Ponyo!

I've been a moderate Miyazaki fan for a few years now, and I've been waiting for the American release for months now. Rumor has it that you can see a version online, but why deprive yourself of the full cinematic experience?

2080 Words Later

Last week was a bit excrutiating writing-wise. My prose muscles seem to have gone cold during the flurry of moving and settling in. It's a bad day when it takes the better part of a day to crank out a painfully overwritten paragraph or two, and then just dump a few block quotes in just to pad the word count. Blech.

Yesterday, I did a combination of things that worked. Firstly, I downloaded Freedom to disable my network for 5-6 hours. One would think I could muster the discipline to shut off my wireless my own damn self, but, yes, I do require technology to act as a grown up in my stead. Then, after staring at the computer failed to magically produce I ideas, I started writing them out in longhand. Eureka! Productivity achieved.

Most importantly I think I've managed to break open the swamp in a way that more effectively ties it to the sea in terms of looking at Dred. I returned to the Allewaert essay and looked again at that passage on the first page.

"Whether this chain of sea-coast-islands is a step, or advance, which this part of our continent is now making on the Atlantic ocean,” Bartram muses, “we must leave to future ages to determine.” The advancing continent seems to confirm a present-day scholarly tendency to read the writings of eighteenth-century Anglo-European elites as contributing to the imperialistic project of continental expansion. But as Bartram moves deeper into his meditation, the continent begins to dissolve. He reminds the reader that the tide-lands “were formerly high swamps of and any southern planter could confirm that draining these coastal marshes would yield “strata of Cypress stumps and other trees” (78). Land becomes sea, and only fossils and fragments remain to testify to these marshes’ terrestrial past as the southern terrain that Bartram exhaustively details in more than four hundred pages moves toward annihilation. (Allewaert 340)

This anxiety over physical dissolution embodied in the swamp seems to echo a similar fear manifest in Dred that the insurrectionist threat represented in the swamp will envelope the entire country. The swamp both contains a whole history slave insurrection in the United States and indicates the maroons of the transatlantic world.

This is where I left off yesterday and where I begin today. Radio silence begins in about 30 minutes

Maritime Dreams In Poland

It's super late but I just saw this and had to post it. I'll post more tomorrow.

Two dozen homeless men are building a ship to sail themselves around the world at the St. Lazarus Social Pension here, in the yard of a former tractor factory. Sparks fly from the rusty 55-foot hull as they weld it into form, even after losing the priest who led and inspired the mission.

These men with sharply lined faces and blurry, old tattoos have set out to prove their seaworthiness, and to prove that they have some value to society, even if society has largely written them off.