Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall (Commonplace Book)

Hopkins, I cannot help but point out, was a fellow Balliol man. In point of fact in his life he never used his middle name. The fact that we know him by the three names today seems to be because of later editors, for some reason. Here is the poem, which has fantastic rhythms:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With you fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Ethics as Aesthetics: Aaron Sorkin

Last Sorkin post for a while, until I am ready to write about why Studio 60 is not working.

Plato distrusted the arts, because he was concerned that its beautiful illusions would interfere with day-to-day morality. People would be under the illusion that they had access to truth, when they had only fictions. Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, the first four seasons of West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) is Plato best enemy. On the surface, Sorkin’s characters -- almost all of them, even the bad guys -- appear to be the apotheosis of ethical models in art: loving, strong, smart, deeply principled. Just to name a single example, an entire episode of Sports Night is given over to one of the main characters struggling to choose a charity to donate money to. Sorkin is a genius, one of the greatest living writers in any medium (I would put him alongside Grant Morrison and John Ashbery, and I plan to at some point). But he uses ethics, not as a model, but as an aesthetic device, the way a painter might select a particularly picturesque tree. The only complaints I have heard against Sorkin -- at least until Studio 60 -- boil down to the same objection: he is not realistic. But complaining that Sorkin is not realistic is like complaining that ice cream has no nutritional value, it misses the point. Sorkin is the only genuine – which is to say persuasive – inheritor of the films of Frank Capra, especially Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. Capra is a filmmaker who is such a part of Americana that it can be hard to see how watching his films can be anything other than a study of the nostalgias, especially as Its a Wonderful Life hits with such regularity at Christmas. But they are great films, and Sorkin keeps them alive. Ethics as Aesthetics, beautiful, moving, unrealistic objects. Screw content. Sorkin is pure style over substance. I don't care that much what writers have to say -- as someone once noted Milton could have put all his thoughts on God into four or five pages -- I care how they say it. And Sorkin is a master.

On Studio 60 the parts are there, but they are just not persuasive in the same way. But that is for later.

Studio 60 and Allusion 2

The pilot of Studio 60 also alludes to real life in order to ingratiate us to one of the main actors -- when we are introduced to Matthew Perry his character is high on pain killers from his recent back surgery, an allusion to actor Matthew Perry's long time and public addiction to pain killers. Sorkin alludes to the actor's troubled past in order to transmute his bad reputation into comedy. Matthew Perry is instantly likeable for this reason; we feel he has admitted something to us, and so we feel closer to him (as we would to a friend who had confided in us). This tactic is not new for Sorkin -- the pilot of West Wing involved Rob Lowe's character getting dangerously close to a sex scandal, something the actor was very familiar with.

My fourth, and for now final, allusion in Studio 60 is in the fourth episode, which involves everyone realizing that, in the show within the show, they just aired someone else's jokes as their own; they scramble to revise the West Coast feed by inserting live material into the copy of the show that aired live on the East Coast. In the end it turns out that the "stolen" material was itself stolen -- stolen from a writer who wrote it under contract for Studio 60. It turns out there was no plagiarism, because the network owned the original material. They were "stealing" from themselves. What is funny about this is that Sorkin has an almost shameless ability to reuse his own material. The most dramatic example is the West Wing episode "Someone's Going to Emergency, Someone's Going to Jail" in which Rob Lowe, having discovered his parents are divorcing because his father has been having an affair with a woman for more that twenty years, gets crazy over a work related thing that, unconsciously, is a metaphor for his current situation. The exact same plot is the subject of the Sports Night episode "The Sword of Orion". Dozens and dozens of situations, lines of dialogue, kinds of jokes appear in all three shows (and in Sorkin's A Few Good Men); here is a whole list of them. The point is that just as Sorkin alludes to Perry and Lowe's personal history in the shows, he alludes to his own history as well, in order to charm viewers with self-knowledge.

Comics Out 18 October 2006

A good week for comics: Douglas Rushkoff and Liam Sharp's Testament 11, Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba's Casanova 5, and a double bill of Grant Morrison's Wildstorm relaunch with Wildcats 1 (art by Jim Lee) and The Authority 1 (art by Gene Ha). I will hold of reviewing these until next week, though I may say something in the comments section.

Strong potential stuff this week, but gear up: a week from today Planetary, with the exception of an epilogue, ends (we will see the defeat of the Four, I imagine) and Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers ends with an extra large issue drawn by superstar J.H. Williams III.

In comics news this week Marvel and DC's January solicits are up at Newsarama.com.

Plus -- and I know it is not exactly comics news, but Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodreguiz are making a movie -- the trailer is up and it looks absurd, amazing. It's called Grindhouse. I would link to youtube, but it keeps getting put up and taken down so you will have to hunt for it yourselves. You won't regret it.

Robert Creeley's The Rain (Commonplace Book)

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.