EYEWEAR'S PERSONALITY OF THE YEAR SHORTLIST

Ephemeralists will want to know who Eyewear blog felt was the "Personality of the Year". To be shortlisted HERE, the person(s) must have been a meme or near-meme, and in some other way made a huge impact on the cultural, and pop cultural, mediascape, either by achieving or enduring something, killing people, or dying.

Think thousands of tweets, jokes, comments, headlines, and even poems, generated, by these people, some fictional. So, we are mainly thinking here of actors, musicians, political figures, spies, trend-setters, and, of course, writers. Recourse was made to the BBC, to Time magazine, NME, Q, The Guardian, the FT, The Sunday Times, and various other news and culture sources online and off. Poets, by their nature under the radar, did not make it onto this list, sadly, except in the person of James Franco.

ANDY MURRAY
ALICE MUNRO

ARCTIC MONKEYS
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH
CARLOS DANGER

COREY MONTEITH
DAN BROWN

DAVID BOWIE

DONNA TARTT
DR WHO

EDWARD SNOWDEN

HAIM
HUGO CHAVEZ

IDRIS ELBA
IRON MAN

JAMES FRANCO
JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMME

JUSTIN BIEBER

KANYE WEST

KIM KARDASHIAN

LORDE

LOU REED

MALALA

MARGARET THATCHER

MARY POPPINS

MILEY CYRUS
NICOLAS BRODY

NELSON MANDELA

ONE DIRECTION
OBAMA

OSCAR PISTORIUS

PAUL WALKER
PHIL ROBERTSON

PIXIES

POPE FRANCIS

RON BURGUNDY

ROB FORD
ROBERT GALBRAITH/ JK ROWLING
ROBERT REDFORD

SANDRA BULLOCK
SHERYL SANDBERG

THE ROYAL BABY, PRINCE GEORGE

THE SYRIAN CHILD REFUGEE
TOM CLANCY
WALTER WHITE

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

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....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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