Quick Update and an Upcoming Feature

The week has been full of snuffling and headaches, so just a quick update and an announcement.

First, I have poem out in the current Prize Poems issue of Pegasus (the Kentucky State Poetry Society's journal).

[Here is where I would post a photo, but I forgot to take a photo before lending my copy out.]

Back when I was in high school, I joined a poets' group that met at the McCracken County Library. And the poets I met there mentored me in many ways; one of these ways including giving me their old copies of Pegasus. Seeing my name in this publication feels like watching a circle come to completion.

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Second, if I had a dollar for every time someone (usually with a look that suggested I needed to drag in a fainting couch) said, “You haven’t seen [movie title]?! But that’s a classic!” I could afford to see every new release from now till the next Haley’s Comet appearance. . .and still have money left over for popcorn.

In a (possibly misguided?) attempt to fill in some gaps in my cultural knowledge I’m starting a new, irregular blog feature called, “Bethany Watches Movies Everyone Else Has Already Seen.” Or B.W.M.E.E.H.A.S. for not-much-shorter. (Currently working on The Breakfast Club.)

The rules are simple:

1.       It has to be a movie I either have never seen before or that I’ve only seen pieces of.

2.       It doesn’t have to be old, but it has to a “classic” or a hallmark of some kind. And I mean that in the very, very loosest sense of those terms—something that people talk about and remember, something that seems to have changed film or taken a foothold in culture. For example, Inception would count, for me, even though it’s hardly an old movie, but anything currently in theaters or recently released to DVD wouldn’t.

3.       I’m not going to watch movies I know I’ll hate. For example, I don’t like horror, so I don’t really care about how “classic” the Friday the 13^th movies are. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

4.       I’m going to try to keep this short. No more than 35 sentences per post. No more than 10 screen caps or photos.

These will not be real reviews. I don’t know enough about film to pretend to be a worthwhile critic. This is just a record of my reactions. Also, I’m curious to find out if my perceptions of older movies are different from other people’s when the nostalgia factor is removed. (I’m always shocked, and slightly insulted, to find that people who haven’t grown up watching the original Star Wars movies don’t automatically love them when watching them as adults. But I think Star Wars influenced so many other films that viewing it out of film history's chronology can make it appear derivative.)

I hope I will learn some interesting things from this experiment, and I intend to have some fun with it.