Tuesday, March 17, 2009

angry dwarfs

I'm going to put the current issue of Bust on sale soon. It will be the "I am moving across the country and can only bring what I can fit into a suitcase" sale.

I started using twitter: twitter.com/bradley_sands

I signed up a while ago, but couldn't figure out its purpose.

I have figured out its purpose.

I am enjoying it. More than blogger, I think.

Andersen Prunty is serializing a novel online: thebeardnovel.blogspot.com

I like it so far.

I don't like reading novels online. He's one of the only people whose novel I will read online. Him and Noah Cicero. I will only read Ohio writers online. This is my new rule.

I just registered for my summer classes. It filled me with happiness.

I've been looking through my old college essays. I need to use one for a writing sample so I can apply for a job at my school's writing center.

This is a good part of an essay about Tarkovsky's Solaris:

And what are we to take from that fact that Sartorius’s "visitor" is an angry dwarf. The "visitors" are supposed to be some part of the men’s subconscious. So is this dwarf somebody who was important to Sartorius or is he merely a representation for his personality. It would make sense - Sartorius is cold, scientific, emotionless, and calculating. The dwarf can represent that he is angry, and his growth has been stilted emotionally.

I am a big fan of angry dwarfs in films. This reminded me of the film that has been a personal favorite of mine - "The Angry Dwarf." I think that the dwarf should have been given far more screen time.

I don't think I will be using this essay (and the movie is actually called "The Sinful Dwarf")

I might use an essay that I wrote about a few Fassbinder movies. But it is twenty pages long and I need to make it five to seven. This probably won't be too difficult. The beginning embarrasses me:

You might be asked as you walk down the street some day, “Just exactly what is postmodernism, you intellectual bastard?” To that, you may be pretentious and quote Fredric Jameson by saying that post-modernism is “a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, devoid of...any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists (Shaviro, 7). Or you could reply as the Zen master would to their student, with perhaps including with it a quick jab to the head with a stick, “Just what is is?,” For post-modernism cannot be defined in simple terms - it is a reflection of our way of life. It cannot be defined in words because according to postmodernism, words are meaningless and empty. All that we can do with words is seize and distort them, for they never had any original meaning, only what we chose to bestow upon them.

Maybe I'll just have to write something new. I haven't written a critical essay in eight years. Maybe I'll write one on the novels of Steve Erickson.