Last weekend, I went to see “Inside Out 2”, which was lovely even though I was most definitely one of the older patrons in the theater who didn’t bring children. But it definitely worked in my favor, of course–no need to share popcorn and soda or leave during the film to take a kid to the bathroom, like I used to do with my younger cousins whenever we went to go see blockbuster films during school breaks. I bet you readers have already sussed out that I was the ‘responsible’ kid my entire life.
The first film came out in the summer of 2015, when I was getting ready to go to high school to face all the trials and tribulations of making new friends, doing well in my new classes, and learning how to use a locker for the first time (it took me a couple YouTube videos to get it right, lol). Movies like ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Inside Out 2’ are great films for folks of all ages, but especially kids going through transitions like going to a new school, moving away to a new state, or even just the universal embarrassment of puberty. The literary term for these kinds of stories is called bildungsroman, which is another one of those nifty German words that means “a novel that follows the development of the hero or heroine from childhood or adolescence into adulthood.” (quoted from the Oxford Dictionary).
Some classic bildungsroman stories include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (the latter was a book I had to read three times in my academic career, and I loathed it every time–a topic for another column).
Readers: what are some of your favorite bildungsroman stories? It doesn’t have to be a book–I happen to be the only bookworm in my family, but my mom, my brother and I love chatting about TV shows and movies we like. ‘Naruto’ is a good example of a bildungsroman in anime and manga–where readers follow Naruto Uzumaki in his quest to become the village Hokage, despite being seen as a bit of an outcast. Shows like ‘Gilmore Girls’ and ‘Boy Meets World’ are also great examples from television.
Poem of the day, from the Poetry Foundation Blonde Bombshell By Lynn Emanuel Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage, the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic, retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it needs to be swept away. So, night after night, we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers with their shanks tied up in the tourniquets of rolled stockings and open ourselves, like earth to rain, to the blue fire of the movie screen where love surrenders suddenly to gangsters and their cuties. There in the narrow, mote-filled finger of light, is a blonde, so blonde, so blinding, she is a blizzard, a huge spook, and lights up like the sun the audience in its galoshes. She bulges like a deuce coupe.
When we see her we say good-bye to Kansas.
She is everything spare, cool, and clean, like a gas station on a dark night and the cold dependable light of rage coming in on schedule like a bus Lynn Emanuel is an American poet and educator. She earned a BA from Bennington College; an MA from City College of New York, where she studied with Adrienne Rich; and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Emanuel is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected (2015) and Noose and Hook (2010). She describes her collections Then, Suddenly— (1999), The Dig (1992), and Hotel Fiesta (1984) as a triptych exploring the convention and flexibility of the book and the agency of readers and writers.
Poem of the day, from Poetry Daily Discomposed By Stuart Greenhouse
What do we call those limpid flowzy flowers that look like someone took notebook paper worn soft from pen-pressure— writing and crossing out, writing and crossing out—weeks of heartneed drafting— then, seeing their words also had changed, in the way weather does staying weather, continuously forward, away from itself, in an electric-storm frenzy shredded it, abandoned it scattered around the bare unrealized trunk of whatever idea had birthed it like drought-shocked, not autumn- full, leaves before, like words come back to a voice after crying, returning to gather the scraps in a pile, and with their last ink dyeing them a gentle wash of pale blue and gluing them—absentmindedly now—not inattentive, absentminded the other way, absentminded past habit, absentminded near to the point that someone watching, if anyone were, couldn’t say for sure it was a person there doing it and not their body hove free of the held breath one’s name is— absentminded past the point where concentration could matter any more than the pull and swell of tide could to a bird’s altitude— into a moment vacant and wide as an insomniac’s dawn, the closest thing this world has seen to a halo? Stuart Greenhouse lives in New Jersey with his family, writing about astronomy, memory and the distances inherent in chronic illness. The author of two chapbooks, What Remains (PSA, 2005) and All Architecture (End & Shelf Press, 2008), poems have most recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Boulevard, and Massachusetts Review.
Album of the Day
Brat by Charli XCX Released June 7, 2024 Tracklist
• 360
• Club Classics
• Sympathy is a Knife
• I might say something stupid
• Talk Talk
• Von dutch
• Everything is romantic
• Rewind
• So I
• Girl, so confusing
• Apple
• B2b
• Mean girls
• I think about it all the time
• 365 Charli XCX is an international pop sensation from Cambridge, UK. Andrea Gutierrez is the editor of the Bryan County News, who may or may not have questionable music tastes.