This post will prove so empty that I’ll actually end up explaining the origins of its obligatory image in the main body of the text. Therefore I’ll leave this italicized intro-place blank.
Dear diary,
What does the world need most? Another fool with nothing to say? OK, I’m your man.
My impression is that college graduates maintain a large network of friends. These friends then annually throw birthday bashes to celebrate the anniversary of their fall into sin. Or sin into flesh. I mean the day they got incorporated: mortalized. A birthday bash is where a party of people reserves (or “books”) a restaurant for the night. It’s called a “girls’ night out” cuz there’s only girls in attendance. And this restaurant has a stage, where normally a nightclub singer performs a routine. Diners sip their wine or beer while the talent croons the popular hymn Blue Velvet. The talent wears a wig. (Why don’t we all? I don’t mean those ugly powdered white ones that ancient English judges always honor. I mean a robust, full-bodied wig with bounce and curve that effortlessly renders its wearer chic. You keep your head close-cropped: easy; then you slip on a hairstyle from your portable armoire, which offers a dazzling assortment of colors, lengths, and textures – a fresh new look for every mood.) So the party books out a restaurant that specializes in Mediterranean cuisine, but instead of using the stage at the front for a lounge act, a magician is hired. And every good magician is also a hypnotist. So the party-goers enjoy a vaudeville routine, where lucky members of the audience are called up onstage, and the magician hypnotizes them. “Celine and Julie,” for instance, the impresario introduces his subjects while addressing them directly: “You are now in a boat.” And then Celine and Julie will pantomime boating. This amuses the crowd, because they are hypnotized.
Yet it’s also my impression that not everyone is able to be hypnotized; some people suffer an immunity, as it were. I think that I am one of those folks who cannot be hypnotized. But that’s only if we’re using the concept of hypnosis as a proxy for consumerism. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve never found a place in this market-based society. I like religion: even tho I hate Christianity and every other big-top sham, I’d rather try to get in where I fit in at a church synagogue mosque or “place of worship” than to find my niche in the market. I don’t like buying and selling. I don’t like haggling. I hate banking, accounting and salesmanship. Et cetera.
When I ended the paragraph before that very last paragraph with the sentence “This amuses the crowd, because they are hypnotized,” the meaning could be taken either way: that the volunteer “guinea pigs,” the lucky pair chosen by the maestro from out of the audience—the ones I named Celine and Julie—were the hypnotized entities, OR, on the other hand, that the crowd itself—the whole party—was under hypnosis. But maybe I’m wrong about this; for just now I referred to the legion as “itself” whereas above I said “they,” and that latter term is plural, so…
I think that you get the idea. I hope we’re still friends.
That pair of names was on my mind because of a 1974 movie directed by Jacques Rivette whose French title is English’d as Céline and Julie Go Boating. This film, in turn, was on my mind because we recently finished watching Rivette’s other masterpiece, which was released a few years earlier: the series Out 1. Yesterweek was my second experience seeing it. I really admire it – after my first screening, I liked it a lot, but this repeat viewing blossomed into love. Trivial critics make a big deal about the length of the project; its duration is about thirteen hours. But it’s divided up into not five but eight easy pieces. So it fits the modern form of a television drama shown in a number of episodes, which is why I labeled it a miniseries above; maybe I should’ve said “motion picture” or simply “cinematograph.” Everyone nowadays, in these “End Times” that we’re now enjoying (not because such a disaster was inevitable but because certain brainiacs among us provoked it so as to wring their false prophecy true), I say, everyone nowadays boasts of “binge-watching” their favorite shows on “streaming networks”; well, viewing Out 1 is far less trouble than THAT. I myself spent last summer catching each new episode of David Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks, which totaled as many hours as there are wheels on an eighteen-wheeler, of which I’ve filed sweet sixteen as “evenings wasted” (I use an old-fashioned steel filing cabinet to store detailed records about my daily use of time, which the LORD may cite when judging me).
The point is that my own copy of the set of discs containing the film Out 1 appears in the picture that accompanies this entry. I wanted to share an image of some of the books I’ve watched and movies I’ve read as of late, so that we prisoners of the Internet can remember what it was like to have real fun. Or actually I should say “books I’ve purchased recently” because the two at the left just arrived last Thor in the mail. (By Thor I mean Thor’s day.) Instead of photographing these items on a bookshelf with my phone-cam, I scanned their spines with a stencil duplicator, also known as a mimeograph machine. (Two reasons for this: first, I thought wrongly that you’d be able to read the titles easier, cuz they’d appear clearer; & second, I do not have a phone with a cam: the thing broke: now everything appears to be floating in an undrained swamp, as if the lens got smudged.) But the problem was that the featured books extended past the glass bed of the Photostat, so I had to assemble the image manually by joining two discrete individual displays, both flawed: in the first, Mr Ammons was edging out of the frame; and the second left a void of space like the primal abyss to the right of Mr Ashbery. Then I sewed the pics together by hand; you can probably spot the seam, but I don’t care: I think it looks nice. I say I did a good job. Now here’s a quote from Washington, D.C. by Gore Vidal (chapter 8, part 3):
. . . he suspected that as time passed the division was bound to widen between the many who felt and the few who thought – or was it, he sometimes wondered, simply between those who thought they were feeling and those who felt they were thinking?
Only here, at the very end of this entry, do I realize that, tho I think that I felt that I might have something to say, I forgot what it was.
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