The Voice at 3:00 AM

Today I sat outside in the Coco Bar, drinking rich cinnamon hot chocolate and reading the last pages of The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems by Charles Simic. I've always really liked this poet, ever since I read The World Doesn't End, about a decade or so ago. His writing is haunting and surreal, filled with ghostly characters and presences, funny and existential non-sequitors, and Old World locations.

Reading a whole collection of any poet sort of numbs me out. I hear each individual poem less and less clearly the more familiar I get with the voice, the cadence of imagery, the idiosyncratic diction.

RELAXING IN A MADHOUSE

They had already attached the evening's tears to the windowpanes.
The general was busy with the ant farm in his head.
The holy saints in their tombs were burning, all except one who was a prisoner of a dark-haired movie star.
Moses wore a false beard and so did Lincoln.
X reproduced the Socratic method of interrogation by demonstrating the ceiling's ignorance.
"They stole the secret of the musical matchbook from me," confided Adam.
"The world's biggest rooster was going to make me famous," said Eve.
O to run naked over the darkening meadow after the cold shower!
In the white pavilion the nurse was turning water into wine.
Hurry home, dark cloud.

(I couldn't reproduce the line breaks here, because of something in the website's formatting...)

It Happened One Night

It's taken me days to watch It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert from 1934. I just kept not caring that much about it, and could see where it was going a mile away. This movie took away a bunch of Academy Awards and was loved at the time. I can sort of see why. The plot is kind of... okay. The dialogue is kind of... okay. At the time it was probably considered zany, witty and racy.

Actually, the main problem I had with it was the pacing. Some scenes were too long, and some snippets of dialogue or action happened too quickly. Clark Gable is really good at flirting with the bratty girl, similar to his performance in Gone with the Wind. I think they could remake of it. Not try to update it, keep it in the 30s but do it with 21st century technology and narrative techniques...

Interpretive Interactionism

Norman Denzin's Interpretive Interactionism is an excellent handbook on qualitative methods in the postmodern era. His ideas will be enormously helpful to me when I embark on the interpretive/analytic phase of my research, and will help me write up my process notes and even my orientation to the interviews as they are happening. This has helped clarify the goals of my research which is to untangle the meanings embedded in, articulated through, and structuring "the existentially problematic emotional experiences that occur in the lives of ordinary people"

Disgrace

I just finished reading Coetzee's Disgrace and had to post about it right away. I actually felt the need to write about it in order to get away from the sickening, sad, hollow feeling it left me with. It is written so sparsely, so cleanly, but it is like this slow emotional bleed. Without much consolation. There is, in a hopeless way, some consolation for the main character, but not for me as a reader. The descriptions of dogs being euthanized were excruciating, and for the main character there was just loss, loss, loss. It seems so unfair to have to come to terms with such sadness, but then, what is the alternative?

By the way, this cover is from another addition of the book. Mine had a very blank, elegant cover, that is sort of more fitting. But I thought this looked cooler on the blog.

"Back to the Mothership" on salon.com

I just read a wonderful Jod Kaftan piece on salon.com about what it was like being raised by the actress who played Spock's wife on Star Trek. It is really funny and insightful and incredibly well written. It was too hard to choose a favorite line, so I'll share one which resonates with my own particular existential angst:

Responding to a compliment on his thick red aura, "If you're a 'Star Trek' agnostic, like I am, all you can say in these situations is 'thanks'; the true agnostic just thanks people for their input, then privately envies their absolutism."

http://www.jodkaftan.com/

Igby Goes Down

I love this movie. I watched it for the second time tonight. The first time I thought it was hilarious. This time I thought it was more intense. The dialogue is witty and dark, all the characters sardonic. I think I laughed more the first time I saw it because I was with someone. I never laugh as much when I watch things by myself. Amanda Peet is so beautiful. And I loved Jeff Goldblum in this. I'd write more about it, but I think the Times review, that I got off Netflix, puts it very well: Even though the movie drifts uneasily between satire and realism, and its visions of military school and bohemia feel secondhand, it maintains a ruthless emotional honesty. Ultimately, it gets at something that no other recent American movie has captured quite so acutely: a resentful, lurking disappointment in the good life.
Instead of bringing them happiness, prosperity has left most of the grown-up characters with only a frustrated sense of entitlement floundering in a spiritual void. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=1&res=9C02E3DB1339F930A2575AC0A9649C8B63&oref=slogin

On Charles Schulz

Read a review in the New Yorker this morning of a biography Charles M. Schulz. He was apparently a kind of anti-social, shut-down, unaffectionate man who was devoted and obsessed with his work. He was the richest cartoonist of all times. The review made me more interested in reading Peanuts again, but didn't inspire any interest in the guy's life. I'm not interested in his wives and families. I'm more attracted to the way he dryly depicted the existential loneliness of a simple grade-schooler.