Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

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...".