Absolute Sublime Felicity

I've been eating Greek yogurt (with honey (because it is good)) for so long that, when I recently tasted some Yoplait, I tasted an insipid Frankish counterfeit.

I confess that I believe in a god of absolute arbitrary will - a trickster god, even. But then how could a will be anything but arbitrary?

J.'s Reading List, First Year of Graduate School (Incomplete):

Paradise, Toni Morrison
The Crying of Lot 49 [The Frying of Latka 49?], Thomas Pynchon
Leviathan, Paul Auster
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera [She saw my Identity and Life is Elsewhere and raised me The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality, and La vie est ailleurs]
The Plague, Albert Camus
Mario and the Magician, Thomas Mann
The Trial, Francis Kafka

Emily Dickinson is lovely. And I think that the Serenity comic book takes place before the television show, or at least the movie.

I don't know why she puts in the effort...

J----,

If you just want to hear Scott [Cairns] read Thursday night, that's free. He also speaks on Friday and that's for conferees only. If you want to attend more of the conference, the registration fee is significantly lower for grad students (but I forget the exact cost). I'd love to see you hanging around.

D----,

...My boyfriend would probably come along too. I recommended Scott Cairns to him [more than a year] ago, he never took the time to read him, and now he keeps bringing Cairns up because this blogger guy he knows is really into him. Go figure. But John and I would love to see you...

I'll take a few days off of work. We'll keep in touch!

Letters of the Law

A friend of mine told me of the practice of one of her male friends who was subject to the Selective Service System. One of the mandates of this agency was that those subject to conscription had to keep it advised of any relocations. This young man carried a stack of pre-addressed post-cards, upon which he would write: "I am now at the Rialto Theater at 3^rd and Main" and drop it in a mailbox. After leaving the theater, he would send another post-card reading: "I am now at the Bar-B-Q Rib House at 10^th and Oak."

From Someone Who Is There:

American presidents are quite popular in Iraq, the foremost being George W. Bush, who is possibly the second most popular man in the country, second only to the Prophet himself. One of the [Iraqi] soldiers in the section has a 3-year-old son named George, after the very same. Bush Senior is probably second in popularity, followed by Bill Clinton. "I hope Hillary becomes the next president," Loay said. Really? I asked. "Yes, but only because George Bush can't be elected again." He then asked if he could let someone else be president for a term, then run again in another four years. I told him he couldn't, and he seemed disappointed.

"Hillary says she'll pull the U.S. troops out, though," I said. He dismissed this with his hand.

"She won't do that. It would be disaster. All things would be lost. She will be a strong president, like her husband."

So he would vote for Hillary, but only because he couldn't vote another term for George Bush.

"I don't give a damn about the Rolling Stones."

The way a woman can dismiss something - anything - is a terrible thing indeed. Perhaps I fear that she can just as easily dismiss me.

Infrastructure will collapse.

Poetry, poetry, and the masters of servitude. Thomas may enjoy knowing that Serenity is returning - though as a comic book, so maybe not.

Yesterday Caesar Chavez, today April Fools'!

WE ARE NOT SCAREMONGERING

~This is really happening.

~Clinton trusts she can rely on your vote.

~Have you ever drunk deeply from the cup of theological sophistication only to find that the dregs are a yeasty Tolkein allusion?

~Just because you print it doesn't mean it's there: the Federal Reserve has created more signa to help Bear, Stearns & Co., thereby staging a performance piece of economic Socialist Realism. Everybody has a share.

~And after five years of undeclaring war, congress has finally investigated the use of steroids in major league baseball. Those who resist the authorities bring judgment on themselves, so I shall forgo my pre-game teas and beers, lest the dregs disqualify me.

The Amazing Sounds of Orgy

Recession means depression, and depression can mean the amazing sounds of the killing hordes the day the banks collapse on us.

Nobody Likes Object Lessons

When your opponent says, "That's your opinion," countervail opinion with opinion. Retort, "That's your opinion that that's my opinion."

If your opponent asserts that this too is your opinion, remember: countervail opinion with opinion. Reveal that the very words your opponent has uttered form yet another opinion. An observer of this exchange may be reminded of the peeling away of an onion's layers - or rather of an infinite onion, whose layers are being peeled away in reverse.

Continue with this travesty until, as with an onion, someone begins to cry.

Note: every such attack upon the foundations of your argument can be repulsed, because this kind of attack is at once an attack upon all foundations of argumentation. Imagine that an incompetent army has laid siege to a castle. The general sends men to tunnel under the castle wall and collapse the castle wall; but when the soldiers begin to mine, they dig down into the earth and never underneath the wall. Eventually the pit becomes so deep and wide that the trebuchets and siege towers, and even the siege army, tumbles into the pit (this, by the way, has nothing to do with arguments and everything to do with proper siege tactics).

A day in the life.

According to God, the greater light governs the day; our Soviet has made certain emendations. That the government may govern hours and minutes with as much wisdom!

Grampa walked up and slapped Tom on the chest, and his eyes grinned with affection and pride. "How are ya, Tommy?"

"O.K.," said Tom. "How ya keepin' yaself?"

"Full a piss an' vinegar," said Grampa.

"Oh," said Tom. "So you're a douchebag."

Well, this is exciting.

Power.

Ex opera operatus sum

In Kareol, every Ja serves the greater Nein.

Rossini said that Wagner had wonderful moments and dreadful quarters of an hour. Last week, I endured eighteen quarter hours of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

When Mark Twain made a pilgrimage to Wagner's Bayreuth, he observed that the opera Tristan und Isolde "broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven." I too felt out of place: I slept after the opera, yes, but also during it. Throughout the second act I would nod and then wake to find, every time, that T&I were still talking of the Night betraying Day and the Day betraying Night. Death-devoted head, death-devoted heart - if Wagner loved death so much, why didn't he marry it?

More Twain, for fun:

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a darkhouse with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts.

…The great master, who knew so well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and only added the singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly.

…The opera was concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.

...Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo.

Medicamen Irrequietis

AvP: Requiem: a pastiche of the Alien tetralogy, the Predator duology, the Dark Horse comics, and a Norman Rockwell painting: the motherly-instincted woman must protect childe and drive an APC; the alien must represent a new permutation of Giger's design and reveal a bizarre method of propagation; the cyber-tribal predator must discard his persona at the climax of anagnorisis and then use a new weapon in martial melee. Someone even cries out, "Get to the chopper," if you feel like believing it.

And Norman Rockwell? Well, the movie spends a surprising amount of time with its humans. As the antiphons that beset the verse, so are the domestic vignettes that surround the fructifying aliens - or rather the humans are arranged like strophic verses seriatim, separated only by the alien chorus: Policeman-Pizzaboy-Facehugger-Brother-Chestburster-Girl-Predalien. That is, the humans are a Greek chorus, commenting on the dramatic action in language that is embellished with artistic ornament: viz., "Get to the chopper."

This means that the human characters are not characters at all. At the close of the movie's Introit, several requiems have been granted, but there is no meaning between the death of the humans and the earlier domestic vignettes.

Then someone says, "God have mercy on us all," and then more rest, more unrest. By the time of the atomic Dies irae (whose sequence is "The government doesn't lie to people," "God have mercy on us all," and "We were just following orders"), it is obvious that the humans on screen are particulars of a kind, just like the aliens - shivering pitches of a chorus note. Even those on whom the camera lingers instantiate briefly a character from another movie, and then dissolve back into their genus.

While this is often a bad thing, I took comfort in the abstractions, because they were not nearly as unpleasant as the individuated snoozes in the first AvP.

The Communion of Movies

I wanted to see There Will Be Blood eight months ago. When I found out that Johnny Greenwood was composing the score, my expectations increased.

But when I walked out of the cinema, my first words were, "I don't know about the ending, man." And I was speaking to Omer.

And we walked down Colorado, shuffling our deck of film criticism. And I said again, "I don't know about that ending." But then I did know about that ending, and I didn't like it.

I said that the end betrayed the beginning of the film, even the rest of the film. I said that a humorless, epic tableaux finished as a burlesque show. I said that the end vitiated Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday of any meaning, and that Eli Sunday was already a non-character, a non persona non grata. I said that the film was beautiful and that the music only occasionally distracted me. I also said that the film looked like the way Fitzgerald wrote (with Hemingway doing a treatment of the script), and I still don't know what that means.

"That was one goddamn hell of a show," Daniel Plainview says.

And then Omer and I watched No Country for Old Men. Both No Country and Blood have:

Short title openings
Marfa, Texas
Depravity
Affected speech
Remarkable endings
Blood
Old men
Interchangeable titles
Bad books as source material
The desert
The past

And other things. But the rest is difference, différence. No Country was subtle whereas Blood felt like a millstone around the neck. Omer told me that a critic called Blood "subtle," but I think the movie is an unrelenting, crushing weight.

No Country was funny and terrifying. No Country has, hands down, the funniest welding bit of any movie from 2007.

"Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?" Carson says.

And then I saw Juno.

It's 1985 again.

Even now, the prison records inaccurately show his current location as "the Soviet Union."

Sam:

A bore is said to be "one who talks about himself when you want to talk about yourself!" which is superficially true enough, but a bore might more accurately be described as one who is interested in what does not interest you, and insists that you share his enthusiasm, in spite of your disinclination.

~Emily Post, Etiquette

Blame it on the Reformation, or: Who is Spain?

But neither Luther nor his troupe of predestinarian acrobats were disputing God; or, disputation does not preclude praise; or, or: when is right?

The Grand Regression of medieval kitsch marches on.

Sam:

Get in on this.

Sometimes a dictator is just a cigar.

Beware the Fury of a Patient Man.

I'd trade all of the Lewises, Chestertons, and Harts for a single solitary slovo from Kundera.

In Prague I knew I'd been a witch burnt alive, a pyre of Soviet kitsch.

O Smilax,

I saw Regina; I called you today.

Remember when we were reading through the psalms?

Love,

Crocus

Remember:

Wallace Stevens.