as beautiful as they can possibly be (Friday's Sunday's Poem/Hot Actress 72)

Restaurant
by Harold Pinter


No, you're wrong.

Everyone is as beautiful
as they can possibly be

Particularly at lunch
in a laughing restaurant

Everyone is as beautiful
as they can possibly be

And they are moved
by their own beauty

And they shed tears for it
in the back of the taxi home
________________________________________________________________

About the poem: Harold Pinter won a Nobel Prize for literature, for his plays, not his poems. The reason the Nobel people gave was that Pinter "in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

I don't know about all that. I do know that I read through five of Pinter's poems this morning because I found out he wrote a poem about American Football -- remember, I was looking for one last week -- but then I didn't like that poem. (You can read it here, if you'd like.) It wasn't just that it was full of swearing; I didn't mind that. It's that it seemed unusually lowbrow and overtly graphic, as though it was intended to challenge through it's vulgarity, but intended to challenge and nothing more -- making it the Nobel-laureate-poetry equivalent of a bad South Park episode.

This poem was the only one of Pinter's that I found that I liked, which just goes to show that being a Nobel laureate maybe doesn't mean all that much.

About the ... hot?... actress: I asked Sweetie who I should name, and she said "Katie Holmes." We then had this conversation:

Me: Really?

Sweetie: I'm not sure she's 30.

Me: I'm not sure she's hot.

Sweetie then suggested Mila Kunis, who is hot but isn't 30, so I went with Katie Holmes, but I don't feel good about it. I also found Katie Holmes' IMDB biography, which begins as follows:

Born two months premature at four pounds, Kate Noelle Holmes made her first appearance on December 18, 1978, in Toledo, Ohio. Her parents, Martin and Kathleen, say that her strong-willed personality is probably from being born premature...

To be cloying and sophomoric. Get it? Her "first appearance" was when she was born! Cute!

So I'm not very pleased with any of these choices today. Although I guess the poem does sort of relate to my feelings about Katie Holmes, making it symbolic or something. Then again, symbolism doesn't really mean anything, either, so I'm back to where I started. Going to be a great day, I see.