It is fascinating, the extent to which our 45th president (still hard to type that) is a literary character more than a real person. That is, a snarl of discernible cause and effect and metaphor and metonymy, a composition of depths so easy to perceive that he becomes a kind of poetry, meant to be understood, to clarify the world. Most real people are ill-defined, full of contradictions and mysteries, dozens of causes crashing into each other inside a black box before they emerge as effects.
Obviously part of the reason Trump is not a black box is that the presidency puts a man (or let's hope, soon a woman) under a magnifying glass for years, not one minute out from under it. So you might feel you know Joe Biden as well as you know your own sister who moved to Utah. In fact Biden plays as unusually clear too, partly because he's less a snarl of a man; so it might be more instructive to compare Trump to Hillary, McCain, Cheney, Kerry, W, Pence, Clinton -- none of those national figures really ever threw light on the human experience like Trump does. Not even Obama, who spent so much care writing about his life, parsing his own motives; for all that, Obama remains too complicated to have a plain effect on the narrative the way Trump does. Obama remains human. Trump is literary.
The enormous problem is that Trump is a composition in a cautionary tale, or perhaps a bitter satire, that is being read by millions as a heroic epic.
It is remarkable that the first and only documented joke Trump has told is about a fictional cannibal from the 80's, his golden age. But the artist works with the clay at hand.
I was always taught that that was iambic pentameter: 5 iambs, each of which goes da-DA.
(That is, English iambs, not the classical ones of *4* syllables. And never mind that we count stresses, not quantities, which is irrelevant to counting the feet.)
With apologies for the pedantry, which I am not qualified to deliver, but it's fun.
Dactyls are DA-da-da: AND then the PRESS when i SAY doctor HAN-nibal LECter. It's English, so there's more than one possible stress reading, and I can see starting out thinking it's iambic ("and THEN the PRESS...") but that's not sustainable for a whole line.
You guys are slidin' into The Hole*, wherein Dizzy Gillespie explains St BERNard's waltz by goin' "Da da da, Da da da, Da, da DA!" proving nothing but that St Bernard was a pretty hip dude.
It is fascinating, the extent to which our 45th president (still hard to type that) is a literary character more than a real person. That is, a snarl of discernible cause and effect and metaphor and metonymy, a composition of depths so easy to perceive that he becomes a kind of poetry, meant to be understood, to clarify the world. Most real people are ill-defined, full of contradictions and mysteries, dozens of causes crashing into each other inside a black box before they emerge as effects.
Obviously part of the reason Trump is not a black box is that the presidency puts a man (or let's hope, soon a woman) under a magnifying glass for years, not one minute out from under it. So you might feel you know Joe Biden as well as you know your own sister who moved to Utah. In fact Biden plays as unusually clear too, partly because he's less a snarl of a man; so it might be more instructive to compare Trump to Hillary, McCain, Cheney, Kerry, W, Pence, Clinton -- none of those national figures really ever threw light on the human experience like Trump does. Not even Obama, who spent so much care writing about his life, parsing his own motives; for all that, Obama remains too complicated to have a plain effect on the narrative the way Trump does. Obama remains human. Trump is literary.
The enormous problem is that Trump is a composition in a cautionary tale, or perhaps a bitter satire, that is being read by millions as a heroic epic.
As noted elsewhere ~ there really is a pony in all that horse-hockey ... !
It is remarkable that the first and only documented joke Trump has told is about a fictional cannibal from the 80's, his golden age. But the artist works with the clay at hand.
That's not a weave. It's a comb-over.
Then there's an example of one of his favorite moves: telling people what they actually believe, but are withholding:
YOU *KNOW* THAT HE WILL HAVE YOU FOR DINNER
*Ahem*
I was always taught that that was iambic pentameter: 5 iambs, each of which goes da-DA.
(That is, English iambs, not the classical ones of *4* syllables. And never mind that we count stresses, not quantities, which is irrelevant to counting the feet.)
With apologies for the pedantry, which I am not qualified to deliver, but it's fun.
Dactyls are DA-da-da: AND then the PRESS when i SAY doctor HAN-nibal LECter. It's English, so there's more than one possible stress reading, and I can see starting out thinking it's iambic ("and THEN the PRESS...") but that's not sustainable for a whole line.
And even then it's really not that dactylic. I keep hoping Trump will start doing something with meter and he always disappoints me.
"I keep hoping Trump will start doing something with meter and he always disappoints me."
This is a fascinating subtopic. When I have time after work I may write a well-considered Note about it.
That meter never stops running...
You guys are slidin' into The Hole*, wherein Dizzy Gillespie explains St BERNard's waltz by goin' "Da da da, Da da da, Da, da DA!" proving nothing but that St Bernard was a pretty hip dude.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OxfVJrTNEk
Also "He's weaving!" must presuppose he's using wool fleeced from his sheeple...
That's a truly great film, thank you for sharing
I am pleased every time I get reminded of it. And the bit with the squirrel? That actually happened a few years after the film came out...
https://blog.ucsusa.org/dlochbaum/fission-stories-133-mayflies-and-squirrels-and-rats/#:~:text=The%20reactor%20at%20the%20Wolf,in%20the%20main%20power%20transformer.
Good one!
one might almost think there is method to his madness now that he's also going on about Haitians eating pets...
of course, I'm probably projecting my own connections