No... In fact, he called Americans a "visceral" people. However, it sure did have that aftertaste of "suckers!" I'm referring to Orrin Hatch's comment tonight on Hardball about the fact that 42% of registered voters believe that Saddam Hussein had a direct role in the attacks on September 11. In response, Hatch replied that he's not bothered that this is the case, because [and this is a semi-direct quote from just having seen it] "Americans are a visceral people. They understand that a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda exists even though no direct relation has been proven." I think he just called us "suckers" and that, my friends, is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Another Bushism gone bad. You may recall that in his address to the RNC, President Bush assured voters that what he says he will do in an election year, he does. An assurance made, I'm certain, with "Read my lips... " echoing in his mind's ear (as we know... lots of echoing takes place there). I'm sure we won't be able to find any copies of his 2000 campaign that promise: "that he would sign an extension of the 10-year ban on the semiautomatic weapons." So, no time like before an election to line the pockets of your political allies!
From "The Tonight Show" via SFGate.com
"The candidates are arguing about the exact format of the presidential debates. Kerry wants to stand behind a podium and Bush wants to stand behind Dick Cheney."
The thing about funny is that it requires a fraction of the truth in order to make us laugh. What's true about this isn't that Dick Cheney is pulling the strings. What's funny is that it's politically advantageous for Bush if it appears as though Cheney is pulling the strings. Bush is actually pretty savvy. He's able to preserve the "compassionate conservative" veneer by using Dick Cheney as his "tough guy." What's frightening is that Bush does have a viscious side... one that doesn't sell with his "compassionate Christian" image. One that I find more dangerous and more alarming than a President without a brain.
One of the trends that I've noticed and that I have discussed with poets who write ekphrastic verse is the use of the physical presence of a text as a means of approaching a visual artifact and simultaneoulsy usurping the determinist ending of the paragoni battle between viewer and viewed. Mei Mei Berssenbrugge and other women involved with the book arts create an "embodied" position as viewer. By calling attention to the physical presence of the text, she uses the text's own self presentation to "act out" a model for verbal and visual relationships which do not devolve into power struggles between the viewer and the viewed...
If nothing else, I'm learning to appreciate the time that I can spend even just reworking and revising just snippets of things here or there. This morning I reviewed many of the notes that I'd taken for my "self-portraiture" chapter, and it prompted me to revise/rework/restart my prospectus. So far, this is what I've come up with:
This study examines how women use and change the tradition of ekphrasis as they look at and respond to the visual arts through poetry. Current theories of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, view its social dynamic through a necessarily gendered lens. By examining women’s ekphrasis, this study questions the fatalism of existing theories as an always already violent pursuit of the visual field by the verbal. It seeks to explain ways in which female poets position themselves as simultaneous speakers and subjects of their own art and to uncover the creative possibilities these poets discover as they negotiate the charged gender relations of the genre. At its heart, this study investigates the degree to which women looking at art approach it as self-portraiture and how negotiating the self she is able to make larger claims about the nature of art, aesthetics, and power.
Of course, this is probably too big to start with. The biggest problem that I keep running into is this basic need or desire to make some overarching statement about the situation and tenor of women's ekphrasis today. It's not something I necessarily feel comfortable doing because to do so seems like another attempt to essentialize a female experience. So, that's unhelpful. The disseration, of course, will focus on people who are major contributors to women's ekphrasis. How do we know if someone's a major contributor? Well, I think that their work, or the poem itself, needs to have been incorporated into a larger discourse of major poetic contributions. That seems like an incredibly phallocentric way to approach poetry by women, though. So... the binds become more ensnaring.
So far, I'm imagining a first chapter in which the history and the lay of the academic discourse on ekphrasis is laid bare. Next, I think we need a chapter about ekphrasis that explicity confronts the image of the artist's self, since a female poet viewing an image as female entity is necessarily doing some act of self-representation when she regards and represents any image. So, it's best to deal explicitly with images of the self and how women represent images of the self in order to begin a discussion of how women deal with the image as something "not" of herself. That probably doesn't make much sense at this point. I'm also envisioning chapters in which women consider popular images by well known artists, a chapter on women writing about landscapes (the artistic genre, not actual landscapes). I think there's probably also something to be done about women approaching paintings by unknown artists... though I'm not sure how many poems I could point to at this point for which this makes sense. There's probably another chapter in there about women and household images, still life, and the family portrait (esp. the photographic portrait). We'll see.
I need to get back into reading again. I've taken a short fiction reprieve, and so I need to get back into reading women's poetry again. The reason I was so interested in Ashcroft and the boob in the Department of Justice was because of the poem by Claire Braz-Valentine called, "An Open Letter to John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States." I think there's a lot that can be done in discussing this as an example of women resisting ekphrastic fatalism. Maybe it'll appear as some sort of exigence-creating forward.