AlexanderTheNotSoGreat's Xanga

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:27:25 GMT

Back in Philly and already lovin it!

Also, I've decided that my Blogger blog will now become my principle blog, so update your links everyone (if you have them...) http://cavelector.blogspot.com
And remember, you don't need to be a Blogger member to leave comments on this one!

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:27:13 GMT

the Questioner
Test finished!

you chose CY - your Enneagram type is SIX.

"I am affectionate and skeptical"

Questioners are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family,friends, groups, and causes. Their personalities range broadly from reservedand timid to outspoken and confrontative.

How to Get Along with Me

Be direct and clear.
Listen to me carefully.
Don't judge me for my anxiety.
Work things through with me.
Reassure me that everything is OK between us.
Laugh and make jokes with me.
Gently push me toward new experiences.
Try not to overreact to my overreacting.

What I Like About Being a Six

being committed and faithful to family and friends
being responsible and hardworking
being compassionate toward others
having intellect and wit
being a nonconformist
confronting danger bravely
being direct and assertive

What's Hard About Being a Six

the constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind
procrastinating because of fear of failure; having little confidencein myself
fearing being abandoned or taken advantage of
exhausting myself by worrying and scanning for danger
wishing I had a rule book at work so I could do everything right
being too critical of myself when I haven't lived up to my expectations

Sixes as Children Often

are friendly, likable, and dependable, and/or sarcastic, bossy, andstubborn
are anxious and hypervigilant; anticipate danger
form a team of "us against them" with a best friend or parent
look to groups or authorities to protect them and/or question authorityand rebel
are neglected or abused, come from unpredictable or alcoholic families,and/or take on the fearfulness of an overly anxious parent

Sixes as Parents

are often loving, nurturing, and have a strong sense of duty
are sometimes reluctant to give their children independence
worry more than most that their children will get hurt
sometimes have trouble saying no and setting boundaries

Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele

The Enneagram Made Easy
Discover the 9 Types of People
HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, 161 pages

You are not completely happy with the result?!
You chose CY

Would you rather have chosen:

AY (EIGHT)

BY (FOUR)

CX (TWO)

CZ (ONE)

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 0% on ABC
You scored higher than 57% on XYZ

Link: The Quick and Painless ENNEAGRAM Test written by felk on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:00:45 GMT

Because I'm interested:

Pick the positive traits you see in me
http://kevan.org/johari?name=AlexP

And then the negative ones:
http://kevan.org/nohari?name=AlexP

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:59:27 GMT

All posts are being simultaniously posted on Blogger and on Xanga. I'll do this until my premium runs out in october. No sense in not using it. Then I'll switch to blogger for good.

* I must endure trivia night at a local bar with my brother, which wouldn't have been bad at all if he did not insist on making homophobic jokes all night.

* I argue about various things with my brother's friend including choice, death penalty, the 'war on drugs', intelligent design theory in schools, and of course Iraq. I owned his ass. I hope he knows that.

* I have to listen to my mother passive-aggressively attempting to have me read this bookshelf full of evangelical christian crap that she has installed in my former room.

* Also have to endure my mother saying "let's move the furniture around" and then proceeding to (rudely) toss away all the ideas my dad threw out. Did I just miss this dynamic for the first 20 years of my life?

* I want to be back in Phily NOW NOW NOW.

Monday, August 15, 2005

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 01:05:03 GMT

As I get ready to leave for Alabama tomorrow (staying only for a week there), I an drawn into working out my blog stuff and have discovered Blogger truly for the first time. I am serious considering dropping Xanga and switching over there. Let me know what you guys think of the current layout of my blog over there.

Advantages of Blogger:

1. WAY more customization options.
2. More connection to the blog sphere
3. Skins that are BETTER than Xanga's WITHOUT having to pay for them.
4. The ability to host trackbacks
5. Oh, and you don't have to be a member to comment on people's sites.

So...thoughts?

Monday, August 01, 2005

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 22:37:41 GMT

I was surfing across The Page last night when I came across this article in the Detroit News. Needless to say I am disturbed and rather frighetened by the realities that Foetry has exposed. I was wondering why poetry was in such a wretched state today (as I'll probably rant about at some point) and now I think I've found one of the important clues. These contests are complete malarchy, and the idea that you need to win one of these contests to bust into the poetry publishing world is very disconcerting. Turns out that many of these contests fall victim to nepotism and a sort of quid pro quo nature that really turns my stomach. It's no wonder the art has suffered as much as it has, and the only ones who seem to be published are those touting some sort of post-modern nonsensical approach (literally, it seems as though most published poets today are proud of the fact that their poetry says nothing, does nothing, and means nothing. One wonders what the hell poets like Claire Lockwood are thinking when they seemingly just throw words on a page. Perhaps shes so caught up in her message that she forgot to deliver it. Or perhaps like one of the winner listed on Foetry, Michele Glazer. The poem I linked to creates no thought other than a huge double-u-tee-eff. There seems to be an utter lack of poems that actually deliver something to the reader. (The latest issue of Agni or at least those poems available online, seems to be one of few that actually have substance).

I'm not saying that poems that I surf into, such as this one by Andrew Hudgins are bad because they 'have no message' (on the contrary, i think this poem is saying a few things about childhood understanding and possibly a little about self-censorship. the message, however, is being delivered rather well). What I am saying is that...well, the poems that I pick up from the shelves or that I read online seem more and more to be comprised of the author splattering discombobulated words on a page rather than anything with real thought. And Foetry goes to show why. Not only are poets not being judged in these contests based upon the merits of their poems, but those who control these contests are continuing their own range of thought. By purposefully awarding your students the prize, you are insuring that your 'form' are being preserved (even if its some silly post-modernist idea of throwing away ALL form. It goes to show how terrible things have become when the absence of form isn't even a form anymore). And you know how we know that these awards are truly quid pro quo? Because these contests and their judges refuse to use blind judging! All of this could be solved very simply if the authors' names were detached from their poems before true judging began. They refuse to do this. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?

So now I've discovered that the problems that face of poetry and poetic appreciation are a multitude rather than a simple puzzle. Not only do we have the general public (and by general public, I do not exactly mean the 'uneducated,' but those who do not produce or read poetry). A while ago a friend of mine claimed that a critique of a poem he wrote was that 'all poems must have rhyme and rhythm, or else they're not poems' and about a week ago another friend of mine was told that he was being 'too direct' in a line of verse and needed to 'use more metaphore.' Both incidents made me want to break something. The notion of sticking to form and fucntion and rhythm and rhyme as a rule of what makes poetry poetry (not that they are bad, they're just not required) makes me want to bang my head on the desk and wonder if people have missed the last two centuries of literature. On the other side of the coin, there are those who want to wontonly through all form and function out the window and turn poetry into some form of abstract art (read: paint splattered on canvas). Have we gone so post-modern that we reduce language to words on a page? Do we really need to throw away all traces of form? Can't we somehow endevour to create our own instead? Isn't that what the absence of form was meant to be in the first place, our own form for our own generation? All I can do is look at the poetry of today and wonder, as I have said before: 'When did the lack of form cease to be a form and become utter random "poetic" tripe?'

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:17:55 GMT

Quick things:

For some reason, I feel high as a kite today. I don't know what it is (or rather, I think I know but I'd rather not name it for fear that it'll shatter) but my mind is incredably at ease today, and it looks as though its going to stay that way for a good while now.

I'm leaving on the 15th to fly to Alabama and shall return a week later on the 22nd. Sorry to my friends and family, but I hate the place you live, and would rather have my toenails pulled out than stay there longer.

This year is going to be a blitz. Senior thesis, shoving in a comp lit minor, hopefully crafting some writing projects that I can publish. I can't believe i got so behind on that last one. I wonder what it was? I have an idea, and I think that'll be a good thing to ramble about later.

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:11:32 GMT

Sitting in the library up on the second floor Mezanine (which I have just dicovered is a rather relaxing place to work) about to finish up my Warfare paper on Roman imperial grand-strategy so that I can go out and have fun with friends tonight like I so dearly need....well, after I get done with my paper, I'm going to feel obligated to do SOME work for papyrus stuff (considering that I haven't done any this week and am therby risking the health of my pocketbook). In any case, I'll dive back into my paper now without any mindlesss ramblings or intellectual discussions for now, but rest assured that I can feel something coming within the next few days (once again, for better or worse, we shall see).

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:13:26 GMT

Arts and Letters Daily has directed me over to this UK Guardian article which I found interesting. Here is a clip, relevant to what I want to say in reguards to it:

By some perverse twist of intellectual history, the very reason we once read novels - to be liberated from solemnity and absurdity, to be engaged in a merry war with everything around us - is the very reason we won't read novels which perform such a service now. The isolation of comedy from everything else we do is symptomatic of this. We are right to shrink from the very idea of a "funny" book. There should be no such genre. We should expect laughter to be integral to the business of being serious. We are back in a new dark age of the imagination. We read to sleep. Either we refuse the idea of art altogether (something we do with every page of a Dan Brown novel we turn), or we confer integrity on it from outside, allowing it to be art only by virtue of the pre-determined importance of its subject matter, or the acceptability of its attitudes. This is a species of censorship to which we have all acceded.

Some things, we believe, should not be scrutinised or ridiculed. And day by day the list of sacred sites and objects - like one of Gargantua's spiralling menus of excess - gets longer. Soon parliament might even harden our jokelessness into law. A radical confusion between art and action is at the heart of this. What we consider unacceptable in human behaviour, we consider unacceptable in art, forgetting that art exists precisely to say the otherwise unsayable.

Here's where I think the author is kind of missing something. He seems to insist on the placing of a comic element within art, one that somehow "liberates us from solemnity and absurdity." I have never read a Dan Brown novel (I have heard from rather trusted sources that it is complete literary drivel) and while I do not knock entertainment for entertainment's sake (hell, I've spent 35 hours playing Final Fantasy VII so far, haven't I?) I actually do think that novels such as Dan Brown's are chipping away at the artistic element of writing. It's not so much that I don't think these sort of novels should exist as it is that I am appalled that they exist in such large numbers. The author is right to tear them down and question their artistic value. However, I do not think that the elements of solemnity that we see in certain novels (he gives novels on 9/11 as an example, though I actually have never seen such a novel, perhaps I just steer clear of them) of how this 'new trend' is progressing. I only disagree with him in his views insofar as he thinks that art need always be in a mocking form to be art. This is far too outlandish a distinction to make. Not only is laughter or 'funniness' completely unecessary for the existence of comedy (one can be darkly ironic and satiricle without a shred of "funniness"), but I feel that placing an emphasis on comedy is ridiculous. One can critique and challange society and it's insecurities without being 'funny' per se.

Jacobson's final conclusion is a well taken point, and I actually agree with him nearly one hundred percent (he still manages to get wrapped up slightly in this 'comic idea'); however, I feel his point could have been made a lot better by focusing on the modern day's obcession with nursing people's insecurities in art rather than calling them out (with comedy or otherwise). By focusing only on the comic aspect, he weakened his point. "Irresponsible" does not equal 'comic' as he proclaims. Irresponsibility as James seems to speak of it merely means setting yourself outside the limitations of cultural norms and prohibitions in order to challange those very things within art. This is not to say that art is meant to challange these norms! I feel that art at its core is about making people think about themselves, their souls, and the world around them. Apuleius does not write his Metamorphoses (known commonly as The Golden Ass and, argueably, the first true novel in western literature) in order to make us laugh at his ribaldry. While this might have been one of his goals, it seems to me his true goal is to answer the question 'Quis ille?' and all the implications that come along with it. And he doesn't forget the surface reason for the creation and the reading of literature, inserting into it the hidden message of his tradition: Lector intende, Laetaberis.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 05:17:28 GMT

Perhaps if I bang my head on my desk, I'll manage to regain some vestage of my sanity.

So, the sapping of my work ethic two weeks ago has involved me in a little bit of financial trouble this week, which is consequently ruining my social life for the duration. As a result, my depression is causing yet another sapping of my work week for this week, which is on the road to cause major problems for me two weeks from now.

Oh, and the more I think about it, the more this entire "free love" and "relationships are evil" mentality that some of my friends have is starting to piss me off. Sorry, guys, you're my friends and I love you, but it's probably a good time to grow up and realize that mature adults actually make monogamous commitments to each other rather than running around screwing anything that moves. Being mature and loving somebody is about commitment and understanding, not sex. Those who have disdain for commitment are probably the ones who fear it or have other insecurities surrounding it. Live your life the way you want to, but don't spit upon those of us who are actually willing to love somebody and take on all the sacrifice and commitment that goes with it.