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January 1, 2010    Fresh Not Clever

We finally saw (500) Days of Summer and loved it.  The hype got it right this time.  Somehow the screenwriters and I guess the actors and director got it all to work.  I want to give primary credit to the writers---and when you search imdb for the movie there is a site that gives all the good quotations from the movie---something I don't think you see that often.  Now maybe that is just another form of pre-release advertising I had not seen.  Anyway, the movie is delightful and sad, moving and sweet and hopeful.  Captures a crucial passage in every (wo)man's growing up.  Trying to be PC there with that parenthesis---even though Virginia and I have differences of opinion here on whether both boys and girls have similar phase experiences.  That discussion today did reveal a whole year in Virginia's life I had never known about---the year of dating Bruce Parker.  Came down to the fact that she had to dump him, he was in love and she was just not.  Where is he now?  I had never heard of him.  Probably her sophomore year of college, after her big love, Robert B. went off on his Mormon mission year and then, later, to become a genuine spy (now retired).  The things you don't know.  The things these harmless movies reveal.

Novel --  "Ali and Nino"

Kurban Said  --  Ali & Nino 1937 Azerbaijani writer, pen name for both Lev Nussimbaum and his Viennese friend Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels

Fascinating book.  Easy to dismiss as some readers (e.g. on Goodreads) do for being non-PC, old style, “colonialist” and exotic and all that---but Paul Theroux is right to praise it as a unique and amazing book.  Ultimately the lovers prevail, in a limited way, in the failed ways that all of us do---the survive and have a child---and then accept their less than happy fates, but in the process they have threaded their ways through an incredible mix of conflicting and competing identities, ideologies, religions, national politics and international warfare.  I see the hero as a figure of the artist who is attempting new work, a new life, free from the shackles of all the -isms that would limit his life and the life of the woman he loves.  Together they love and create a new life together.   What else can we ask for, hope for?  Along the way we “learn” a great deal about the melange of cultures out of which the Azerbaijani’s have fashioned their culture over the centures.  Theroux is right to praise the book in the terms he chooses:  “This wonderful novel---beautifully constructed, vivid and persuasive, a love story at once exotic and familiar--is living proof that art is indestructible and transcendent.”  (in the Afterword)

By the time I got closer and closer to the end of the book I admired and enjoyed it all the more.

It reminded me at the start of The Kite Runner, which I did not really like because by the end it becomes a cheerleading pamphlet for the American war in Afghanistan eight years ago.  Last year I read a Saudi novel---Wolves of the Crescent Moon---banned in Saudi ( & hence "good" to liberal editors here?).  Taking all 3 books together---not a big sample---but we can wonder about Asiatic---Caucasian---ways of storytelling and remember that they are not at all like the western novel.   Ali & Nino in other words is closer in literary features to 1001 Arabian Nights than it is to The Great Gatsby.  And yet once that point is made----then we can note, as Theroux does, that given the literary traditions of Central Asia & Persia & Turkey this book cuts it all  up and re-collages it in superb ways----modernistically we might even say---

In 2005 Daniel Lazare published an article in The Nation sort of about the book but really just using the book to opine in a typical American way about Arab-Israel/Jewish problems---our chief American fault when faced with a book as subtle as Ali & Nino and the world it portrays is that we like the world to be in clearly demarcated bi-polarities in order to make politics easily graspable and defensible. While Ali & Nino is all about wars and nationalism and relgious differences and the clash of identities, it is finally about none of these, or all of these but only as background to the highest of human emotions, thoughts and desires.

January 4, 2010

Farewell Faithful Studio

END OF AN ERA

2:45 pm  I am driving home from the studio, having put the last of things into the car.  The last visit to that studio.  According to an early painting I might have been in that building, in three different offices, since 1993 at least.

Now it feels quite good and right.   Just “made” $2760. for the year.  Nice.  Can easily set up shop here.  Sweet.  No longer have to worry about the place or getting to it, closing the windows, paying the rent or dealing with the neighbors in the building.  Of course the “psychotherapist” was there  and said, Oh, moving out.  Well did you ever come in very much anyway?  It varied.  And won’t have to deal with the landlords any more.  And won’t have to be the Barnett Newman or Jonathan Lasker or Tobias Lehner of the White Mountains.  Now I can be the Giorgio Morandi of the Baker Valley.  Of course I will miss the place.  Lots of memories and the huge windows and the big space.  But always days when I wanted to work and it was too cold even with hat on and woolen vest and summer was at least two months worthless because of the heat and humidity.  So farewell.  The King is dead, Long live the King.  A bright new age is upon us.  Dress rehearsal for retirement.  And then after that, death itself.  To wax melodramatic.

Or Beckettean.  I can see a production of "Happy Days" at Walmart.  And at the pool.  Maybe a pool in Florida.  On a sunny day like today, the snow all brilliant, the club's pool is really too splendid in its pragmatic way.

Earlier we swam.  New record for Virginia---45-50 minutes non-stop swim.  Thought we might go see Avatar but remembered that tomorrow is Pilates in early afternoon.

January 5, 2010

The Last Mistress

Une vieille maîtresse

After a 10-year affair with his Spanish mistress, Vellini (Asia Argento), the well-bred but penniless Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou) must marry wealthy aristocrat Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). But Ryno's sensual and volatile former lover will not give up so easily. Set in 19th-century France, this ravishing period piece by acclaimed French director Catherine Breillat was nominated for the Palm d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

We watched this on Sundance channel last week.  Beautiful production, great story and acting.  One of the best of recent movies we've seen.

Taken from a novel right in the period of Virginia's writer---"based on a controversial novel by French writer Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly.  Valle-Inclán admired d'Aurevilly and knew this novel.

January 7, 2010   My Avatar

Survived Avatar, 3D, iMax, seats in 4th row, 2 inches from screen.  I thought "Green Mansions" made blue--- the 1904 novel by W H Hudson that I read in high school.  Sure enough -- this line from the wiki entry on it "He finds the giant tree burned,"  . . . .  Great fun.

When I read Ron Silliman's review a few days earlier I agreed in advance with all the critiques he made of the film and now I still do.  And at the end of his piece I was really puzzled when he says after all of his critiques---"I want to see it again."

But as we left the theater Virginia said "I want to see it again" and I said, enthusiastically, "sure, let do it.  I would enjoy it again for sure."

But I want to see it in plain and ordinary 3D and not in iMax.  We got to the theater too late and missed the first moment, plus we had to sit in those seats no one wants in the first three rows.  The theater had posted the time on the internet as 3:30 and when we got there at 2:59 and were in line for tickets we heard that it was starting at 3.  IMax always "seems" like it will be super cool----we last saw a "Harry Potter" there---in hopes that this time with a "real story" the Max would be really cool and effective somehow.

Well, it is massive and marvelous but I'm still not convinced or pulled in enough.  Somehow the old Cinerama had a much larger screen---Charleton Heston and the parting of the Red Sea hasn't really been topped----and the colors and image were much sharper and more vivid.  That old timey Technicolor.  The imax image is just not as clear and sharp or powerful.  Or memorable.

The 3D this time is superb.  And there are lots and lots of great effects pulled in every few seconds.  Mostly you feel like you are in a big aquarium.  I'm calling it the Bluequarium.  The first great bluequarium epic of the 21st Century.  Whoo Hoo.

Now at last we can really enjoy the attacks the talk show idiots are making on the movie for its horrible "message."  i.e. the hippies win.  Evil lefty agenda politics.

January 12, 2010   image vs word--the disconnet

Here is a house in the areas of DC my friend lives in, same Zip code.  Looks ok, even pretty nice in certain ways.  His place has one or two shade trees in front, or so it seems when I stalked it via Google maps and street views.  I do wonder when and how Google earth takes its photos and just how much photoshopping they permit themselves to do with the images.

I asked my friend this morning how things were going on his street---how nice it looks on a sunny day on Google Earth.  Here is his reply----

"

What Google doesn't show you:  The three wrecked cars just out front of my building.  Some drug dealer came around the bend too fast on an icy night and slammed into the cars, making two undriveable.  More annoying is the Heroin dealer who lives downstairs.  Last night he was in a screaming match with someone about who-owed-who money and it lasted from 2:30 to 6 am.   I've now told him that the next time I hear a peep out of him I'm calling the cops and maybe coming after him with the two shotguns I own and keep in my closet.

These are the things google maps just can't quite register.

January 17, 2010   Breaking and Entering

BREAKING AND ENTERING

Movie last night.  2007 release date.  Juliette Binoche and Jude Law.  Written and directed by Anthony Minghella.

saw the Anthony Minghella movie last night.  Think I saw it once before---maybe in late 2007 or early 2008 but maybe I just saw parts of it on tv or something.  Really good---and yet slightly impossible at various times in terms of getting the plot and motivation to work successfully and smoothly.  Binoche and Law, well, their chemistry made the story and so when his character has his moral epiphany and decides to stay with his wife and her daughter, that's where the strain comes in too much because Liv, the partner who won't yet be the wife, played by Robin Wright Penn, just isn't as chemically wonderful as Binoche or as worthy.  And so the fault line in the movie is this invisible, but not invisible enough, sense of dark, white, bad, good, moral tangle that is not tangle enough---and yet when Scott and Liv do lie to the authorities we applaud their official deceit and private moral triumph.  Maybe this private-public split is something story-tellers like to craft---I think for now of Coetzee's "Disgrace," which I don't like nearly as much as everybody else seems to---precisely because it seems to me all the underlying moral fabulation slices apart all too neatly and primly---giving

the impression of some sort of flexible, realistic adjustment to real situations but feeling finally just too severe and unforgiving in spite of all the talk of forgiveness and redemption in the narrative texture of the telling.

Loved the scenes of London that formed the background to this movie---almost wonder if Minghella made the movie because he wanted the chance to use this massive construction project and process----the rebuilding the neighborhoods around Kings Cross and St Pancras train station.

Second to last movie that Minghella made---he died at 54, way too soon.  The movie reminded me of this music from the early 80s---I thought it was the Morality OF Architecture---but Wiki says it is just And---Architecture & Morality is the third album by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, released in 1981. It is the group's most commercially and critically successful album, selling over 3 million copies[3].  Don't know if the movie uses any pieces from this group.  Have to check.  Gabriel Yared is listed as the composer.

What a Strange Book

Fortunately, this is the response everyone seems to have to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.  Finished it a few nights ago.

Often I think it is silly or uninteresting for a book to have an Afterword in it.  But this time it was a sublime relief and pleasure to read the brilliant essay on the novel by Elendea Proffer.  If you are tempted to attempt the book, you must use this Vintage paperback edition for Proffer's ample notes and this wonderful Afterword.

You finish the book and say, WTHWT?  What the heck was that?  I did.  I understood everything I was reading---mostly---or even lots---but I was just never sure what was going on was really going on and mostly I wondered what I was meant by the Implied Author (cf Wayne Booth's whole argument about fiction) to understand about what all had been going on.  Ellendea assures us that it is the book, not me/us.  I've read lots of Modernist works, I had thought, and could handle any sort of instability, unreliability, collage and juxtaposition, fluid merging and blending --- all of it---and yet Bulgakov's novel is something else indeed.  It is far beyond being just a tour de force.  It has haunted me for a few days now, and in casting about to relate it to other works, of course Joyce comes to mind, but so also does Tarantino and Garcia Marquez.

January 21, 2010   Murakami's Playlist

"Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side--which world--contains his center of gravity."  (222)

Just re-read Haruki Murakami's small novel, After Dark.  I am convinced all over again that it is a masterpiece, a genuine pearl of a tale of what happens to us "after dark."  In the late hours between midnight and dawn, those people awake at different times experience the variety of instabilities we are all prey to throughout our lives.  "Around us, cause and effect join hands, and synthesis and division maintain their equilibrium.  Everything, finally, unfolded in a place resembling a deep, inaccessible fissure.  Such places open secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light.  None of our principles have any effect there.  No one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out."  A paragraph later the narrative asks "But is this actually true?" (215)

I said "the narrative" because Murakami tries to destabilize the narrator of the telling in various ways by having the point of view consciously become at times a camera, like a security camera in the corner of a fast food place or a quick check store.  There is a small ensemble of characters, some of whom interact, but there is no central figure.  Maybe.  And the one or two who might be central find themselves, in the middle of a cell phone chat, asking themselves "I am me and not me." (220)

The people in the story ask all big questions about meaning, or most of them, memory, reincarnation, life after death, how to heal from shock and violence, running to escape and always being followed by consequences.  In all ways this world is very similar to the spare, empty world of Beckett, for instance.  And yet all is calm and tranquil it seems.  There is a lightness to it all that seems hard to believe.  In the midst of all of this anxiety, where is the angst?  Why aren't these people more upset with their upsetting lives?  They all just keep going, the clock counts off the moments of the real time through this night, everything burns as brightly and consistently as enflamed neon does in glass tubes.

It would be as if Beckett’s vision and world has become translated into Hanging Out and Not Caring if Godot Comes of Not and meanwhile would you like another beer or coffee”?  Engame is now the video screen, Happy Days loses the ironic, sarcastic edge and has become, for these young grown-ups, Pretty Happy Days with all the usual complaints.  Life is weird, sure, and give me a call after you pick up the milk.   Instead of existential turbulence we have the delicate play of unstable point of view, a light drifting around of observation and search for meaning that seems to absorb the darkness and even the violence and open the story to promise.

Eri and Mari Asai are two sisters at the center of the story.  They were caught once in childhood on an elevator during an earthquake.  They hugged each other then and were strong together in the darkness.  But after that they lost close contact with each other.  Since then they have felt far apart.  Nothing seems able to change that.  But Mari curls up next to her sleeping sister sleep until dawn, and the story ends with a slight affirmation, a tiny opening of consciousness that does promise that “There will be time until the next darkness arrives.”

And in the background all the while we hear a terrific playlist of superb music of every variety.

January 26, 2010   Terms for Syllabistic Days/Daze

Making up first-day handouts for the start of classes next week.   Two more cheers for HigherED--

Goals, Methods & Ideas

The Educated Imagination, Conversational Reading, Socratic Dialogue, Family, Community, Tribe, Nation-State, Warfare, Peace Studies, Hermetic Alchemy, Transformative Healing, Search through the Abyss, the Second Coming, Gnosis, Therapeutic Memory, Writing on the Body, Craft, Form and Flow, Finding the Zen Zone, Canonizing the Saints, Destroying Enemies of Civilization. Terminator, Endgame, Happy Days, Killing the Buddha, Wanderlust

January 31, 2010      End of January

"Being unable to overcome death, misery, and uncertainty, men have agreed, in order to be happy, not to talk about them."  Pascal

I take this from section 4 of Bernhard's memoir Gathering Evidence.

I really wonder if the touted new psychology of happiness studies can manage to say much more than this.