Of a Circle

Sometimes the pudding is much better than the supposed proof. This is the case with Ang Lee's Life of Pi, based on a book which Barack Obama called "an elegant proof of God." It's really not proof of God's existence--in fact, it's actually much easier to use the story the film presents to disprove God's existence. But it is elegant, in fact beautiful, a breathtaking poetic construction of insight, which is far better than proving anything. As Oscar Wilde said, "No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved."

The first portion of the movie is about young Pi's life growing up in India, where his father runs a zoo. Pi is abnormally drawn to all the religions that have places in his home town--Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. His father encourages him to study the principles of secular reasoning instead of flitting from one complex spiritual impression of the universe to another. He doesn't sympathise with the fact that Pi isn't so much trying to figure out how the world works as he is studying the beauty of its aesthetic variety in its various digestions through stories. As he says at one point in voice over narration as we watch his younger self reading a comic book about Hanuman, the Hindu gods were his superheroes.

But his father does impress upon him the importance of respecting empirical reality in a lesson that defines the thematic problems the movie works with throughout its length. Pi, having nearly had his arm bitten off in an attempt to feed the zoo's Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, has his father graphically demonstrate to him that the empathy Pi felt he shared, looking into the tiger's eyes, is only a reflection of his own feelings. That the tiger has a personality very alien and different from Pi's--his father makes this clear to Pi by forcing the child to watch the tiger devour a live goat.

This lesson follows Pi once he's trapped alone with the tiger on a small lifeboat, lost at sea after the sinking of the Japanese freighter that was carrying him and his family to Canada. Pi barely has time to mourn the loss of his family when life quickly becomes about learning to live with a powerful, hungry tiger.

One of the movie's shortcomings is in that it relies on Pi to tell us so much in voice over narration, mainly that Richard Parker kept him alive by keeping him alert and requiring him to tend to the tiger's needs. This would have been better had it been demonstrated visually. The impact of Pi's relationship with the tiger largely functions on a kinetic level, like a good action movie. Though the cgi in this movie is particularly ineffective, especially since real tigers are used in several shots, making the cg tigers even less convincing by contrast. This film probably would have been better fully animated, maybe even computer animation.

And it's shot for 3d, though I saw it in 2d. I could see how in some shots the 3d would have enhanced the movie visually, particularly in the repeated shots of the tiny boat in the centre of the screen surrounded by water and/or sky, emphasising Pi's smallness in respect to the complex and dangerous reality around him. But shooting digitally for 3d has much more of a detrimental effect, as beautifully conceived shots of sunrises and water wind up looking cheap and artificial. There are parts of this movie that don't look much better than the old video game Myst.

But at times I think there's a deliberate artifice to the look, especially in an amazing sequence where Pi encounters a carnivorous island populated by thousands of meerkats. He makes a bed in a tree, which is a good thing because as the sun sets he observes all the meerkats scrambling up into the trees and the tiger retreating back to the boat. He realises, after a fascinating moment where he finds a human tooth in a glowing flower and witnesses hundreds of fish skeletons floating up in the pool of freshwater he'd bathed in during the day that the whole island was some sort of Venus Fly Trap. It nourished animals by day to devour them by night. It's another thing that forces Pi to confront the hostile, ruthless instincts for survival that his father had demonstrated to him in his youth.

There's a much keener, more beautifully nuanced interplay between grace and nature than the broad dichotomy presented in last year's Tree of Life. Instead of Pi's father essentially being a villain, Life of Pi shows how pragmatic carnivores are integral to the overall grace of existence. Pi says that Richard Parker kept him alive by keeping him alert, but by the end of the film one might wonder if what Pi really meant was that the strangeness Richard Parker continually forced Pi to confront kept him from the fate his father feared for him when he explored every religion available to him, that believing in everything is ultimately the same as believing in nothing. It's far better to have a number with no foreseeable end.

Oopa the Day Before

I dreamt last night I was a pregnant woman working in the Palace of Versailles, which had been converted into an automobile garage. I remember being in a beautiful white and gold corridor and seeing a growing, creaking wet spot on the ceiling above me and realising that the ceiling was about to collapse. My grandfather, who in reality passed away just over ten years ago, was upstairs and I was rushing to warn him when my water broke and I went into labour. By now you're probably thinking I wet the bed and I swear I didn't.

After I had the baby (it was a boy), I ran upstairs and found my grandfather, in slacks and undershirt, lounging in a full bathtub while an iron on the ironing board was burning through his shirt he'd evidently been in the middle of ironing. He woke up and, seeing the baby in my arms, told me how having a child in my uncertain position in life was unwise, that having a child completely changes and dominates your life. Then I woke up three minutes ahead of my alarm, which I'd set for 7am to go and see the insurance guy who showed up about fifteen minutes early. There was actually frost all over my car this morning, and to think in late October I was fretting we wouldn't get even the poor excuse for winter California usually gets.

Anyway, everyone's talking about what's been foretold for December 21st, an event many sceptics are saying is unlikely but I choose to believe is bound to happen. Yes, by to-morrow at this time, "Gangnam Style" will have reached one billion views on YouTube.

If any video was going to reach one billion views, I'm kind of glad it was this one. There's just something miraculous about a satirical South Korean rap video conquering the U.S. It's not such a bad song, either. I note with some bemusement, though, that Psy has not only apologised for comments he made criticising the U.S. handling of the war in Iraq, he's just purchased an expensive condo in L.A., which was Gangnam before Gangnam. Funny what a little money and fame will do to a man. Congratulations on your victory, Psy, the U.S. accepts your surrender.

I went to feed the ducks to-day and saw one of the white ones who, I'm pleased to report, is not only surviving but also enormous.

Eroding Night

Turns out school is a lot easier when you're not busy chasing girls and preoccupied by various other bits of teenage bullshit--I see to-day I got an A in both my fall classes, including the math intensive Astronomy lab for the Astronomy class I got a C in 13 years ago. I think more people should wait until their thirties to go to college.

Next semester I'm taking a math class (I did finally take a math assessment test a couple days ago and this is the first of two math classes I need to take) and British Literature II, which I'm really excited about. I'm not excited about having to get up at 9 or 10am, because the only British Literature II class available is at 12:30. Though it won't be as bad as to-morrow's going to be--for some reason the only time the guy from my insurance can come over to take pictures of my car is between 7:30am and 8:30am. Considering I normally go to bed at 4am, that's basically going to be the middle of the night for me. Well, I suppose I should be happy if this is the worst that comes of the whole business.

I'm getting in the British Literature mode already, I guess, having listened to Tim Curry read A Christmas Carol in its entirety last night. My impression of Dickens wavers between impatience with his sentimentality and delight at his fundamental sense of human weirdness. Somehow I enjoyed Washington Irving's dwelling on domestic, traditional English Christmas revelries more than the portraits of merry impoverished families A Christmas Carol presents. But I love how the ghosts, in their intention as allegory, work out to be creepy manifestations of neuroses. The child anthropomorphised Ignorance and Want living in the skirts of the Ghost of Christmas Present are nice and bizarre, conflating the Victorian obsession with the purity of children with Dickens' condemnation of capitalism. That's one thing I definitely love about Victorian literature--including literature from the time coming from outside England--the general distaste for capitalism and war.

Twitter Sonnet #458

Virtual drunk descendents wobble sword.
The plum progeny pillory pixels.
At dusk, keyboard blackguards each break their word.
Computer carts squeak on chassis thistles.
Perfect rectangular buttocks strain Yule.
No-one goes anywhere in a willow.
And every day, pinstriped rain makes a rule;
Purple in this red is not so mellow.
Useless sorts of water wait by a mouse.
Gambrel helmets cue Dutch Sith ancestry.
Turbo-lasers break the sturdiest house.
Late the marathon remembers pastry.
Early apples burn with bright concave space.
Photon torpedoes undermine the race.

A Real Bear?

Now let us go back to that year of myth and wonder, 1985. Or so that year seems in Seth MacFarlane's Ted, set in Boston at a time when kids gleefully received inarticulate Star Wars figures in plastic suitcases shaped like Darth Vader's helmet for Christmas and one lonely little boy was delighted by the gift of a giant teddy bear, which he unimaginatively names "Teddy", which possibly is to be expected from an eight or nine year old boy so excited to receive a teddy bear. It's a story that plays like a rote fantasy adventure, following a pair of friends on a formulaic trip through growing up, fleeing the hazy sitcom conception of maturity having something to do with getting a job, an apartment, and marrying your girlfriend. It's an okay movie, with several genuinely funny moments, though with a sincerity rendered pathetic under the weight of its writer/director's faith in formula.

I first heard of Ted on April 1st this year, in the form of a Twitter account and a facebook page for the titular character. I immediately "liked" and "followed" because I thought it was a really good April Fool's joke on the part of Seth MacFarlane--I love when people go to great lengths for an April Fool's joke, and I was amused to see he'd gone so far as to get Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg to perform some cliche romantic comedy scenes--him accidentally hitting her in a club while trying to dance, the two of them failing to paint a room as they fall into giggling and going at each other with paint brushes. I thought it was a good joke, this idea of taking an 80s trope of the puppet oddball who fits into the family unit of human characters (Short Circuit, ALF), and adapting it to 2000s cliches of the gross-out buddy movie. I thought there MacFarlane was showing an insight tempered by whimsy, as most of the best stuff on Family Guy tends to be.

Then on April 2nd, all of the Ted sites and social media pages were still up. Now I've actually seen Ted, full length, and it still feels like an April Fool's joke to me.

It's really strange, actually. How can I have watched an hour and forty five minute story without feeling like I'd watched a real movie? Maybe it's MacFarlane's amateurish directing, liberally exploiting standard shots almost constantly, from several whooshing crane shot set-ups of bands at parties, to the first setup exterior shot of Wahlberg's and Ted's apartment building. I think it's more to do with the sitcom logic in the writing, like Ted, after being told by Wahlberg that his girlfriend wants Ted to move out, getting a job at a local supermarket and immediately being able to get an apartment--we have here the standard girlfriend ultimatum to test of buddyhood along with the persistent American delusion that Want Job = Get Job = Get Apartment. But one senses MacFarlane does this knowingly, especially since he makes the circumstances of Ted's hiring absurd--Ted insults the boss, who hires him because he likes Ted's boldness. There's a winking double absurdity in the absurdity of the idea at one level, and the extreme absurdity of the guy promoting Ted after Ted bangs a girl with a vegetable he then sells. It's MacFarlane saying, "I know this is stupid, and that's why it's funny," and he is right, which is where a lot of Family Guy's humour comes from.

Ted's problem is that it takes this absurdity seriously. MacFarlane actually leans on the cliché plot of the boyfriend/buddy/girlfriend problem triangle because he has a genuine affection for this stuff, losing sight of the fact that it's in mocking it he achieves most of his humour. MacFarlane's shows have always lacked a basic sense of heart, except in episodes written by writers like Daniel Palladino, which is why MacFarlane's shows don't connect as well as The Simpsons. MacFarlane's funny, but I get the impression he's kind of a phoney. But he's a real phoney. That's it--he's a male Holly Golightly.

Like I said, Ted is genuinely funny. My favourite part was Giovanni Ribisi, who kidnaps Ted, motivated by a childhood obsession with the talking bear. Ribisi invests the character with a genuinely interesting weirdness, and somehow the funniest part of the movie for me was watching him enthusiastically dance to the music video for Tiffany's version of "I Think We're Alone Now".

A Pale Domain

Now let us go back to that year of myth and wonder, 1965. Or so that year seems in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, set on the beautiful, fictional New England island called New Penzance, it's a story that plays like a great fantasy adventure, following a pair of young lovers in their desperate trek through the wilderness, fleeing the grasp of adults led astray in their maturity. It's a very good movie, about the redemption innocents can inspire in adults and the pretty, constant frailty of human life.

The story's set a few days before a hurricane of legendary proportions is set to hit the small island and orphan Khaki Scout (like a Boy Scout), twelve-year old Sam goes AWOL from his troop. The troop's led by a weenie named Ward--Edward Norton in a too rare bit of appropriate casting, who in a series of romantic hero lead roles (The Illusionist, Down in the Valley), seems to have striven against his "thirty year old boy" look and voice. But here at last it looks as though he's gotten something like a sense of humour about himself again.

Also going AWOL is Suzy Bishop, a girl who seems a couple years older than Sam--taller in any case--who has a violent temper, a perpetually serious demeanour, and an obsession with fantasy novels. Her parents she's escaping from are a couple of anal retentive lawyers played by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, the latter of whom is wound tight at all times, comfortable using a megaphone rather than raising her voice to call the children to dinner, and Murray's character, Mr. Bishop, is the closest thing to an actual villain in the film, but filled with too much evident self torture and human frailty to be truly hateful. He's somehow both menacing and deeply melancholy as he goes outside, shirtless, with a bottle of wine and an axe to find "a tree to chop down."

In charge of tracking down the children is a sheriff played by Bruce Willis, who proved to me once again it's impossible to respect any man wearing a short sleeved button down shirt.

Suzy describes him as "dumb and sad", but he has a gentle wisdom about him too, as well as an admirable humility, as he's able to admit to young Sam that the boy's probably smarter than he is.

Sam and Suzy's journey through intensely beautiful shots of Rhode Island wilderness is the centrepiece of the film and around which all other things orbit. They're written with frank and effective innocence, exploring duties as a couple, their emotional boundaries, their sexuality, and the accuracy of their conceptions of reality. When Suzy tells Sam how magical and special she thinks orphans are, he replies, "I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about." Sweetly, the first part of the statement is all that seems to stick with her.

As the storm approaches, it seems to become a manifestation of the Gods' advocacy of the purity of Suzy and Sam's relationship as genuine human affection functioning without the abstract bullshit the adults have locked themselves into.

Anderson's often static and carefully arranged compositions remind me of Ozu--they almost always seem to consist of deliberate layers of frames leading the eye to a point in the image.

Ozu almost always shot from low angle, but though Anderson isn't dedicated to any one angle like that, he seems to generally lean more towards high angle, with the horizon being near the top, which adds to the sense of all the characters being small, fragile creatures of limited perceptions. In his review, Roger Ebert says Anderson is "the only American director I can think of whose work reflects the Japanese concept mono no aware, which describes a wistfulness about the transience of things." Which is probably another reason I was reminded of Ozu.

An Accident

So Friday was a pretty eventful night. After the movie, I went to the grocery store and afterwards hit a bicyclist with my car as I went through the nearby intersection. I was going between thirty and thirty five miles an hour but the 23 year old guy was uninjured, despite cracking my front bumper and denting my driver's side door at the handle. It was night, pouring rain, and my wipers were going. The investigating officer told me, "I never say who's at fault at this point but . . . He technically ran a red light, if you get my drift. I wouldn't worry."

I didn't see the bicyclist at all before the instant I hit him. I stopped in the middle of the intersection and looked back and saw him pulling his bike to the curb. I parked in the grocery store parking lot and got out to see what kind of state he was in. I found him trying to call someone on his cell phone, standing with his bike propped against him. I asked him if he was okay. He said, "I don't know, I've never been in an accident before. I tried to brake, but all this water . . ." He told me his arm and leg hurt.

"Can you move them okay, can you move your fingers normally?" He could. But he said he was in pain--I asked if he wanted me to call 911 and he said he did.

"I really don't feel well," he said.

The 911 operator asked me about the guy's condition, I said, "I don't really know. He just says he doesn't feel well . . . Do you have any scrapes?" I asked him.

He held up his hand and I saw what looked like a pin prick of blood. "My hand's pretty busted up," he said, a statement I relayed to the operator, who told me someone would be there shortly.

When paramedics arrived they could find no injury or sign of concussion. I talked to three cops, all of whom asked me repeatedly if I'd been drinking or using an illegal substance. One of them tested my vision by moving a pen in front of my face, another patted me down and asked if I had a bag of marijuana in my pocket. I said what he felt was a receipt, which it was.

In answer to questions from the 911 operator and the cops, I kept saying, "I hit this guy with my car," knowing full well how it sounded--I wasn't sure really what happened. All I knew is that the guy had come from my left and I had been going straight through a green light. Particularly with the rain and the darkness of the night, I don't know how I could have possibly seen him in time to stop, but I've heard pedestrians generally are considered the innocent party and I wasn't sure whether a bicyclist counted as a pedestrian.

It was a long time before I could make sense of what he told the cops, mostly because I think I was a bit shaken up and I was working from the perception that he had come from my left. What the guy said was that he was turning left and he insisted that he'd signalled, I guess meaning a hand signal. I realised later, as I think the cops grasped right away, he had been going as though straight through on the same green light as me and had abruptly turned left. The police kept using the phrase "cutting the corner".

The investigating officer showed up a few minutes later than the first police to the scene and he asked me questions, repeating a couple later I could tell in an attempt to make me contradict myself in case I was lying. But I told him the truth.

I'm not sure how this is all going to play out still, but he seemed pretty confident as to the state of things and towards the end. I called my insurance when I got home and I'm supposed to hear from them some time next week. I've always been a pretty cautious and careful driver, and I have good reflexes. But needless to say I've been a little more apprehensive on the road since.

Twitter Sonnet #457

Trauma appears at the five rake picnic.
Wire fingers guard a vial of sky.
Gentle flames will sustain the tricked cynic.
Jimi sharpened his violets for "that guy."
Mountain sized dioramas shake the clouds.
Beagle ghosts lace a black rubber loafer.
Santa's sleigh asks for six women in shrouds.
Silent buttons drift past the stern gopher.
Lint jammed zippers sneeze the ether pin's goals.
Ribbons bend across the rubber port bow.
Apples whiten in bleached electric holes.
Skeleton pine shadows nourish Santa Claus now.
Liquorice debris blends with the asphalt.
Cotton candy strangles the stripper's salt.

There and All Over the Place

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a pretty good movie. If you like Middle Earth stories, like me, it's even better. It probably would've had broader appeal if it had been closer to the novel. Ironically, in straying from the novel, it's more appealing to the hardcore fanbase than for general audiences. Which is not to say all of Jackson's deviations work. But most of them are at least tolerable.

There are a few complaints from the negative reviews that I would like to call out as bullshit. I think they're things written by reviewers less interested in describing their reactions to the film than they are in writing down things that will keep them respectable enough as critics. For example, the beginning is not overlong. Particularly not the scene where the dwarves invade Bilbo's home. That couldn't have been more perfectly executed. And it highlights the fact that Martin Freeman not only makes a perfect Bilbo, he easily surpasses Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. There's a reason we don't see a lot of movies with Elijah Wood or Sean Astin headlining, if you get my meaning.

And Freeman's performance is so much more, well . . . English. He takes to this fellow culturally inoculated to being high strung yet with a basic good nature like a duck to water. He knows Bilbo inside and out, Bilbo's in his blood, just like Tolkien intended in writing characters designed to be so dyed in the wool English. He connects so beautifully with the character and the story, I could feel the entire audience turning on in response to him. Which is why I think the movie would've been more audience friendly if it had been closer to the book.

One of the ways the movie deviates from the book in a way that diminishes its broader appeal but I think will nonetheless be a lot of fun for Middle Earth fans is Jackson's expansion on Thorin Oakenshield's character. As the sober older man set in his ways and with an eye for the wealth of Erebor in the book, he contrasts slightly with the hot headed young man we see onscreen. He's still a more worldly figure than most of the other dwarves, at one point chastising Kili and Fili for teasing Bilbo about the possibility of orc raids. But his whole character is undermined by an arch enemy orc who kills his father in flashback earlier in the movie. Despite the fact that it's the heat of battle, and he's just witnessed the distinctively white orc behead his father, Thorin apparently doesn't feel like paying attention to whether or not the white orc is successfully executed by the dwarves seen dragging him off. He just assumes the white orc dies of his wounds, which makes it hard to get invested in the bloody lust for revenge we see in him later when the white orc turns up again.

The white orc is pretty good, actually, and would've been a great addition if his setup hadn't been so weak. His mannerisms seem as though they were modelled on Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. His white warg is gorgeous and, on that point, I was ecstatic about how beautiful the wargs looked in this movie. Instead of the blunted, almost catlike faces they had in the Lord of the Rings movies, these wargs are truly wolfish, with long faces and teeth.

The best dwarf is Balin, played by Ken Stott who, with his white hair, prosthetic nose, and ably affected Irish accent reminded me of Darby O'Gill and the Little People, a movie the influence of which on Peter Jackson is unmistakable when you watch it.

The best scene in the movie, as so many reviews have pointed out, is Bilbo's scene with Gollum. Any point where Tolkien's brilliance that played perfectly well without actors, physical scenery, illustrations, or special effects is translated in a straightforward fashion--with performances that capture the characters so harmoniously--is a high point in Jackson's Middle-Earth films. I loved how the audience hushed and they seemed to be trying to figure out the riddles along with Bilbo and Gollum, instead of shifting in their seats as they tried to swallow one of the senseless plot twists Jackson saw fit to spackle the movie with.

The scenes with Radagast pulled me in two directions. I loved Radagast's bird's nest in his hair, his rabbit drawn sleigh and, of course, I love Sylvester McCoy. But Jackson gives him only trite business about resurrecting a hedgehog and investigating the Necromancer.

The extra scene with Galadriel and Saruman isn't bad. Saruman's portrayed as a sort of humourless headmaster contrasted with Gandalf as the cool liberal teacher who smokes pot between classes.

Rivendell is as beautiful as it was in the other movies. The movie looked really great, with the production design benefiting from Alan Lee's graceful, sort of washed out art nouveau look alongside the endless striking shots of New Zealand Jackson comes up with. You see so much footage of New Zealand nowadays, it's a marvel how Jackson seems to find this or that new extraordinary rock formation or copse.

I don't think there's been a movie with so many ways of watching it. You can see it in 2d, 3d, 3d in 48 frames per second, and IMAX 3d. I saw the IMAX 3d version because it's the version that played closest to the time convenient for me. It was the first time I saw an IMAX movie, which Harry Knowles, in his AICN review of the Hobbit movie, is already describing as antiquated. Maybe my eyes aren't sensitive to whatever it is IMAX is supposed to do because I honestly couldn't tell the difference between it and regularly projected film. The 3d was mostly fine because I stopped noticing it after a while--which of course means it's pointless. When I did notice it, it was because something looked strikingly artificial. It's not so bad with the cgi stuff that looked fake anyway, but when it breaks up the bright green grass of the Hobbiton hills, it's distracting and disappointing.

Speaking of someone who hates 3d, I read the first story in Caitlin's latest issue of her Sirenia Digest to-day, "WHEN THE NIGHT REJOICES PROUD AND STILL". It's a really great little portrait of Martian colonies after Earth's been abandoned, something that reminded me strongly of Cowboy Bebop, especially in reading that the colonies are under domes and there are corporate towers. Caitlin spends most of the story on a fascinating holdover harvest festival that reminds one a bit of The Wicker Man crossed with Dia de los Muertos. The interesting sado-masochistic sacrifice ritual fits nicely in line with a lot of other Sirenia Digest material.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, the movie last night came with an IMAX exclusive preview of Star Trek: Into Darkness, something like fifteen minutes of footage from the movie. It was good, better than I remembered the first movie being, and special effects work made a nice, genuinely alien looking world of red foliage for Kirk and McCoy to run through. Zoe Saldana was still outshining everyone, though I found Chris Pine slightly more tolerable, maybe because there wasn't time to give him any broad, apple chewing business.

A Pattern

In Connecticut to-day, as you no doubt know, a man has shot and killed 27 people including 20 young children at an elementary school. In China to-day, a man stabbed 22 children at a school, injuring but not killing them. In China, private citizens are not allowed to own guns, while in the U.S. private citizens are allowed to own guns.

If the contrast between statistics of deaths by gun violence when comparing countries where citizens are allowed to own guns with those countries where they're not allowed to own guns didn't already make it clear which policy on guns made people safer, to-day's grim parallel of events couldn't make it more plain.

As we know from an NFL player's murder suicide shooting from two weeks ago, when Bob Costas dared to suggest on television that access to firearms leads to deaths by firearms, opponents of stricter gun control are quick to dismiss vocal endorsements of stricter gun control that come immediately after massacres as inevitably oversimplified.

Perhaps they would also tell the parents of seventeen year old Jordan Davis, who, unarmed, was shot and killed on November 23rd, that they should see no resemblance in it to the shooting and killing of Treyvon Martin.

Perhaps a pattern should not be seen in to-day's shooting occurring a few days after a deadly shooting at a shopping mall in Oregon. This year also saw the shooting at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.

It seems like gun massacres in the U.S. are becoming more frequent and more horrific. Considering the age of most of the victims to-day, one could argue this is the most horrific, yet I think many people are numb to the news. It has become normal. This may be the most horrific thing of all.

The Hunter's Manifestations

So now I can go back to reading Moby Dick. Yet I keep thinking about Washington Irving. I may post my term paper here in a couple days--not until after I get a grade, lest I'm accused of plagiarising from myself. But I'm not sure it makes for a very interesting read. The focus is on what makes American Literature American Literature. It's a bit of a "I'll tell you what Christmas is really all about, Charlie Brown." I say that despite really enjoying the Christmas stories in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

There is something I want to talk about. I was frustrated that I couldn't think of anything particularly new to saw about H.P. Lovecraft. Every time I had a line of thought about him, I'd find an article or analysis that already had the same thought. The Lovecraft section of my paper isn't a lot more than stringing together citations. I thought I really had something with the similarity of the cosmic dread Lovecraft evokes to the gloom and doom of the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards' sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", but I saw Lovecraft himself, in his "Supernatural Horror in Fiction" essay credits the Puritan philosophical heritage as part of the wellspring of American horror. Oddly enough, I found a lot less written about Washington Irving who, having a hundred years on Lovecraft and being one of the first respected American authors, seems like he'd have a lot more material written about him. Maybe it's because so many people are busy trying to prove Lovecraft is noteworthy while Irving's taken for granted. Maybe the college library databases I was looking at just aren't that great.

Anyway, I noticed something about "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" I can't find anyone else commenting on. It seems so obvious to me, I really don't think I could possibly be the first, but at this point I can't find anything else written about it.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was heavily influenced by Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Most sources point to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"'s main influence as being The Wild Huntsman folk tales of Germany and Scandinavia. But aside from the Huntsman's obvious resemblance to The Headless Horseman and the fact that the stories are often cautionary tales where someone runs afoul of the Huntsman through carelessness, I can't find a story of the Huntsman that quite resembles "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", most crucially in the lack of a character as strongly rendered as Ichabod Crane.

I titled my term paper "The American as Caliban or Falstaff" because I focused on the attempts by Lovecraft and Irving to assemble workable self-images based on relatively uniquely American pressures relating to the importance placed on self-sufficiency and mixed cultural identity. In reading The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, I think what we see is Irving trying to digest the extreme fear and depression he feels upon the bankruptcy of his family business (as evidenced in quotes from Irving's letters in various articles I read, where Irving talks of being "cast down" and "abased"). The sea voyage that opens The Sketch Book features the grim witnessing of a shipwreck followed by "Roscoe" and "The Wife" which both directly dwell on the subject of bankruptcy. It's around halfway through the collection, beginning with, I think, "Boar's Head Tavern", where Irving starts on his obsession with Falstaff, in that Crayon attempts to actually track down the inn which Falstaff frequented. At the same time, an obsession emerges with inns or the squire's manor house, places where rich and poor could come together and food, companionship, and shelter were implicitly taken as human rights.

What have the heroes of yore done for me or men like me? They have conquered countries of which I do not enjoy an acre, or they have gained laurels of which I do not inherit a leaf, or they have furnished examples of hair-brained prowess, which I have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to follow. But, old Jack Falstaff! kind Jack Falstaff! sweet Jack Falstaff! has enlarged the boundaries of human enjoyment; he has added vast regions of wit and good-humour, in which the poorest man may revel, and has bequeathed a never-failing inheritance of jolly laughter, to make mankind merrier and better to the latest posterity.

In "Stratford-on-Avon", Irving talks about an incident in Shakespeare's youth where he poached deer and how it was likely the inspiration for Falstaff's deer poaching at the beginning of The Merry Wives of Windsor. So Irving, feeling intense shame and unhappiness at his impending poverty as well as, as someone who considered himself a gentleman, a discomfort with the very preoccupation of finances, fixates on Falstaff, a knight who lives on the edge of poverty, resorting to manipulation and theft, and yet who's beloved, not only by the characters in the plays but by audiences. Falstaff is seen by Irving as a key to his own redemption.

Falstaff becomes the prototype for both Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane--the one slothful and the other gluttonous and avaricious. Crane, as he heads off for the Van Tassel party near the end, is described;

That he might make his appearance before his mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman of the name of Hans Van Ripper, and, thus gallantly mounted, issued forth like a knight-errant in quest of adventures. But it is meet I should, in the true spirit of romantic story, give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed. The animal he bestrode was a broken-down plough-horse that had outlived almost everything but his viciousness. He was gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer; his rusty mane and tail were tangled and knotted with burrs; one eye had lost its pupil and was glaring and spectral, but the other had the gleam of a genuine devil in it. Still, he must have had fire and mettle in his day, if we may judge from the name he bore of Gunpowder.

One could say the reference here is to Don Quixote, except Ichabod's intentions to gain Katrina and her fortune are far closer to something Falstaff would try.

Then consider the climactic scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor--Falstaff is tricked into appearing by a famous oak in the guise of Herne the Hunter--a supernatural figure from folklore likely inspired by none other than the same Wild Huntsman (who at one time was none other than Odin). The wives, husbands, Mistress Quickly and several of the town's children then disguised as dangerous faeries terrorise Falstaff, much as Brom Bones does in the guise of the Headless Horseman. Brom Bones does it as a competitor for the hand of Katrina, and perhaps indirectly (certainly thematically) punishing Crane for courting the woman with such material motives. The Merry Wives of Windsor is all about honour in marriage--Falstaff is being punished for trying to seduce two married women at once.

I really can't be the first person to notice this.

Twitter Sonnet #456

Babe eyed dollar face would fain to secede.
Blinking texts tap the retinal shoulder.
Noisy tears at the knees dim as they plead.
Cross-eyes yell to show which one is bolder.
Twisty tie turpentine ticks the clock leak.
Erased raisins reveal no commercial.
Conspicuous cows call you from the peak.
Umpires punish the shamed initial.
Stove pipe stockings extol freedom's slave toe.
Squeaky camels contort to beige rat things.
Amoebas represent with the oboe.
Skulls say, "Assorted candies for nude kings!"
Dewy blades butcher the porcine soil.
There's cards underground undreamt by Hoyle.

Paper Terms

I guess this'll be my last blog from the school Tech Mall for a while. How sad. I'm so tired. I got up too early, added a paragraph to my term paper, went to Office Depot to get the manila folder it had to be turned in in. People don't know how to drive. Everyone seemed to be just milling around the mall where the Office Depot was located. I suppose it didn't help the street had been repaved and it was left up to our memories to know where the lines are supposed to be demarcating turn lanes.

Still not as crowded at the malls as previous years. I guess that's okay, I forgive you, humanity. Just don't kill the mall, my beloved sterile microcosm.

I was already looking forward to Django Unchained but I got really excited from this bit in The Guardian's review;

Django proves himself an able assistant and a brilliant gunfighter and Schultz is electrified to learn that Django is married to a woman (Kerry Washington) whose German owners taught her the German language and named her Brünnhilde, which her subsequent ignorant purchasers mishear as "Broomhilda".

I'm picturing Christoph Waltz, as Schultz, getting caught up in the romance of rescuing Brunnhilde. That's going to be great.

Where a Bunch of Men have Gone Before

Busy to-day working on my term paper, which I'm halfway through writing. I suppose I should also study to-day for to-morrow's Astronomy lab final, though I'm feeling rather comfortable about my grade for that class since the teacher decided too many of the students had done poorly on the outside of class moon/sunset observation lab and therefore decided to count the assignment as extra credit and I got 100 points (the maximum) on it. I don't know what everyone found so difficult--it didn't amount to much more than taking four pictures of the sunset.

Paramount has announced that Benedict Cumberbatch is playing John Harrison in Star Trek: Into Darkness, a guy killed by Khan in "The Space Seed", which everyone is assuming, rightly, I think, means Cumberbatch is playing Khan in disguise, a suspicion supported by the fact that Carol Marcus is in the movie, basically meaning this is likely J.J. Abrams' remake of Wrath of Khan. What a dumb bait and switch. "I'm not the genetically modified super soldier you think I am, I'm simply just like him! No, wait, I am him! Rich Corinthian leather!" I like Benedict Cumberbatch a lot, but this is dull news. I was hoping he was Finnegan.

Gilding the Activity Wheel

What's he been doing, Precious? Reading his bookses? Yes, Precious, he has! Until late last night, and then during lunch and tea after class, reading, reading, reading, knowing all the while I'll never feel like I've read enough and knowing that anyway the real purpose of this essay is just to regurgitate the ideas that have been presented to us in class. I mean, who am I, who is anyone in the class, to presume they're going to define American literature in any way significantly different than it's ever been defined before? I'm so glad I don't have to grade these papers.

But I have the compulsion to write something I think of as interesting, however impossible that may be in the parameters. Not to mention reading H.P. Lovecraft's essay, "Supernatural Horror in Literature", enticed me with something like just under eight million books and stories I haven't read from the past few centuries. I'd probably read a lot more often than I do if silence didn't make me irritable.

By the way, to those interested in the evolution of language, one little thing I've noticed in comparing Washington Irving with Lovcraft is that Irving uses the word "diffuse" to mean distributing or propagating in equal degree to a number of subjects or throughout a location while Lovecraft uses it to mean to nearly extinguish.

In the above mentioned essay, Lovecraft speaks somewhat derisively of the "infallible detective" type, the "progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes". One of the ways fiction has evolved to make such detectives interesting since Lovecraft wrote that is to show that being a deductive genius and/or inductive genius doesn't mean you're perfect and in fact may be symptomatic of peculiar psychological problems. Case in point being the thing I took time off from reading to watch this morning, another episode of the new anime series Hyouka (氷菓), whose resident infallible detective developed his mental abilities out of laziness--obsessed with conserving energy, he tries to solve all problems in his head to avoid as much fuss as possible.

I'm liking the show more and more. Five episodes in, the format seems to be to present a new mystery every episode, sometimes pieces of a larger mystery spanning several episodes. The show follows the now typical, Haruhi Suzumiya-ish school club format, in this case a club devoted to classic literature, though the students have yet to discuss any piece of classical literature. In the episode I watched this morning, the mystery involved the math teacher of one of the students of the club upbraiding students for not knowing the answer to a question on the board, not realising that he was asking them to solve a problem from a chapter they hadn't yet studied. The mystery put to Oreki, the lazy detective, is how the teacher could have made this mistake.

It seems like an oddly innocuous mystery at first, but there's a subtle, intriguing undercurrent in a mystery presented almost as an aside--why did Chitanda, the student whose class it was, become so angry at the teacher's mistake when she's usually very tranquil? The episode doesn't answer the question, but one can deduce it from the arc concluded in the previous episode, when the students finally solved the mystery of why Chitanda's uncle had been expelled from the same high school back in the sixties--it had involved school faculty using him as a scapegoat. When one considers this, one can see why Chitanda is set off by school authority figures using their position to rebuke students unfairly.

This subtlety in storytelling is unusual for anime. Another thing I like, which seems to show the influence of Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, is the surreal depictions of the detective's mental process and visualisations of the stories brought to him. In this case, we don't see the incident where the teacher is yelling at the students, we get Chitanda's second hand account, and as she tells the story we see Oreki's conception of the situation as her being the lone human in a class populated by crash test dummies, some of whom are wearing kabuki masks.

In addition to creating an impression of Oreki's naturally imperfect knowledge of the situation, it subtly conveys his feelings and those of the students generally with a satisfying strangeness.

So it's a cut above average, not nearly as moe as I thought at first, except for an ending theme segment that drops some moe on a cosmic scale, infantilising the two female characters. To my shame, it appeals to the otaku in me. Call me a pig, I deserve it.

Twitter Sonnet #455

Sale priced Cyclops liquidates his tear duct.
Cave-in clusters disguised themselves as rock.
Casual sunlight illumes strict conduct.
The virgin foot feels up a chaste tube sock.
Downcast telescopes descry the programme.
Braided soldiers stagger on snowy ground.
Breaded wallets brim with fresh white sorghum.
Unsown grains spring at every millstone sound.
Anachronistic crimping mars old hair.
Heart shaped heads hover on the mind's collar.
Dust diffuses in the home of Sweet Pear.
Quiet shadows divulge bedtime's parlour.
Marionette timers mitigate class.
Power Point presents American gas.

The Top

I was having a dream last night about a group of elephants distressed at their inability to drink due to the fact that they lacked trunks. I woke up and found my shirt twisted a bit around my throat--I straightened it and when I went back to sleep I saw the elephants had trunks again.

I've spent the past couple days reviewing Lovecraft and reading some of his work I hadn't read yet, including his essays. It came as something of a surprise to me that Lovecraft ever found it necessary to employ the word "snookums" but even more surprising is how funny and, I would add, truly insightful his "Cats and Dogs" essay is. Despite his "The Cats of Ulthar", I hadn't thought to look to Lovecraft for an erudite affirmation of feline superiority that all sophisticated souls recognise instinctively. But the man waxes admirably on the subject;

We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that all comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have beauty in a very ample degree; but even the highest level of canine beauty falls far below the feline average. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic -- nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. Puss is a Doric temple -- an Ionic colonnade -- in the utter classicism of its structural and decorative harmonies. And this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat's slightest motion. The sheer, perfect aestheticism of kitty's lazy stretchings, industrious face-washings, playful rollings, and little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something as keen and vital as the best pastoral poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way but it is his capacity for leisure and repose which makes the cat preeminent.

There are some bits in this essay I actually thought might be applicable to my term paper, though it may be a bad idea since I once overheard my teacher saying he doesn't like cats, calling them "nature's Republicans".

Lovecraft, in his essay, describes cats as "the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality -- the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman." Which, I suppose, one could say bears out the idea, though cats, I would argue, possess the self-sufficiency in reality that Republicans only possess in the form of destructive delusion. Certainly Republicans are rarely described as beautiful, Elizabeth Hasselbeck notwithstanding*.

It's also the first solid evidence I can remember seeing supporting the statement on Wikipedia, "Lovecraft was also acquainted with the writings of another German philosopher of decadence: Friedrich Nietzsche." Which is a peculiarly limp statement, meant, I think, to rely on reader prejudices about Nietzsche for its meaning.

I, by the way, am acquainted with the works of General Motors. You know what that means.

*Even she has that Fox News, light Oompa Loompa look.

Room Shaping

When one thinks about abortion in the early 1960s, one is likely to think of the social stigma attached to it and the necessity for women to undergo the procedure in dangerous and clandestine circumstances. 1962's The L-Shaped Room shows the stigma that could be had for not getting an abortion. Leslie Caron stars as Jane Fosset, a young French woman in England who decides she's going to make a go of it as a single parent after she becomes pregnant from her very first sexual encounter and marriage is out of the question. It's a well shot, decent ensemble film, at times dated in its moralistic even-handedness, but ultimately enjoyable for its well performed characters.

Certainly it's a change of pace for Leslie Caron, who I was used to seeing exclusively in big budget, Hollywood musicals. The L-Shaped Room is black and white, filled with location shots and cluttered, realistic lived in looking sets after the manner of New Wave imitations in vogue. Cinematography is by Douglas Slocombe, who would go on to shoot the first three Indiana Jones movies. The third name familiar to me was Brock Peters.

He lives in the room created by the L shape of Caron's top floor quarters in a shabby boarding house, otherwise populated by prostitutes and a penniless young writer, whose indignation at learning Caron's pregnant after he's pursued her we're meant to sympathise with. We're supposed to sympathise with Caron more, of course, but Toby--the writer--is meant to be the other side of the issue.

It ends up being a somewhat sentimental film, reminiscent of Hollywood misfit ensemble pieces like Separate Tables but with a slightly New Wave package. It introduces the other tenants, particularly the prostitutes, as loveable and quirky, in particular an endearing lesbian former show girl, who reminded me why I'd decided to watch the movie in the first place;

The Sack at the Centre of the World

I feel like Washington Irving would've really liked The Big Lebowski. It occurs to me, after finishing The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, that Falstaff was the original Walter from the Coen Brothers movie. Or maybe he's closer to The Dude. I think he'd fit in at the bowling alley, anyway.

I already liked Falstaff, but Washington Irving's deep affection for him is pretty infectious. He seems to regard Falstaff as a personification of some of the best qualities of English culture, mainly pre-Victorian societies of inn and pub regulars. His story length description of John Bull, where it's not obviously a metaphor for Britain's Imperialistic policies, is tellingly reminiscent of Falstaff. There's an incredible charm to these short stories and essays, particularly "Stratford-on-Avon" and "The Inn Kitchen", that it's no wonder Irving's work was so influential. The Christmas stories have a similar charm in their descriptions of slightly disorganised communal gatherings nonetheless strictly observing traditional practices thanks to an antiquarian squire in possession of the local manor house.

The simplistic, sentimental melodramas like "The Pride of the Village" and "The Broken Heart" are comparatively dull and it's rather surprising that the same man who constructed the singular works of wonderfully odd characterisation in "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" would present such plain formulas of types--the beautiful innocent country maiden seduced by the young soldier, the widow who sees her son die and so on.

In interesting contrast to these are the perspectives on the treatment of Native Americans by historians, "Traits of Indian Character" and "Philip of Pokanoket". I was reminded of Benjamin Franklin's writing on the subject, but where Franklin presents an entirely positive view of Native Americans, Irving does allow descriptions of extreme behaviours by Native Americans in warfare, but it's only to contrast it with the far more barbarous acts of the whites and to point out the actions of the Natives was natural retribution for the supreme savagery of the Europeans. The description of what became of the queen allied to King Philip at the hands of white men is tough to read and reminded me of some of the worst descriptions of medieval torture and warfare. It's a strange thing beside the humorous Falstaff essays and the fanciful melodramas.

These reflections arose on casually looking through a volume of early colonial history wherein are recorded, with great bitterness, the outrages of the Indians and their wars with the settlers New England. It is painful to perceive, even from these partial narratives, how the footsteps of civilization may be traced in the blood of the aborigines; how easily the colonists were moved to hostility by the lust of conquest; how merciless and exterminating was their warfare. The imagination shrinks at the idea of how many intellectual beings were hunted from the earth, how many brave and noble hearts, of Nature's sterling coinage, were broken down and trampled in the dust.

I certainly admire Irving for publishing, them, though. There was already push-back in 1820 media regarding the traditional demonisation of Native Americans, but considering the Indian Removal Act was still ten years away, Irving would hardly have been preaching to the choir, though he naively refers to contemporary kind treatment by the U.S. government.

"The Mutability of Literature" is a pretty insightful essay on the evolution of writing in England couched in an amusing story of Crayon arguing with an antique book. All in all, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon is a great read. Certainly it's the fastest I've ever read a book of the length--I think it took me less than a week. Though I didn't do much else yesterday--I listened to it while driving to the mall to do Christmas shopping and on the way back, then listened more before switching to reading it the old fashioned way. I probably never would've finished in time if it weren't for LibriVox. Now the next few days I'll concentrate on Lovecraft, which should be easier, since I've already read all his available work, I think.

Twitter Sonnet #454

There is no video at TV's end.
Teletubbies burble as sweat from pores.
Animosity's mistletoes descend;
Delighted amateurs giggle old scores.
Premature cognac conceives of no star.
Fawns financed by hunters tread in a school.
High up plastic cups contained fish too far
For nutritional decency to rule.
Bad tea degrades to liquid tamale.
Overcharged chambers roast rosy young hearts.
Lilac cardigan drapes cheap Svengali.
Raspberry blood blushed the hot flaky tarts.
A late spring is foretold in digital.
Gridlock girds the sky of screws magical.

On the Nature of Love

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Thirty years after Oscar Wilde wrote this in his Ballad of Reading Gaol, F.W. Murnau made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, an extremely simplistic, melodramatic tale of an archetypical husband and wife who, as one of the first title cards informs us, are meant to encompass the essential nature of relations between husbands and wives in all times and all locations. So one can suppose Murnau shares Wilde's belief in that the central issue of the film is the husband's attempt to murder his wife. It's a film of incredible visual beauty and curious philosophical perspective.

The film begins with the element that comes between the married couple--a flapper from the city who, in a scene of ghostly luminance and shadows on the reedy shore of a lake, will employ aggressive kisses to convince the husband to drown his wife.

The wife, in contrast to the conniving city flapper, is an innocent, cheerful young conservative woman, mother of the husband's young child. The two run a small farm, which the flapper seeks to induce the husband to sell.

The man finds he can't go through with the murder, but in looming threateningly over his wife when they're alone on a boat, ostensibly on a trip to the city, she sees he means to kill her and becomes terrified of him and heartbroken. As soon as they reach shore, she runs from him and he pursues, desperate to find some way of relieving her fear of him. They finally reconcile when they witness a wedding and are reminded of the love behind their own matrimonial bond, and the bulk of the movie is the two of them enjoying the various things city life offers for the day--dining, grooming, carnival games, dancing.

There's no real complexity to the story, we're simply invited to view this simple portrait of people in love. The film is chiefly carried by Murnau's considerable talent for beautiful filmmaking, which compels us to analyse the fundamental truths behind the broad story. The film is called Sunrise, which obviously reflects the hope Murnau means to convey that, even as he recognises a fundamental compulsion for destruction between two people in love, the attraction between the two lovers is ultimately the stronger influence, and is always within reach.

The Words Relax

The negative reviews for the first Hobbit movie are actually one of the first items to give me hope about them. I love how so many of these reviews come from the ostensive point of view of someone familiar with the book but who reveals in their opinion a lack of familiarity. Like Mr. Beaks' review on AICN; "It could be that Jackson's trying to introduce too many characters at once, but he commits the double sin of failing to make the most important members of the crew memorable or vital to the story. Balin, Fili, Kili, Dwalin... unless you know the story well, they barely register." You know, exactly as they do in the book, something one need hardly look past the similarity of their names to see it was something Tolkien did intentionally.

People are also complaining about the slower, more relaxed pace of at least the beginning of the film as though this were a negative thing. This is actually really exciting for me as the Lord of the Rings movies are feeling increasingly over-caffeinated to me. And is it so crazy to like the travelogue tone of the books everyone's complaining about? So kill me if I want to linger in contemplation of beauty.

Yesterday I realised that with the help of Librivox, I could listen to Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon and play Zelda at the same time, which is just what I did. I wouldn't recommend it for all the stories, but for the sentimental stories or lists of points of interest for nineteenth century Americans curious about England, like "The Widow and her Son" or "Rural Funerals", it's a good route. The readers vary in quality, from Serial Killer to Type Writer. The guy reading "The Spectre Bridegroom" sounds like a guy in charge of a computer lab. There are two versions of the Christmas stories, one from the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon section and another in its own Old Christmas section. For the first essay, "Christmas", one can choose between a woman reading in clipped monotone in the Geoffrey Crayon section or a guy, in the Old Christmas section, speaking in an oddly hushed and effusive tone, almost a whisper, like a guy on death row supplicating to an uncaring god in the dead of night. But the two women reading in the Old Christmas section have pretty adorable voices and sound remarkably as though they actually care about what they're reading. In particular, I'd recommend the reading of "Christmas Eve" by Kristen McQuillin.

Heaven's Lost Satellites

There's maybe one truly innocent person in 1946's Black Angel, but most of the characters are people who have ruthlessly, reluctantly, or in a fit of derangement irrevocably compromised themselves. It's a good film noir that twists presumptions of morality well past the breaking point.

The movie begins with a killing, a beautiful singer who seems to be blackmailing everyone in town, including Peter Lorre as a nightclub manager and the man who's arrested for her murder, Bennett, who had innocently shown up to her apartment with a gun in response to her threatening note. He insists to police he never planned on using the gun, but one wonders what would have happened if she hadn't been dead already when he got there.

And there's Dan Duryea as alcoholic piano player Martin Blair, the singer's ex-husband and former partner in the music business. He's trying to force his way into her building as the movie begins, but a doorman turns him away even as Peter Lorre is granted admittance.

Most of the plot is set in motion by Catherine, Bennett's wife, who tracks down Blair in attempt to prove her husband is innocent. The two begin an amateur investigation that eventually involves them becoming a musical act for Peter Lorre's club, with Mrs. Bennett singing and Blair playing piano in seemingly the same setup Blair had with his deceased wife. He tells Catherine he made his wife a star, he can do the same for her. And of course he falls in love with her, too.

It's a film noir, so things go wrong, I won't tell you how wrong and in what way, but I will say that although Peter Lorre is great as always, this is really Duryea's movie. I guess the only other movie I've seen him in is Scarlet Street, which I saw so long ago I barely remember it, but here he's very effective as a fellow with a rough edge about him, a man who's always been a hair's breadth from getting what he wants, but who sabotages himself in small and large, incredibly tragic, ways.

Twitter Sonnet #453

Argonaut naugahyde adheres to wood.
Dollars dim at the cobwebbed side hall.
Politic wings wither when understood.
Molasses fusion ends with a rum ball.
Dissipating poppy discernments sleep.
Fading cotton canopies descend slow.
Gentle noodles languidly trace the deep.
Paper squadrons begin drifting too low.
Baker's dozens of dominatrices
Fall in with compliant doorknob rubber.
Holly clogs the pits in the cornices.
Inedible lollipops find harbour.
Angry damaged goblets blink out of drink.
Rivers red and pink converge in a wink.

The King of Cups

I saw this at Wal-Mart to-day when I was getting my oil change. I guarantee there are thousands of homophobes who think this thing's unimpeachably heterosexual.

This morning I was toying with the idea of starting a website called Schadenfreude Idol, where nominees would be selected and judged like in American Idol before the object whose pain was most delicious was voted on. I got to thinking of this when I was reading a story on the forthcoming Superman film Man of Steel. I think only Superman could fly faster than what I suspect will be the velocity of its meteoric failure when it's released. No-one wanted to see a Superman movie when Bryan Singer's was released, no-one wants to see one now. I don't care if they take off Superman's red panties. And not that it'll be his fault, but I look forward to it being another black mark on Zack Snyder's career.

I had to abandon plans to finish The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon yesterday when I remembered I needed to read Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener". I liked the Walt Whitman piece a lot more than I thought I was going to. The language was good and I agree with some of the ideas. But "Bartleby, the Scrivener" was just brilliant.

I was sort of wondering if there was any idea behind the pairing of the two pieces. Before the last couple of paragraphs in the Melville piece, I thought the description of the indifferent and meditative Bartleby was a parody of Whitman's protracted ode to humanity and body odour. The end of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" kind of changes one's perspective on the whole piece, but I'm not sure it wasn't a commentary on the sort of Transcendentalist Whitman was. I was reminded of Adam Carolla, of all people, who I heard on Nick and Artie discussing his parents, who were hippies, and saying that the hippie lifestyle is a form of depression--letting one's hair grow long, neglecting personal hygiene, generally not fitting into society. Suddenly Whitman's piece seemed more interesting if I thought of Whitman as depressed.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" again showed the attention to minor characters I'm loving in Moby Dick. There's no reason Melville has to describe Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, but it's so great that he does. These simultaneously bizarre and insightful characterisations kind of remind me of the Coen brothers.

Dream Kings and Chess Queens

I dreamt last night I lived on a curb, halfway up a hill at the top of which was a French cafe and at the bottom of which Neil Gaiman was trying to prove H.P. Lovecraft wrote for television in the 60s. Gaiman figured into the second dream I had last night, too--he was taking a young Debbie Reynolds on a date in a museum the size of a city. It was made up of a lot of small corridors and stairs with statues and paintings displayed in thin alcoves. Gaiman was wearing an Edwardian strongman leotard and was alternating between singing "Men are beautiful" to the tune of Christina Aguilara's "Beautiful" and singing "Lili Marleen" in German. Sometimes Marlene Dietrich would appear hovering behind Gaiman to sing the song, clearly somewhat confused at what she was doing there but singing the song feelingly anyway. Sometimes Gaiman would turn into a thin, middle aged Russian woman with dark hair and a high collared blouse and she would sing the same songs but very sarcastically.

So we have a new Women's World Chess Champion, Anna Ushenina, from the Ukraine. She continues the tradition of female chess champions looking gorgeous and sleepy, paralleled by the male champion tradition of looking like cell phone salesmen;

Well, I guess Kasparov doesn't look like a cell phone salesman, but otherwise I'd say the rule holds.