A Conservative Journey Through Literary America – Part 4: The New Formalism

In the beginning there was the word, and it had form.

Homer wrote his two great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in dactylic hexameter.  Not for arbitrary reasons was it so organized – in pre-literate Greek society, epic poetry was sung, and the fixed metrical structure allowed for ease of memorization for the poet while simultaneously lending a pleasing musicality for the listener.  This relationship between music and words, a relationship both practical and aesthetic, continued to be enshrined in poetic structural forms for millennia.

Until Whitman.

That beautiful, bearded, destructive bastard knocked poetic form hard to the ground with his free, expansive, structureless verse.  The fact that it was also thrilling and brilliant and original had the unfortunate effect of encouraging lesser poets to write in a likewise fashion, and what Whitman had floored in the 19th century was thoroughly killed in the 20th.  Music and verse became decoupled; form and structure became increasingly ridiculed as backwards, stifling, archaic, not unlike bourgeoisie society itself.

Until… (more…)

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Tags: Bill Kristol, Dana Gioia, homer, Ira Sadoff, Neo-Formalism
Posted May 24th 2009 at 6:53 am in Entertainment, Featured Story | 140082One Commenthttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mpatterson/2009/05/24/a-conservative-journey-through-literary-america-part-4-the-new-formalism/A+Conservative+Journey+Through+Literary+America+-+Part+4%3A++The+New+Formalism2009-05-24+13%3A53%3A28Matt+Patterson

‘Taken’: The World’s Oldest Profession is Father

He is a man with a gun. He is a killer, a slayer. Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer. Self-effacing, self-forgetting, still he is a killer. . . All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper. (more…)

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Tags: ben stiller, Claudia Barlow, Clint Eastwood, D. H. Lawrence, daniel craig
Posted May 20th 2009 at 8:04 am in Entertainment, Featured Story | 138886One Commenthttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2009/05/20/the-worlds-oldest-profession/%27Taken%27%3A+The+World%27s+Oldest+Profession+is+Father2009-05-20+15%3A04%3A02Leo+Grin

The Idiossey

The Not-Really-That-Epic Poem of Obamacles
Revised and Updated

(with Apologies to Homer)

Book the First: A question for the Muse

Speak to me, O Muse, of this resourceful man
who strides so boldly upon the golden shrine of Potomac,
Between Ionic plywood columns, to the kleig light altar.
Fair Obamacles, favored of the gods, ascends to Olympus
Amidst lusty tributes and the strumming lyres of Media;
Their mounted skyboxes echo with the singing of his name
While Olbermos and Mattheus in their greasy togas wrassle
For first honor of basking in their hero’s reflected glory.
Who is this man, so bronzed in countenance,
So skilled of TelePrompter, clean and articulate
whose ears like a stately urn’s protrude?
So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us his story.
And just the Cliff Notes if you don’t mind,
We don’t have all day.

(more…)

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Tags: homer, iowahawk, odyssey, poem barack obama, spoof
Posted Jan 22nd 2009 at 9:19 am in Featured Story, Media Criticism, Politics | 27373136 Commentshttp://bighollywood.breitbart.com/dburge/2009/01/22/the-idiossey/The+Idiossey2009-01-22+17%3A19%3A13Iowahawk