{"id":15908,"date":"2025-09-15T08:30:25","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=15908"},"modified":"2025-09-15T08:30:25","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T06:30:25","slug":"poems-by-brian-harman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=15908","title":{"rendered":"poems by Brian Harman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back in Plato\u2019s Cave After Reading Dorothy Parker\u2019s <\/strong>Philosophy <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By daylight, her shadows, by dark, I am a prisoner to memorization.<\/p>\n

Did she? Did she not consecrate? I seriously doubt or maybe it’s true;<\/p>\n

she\u2019s from New Jersey, she blazoned cigarettes, she marked up paper<\/p>\n

with do\u2019s and don’ts, took her glasses off, so many valorous questions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Life as Film<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Noir: you’re saying everything\u2019s swell <\/em>all day.<\/p>\n

Mystery: the onion is peeled and there’s a note.<\/p>\n

Action: your blood pumps and you\u2019re a hero.<\/p>\n

Comedy: your whoopee cushion is in the coffin.<\/p>\n

Adventure: the house cat got out of the house again.<\/p>\n

Foreign: you want chocolate, a baguette, a cigarette.<\/p>\n

Indie: you could have told them that grass itches.<\/p>\n

Drama: you say out loud what you are really thinking.<\/p>\n

Sci-fi: self-driving cars crash.<\/p>\n

Horror: hair in the drain is frightening.<\/p>\n

Sports: you pull a muscle in your dreams.<\/p>\n

B-movie: eating chips on the couch is a great weekend.<\/p>\n

Documentary: you love artists, you hate corporations.<\/p>\n

Fantasy: you do not want to live in the real world.<\/p>\n

Criterion: your eyes are witness to someone eating nails.<\/p>\n

Thriller: your mind lingers like a night train.<\/p>\n

Romance: love is unbelievable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the Movies with Slavoj <\/strong>\u017d<\/strong>i\u017eek<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014after A Pervert\u2019s Guide to Ideology<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Slavoj: When you take the symbolic meanings of movies,<\/p>\n

like for example,<\/p>\n

in the movie Falling Down<\/em> with Michael Douglas,<\/p>\n

the famous scene,<\/p>\n

Michael Douglas walks into a fast food place called<\/p>\n

Whammy Burger,<\/p>\n

where he wants to order breakfast, but gets denied by<\/p>\n

the young, female cashier<\/p>\n

Sheila and manager Rick, it is really only<\/p>\n

a couple of minutes past<\/p>\n

11:30am, but Whammy Burger has just stopped serving<\/p>\n

the Wham and Cheese Whamlette,<\/p>\n

and so forth, it is this idea of rejection, and it is this idea<\/p>\n

of consumer mentality, take for<\/p>\n

example, also in the classic film, Silence of the Lambs<\/em>,<\/p>\n

Sir Anthony Hopkins<\/p>\n

plays the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter, he has<\/p>\n

a similar appetite while being<\/p>\n

behind the prison glass, the customer not getting what he<\/p>\n

wants, it is a clear, translucent view<\/p>\n

of the failure of capitalism, when Anthony Hopkins does<\/p>\n

that perverted<\/p>\n

fluttering lip sound to Jodi Foster, it\u2019s a fundamental sound;<\/p>\n

to put it in sociological terms,<\/p>\n

the multiple multiplicities of the people of the United States<\/p>\n

and other capitalist countries,<\/p>\n

of course this is not a turn-on to Jodi Foster, but she is forced<\/p>\n

to try to understand<\/p>\n

the fascination, delusion, suppression, the trifecta that is<\/p>\n

the feeling of everyday,<\/p>\n

of everyday people, and it is why Michael Douglas goes<\/p>\n

fanatic and finally<\/p>\n

takes out the semi-automatic weapon from his duffle bag,<\/p>\n

and effectively points out<\/p>\n

the ideology of fast food corporate America, how the actual<\/p>\n

hamburger that<\/p>\n

he finally gets served does not look like the picture<\/p>\n

of the hamburger<\/p>\n

that is advertised on the overhead menu, let us also take<\/p>\n

the movie Adaptation<\/em>,<\/p>\n

with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, this is pure symbolic<\/p>\n

capitalism at face value,<\/p>\n

the writer\u2019s block, the chase for ghost orchids, the scene<\/p>\n

where Meryl Streep is lying in bed<\/p>\n

talking on the phone to Chris Cooper, she says she doesn\u2019t<\/p>\n

feel anything anymore,<\/p>\n

she is living life, not in a state of homeostasis, but a stasis<\/p>\n

of numbness, so she decides<\/p>\n

to take obscure drugs that Chris Cooper had given to her,<\/p>\n

and all of a sudden,<\/p>\n

Meryl Streep becomes fascinated with her toes, and then<\/p>\n

she brushes her teeth<\/p>\n

and she can hear and feel every brushstroke, she has found<\/p>\n

a quick way to happiness,<\/p>\n

this is once again a reflection upon the delusory pursuit<\/p>\n

of the American Dream<\/p>\n

or whatever you want to call it, the dangled carrot,<\/p>\n

the grass is greener,<\/p>\n

this is not the kind of thing you will find in Marxism,<\/p>\n

the perfect political persuasion<\/p>\n

to Stalinism, no, in the consumer capitalist perverted mind,<\/p>\n

the grass is<\/p>\n

always greener, it is always pain for pleasure, as we see<\/p>\n

in the movie Dodgeball<\/em><\/p>\n

with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn, to learn this, they<\/p>\n

throw wrenches<\/p>\n

at dodgeball victims as a form of practice, what is this,<\/p>\n

they say<\/p>\n

\u201cif you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Me: Slavoj, would you like some Raisinettes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in Plato\u2019s Cave After Reading Dorothy Parker\u2019s Philosophy   By daylight, her shadows, by dark, I am a prisoner to memorization. Did she? Did she not consecrate? I seriously doubt or maybe it’s true; she\u2019s from New Jersey, she blazoned cigarettes, she marked up paper with do\u2019s and don’ts, took her glasses off, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1800,77],"tags":[1813,1801,1123],"class_list":["post-15908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-86","category-english","tag-brian-harman","tag-egophobia-86","tag-english"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-48A","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15908"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15909,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15908\/revisions\/15909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}