from within- --- In response to a comment that my site had nothing to do with vampires. I still don't know if she's right. SarahPrime of VDA had the sweetest nice thinks to say: "And you have a really cool blog site, one of the few worth visiting (and your pictures no longer make you look like Madonna; now you just look like a total babe, in an intellectual and somewhat annoyingly hip sort of way). Speaking of blogs, everybody should visit Danny's. He has more silly psychological test links than I've ever seen in one place." 12/14/2001
Yes, the scanner is fixed, and I've done a half dozen new images. Well, not fixed, but I can work around it. Lots of bashing and screaming and unplugging it, but I got some scanning done. I'll post them as the start looking funky. Here's my first most recent scan on the right... pillars. 12/13/2001 Comments is terminally busted. And I can't even get the stuff that Noor's using, because it is not accepting new people. I'm checking with Emma to see if I can use PHP or CGI on my site. She just moved it recently and I don't know where the stuff is. If worse comes to worse, I'll have to use SpazzM's, but it is stupid. I wrote 5-7 poems tonight. I'll transcribe one or two and upload them in a bit... oh, ya. And I think I know why my scanner's busted. Wooohoo! Eeek. It snows and rains. Another rant. This time in response to a post at VDA: Yahoo! Groups : vda-newcarthage Messages :6077-6106 of 6106. Hope it is not too out of context. Sasm Well, I'm not as adept as SarahPrime when it comes to the the warps of modern culture, but in general I can't agree more. As I've ranted about the hegemonic pressures of institutions of people who try to force us all into their cultistic mould [sic], to me, my enemy is represented by people who have 'truth' and 'answers' just like your average religous freak. I've posted about interests of science and historical period 'facts', but I don't think that there is anything in the past hundred years of any value, except people like the Bloofer lady that SarahPrime refers who try to cut through the modern fantasy shit. If you want to learn anything you find personally useful, it must stand up to your rampant attack on its pretenses of truth. You may find something of value to you being the facade, or the facade may crumble with nothing behind. That is, of course, why I'm such a hostile bitch, so easy to attack. If something survives the attack, then there may be something to be learned from it... and as I've learned... I think from Father Thomas Berry the ecotheologan, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Oh, I just realized I'm not fully coherent. Let me recap. Anything that sounds true, probably isn't. Anyone who says they've found the truth is definitely full of shit. Run from anyone who won't give away their story for free. Question everything everyone says. But respect anyone who holds an honest belief and does not try and force it upon you... because there is something blessed in an honestly held opinion. I often fail to respect this last thought, and it bothers me greatly. Me? I'm just Sarah. I call myself what I think I am. I do what I think I need to do to survive. I sing songs about what I've thought and discovered. And I make a fool of myself in the process. What more can a person do? Little, I think. Sorry folks, I'm ranting about Live Journal... http://www.livejournal.com/users/childeofloki/ has been commenting about my post below bemoaning people putting other people's work on their journal. On his page or the other guy's, I make what I think is an encouraging post for people to put their own poetry on their site. Well, I then on my OWN page I ranted (see below) as is my won't. Well, said duo have commented vociferously (a friend following the discussion and commenting on my bombast suggested obstreperous, but that's not a word I really know well.) on the post on my page... probably they should have done it on their own, but that's that. Well, my apologies when unnoticed, and my retraction of my links to their sites also so. Then we get blither and his buddy the rat crusher made posts like the following. Cute and sweet, and just every so completely off the point. While Coleridge is a stoned wanker is true and known and well, just ever so on the mark. We can look at real poets, say Blake, Pope or Young, and their lesser brethren Collins, Grey, Smart; poets of feeling, sense and matter. Sorry if I don't like Coleridge, but he's just another michael jackson, too often played on the hit parade. But that's just my loose appreciation of literary modes--I think he means genres and movements, but there's room for all types. And I agree... dirt and ignorance is most sanctimonious, to that I am devout. Oh, I should get on topic... Childe o Floki makes a couple of points, and I should give them the thought they deserve. I made a mistake, for which I still apologize, but for which I'm unforgiven. I shouldn't have peaked on people who get their thrills by typing in bad romantic poetry in place of their own wonderful words. I should have stopped responding to re-flames. I just don't know how to avoid commenting when I have an opinion on something. As for Bloodraven and Floki (Floki IS the proper name of an icelandic mythical figure, if you don't know.), hmmm... they can do any of the following: - rant Cause everyone knows I'm a pain in the ass as a friend, but it is worth it. Sasm Floki's comments: 12/11/2001 I was sitting here wondering what I feel about things today, and then I realized that I don't. That brought a purplexed smile for a moment, but not accompanying feeling, so the smile faded away. 'Sitting here wondering, and waiting for the time for me to fly' I guess, in hommage to some reggie tune I heard over and over again last summer. The thought that keeps coming to me repeatedly is 'when are you going to leave?' followed by 'what are you waiting for?' With subtle side movements and the odd jaunt up and over some hills and water, I've been living in a happy safe space for longer that I can remember... that being a couple of years. Not that it is quiet or without challenge, screams in the night and disposing of the bodies is always its own game of chess, but that's the sort of experience I can't really share in any meaningful manner. I'm in the cleft of a public/private journal--writing about things that could have no real interest or meaning to a reader, and yet somewhat vague for the writer. I like journals that are definite and experiential: here's what I did, and it was cool. And I'm cool for doing it. And then I met Beth and we called Noor and slogged out into the night and partied until our arms fell off. Ya, that sort of thing. It is just not the case this time. Just being in the midst of the December season--jew, christian, pagan, new age--festivities are starting to swirl about like a fanciful dance of conclusions and beginnings. I think it is just going to get more invasive, and I'll have less time to think and dream. I swore that I'd participate this year, and not hide and sneer and complain and pout. I don't have to dress up or anything, thank you gods, but I have made a committment to be present and smiling. It was a bit of a trick. Esme, our self appointed goddess of cheer, festivity and inclusiveness got me into an argument about these arbitrary expressions of joy, and when I wasn't looking I made the bald statement that people get out of it what they put into it, and it should be their responsibility to make it interesting and fun for everyone. Shit. I knew I was caught in a net of her devising... as this is how she works... start a fight, make you committ to a statement, then drop a bomb of an ultimatum on you that was what she was really wanting in the first place. I love her for it when she uses it on my behalf... usually to get people off my back around the house. This time I was sunk. I'd all but admitted that it was my unwillingness to get involved that led me to think badly of public festivities and holidays. So the deal is that I get involved this year... not just haunting on the corner with a book in one hand and a frown in the other, but to get right into the fabric, sing (not really) and dance. God, I cringe just to think of it. But why not. I just have no real reason to refuse. Isn't it up to me to figure out what I'm trying to accomplish with my existence? Haven't I made a committment to myself to live with and within myself dispite the limitations fate has put on me? If I'm willing to crawl through unending miles of shit to get what I need to survive, why shouldn't I be willing to crawl through endless nights of holiday festivities and social gatherings to see if there's anything, at the end of the night worth having gotten out of bed for? Hmmm... Back to nature... Music: Feed the Enemy & Rhythm of Cruelty by Magazine off Secondhand Daylight 12/9/2001
Algerian Massacres. I mailed this off to Noor, but I think it is something for public consumption. We forget what goes on if CNN doesn't show it. Not much good information. I saw some pictures about it on TV, but couldn't get any good stuff in English... this is the best I can find. But the TV reports said more about women and children being killed. I loveBIF-NAKED.Just got my first present from Canada today. Actually my first present of the year, and it came from Spazzm in Canukia. WOW. Bif. It is from 1998... looking to see if there's anything new at the site above... who know.s 12/8/2001 a rough draft at the window 12/6/2001 Again on VDA carthage... > >Undead: was, should be, sometimes is dead; pro-theLiving. Hmmm... The main difference between the undead and the living is that the living have never been dead. This is very much what you said. When you've been pounded into luncheon meat and have lost all sense of the life that came before, you're half way there. If you just sit there and corrode you're stuck. But if you find yourself, in your mind, beyond all space and time, severed from the petty daily stress and strife, far from the woof and warp of the world you thought you were in the middle of... and you never again feel that you can move through the world unblemished, or become part of what you think you have lost, you are undead. Less than living, but still breathing and burning with desire. Not dead, but sonambulating through the night nonetheless. Broken and battered by wishing rather to be fully alive and unconscious of what you are. To be undead you know thought after thought, therapist after therapist, bottle after bottle, blood drop after blood drop, that there is nothing so precious and worth of the closest regard than the smile of a stranger or a giggle from someone unaware that anyone is watching. And all else is the folly of the living wrapt in future, unaware of the beauty of the present. Hmmm.... I wonder where that came from. 12/5/2001 Yahoo! Groups : vda-newcarthage Messages :Message 5593 of 5593 From:??"Sarahsmiles" Date:? Wed?Dec?5,?2001? 2:42 am Subject:? [VDA] Saggy!!! [Re: Fwd: An interesting --- In vda-newcarthage@y..., Harijan > >Sorry... it doesn't mean that you don't do important or good work, and Don't be thick. Just because we share the same name doesn't mean you get away UNDEAD does not say any or all of the following: It does, of course, imply oodles of stuff. But it is up to you which signified I have never, and will never 'call' myself a vampire, but in gest. Vampires are God, I've missed this place... it is the "home of the rant". Sasm 12/4/2001 12/3/2001 I'm pestering people on vda-newcarthage again. --- In vda-newcarthage@y..., sikboy@a... wrote: > If I dont stop Ill die.The bottom of a bottle of sangria > isnt worth my life.Not that my lifes worth mutch at all. We die regardless, if we haven't already, as much for what we do right as do wrong. But you're right, the bottle isn't worth a life. A life may be worthless, admittedly so, but who can be sure that it's value they know. Your value and values are complex and varied and its hubris to think that we know everything always forever. It may be that it is one thing we can never know. Go or stop or stand or fall, but do it with friends if you've got them at all. They may have insight truthful or lies, to help you decide what to do in the night. For me, however, I'll do what it takes to find some way on forward, a new path that takes me as far away as I think I can get from that which is killing me, have no regret. If somethings killing you it is probably quite local, leave it and find if it follows. If it's local within, and it's making you grim then find something better to swallow? I drink, therefore I am. Sasm I've been busy causing trouble on thraxil: today. I wish I has a Thraxil. Everyone should have a thraxil who loves them. But then again, what IS a thraxil? It has oft been debated, but I forgot where. 12/2/2001 Yahoo! Groups : vda-newcarthage Messages :Message 5490 of 5490 Books should be burnt. There's nothing wrong. They keep you warm at night. They're made of wood, and I think they should make a wonderful light tonight. . But burn just one, or two or three, but leave the manuscript safe with me. I'll read the book and learn it well and recite the story from here to hell. Stomach Contents: I got 2 CDs I'd order today. Rather thrilled. So, I think I'll do what is expected and blog about them. No poetry, not vitriol, no spam. 1) Stranglers: Feline. Must have been made when I was in diapers, but somehow in France one still hears the Stranglers. I don't remember hearing them before getting to Lyon or somewhere. So very melodic, almost a counterpoint. So very 80s too, of which I'm otherwise sick. I will not get dragged to an 80s disco night ever again. I hope. But this... is just so nice. 2) Brian Eno: Music for Airports. I was verbally battering a raver friend of friend of one night who told me that if I really wanted to know what makes trance work, I'd have to listen to Eno. Well, I'm quietly hooked. I haven't listened to this one yet, but Music For Films is what is next on the CD changer. I have no idea what it will sound like. I'll let you know. 12/1/2001 Thanks to Danny's prodding, I redownloaded the Snorcomments stuff and installed it. Things SEEM to be working now. THanks SG! I figure that you all wanted to see the new Medici Girl. C'est moi. On your right I give you "The lizard girl" and a photo I call "caught in the headlight". They are still both victims of my slowly dying scanner... but it is a small price to pay for such narcissistic beauty. |