Now that the Guardian has listed its top 25 films in 7 categories (Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Action, Art-House, Comedy, Crime and Romance) I must observe the following - any list of the top 175 movies which does not include, in no order, Shane, The Third Man, The Silence of the Lambs, 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantasia, Rambo, The Shawshank Redemption, Lawrence of Arabia, Mr. Majestyk, Ice Station Zebra, The Poseidon Adventure, The Wrath of Khan, Pretty Woman, The Elephant Man, Out of Africa, Sophie's Choice, Schindler's List, The Sting, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Midnight Cowboy, Titanic, or An Officer and a Gentleman, can hardly be said to represent the best of genre films. On the other hand, it is good to see Mulholland Dr., Pulp Fiction, Touch of Evil, Vertigo, Peeping Tom, Days of Heaven, and a few other classics, there.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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