Female Poets Presentation

Tonight was my big presentation on female poets of the 19th century. I feel fairly good about it. I was a little nervous, and I stammered a bit, but mostly, the presentation went well. I think everyone was impressed by it. Carolyn Loeb, who is this awesome art historian, showed up and took notes and asked questions and made me feel like I'm really an emerging scholar. I felt very adult and proud of myself.
Someone asked me what I liked best about this project, and I feel, without a doubt, that I'm happy I discovered Frances E.W. Harper. The more time I spend with her, the more I learn. I would be more than happy to keep writing about her work, because she's an important, mostly forgotten voice in American literature. She's a wonderful, gifted writer and deserves to be up there with Whitman, Twain, Poe, Austen, Dickens, and Dickinson.

It! Terror from Beyond Space

Some movies only leave great questions. With It! Terror from Beyond Space, the burning question is why would NASA give its astronauts so many grenades but only one bazooka?
I joke, sort of. It’s true that this group of astronauts, coming back from a mission to Mars and finding that they have an uninvited and violent guest aboard their space ship, try various schemes to kill the monster, including the aforementioned grenades and a bazooka. It’s a typical “confined in a small space” story, reminiscent of last year’s “The Waters of Mars” on Doctor Who. The astronauts are generally stupid, droll, or in one case, vaguely bro-like. The only delightful thing is the monster. Even though he’s in a full suit, you can feel how much the actor playing him is enjoying it. Villains are at their best when their depictions are infused with child-like joy, and this monster is the proverbial kid in the candy store.
One of the saddest thing about this movie is the women. Having female astronauts at a time when all astronauts were male would appear revolutionary. However, in this movie’s vision of female astronauts, they both serve as the mothers of the spaceship, making the boys sandwiches and comforting them when they are disappointed. Plus, we all know that these female astronauts, dressed in the kind of skimpy uniforms that would make the Star Trek franchise proud, are there for the male gaze. So it’s still ultimately a fail.
This is one of those movies only hardcore film nerds and science-fiction fans could appreciate, because it mostly lacks anything else going on.

An Incident on Albert Street

My friend Erin Wisti wrote this for the SpartanEdge. As usually, Wisti writes a great piece about an important subject.
This is the kind of story that makes me so angry and so sad. I'm angry at people who behave that way, but I am also sad Wisti experienced that. She's a wonderful person, and it's not okay that someone treated her that way.
Hopefully, her piece will change at least one person's mind.

Bread Rising

Tonight, I got to see Christine Rhein read from her first book of poetry Wild Flight. I really liked a lot of things about her poetry. I think she has great taste when it comes to picking interesting subjects to write poems on. It struck me that she often wrote poems on quirky stories or things she read about in the news. She had poems about birds being shot in domino matches and about abstract art involving the Mona Lisa and toast. She is also creative in terms of form, writing a poem completely in computer code called "In Code." (Other poems that had interesting forms include "For My Son, at Twelve" and "Self-Portraits, Three Way Mirror.") She had a great sense of details. (One of my favorites was talking about a Norwegian band named Bull's Eye. I was able to find bands named Bullseye, but they were American. If this band really exists, point me in the right direction. My favorite line of the night? "Imagine if we could hear bread rising." The next time I get a chance, I'm going to try.

A Black Queen of England

Doctor Who does not have such a great track record when it comes to race. A while back, when David Tennant announced he was leaving the show, there were all sorts of ideas about who the next doctor should be. Some of these ideas included black and/or female actors taking over the show. Who got it? Another white man.
The show occasionally has dealt with race, as it did briefly when it had on as companion Martha Jones, played by the lovely Freema Agyeman, who is of Ghanaian and Iranian descent. Agyeman was a wonderful breath of fresh air and did a wonderful job making Martha a smart and captivating character. The show acknowledged her race, and showed characters, even supposed good ones, treating her badly because of it. I personally thought this was a great opportunity for a interracial romance to develop between her and the Doctor, who, despite saying that ethnicity was irrelevant to him, was still played by a white actor. When they instead married her off to Mickey, the one and only major Black British male character who was first romantically involved with a white woman, I was disappointed. The show did not develop a romance, between Martha and Mickey, it simply put them together as an afterthought. I wondered if people were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black British woman involved with a white-looking alien. Or with just a Black British woman.
Which is why I was surprised by the character Liz 10 on this past weekend's episode of Doctor Who. Liz 10 was played by Sophie Okonedo, who is most famous for starring in Hotel Rwanda. Liz 10 is the 10th Queen Elizabeth, and she's clearly black. Of course, she's also being lied to and manipulated by her own government (who are mostly white, natch) and by herself. I am glad that they decided to show a Queen of England of the future as black, instead of white, like every King or Queen of the past. Liz 10 is badass, the kind of character I would love to see as a bigger character on the show, but who I suspect we won't see, because, well, if the past years of this show is any indication, even if she did become a companion, she would eventually be written out of the show and married off to another Black character. Because only Black women can marry Black men; they can't have a romance with some white alien, because he's too busy pining for a white woman who is literally another universe away.

The Flaming Lips: The Fearless Freaks

The Flaming Lips: The Fearless Freaks is a fascinating documentary following around the band of the documentary's title, who live in a strange but delightfully whimsical world. Although the documentary has concert footage, it seems much more interested in telling the stories of the band members and their various projects, some of which are not music-based.
Like every good documentary, it leaves you wanting more. I found myself wishing someone would make a documentary exploring the relationship between Wayne Coyne and his wife Michelle, who works as a photographer. She is at the periphery of the film, and I found the two of them more interesting than some of the other issues at play in the film. The film also made me want to see the science fiction movie that the band is shown working on (which, I believe, has since come out.) And now I want to explore Coyne's stomping grounds, the Oklahoma City/Norman area, just in the hope of running into him. Because ultimately, the movie made me want to be a member of this band, which is always the danger of falling in love with music like this.
I feel terrible saying this, but much of the film focuses on drug use. This has become such a cliche in rock docs that I found myself wishing, especially for those involved, that this was a different story.
Overall, the film is a fun look at one of the most experimental bands out there today and for fans it's a must-see.

Poetry Reviews

Today is another Red Cedar Review day. On Wednesday, we began looking through old editions of the journal. We're publishing an anniversary issue with content from the last fifty years of material. It's a lot to go through, which is why we're starting now.
One of my jobs as the poetry editor is to condense all the reviews in one easy-to-read excel sheet. I'm a master at making one of those, and I just finished the first draft. It feels satisfying to be able to see that we already are making headway on this project.
I'm not working on this project alone. Gavin Craig, who use to work for The Red Cedar Review began a blog archive of all our work (as well as other literary magazines.) When my poetry readers have sloppy writing, I can just look up the correct spelling of something on there. The only thing I don't like about this is that I can't add notes to his notes about the journal.
For example, Jane Vincent Taylor published a poem with us in 2000. She's since become a more notable poet and her book What Can Be Saved is amazing. She also has other great poems, like "Ice Broken". I got to meet her when I was a sophomore, and she's lovely. I want to note her contribution in the blog.
Also, I noticed that we have published Carrie Preston several times. I initially noted this because she was the former editor of the journal, and I think we should consider asking the former staff members who have gone on to become writers to come back at the issue release party. On a lark, I googled her. Turns out she's a poet and academic now. She has published other poetry too. Now I have another note and something to tell Emily and Ashley, our current editors.
Actually, I wanted to mention to Emily and Ashley that, as long as I have access to a computer, I can continue to contribute to the group over the summer. This summer, a group of staffers is going to go through the archive and digitalize everything. I believe it will be available on ProjectMuse. I was thinking, if I and other readers have access to those journals as they are digitized, we could continue to read and review them, which would allow us to have a lot work done before the school term starts up. I think this might be a great idea, especially since it'll allow me to stay involved in the project longer than I thought I would otherwise be able to.