Saturday, September 1, 2007
n-n-n-nothing but burgundy
I finally made my way back to the library to settle my fines (apparently my arm and leg are worth $27). In celebration of being out of "the red" with the Cbus Met Lib system I took out Beckett's Waiting for Godot ( somehow I've never read this and have been thinking about since my trip to Trinity College in Dublin last summer), and Camille Paglia's Break Blow Burn. Paglia's analysis of "fourty-three of the world's best poems" reminds me of why I want to continue my education in English.Pulling every word apart, figuring out why the writer included a symbol/color/character (consciously or otherwise)...it's like doing a puzzle backwards. Someone gives you a Monet, Gauguin , a Pollock and your task is to take an exacto knife to it. You must extract each waterlily and understand it's placement, it's color, purpose, possible historical reference, symbolism...and so on and so on.
Most interesting to me however, was Pagila's choice to include a Joni Mitchell song among Shakespeare, Yeats, Donne...even making comparisons to Dickinson and Plath. What Pagila does in including verse from popular culture into a collection of what she (as a professor and scholar) considers to be "fourty-three of the world's best poems" capsulizes my motivation for continuing in English. Pagila chose to analyze Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock". I have a history with the lyrics itself; my mom sings it fairly regularly (though we didn't know it was a Joni Mitchell, only known it to be Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), so I was excited to see what she had to say about it. Her discussion made great points and has left me pondering and debating with my mom.
Working on a project like the book Pagila has written itself would be a dream job for me, but being able to include contemporary, popular literature and song into a real, nitty-gritty literary discussion is exciting to me. I don't see any reason why there should be more study on Puccini than the Ramones (aside from relative age), or why Dickinson is classic and someone like Addonizio isn't taught in school? Shouldn't a work of art that reaches and identifies the masses be as important, if not moreso, than high art?
Woodstock-Joni Mitchell
(line and stanza breaks as dictated by Camille Paglia)
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And he told me
I'm going on Down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
And try and get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog
In something turning
Well, maybe it's the time of year
Or maybe it;s the time of man
I don't know who I am
But life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song
And celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
million-year-old carbon
We are golden
caught in the devil's bargin
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Well, if you're still reading now...you get a prize! A cartoon-y prize!
Cheers m'dears
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