The Gazette

This is how poetry makes me feel:  "Eat your damn Thoreau, kid." However, if I swallow my distaste, I find poems that I absolutely love!! My favorite poem is probably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot. I'm a huge Eliot fan. I also love Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, John Milton, and Emily Dickinson. If we're going to continue the picky eater analogy, Shakespeare is my dino chicken nuggets and Aphra Behn is my Kraft mac and cheese. Tried-and-true.  "Mmm.. Sonnets From the Portuguese" The problem with poetry is it needs to strike a balance between strong emotion and a tight structure, specifics and abstractions, floweriness and concision. Most poetry I feel misses the mark. It's too sappy, too rhymey, too vague, and way too long. And I should know. My works have been rejected from many a poetry contest.  Side note: poetry contests are sorta rigged. Most people write about something happening in their life, which is cool, but there...

 It took approximately 1 viewing of "Best In Show" to paint Darby. Here he is!  Apparently there has been some trouble when I try to upload images from my computer, but I'm hoping this one worked.  Anyways, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The canvas is 8x10 inches, which is bigger than I normally use, so I feel like I could get a pretty high level of detail. The lines in the background are kinda wonky, but I feel like that focuses more attention on the dog. I was sort of taking a page from my absolute favorite contemporary artist, Kehinde Wiley, who does large scale portraits with backgrounds that look like fancy wallpapers. I don't really have the skill or time to get so elaborate, but he's definitely one of my biggest artistic inspirations.  Wiley's portrait of Obama  I also wrote a couple words about Darby's personality I would like to hang up next to his portrait:  " Some dogs fall all over their humans. Barking, jumping, running arou...

It's another fact universally acknowledged that if you are watching a movie or a TV show and a dog comes onscreen, your neighbor will lean over to you and whisper "If the dog dies I'm turning this off". If this is you, worry not! Check out  doesthedogdie.com to look up "emotional spoilers". While that particular function seems a little silly to me, it turns out this is also good to screen for things that could potentially be triggering, such as suicide or torture scenes.   :( So, dog movies. I personally refuse to watch things that have dogs in them. At their best, they are tacky and rely too much on slapstick humor (think Hotel for Dogs), and at their worst, nearly pornographic in their absurd heartstring-tugging and tear-jerking (A Dog's Purpose, Homeward Bound).  "Is this a Dog Movie?" Generous exception made for Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Because his style is so wry and direct, it cuts through the overdone Boy and His Dog thing.    W...

My first thought on starting a new post: I am so burnt out. Homework is a Sisyphean task. Right now, I'm typing this at the computer lab because my laptop stopped working. I have spent the last 45 minutes trying to figure out how to log in to various accounts so that I can get my homework done.  How do teachers stand up in front of the class with a straight face and say something like "The assignment is on Zeeble today and once you get done with that don't forget your Scroobler questions are due by 11:59. We're going to have a test on Boingus next Monday, so check out the study guide on Spingo. If you have any questions don't forget to message me on Zonk!" I can see why Victor Frankenstein dropped out of college to become a bodybuilder.  How it feels to get on Pongo to check my Bleepie notifications Anyways, how do I feel about Dogs? I feel like I've gotten a pretty thorough education. Everything is about dogs, except for dogs, which are about people. It...

 If you're looking for a post about dogs in art, move along. This post was requested by the inestimable Alison Gee and isn't for credit, I just think people need to know the truth.    Anyways, if you Google Artoo's gender, it says "masculine programming". This is from Daniel Wallace, the author of multiple Star Wars fanfiction. Since Star Wars is a kids' movie, writing history books for adults over it is kind of cringy, plus he's a man so I don't think that's a valid opinion. She doesn't have a biological sex, being a robot and thus unable to reproduce, but gender-wise, she is female.   My main argument here is the scene in A New Hope, where everyone gets stuck in the trash compactor. Everyone is panicking, but Artoo hacks into the computer and saves everyone without losing her head. Could a man do that? Could a man do that without the expectation of praise? Definitely not. She continually saves the day quietly and unrewarded.  Girlboss Further...