Complementarity Pt. 12

It occurred to me that large portions of this work almost solely as a part of the whole, which is why it's sort of odd that I'm posting it in pieces like this. Anyway, the penultimate piece of Complementarity:

Farther away I begin to run from you!

Farther stretching myself into my work

Playing more as I am limbered

I am unfit for such a game

I do not compete

I do not measure myself against any man

I am the perfect thing

I am the proof that the next thing will be greater

If I am the meter

Then he who outstrips me proves me great

He who measures his lyric against mine renews my growth

I stretch and extend myself eternally

All poetry then‽

Walt Whitman, a kosmos!

 Leonnie Dickens, a nebulous singularity then!

The moon then! and the sun, its self-obviating spheroid!

This is the game of it

To make of oneself a dense and spinning thing

An expanding, energy creating, self-sustained system

A ball of matter, a ball of life, the water of the heavens

A wave of a man

A particle of woman

A whole human of starry effluvia

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son! 

 -Rudyard Kipling

a name change

So I have decided to change the name of the blog to, wait for it... Of Myself and the Universe. This is an advance warning so that people don't look at their Google Reader and get confused. The change will be official as of next Tuesday. that is all.

Complementarity Pt. 11

I shall explain myself in brief
I shall give you the key to unlock yourself
If you will hear it
I am a poet
   I transcend myself
If I am wholesome, can I decline to write of vileness
With as much warmth, and more volume?
Can I speak of the known more than the unknown?
Can I choose half the universe as good?
And not surveil the remainder?

But none are evil among the grand unity of the kosmos!
The singularity good, and the swaddling star good
The lightning is good, and the thunder is good
And neither is less than its other
The sequence good, and the chaos is good
The logic good, and the passion good
These are for me to know nascently
These are for me to find out anew
These are the form and bones of poetry
That nothing is irreconciled to any other

I am no less the singer of epodes
Than the odes themselves
I am Homeric, Byronic, Epic
I desire poems, I desire prose
I desire the cause of languages
As though I need to speak anymore!

Complementarity Pt. 10

O! of odors! O! of perfumes!

The musky yellow of houses at dawn is mine
The creeping synesthesia that accompanies a living
I love too the vacuity of the fresh atmospheric scent after lightning

the emptiness which is a purity
the purity which fills the sky with virtue
I am excessively pleased with these

Even my own smell after I sweat

I feel it and am not reviled by it

For it is mine

As much as language in my mouth is mine

As much as water is mine

I, the child of futures

The father of pasts

The circuitous nephew of presence

I stretch myself against the day and measure

My voice against its voice

Being both taller and shorter

I will survive it

It does not fit me like a suit that is not mine

I shall not be a guest of death today

I shall be a companion of the dying, and the forever-living, they are the same

Well Written books, with Pictures!

I recently stated that some of the best writing I have ever read was in comic books. I keep having to make the point that I am an English major (and a pretty good one, if my work so far is any indication), and here it should serve to reinforce the point that I know what good writing looks like. So as I go through my list of books on ComicRack (my digital reader of choice), I've decided to make a short list of some of the best writing I've ever read, comic-wise, in no particular order, (this is not a list of my favorite comics, but a list of the ones I think are the best written):

Cover of Watchmen

• Watchmen, Alan Moore: I'll go ahead and explain the convention here of only naming the writer of the book, since I'm not making a list of most brilliant artwork in a book (though Dave Gibbons is no slouch here). Anyway, I am obviously not the first person to say Watchmen is awesome, and I won't be the last. This is largely thanks to an abundance of absolutely awesome writing, with Moore showing off his versatility by bringing together a world of vastly different characters, as well as an astonishing amount of background info about the world they live in. I never got to read it in its initial serial form, as I was two when it was finished, but it was one of the first graphic novels I added to my bookshelf, and I read the Dr. Manhattan parts repeatedly when I first got it, because it was so poetic. Every now and then I still reread it, and I never get tired. Everyone should read this book, partially because it is basically a genre-defining work, but mostly because it, like Shakespeare, or a Taco Bell Chalupa, is exactly as good as advertised
  
  
  
  
  Cover of Old Man's Cave (Bone, Book 6)
• Bone, Jeff Smith: This is here for very different reasons, because there aren't as many singularly eloquent speeches here, but there is a clear sense that Smith knows exactly what he wants to do with this story, which counts for a lot. In the technical sense, the tone of the story is perfect, and it stays that way throughout. If I were to pick a favorite part, it would have to be Book 6: Old Man's Cave, largely because I looked for it in stores and online for well over three years, and could not find it until 2007, (that volume was released in 1999), when I bought the whole thing in one volume. It was totally worth it. 

Image via Wikipedia

• Planetary, Warren Ellis: Because Warren Ellis is clearly a serial genius and John Cassaday is his shape-shifting accomplice, Planetary is awesome. The story of Planetary is not entirely new, as the whole series is an homage to hero stories of the past, but a story doesn't have to be new to be great, and Ellis' strength in my opinion, is his unbelievably clever sci-fi writing, which seems to be more along the lines of Asimov, than DC. Of particular note for me are issues #12 and 26, when awesomeness is afoot.
Image via Wikipedia
• The Sandman, Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman = win. I don't know how to properly explain how good these books are, they are not only filled with haunting images(in a good way), but also some of the most intellectually challenging writing I have ever seen. Plus, there is an amazing amount of just plain beautiful verbiage, in every issue. For a best of the best, I'd go with Brief Lives, in which "we all know everything, we just pretend to ourselves that we don't to make our lives bearable"

Cover of The Ultimates Vol. 1: Super-Human
• Ultimates, Mark Millar: Up until this point, Marvel has been taking a serious beating on this list, since 3 of the previous entries are DC properties. However, I will go on record as saying that for the main brand, Marvel has much stronger writing. The Ultimates are a great example of this, with the ability to take these heroes(they're the Avengers, in case you didn't know) and make them real, socially relevant people. I cannot find the exact number of the issue I wanted to highlight, as blogger appears to make my computer really slow, but there is an issue in which Nick Fury is the focus, which I think is emblematic of the series: very strong characterization, and plot twists.