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

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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. What do I mean by smart?

"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...".

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise

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

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