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Saturday, November 17th, 2007
Tonight, Sylvia started to pick up on the class thing in Harriet the Spy -- first noticing that Ole Golly is not Harriet's parent, and asking me to explain about nannies; then when Harriet was talking to their cook Sylvia said "They're rich, right?" And that came up again when one of Harriet's classmates was dropped off by a limosine. -- It seems like it's a pretty obviously major feature of the book, and kudos to Sylvia for picking up on it, but I'm wondering a little why my memory of the book would include none of this -- it's all just a fun story of Harriet running around spying on people and then having some trouble when she gets discovered. Was I dense? Hmm...
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Continuing our Almodóvar festival -- we watched The Flower of my Secret tonight. A really beautiful, sensual movie. I guess I don't think it's on the level of Volver and All About my Mother, quite, though it does anticipate both of them.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Reading this book is a puzzle -- every time I set it down & then pick it back up I am having to start from the beginning, reciting the words like poetry trying to burn them into my consciousness, "trying to find my path" into the book. -- Because I am trying to understand the transition from narrator reading, p. 1-7, to narrator with his mother on p 8 and outside on p 9 ff.
posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond
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Friday, November 16th, 2007
Tonight for bedtime stories, Sylvia and I started on Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. Looks interesting! -- I read this book, probably twice or three times, when I was 9 or 10 years old; I remember really liking it but not too much about it. For instance I had totally forgotten the class differentials in the book -- perhaps I just didn't understand them as a kid -- but already in the first few pages we are seeing what an important role class will play, as wealthy Harriet is brought out to Far Rockaway to meet her nanny's mother and she and Sport seem totally alien to the situation.
posted evening of November 16th, 2007: Respond
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Thursday, November 15th, 2007
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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Miriam passed the bar exam!
posted morning of November 15th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
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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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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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
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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