READIN

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

🦋 Good timing

Check out the opening passage of Pamuk's The New Life. I am going to quote it at length a bit because it's blowing my mind:

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace...

So it was that as I read my point of view was transformed by the book, and the book was transformed by my point of view. My dazzled eyes could no longer distinguish the world that existed within the book from the book that existed within the world... I began to understand that everything the book had initially whispered to me, then pounded into me, and eventually forced on me relentlessly had always been present, there, lying deep in my soul.

This is making me think -- I had already been thinking, based on some essays in Other Colors -- that Pamuk reads books the same way I do. (Irony alert -- that is just a rephrasing of what Pamuk is saying I should say -- but I'm sticking with it.) This passage that I'm quoting is what I wanted to say before about identifying with a text. (Well I should hasten to add -- I've never experienced it quite as intensely as the narrator is doing here -- but the idea's the same.) I'm not actually sure if I'm going to keep on reading this book right now -- but it is a really nice piece of information to have on hand.

posted evening of November 15th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 A lawyer in the family

Miriam passed the bar exam!

posted morning of November 15th, 2007: Respond

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

🦋 Blogging activity

So I'm coming up on 900 posts on this blog, in the past 4½ years. (And some number of "posts" in the previous 3½, when the site was something proto-blog-like, but there is not any easy way of counting them.) Here is how the activity breaks down year by year:

        +--------------+----------+
        | year(posted) | count(*) |
        +--------------+----------+
        |         2003 |      184 |
        |         2004 |      175 |
        |         2005 |      160 |
        |         2006 |      135 |
        |         2007 |      232 |
        +--------------+----------+

(Remembering that 2003 was not a full year for the purposes of this discussion) -- it seems like this last year is about the most active since I started blogging -- this becomes particularly noticeable when you consider that I posted very little in the first few months of this year. -- Indeed October '07 has half again as much activity as the next-most-active month, which is August '07; four of the ten most-active months are in 2007. This has been the latest installment of obsessing over meaningless statistics; tune in next month for popular Google search referrals.

posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Identity and Escapism

As long as I'm tackling big ideas, something I want to throw out there is the idea that in reading novels/watching movies/listening to music I am attempting a form of escapism which is not strictly escaping from my surroundings, but rather escaping from my own head -- that by "identifying strongly with" these works of art, by pulling them into my consciousness and stamping them with my mark, I am attempting to get myself outside of my self. But I find that I can't phrase this in a way that is simultaneously coherent and not banal.

posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Hitchcock: making fun

If I had it in me (if I were better versed in film criticism, if I were a better writer), I would write an essay about how the common thread running through Hitchcock's films is one of satire. I would first spend some paragraphs or pages writing about the quality which prompts me to describe a story as "corny" and then write about how Hitchcock builds his fictional world around that quality and then spends his movies poking fun at it, and at his characters and his plots and his direction. If I were able to hold more than a couple of his films in my mind at once, I would illustrate this thesis with examples from throughout his work, say that to my way of thinking, his movies were best early on when the satire was subtle and not the main point of the movie, and fell off slightly when they became more cartoonish; would paint an arc of his career and show how the trend moved, which movies exemplified it and which were exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately (or perhaps not!), I am not that kind of a writer. Instead I will merely assert the thesis as true; and the next time I watch one of his movies try to write about it as seen from this viewpoint.

posted evening of November 14th, 2007: Respond
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Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

🦋 Hey nice!

So I go to turn on the tv this evening and see if anything's on, and AMC is playing Vertigo! Just starting. Excellent.

... Another Hitchcock film that I've seen before but long enough ago that a lot of it has passed out of my memory. It seems a whole lot like Rear Window, and not just because of Jimmy Stewart -- though his presence is a central part of both movies. I am liking it but not in the same way I love my favorite Hitchcock films.

...When all is said and done, not as good a film as Rear Window -- which in turn is not on the level of The Lifeboat and The Lady Vanishes (and well, basically every movie of his I've seen from between 1935 and 1951). And it occurs to me that what I mean when I describe a movie as "good" is the degree to which it takes possession of me, takes me outside myself -- which totally ties in with what I have been thinking about music and reading over the last few days.

posted evening of November 13th, 2007: 4 responses
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Monday, November 12th, 2007

🦋 Elling

Tonight we watched Elling, and really enjoyed it. Not too much to say about the movie I guess -- just that it is lovely and heart-warming, and that the two lead actors are hilarious.

posted evening of November 12th, 2007: Respond

🦋 Truman Sparks on the stereo

So I was listening to the new CD from Truman Sparks this morning, and trying to come up with a theory about how something had gone slightly wrong in the mixing booth -- based on how great and together the music is, but how some of the vocals sound like they were poorly overdubbed -- but before I work on that theory any more, I just want to point out that the final track, "Enter TROG", is just magnificent. Everything about it is right on. (And that is billed as a remix, so clearly the producer had something on the ball.) And, because my CD player was on repeat, the next song was track 1, and I noticed all over again what a great opening the record has, until a minute or two in when the vocal strangeness kicks in.

posted afternoon of November 12th, 2007: 4 responses
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Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Tonight we watched What Have I Done to Deserve This?, an early movie of Almodóvar's -- well, "I watched" -- Ellen begged off about halfway through, saying it was not her cup of tea. To be honest not really mine either -- there was plenty of visual beauty in the film and some fine acting, and moments of genius; but watching the movie seemed on the whole more like a chore -- something to sit through because you want to catch bits of nuance and technique in his later movies -- than a pleasure. I had a similar reaction a couple of weeks ago to Godard's Band of Outsiders, that the movie just didn't come together as a coherent work of art, that it was not well-directed.

posted evening of November 11th, 2007: Respond
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Over at Unfogged, they're talking about books people are embarrassed about not having read. For me this usually comes up (nowadays I mean -- ten years ago I was incessantly feeling embarrassed about my lack of intellectual achievement) in the context of books which I should have read in order better to understand the book that I am reading at the moment, and enjoying, and I'm feeling like the enjoyment is a false consciousness because I don't have the background necessary to actually enjoy the book.

Like last night on the way home from the Truman Sparks show, I was reading Pamuk's marvellous introduction to the Turkish edition of Tristram Shandy, and my dormant feelings of embarrassment about being unable to get through Sterne were reawoken -- I thought I had gotten over that during the group read at Is There No Sin In It?* last year. Other authors Pamuk is making me feel bad about my lack of acquaintance with: Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Victor Hugo.

But Pamuk also gives me hope that I may pick Shandy up again someday:

Behind the smoke and noise of his anger, there is the knowledge that great literature is what gives man his understanding of his place in the scheme of things, and so, reminding himself that writing is one of the deepest and most wondrously strange of human activities, he picks up the book again in a moment of solitude.

posted afternoon of November 11th, 2007: Respond
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