I get Google ads alongside my Gmail, something that doesn't bother me in the slightest, because most of the time I barely notice them. (I can read a newspaper and miss most of the advertising.)
But I have to wonder at the the appropriateness of the some of the ads that do turn up. Alongside a poem in an email today were the ads listed below. The poem was about seeing dance in every movement of life, and it's a nice piece by Mitch Roberson called Every Day We Are Dancers. The bit about the two men carrying a huge mirror across the road is particularly neat.
So let's look at these ads, and see if Google has lost the plot or not in its ad placement.
Showing posts with label shower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shower. Show all posts
Sunday, March 09, 2014
Friday, May 25, 2012
Lists
One of the things I love about Les Murray's poems is the way he frequently creates a poem out of a list. But in his case, it's not just a list of names that might or might not have a relationship to each other, it will be a list of hugely inventive metaphors for a particular item. Shower is a prime example. He takes the idea of a shower and provides a seemingly endless array of creative approaches to thinking about the simple shower. There's a typical Murray humorous ending to this poem as well. I've known the poem Shower for some years, because it was one that I memorised. However, while reading through one of his collections I came across a poem called Broad Bean Sermon. This poem isn't quite like Shower in that it doesn't focus completely on 'explaining' the idea of a broad bean. This second poem does give a number of metaphors for broad beans, but also delights in the idea that no sooner have you picked them all than you find there are just as many still to be picked:
Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight
appear more than you missed:
It swings back and forth between the two themes. And here is just one section of his descriptions of the beans:
ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,
beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light.
The site where the poem appears online has 'freshy-sided' but in one of my books of Murray poems, it's printed as 'flesh-sided'; in another it has 'fleshy-sided'. None of these is clear as to the meaning, and which is correct? Maybe all of them; other poems by Murray have variations like this, depending on which edition of his books you're looking at.
In relation to this I want to direct you to a blog by Iain Sutherland, called The Ink Jester. Iain is a young friend of mine - he and I have known each other for years, since he was little. As a child he played the dwarf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I played Mr Beaver) back in the early 2000s, when our church presented a dramatised version of the book. Iain's been experimenting with writing on his blog, and the other day he produced a list of 152 uses for a paperclip. It's not poetry, and not intended to be, but as a list of ideas it has some delightful moments.*
Later addition: I just rediscovered a short poem that fits into this post nicely...I've been working through my list of cuttings and found one by Jonathan Potter, called You and I. In it, the writer details several things about the 'You' of the title.
*This used to be available online, but seems to have disappeared.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Reading
Having been released from reading almost solely for the Varsity course I was doing, I now seem to be soaking up books left, right and centre on all manner of topics - though strangely enough, few of them are fiction. At the moment I just can't seem to find the right novel to read, and though I've started a couple they haven't enthused me in the slightest. This is nothing against fiction; it's just my state of mind at the moment, I guess.
A friend of mine - the collaborator on the play we're doing, as it happens - was enthusing last night about a trilogy called The Salterton Trilogy. These three books were written by William Robertson Davies (he tended to drop the William when writing), a man who is credited with being one of Canada's most distinguished men of letters (a title he hated, apparently).
The three books in the trilogy are Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). They apparently have a background of amateur theatricals, (as you might gauge from this cover) which could certainly make them interesting to me.
They have very little to do with shower faucets, which is hardly surprising - though not having read the books yet, I could be wrong on this. And why did I mention that? Just to see if you were on your toes. Your comments will enlighten me as to whether this was the case or not. I'd hate to think you were skimming through this blog post just picking out the interesting bits and ignoring the rest. Though one of the books I got from the library recently - and it was an interloan too, meaning it cost me real money - was so thin in content (heaps of quotes from famous people but not much else) that I skimmed a good three-quarters of it before I came to anything that really aroused my interest. Terrible state of affairs, but such is the nature of books. And anyway, if I'm going to read at all I need to keep reading as fast as I can...being as old as I am, I may not have much reading time left....!
Saturday, November 14, 2009
If you've got talent, use it
In an interview for Success magazine, fashion designer, film-maker, actor, opera director and cabaret artist Isaac Mizrahi remarked, “My piano teacher said, ‘You have to choose what you want. You can’t continue to study the piano for eight hours a day and be an actor and design clothes.’ I listened to what he said and he made sense, but I couldn’t relate to that model. I am not a specialist.”While I make no claims to be in Mizrahi's class when it comes to talent I understand the idea of not being a specialist. I've played the piano since I was about seven and have performed on it, and accompanied singers, ever since. Yet at the same time I've always written - endlessly, as anyone in my house will attest: the place is full of old notebooks of written material. I have my first stage script still, which I typed out on the first typewriter I bought. I have several novels in various forms of draft, and a determination one day to get at least one of them published. (I even have the very first story I wrote, when I was still in primary school - it has something to do with finding whiskey under the bed, although at that time I probably had no idea what whiskey was.)
I've composed music throughout my life - but have also acted. I must admit that there was a long gap between my early acting experiences (I'm not including the time I was a little elf in a brown suit made by my mother) when I was in my teens, and my more recent ones. It's only in the last few years that I've really had the chance to get my teeth into some acting, but I've had a long relationship with the theatre.
At one time I even painted pictures, hardly any of which survive. This was perhaps my least successful talent, but that may be because I've spent less time on it than on any other of the art forms. So a specialist I'm not. I can't imagine the dedication required to spend eight hours a day practicing the piano but that doesn't mean I don't use the talent I have. I just spread the eight hours around...
Apropos of none of the above, an Anglican chaplain whose tweets I keep up with put a link on Twitter to the Twitter episode of 2 Hot Girls in a Shower. You probably have to be in the mood to watch these videos, none of which are more than a minute and a half long, and none of which (at least amongst those I've seen) are as salacious as the series title might suggest. They consist of a blonde girl and an Asian girl standing side by side in a booth which, as they explain in one episode, is only a movie set with a sound effect of a shower in the background and a bit of misting on the camera. We see nothing untoward.
But what we do see are a couple of talented actresses (Kim Evey and Julie Wittner) 'explaining' all manner of things; the blonde girl plays the slightly dizzy blonde and the Asian the seemingly sharper character. Their explanations, of everything from Sudoku to Father's Day to where to go on a first date, are off in the left field somewhere, and I found them quite mad.
[PS: Occasional moments in the videos are borderline.]
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