Developing Genius: Or, Plans for the Present

Well, she's here.  Yesterday was Gabriella's one month birthday and she celebrated by crapping herself in the most explosive manner.  Also, she recited the first 3 lines of sonnet 141:

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise.

 Most people would not have been able to understand her, but that is only because of their relative lack of brainpower.  My kid's a genius.

So what about that list?

I suppose to require her to adhere directly to the list would imply that I had the intellectual and physical capacity to plan the path of success and world domination (logically--I put the list together, so I had to have been able to think up the process by which she could become the first great American author/take over the world/become a hermit/etc).  However, this can't be the case as I have not fulfilled the list myself.  Therefore, there must be some room for improvement.

I know I just compromised my life's declaration, viz. I am smarter and better than everyone else, but she is my progeny, and with my immense genetic development, I am sure to evolve more rapidly than most mammals.  In other words, she's going to be smarter, better, and faster than me.

So what does the present hold?  She is currently singing Mussorgsky's The Nursery progression.  Perhaps her life does not hold a literary or spiritual bent.  She may have some musical talent.

Who am I kidding, My genetic pool has NO musical talent whatsoever.  But the fact that she is singing in Russian certainly cheers me up!

Naiveté and Greatness

Yes, another post about myself.  Remember, "to be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself."

I am exceedingly naive.  Especially when it comes to reading and understanding books--whether philosophy, literary theory, or pure fiction.  I often love or hate a book, phrase, thought, or image without any knowledge whatsoever about the author.  Sometimes this gets me into trouble.

For example: I am an unabashed fan of Martin Heidegger.  I decided to bring in a comment about Heidegger and "Being" during a conversation (admittedly sophomoric) about sub-strains of generic existentialism in modern Christianity.  I was consequently shunned from the rest of the conversation for sympathizing with a Nazi.

Please remember that I qualified the discussion as sophomoric, so you can't really give much credit to the crowd or the conversation that ensued, but it is an example of my common way of thinking.  Another time, in a Graduate class on Shakespeare's Tragedies, while discussing the "Rape of Lucrece", I brought up something about the Neo-Platonic imagery in the poem and was immediately shot down, as that seems to be an observation that has been made about 30 trillion times in the great land of Academia.

Well, I don't care.  I would prefer to be somewhat naive about the things I read (not knowing that Emerson was a Transcendentalist, Marquez and Rushdie Magical Realists, etc.) than know about it going into the story.  I don't like carrying prejudices into my reading.  If I do, I will judge the material based on what I know going in and not on its own merit.  I guess this goes against more mainstream literary criticism, but even if I were to critique a work of literature or poem, I would rather not know the history.  I don't want to know that Ginsberg was a homosexual before I read "Howl".  Not because I will judge it more positively or negatively on that basis, but because I will begin to read things into it even in the first line.  It is extremely difficult to break myself of knowledge if I do have it.

New Subtitle and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #14

Scratch that last note, my new subtitle will be "How To Pretend To Be A Genius".  What do you think?

TURN OFF THE NEWS

anxiety gallops through chatter
fading century’s martial insanities
brain struggles to sum up “shut up”
articulation fails
walking shadow slides across faces

dusk over epitaphs
ash hair rusty litanies

dead friends and rain
paradise is an idiot
bones vines cold day
old vulture in airlock

scorpion dust
sneeze

-Anselm Hollo (Poet Anti-Laureate of the U.S.)

More Erudite Ramblings

I am thinking of changing the subtitle of my blog to match that of my friend, bjorniavelli, who is "Less Humble Than Others", with a slight change.  It would then read, "So Vastly and Supremely More Humble than You, You Just Wouldn't Believe It."

Since I am so well learned in the ways of becoming and maintaining the status of household Genus, I will enlighten you with some of my hard-earned and always humble wisdom:

To be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself.  Take for example a young man, say in his mid-or-early-twenties, who works in a rather affluent suburb.  He often sees middle-aged women in Cadillac or Lexus SUVs in the drive-thru of his local Starbucks and thinks to himself, "Why are all these women so obnoxiously self-absorbed and stupid to be buying coffee from this company every day?  I mean, their coffee is so notoriously bad and their atmosphere is so blatantly anti-rational (I mean for crying out loud, they sell Sufjan Stevens, The Beatles, and A Charlie Brown Christmas all on the same counter!) and so unbelievably corporate, yet hypocritically "socially-concious", and faux-artsy, and--" then he interrupts his thoughts to pay for the coffee.

See, it is the innner conundrums of the Genus' mind that make him what he is.  He is not a hypocrite; a hypocrite is one who uses the same rules to mean different things in different situations.  He is a realist--he understands he can't expect everyone to live by the necessarily objective rules of life, rises above the despair of the nihilist, simultaneously denounces the Absurdist absenteeism, and becomes what can only be known by one who is also a Genus: that Other, which other than which cannot be thought not to exist (take that Anselm the blunderer!).