Dear Edgar Allen Poe (or sharing my insaneness)

Dear Edgar Allen,

I hope it's okay for you, if I just call you Edgar Allen (I thought about Eddie or E.A. as well, but that was a bit too informal). I mean you are human, and not Mr.Poe (sorry, but it does sound like the hustband of the red teletubbie).

I always wanted to tell you that your style of writing poems is one of the most genuine in that special kinda business, you know? I hope you do know.

In the last few (very idle) days I read and re-read a lot of your poems in English as well as the German translation. Did you know that they translated your poems in a weird way? In a weird not very idiomatic way? No, I don't think you knew. But well, let me tell you more about that certain fact.

Take the poem you've written for Marie Louise (Shew), the person who has the same name like me. But why is her last name always put in brackets? You probably liked that - putting last names into brackets. Edgar Allen (Poe) - how about that?

I read that she was your neighbour. My neighbour's names are not imprisoned in brackets. But they never did anything normal neighbours do - like lending you some sugar or mowing the lawn when you are on holidays (but they do water our flowers from time to time, because our neighbours are nice indeed - just so you don't get any silly ideas).

Well, let's come back to the topic of poetry translations. Take the first three stanzas e.g. In German the "Macht der Sprache" appears in the second stanza, while you can find the English "the power of words" in the third stanza. I know! Unbelievable!

Anyways, here are my thoughts on your lovely (kinda) to-me-addressed poem:

To Marie Louise (Shrew) <-- Brackets...lovely

Not long ago, the writer of these lines, <-- you

In the mad pride of intellectuality,

Maintained "the power of words" - denied that ever

A thought arose within the human brain <-- Yours?

Beyond the utterance of the human tongue: <-- Your tongue?

And now, as if in mockery of that boast,

Two words - two foreign soft dissyllables -

Italian tones, made only to be murmured - <-- Hang on a minute! Which are the two words?

By angels dreaming in the moonlit "dew

That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,"

Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,

Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,

Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions

Than even the seraph harper, Israfel, <-- Must've been a typo... don't ya mean Israel?

(Who has "the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,") <-- brackets <3

Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.
<-- what?

The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand. <-- C'mon! Tell me! What happened?

With thy dear name as text, though hidden by thee,

I cannot write - I cannot speak or think - <--- Wwwwhy?

Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling, <---Who's Alas? *types it into translator* sure, nevermind.

This standing motionless upon the golden

Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams, <-- Nice formulation!

Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista, <--You have vista? Get Windows7, 's way better.

And thrilling as I see, upon the right,

Upon the left, and all the way along, <-- Everywhere?

Amid empurpled vapors, far away

To where the prospect terminates - _thee only_! <-- Really? I'm normally not on your vista, am I? Or are you stalking me?

~ italic words by Adgar Allen (Poe) himself~

In the end I gotta tell you that this is not the best piece you've written, but because you addressed it to me I think I could probably forgive you.

And actually it implies an 'emptiness' to which I'm not able to relate something to(especially to me - as it is written for me) somehow. You've written 27 stanzas and what did you say? Nothing... well, let's say not much. You might as well say now that a great writer has to be able to entertain people with nothing written down in 27 stanzas. And I agree, I can also write tons of pages descirbing not more than a room, but is that really the quintessence, the main issue, the meat and potatoes of writing something?

But that shall be enough for today. I promise, I'll stop passing my criticism on your great work from now on. Of course I do hope you'll accept it, as all great writers tend to accept criticism easily (if not, they cannot be called great writers).

I wonder what that other Marie thought about your poem - I think she loved it. Dunno why, but she sounds like someone who'd love such a poem. And we gotta talk about that stalking thing and me on your vista once more, eh?

I'm looking forward to hearing from you,

Love,

Marie (No, I'm not putting my last name into a bracket)

-----

And yeah, since noone's blogging or commenting or doing whatsoever, I now write blog-entries to dead people such as Eddie. : )

Ramblings, Scramblings And An Unsolved Motivational Creative Lull

Well yeah, nowadays (since two days to tell the truth) I have time - a lot of time. I just can't deal with those christmas bank holidays somehow, just need to get used to it again.

Anyways, this was my to-do-list for the last two days:
-write another chapter of a book I'm currently writing (I wrote the heading)
-redo my door-artworks (I have some ideas in my mind)
-draw a picture for a friend of mine (started drawing; sheet landed in my waste paper basket)

What I did:
-spent half of the day at my PC
-collected various pictures I'll use later
-talked to people I haven't talked to for a while
-searched for books I'll need for a presentation and for my book
-convinced my mum to go shopping with me (yay, new dress/jacket) and my parents to let me go to Kassel in February
-read 20 pages of book (it doesn't deserve a 'the' in front of the title - it's the horrible one starting with a t)
-longed for Istanbul
-listened to music I actually dislike (hint: Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy,etc.)
-updated my dusty blog again

Looks actually not THAT bad, but if you consider that I just did stuff I actually didn't plan to do...

How are things going anyways? Is anybody still blogging?

Inglorious Basterds - A Review

(Wow, I'm actually a bit proud of this title, go me! - oh and it's basically bout me spoiling the film for everyone else)



When my friend asked me if I wanna see that film I agreed immediately. Not because I liked the plot (I didn't even know anything about it - except for Brad Pitt and Til Schweiger playing a role in it and I can't say I'd be a particular fan of anyone of them). I just generally like to go to the cinema, so I thought yeah why not. After all the stuff I've heard about it, I expected a brutal-war-something film with not much of a story-line and plain violence.


And it turned out to be completely different from what I expected!

The actual plot looks like this to me:

Anti-Nazi-American group tries to kill Nazis -> Jewish women gets nearly killed by Landa (funniest Nazi ever) -> Few year later Jewish Women owns a cinema -> Goebbles and some other Nazi-Hero guy want to show the premiere of the film they made about the Nazi-hero one in the cinema -> women wants to kill them -> The 'Basterds' have the same idea as well -> in the end all the Nazis - including Hitler - are dead and the jewish women as well



The funny thing about the film is the way all people behave like. Some of those characters were plainly awesomely displayed.

For example, Aldo Raine (played by Brad Pitt) is not more than a constantly swearing, but somehow also quite clever leader of this group.

The best thing he said was in my opinion (can't translate it properly, because I've seen the syncro-version of course):



A.R.: "Why did she choose a basement for this? We can't fight in basements!"

Some other guy: "We don't have to fight here, we're just here to talk. And she probably just wanted a place without Nazi distractions."

A.R.: (ignoring what the other one just said) "But their are too many reasons, why we can't fight in basements. First of all: You can't fight in a basement."

I know, standard joke, but the way he said it was truely funny ;)



Then there was my absolutely fave character in this whole thing. Hans Landa played by Christoph Waltz who clearly surprised me with his acting skills. He was a colonel (also called the Bear Jew or somethin) who actually wasn't that deeply into all this Nazi-Propaganda and everything, he basically did his job. We decided he was a bit of a psycho because of his genuine laughs and weirdish jokes. In the end he said he'd give up if he was mentioned in all the history books as the person who made the war end and as someone who was a Basterd and a member of the Operation Cinema all the time.

I can't pick a single favourite quote, but the one I laughed the most, was this one:

H.L.: (very satisfied) "Ohhhh that's a bingooo!"

A.R. and another one stare at him weirdly.

H.L.: "Is that the way you say it: That's a bingo?"

A.R.: "You just say "bingo"."

H.L.: "Ahhhhh Bingo!!! What fun!!"






And - always the most important person in a Nazi-film - the Hilter actor. I'm normally used to the german 'Hitler' called Bruno Gans. He's the best for this role and noone could ever beat him.

Even if he's not playing Hitler you think of Hitler. And in this film Hitler was played by Martin Wuttke (someone I've never heard of before, but I just found out that he Goebbles in another film). He was quite okay. But the film didn't even need a proper Hitler, because the Hitler I.B. had some humour as well - at least it seemed so.

Hitler recieves a phone call.
The phoning person: "Do you still want to talk to "private Butz", mein Führer?"

Hitler: "Who or what is a private Butz?"


And for finishing this here I've got two pictures and a video (am I brilliant or what?).


First of all, The Hitler comparison:


1. Bruno Gans as Hitler in "Der Untergang"
















vs.


2. Martin Wuttke as Hitler in "Inglorious Basterds"












Second of all: Funny-Bingo-scene-video-thing!!!




I hope you liked it (or at least read it). Thanks anyways! =D

Long Time, No Post

... Yes I know.
I never completely forgot about this, but I didn't know what to write or I just couldn't be arsed to write anything. I didn't even want to write about my Istanbul Trip, the Chinese Food Review (but I'll write that this week I guess) or my holiday-madness-my-life-changed-I'm-unhappy-experiences which are quite difficult to explain and that again is just another try to defend myself. ; )

And the other point is that school started again last week. This year is the year before my final year (in Germany called Oberstufe) and it is quite important for my graduation and my final exams. Due to this I gotta be prepared for every single lesson and study a lot, etc. etc. (insert a rolleyes-smiley here). But actually it turned out to be a bit more relaxing than it was in the years before, because we were all used to having a lot of lessons (mostly 'unneccessary' ones in which you can't keep your eyes of your watch). And now all of those are gone, because we were able to choose between some of them last year which is quite an improvement.

Enough talk about school, let's have some more interesting topic: MUSIC! Last Sunday I ordered 6 new records from Play.com. I hope some of them will be delivered tomorrow. Here's a list of the albums:

Towers of London - Blood, Sweat and Towers (pretty crappy british wannabe-punk band, but they are funny as hell in my opinion)

Kanye West - Graduation (I wanna put it in the CD Player and force it to interupt me)

Muse - Black Holes And Revelations (I just felt like buying it and it wasn't expensive at all)

David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars (*many bowing emotes* I absolutely LOVE that album! It's amazing!!! But I weren't able to find it in any record store... but soooooon, I'll have it)

And, last but not least:

The Libertines - The Libertines
and
The Libertines - Up The Bracket
(I really need to support the artists.... Libertines Reunion! Now!!!... which makes me wanna think about telling you my Peter Doherty dream I had this week. And no, it's not a fangirl one :P... because I'm not that much of a fangirl)

So long, and thanks for all the fish! :D

Pizarro - Ohoh!!!

He's back! He's finally back! (I don't think anyone of those who might read this may be interested, but I just gotta share my happness about that)

And he signed a contract valid until 2012!

And for those who don't know who

he actually is: Claudio Pizarro (called 'Pizza') is a Peruvian
striker who played for Chelsea. Last year he was loaned to
Werder Bremen and played there, Werder also won the DFB Cup with him. He has been playing for
Werder earlier as well (in 01/02 I think) and he also played for Bayern München and today he signed the new contract with Werder. I hope he and Werder will have an awesome season!

Caesar Ora Una Classis Romana

That was one of the phrases our Latin teacher used to make us all laugh.

And today I read in a newspaper article that he died during the holidays.
I was really shocked and I still am.
He was a great teacher and a wonderful person.

It was also written in that article that he made a guided tour in the Carpathian Mountains with his younger brother and another group. I know that he liked such adventure tours (he accompanied friends of mine when they were in the Czech Republic with school). Apparently he slipped and fell, although it was a safe pass they were walking on.
It's really sad and I still can't believe this. He was a successful teacher who was just way too young to die (he was only 47 years old).

And concerning it was planned that he would teach some people of my class, including me, for the next two years, it moves me even more, because I was really really looking forward to his classes.

On the other hand I'm happy that I got the possibility to get to know him better and to be a student of his. I gotta admit that I was not always looking forward to his latin classes, but in the end I can say that I learned a lot, laughed a lot and I'll always remember him as the well-balanced, trustworthy, constantly smiling, likeable, intellectual and friendly person he was.

May he rest in peace! I'm sure we'll never forget him.
"Ganz genau!" to say it in his words.

Typical Holiday Boredom

The circumstance that is always haunting me during the holidays struck again - the holiday boredom (well, it's not really boredom, it's more the fact that you've got nothing to do and instead of doing something senseful you just do what's in your mind).

For example, yesterday: Normally I'm happy when I've got some spare time I can write stories in. In the holidays I've got the time to do that, but most of the time no ideas enter my head. And then, instead of writing, I paint stupid pictures or make collages. Well, that's fun as well, but in the end of the holidays I think: "You had so much time left, and instead of writing you did a lot of other stuff. That's how you lose your precious time."

And the other problem is that I can't even change that. Whenever I try to write it's like torture for me, because doing something else would be more fun atm.

Oh Gosh, even my problems get more senseless in the holidays >.<

However, I'm looking forward to Saturday/Sunday. A friend will visit me on Sunday and my family on Saturday. In that time I normally know what to do and what not. Then my weekend won't look as absurd as the rest of my week did!