Contrary to what Clancy just told me while
shutting my door. They are chemical wedding happy. I would like to have
a comprehensive listing of every film that’s used them or the
Gymnopedies in the background. The Royal Tenenbaums comes immediately
to mind. Here’s a partial list.
I’m reading, among other things, M. John
Harrison’sViriconium (with an
introduction by Neil Gaiman in which he mentions buying a copy of the
Codex Seraphinianus and refers to the panel I reproduced a while ago).
I’m enjoying The Puppet and the Dwarf at the moment. Žižek reminds me
much of McLuhan. Facts don’t matter for either. In the space of a few
pages, Žižek has claimed that Martin Luther King made a radical
anti-capitalist turn in the last few weeks before his death and that the
Japanese Army relied on a Zen mantra similar to “the sword that kills is
the sword that saves” to justify their actions in Korea and Manchuria.
These are not even the kinds of claims that can be checked. As with
McLuhan, Žižek just wants to make as many connective gestures as
possible. That’s what makes both, generally speaking, fun to read but
dangerous to the untutored. I’m trying to imagine if Žižek is going to
make some use of Godel’s ontological proof in this book. I hope so.
An answer to these queries came to me last summer as I stood looking
at the Roman aqueduct at Tarragona, which, after so many centuries,
still lifts its simple tawny arches against the pale-blue sky. The men
who laid these stones, I thought, and the many generations who
followed them, were in the main absorbed with gaining money, position,
and pleasure; they gave their time to politics, to ambition, to love,
and to the petty affairs of the neighborhood. All these are gone; yet
this simple useful work, so honest, so strongly built, so satisfying
to the eye, abides.
Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that,
while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was
soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt
better.” Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists—it’s good for
you!”
James Surowiecki did a similar piece in Slate a year or two ago in which
he seemed to omit all relevant details.
Readers of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory may recall
that he quotes this newspaper account of how the average subject can
help with the war effort. I wonder if our Alexander thought of it in
that fleeting moment when he thought himself in charge. I can remember
watching that unfold on my grandmother’s tv, though thankfully I was too
young to be aware of Haig.
Speaking of which, you may remember that Homer wears a “Haig in ‘88”
t-shirt in one episode. Clancy and I are working our way through season
two at present. I can’t decide if “I can picture it now [. . .] The
screen door rusting off its filthy hinges, mangy dog staggering about,
looking vainly for a place to die” or “This anonymous clan of
slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to
have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for
you” is the most amusing line of the season.
I’ve acutally always thought that Roger Ebert is a sensible critic with
good taste. I just watched Dark City, however, and I’m surprised by
the extent to which he overpraises it. To me, it seemed a dull exercise
in neo-gnosticism (pick a PKD volume at random, almost, for a more
intellectually intriguing treatment of the theme); and Kiefer
Sutherland’s performance was so annoying that I’ve begun to question my
faith in Jack Bauer’s ability to lead us through the current crisis.
Well, no. Naming his character “Schreber” is like fumbling at a girdle.
Had the Jude Law character thought that the sun was turning him into a
woman, then that would have been something less marketable to Crow’s
audience.
Clancy and I saw The Prestige in the worst theater in the world on New
Year’s Eve. I had read the considerably more interesting book (how could
you eliminate the frame story?) immediately beforehand, and I find it
curious that Michael Wood, who’s reviewed both the the
film and Against the
Day in the LRB didn’t mention
the shared fascination with Tesla and the occult properties of
electricity seen in both. (Of course, he may in fact have noticed and
didn’t see the need to include every observation in his review, which
I’m increasingly learning to be able to forgive…)
I ambled through the woods adjoining the Cypress Creekway, woods full of
tame does and pileated woodpeckers, woods crossed with impacted trails
and pocked with the aluminum remains of impromptu campfires, and saw,
near the creekbed, a red brazen jeep, its driver behatted (pileated
peckerwood?) and unwary. No one went with Fergus then, as I far as I
could see.
Am finally reading here, in the public library, Malcolm Gladwell’s
Blink. Clancy and I toured the Rosenbaum house, apparently the purest
example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian mode, here a few days ago, and I
was delighted to see Professor Rosenbaum’s copy of My Secret Life
prominently displayed in the built-in shelving. I’m not sure what Wright
was thinking with the flat roofs, exactly. Perhaps he anticipated a
return to the trees before leaking would be a serious problem. The
cantilevers are especially refreshing in a town filled with gaudy
ornamental columns. But I never finished telling you about the Blink:
why is that Gladwell’s book is here, and that works like Timothy
Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptative
Unconscious are not? Doesn’t this represent a fundamental failure in
the library selection system?
J. C. Powys appreciated Hart Crane’s “For The Marriage of Faustus and
Helen” (Hart Crane, LOA 338), and Crane was also consoled by the
vigorous style of Lewis’s Time and Western Man, a “lot better than the
usual Doug Fairbanks of controversies” (575). I could see “There is a
world dimensional/For those untwisted by the love of
things/Irreconcilable” as an epigraph for A Glastonbury Romance.
Also, well known, but worth repeating is Crane’s judgement that “Rimbaud
is the last great poet that our civilization will see” (467). That last
terrible letter, “am going back to Cleveland to help in the business
crisis, " reeks of metempsychotic anticipation: legless, enchanting a
devout younger sister with fairy tales, proprioceptive phantoms.