Catch-up entry (movies, books)

Here’s a detail of the garment of the statue of Demeter of Knidos.

Sir or Madam,

Let me report some of the things that I did during the months when I was vacationing from this journal.

I finished reading Tolstoy’s War & Peace, now it’s my favorite book. The best book I’ve ever read. Also I read many other books; I’ll try to remember to tell you about them later . . .

And my sweetheart joined me in searching out and viewing the full filmography of certain directors I’ve long admired. Our pace was one film per night; we got most of them via interlibrary loans. We screened all of Hitchcock (for the Nth time, in my case – ever since I was a little tiny boy, I’ve owned a copy of Truffaut’s famous book on Hitch, so this was not my first trip up the bell tower) . . . also the films of Jean Renoir, son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir . . . Then we watched all the films of Luis Buñuel . . . and Jean-Luc Godard (in reverse order, from newest to oldest; cuz I’m very familiar with his earliest work, and I wanted to make sure that I saw all his most recent work – I’m glad that I did this, because I found his latest films extremely attractive) (but even some of Godard’s early works are new to me because I could never find copies of them at the VHS rental stores of my childhood – his 5th feature, for instance, Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen] from 1963, I just watched for the first time and loved: the film is Godard’s stab at making a movie like Dupieux’s Wrong Cops or David Lynch’s DumbLand – definitely my cup of tea) . . . and Nicholas Ray . . . and Sergei Eisenstein . . . and Fritz Lang . . .

I fear that it would bore me to list all the directors at once; so now I’ll leave off.

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NOTE. Today, my sweetheart made an appointment with a seller from the classified ads to purchase a queen-size bedframe for seventy U.S. dollars, because our current frame is old and extremely evil. So, at some point, I will need to break from writing this and go help her haul that.

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Here is my position on video games. (When I mentioned this subject in my previous entry, I received bags of hate-mail from my readership berating me for neglecting to reveal my official position on video games; so here it is.) I like them more, the more that they resemble pinball. I mean: fast, colorful, flashy, with boinging sound-effects. And I like best when games are simple and wholesome. I don’t like fighting enemies . . . especially that type of game called the “first-person shooter,” where you’re forced to play a character who’s at war with everything. For each of these shoot-em-up games, I think they should make an alternate version that is free from violence. I’m not speaking from a moral standpoint but only from laziness. It’s too annoying to be in conflict with everybody.

Incidentally, my favorite filmmaker David Lynch once designed his own video game, which almost made it to the marketplace – its title was Woodcutters From Fiery Ships. Here is a quote (from The Guardian, 19 Nov. 1999) of Lynch in his own words describing the essence or story of the game:

Certain events have happened or are sort of happening in a bungalow which is behind another house in Los Angeles. And then suddenly the woodcutters arrive and they take the man who we think has witnessed these events; and their ship is silver, like a 1930’s ship, and the fuel is logs. . . . And they smoke pipes.

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Do you enjoy attending rock concerts? My nerves are too extreme for public events. I get too anxious having to sit still amid a crowd of people. I used to drive into the city regularly and see movies at “art-house” theaters and various places like the U of M. This I would do alone, to try to conquer my agoraphobia; also of course because I was interested in the films. But nowadays I just give in to my fear and stay home. None of the modern cineplexes show the types of pictures I want to see, anyway. And I think that rock music sounds better on prerecorded media played thru a home stereo system or headphones.

I also bought a big (700+ pages) book about Godard: it’s called Everything is Cinema by Richard Brody. I really liked it. And I read Werner Herzog’s new memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All. Then I read a book on Fritz Lang by Lotte Eisner – she coincidentally was the film critic whom Herzog claims to have saved the life of, by way of taking a long walk: When Eisner fell gravely ill, Herzog went on foot from Munich to Paris, because he thought that as long as he kept walking, she would not die; and this apparently worked, for Eisner lived many years longer, despite being nearly 80 at the time; then, one day she asked Herzog to “lift the spell that was on her” so that she could finally pass away; and he did, and then she died a few days later.

Lang is a solid director, by the way. Setting aside his early lost films, I’ve now seen all of his more than forty features, and they were ALL very good, except for one.

I loved reading My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir. Also I read great books by and about Buñuel, plus interviews with him. And another big book on Nicholas Ray by Bernard Eisenschitz . . .

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Here is where I got interrupted and had to go fetch the new bedframe.

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My favorite Nicholas Ray films ended up being In a Lonely Place (1950), The Lusty Men (1952 – a film about bull riding at rodeos), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Party Girl (1958, starring Cyd Charisse: the actress whose picture I stole for my Angela Willsher account, back in my Facebook days). But I loved pretty much everything from Ray. And it’s interesting how almost all the films he made from his debut up to around the time of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) were genuine tragedies, even tho they sometimes seem like they have typical Hollywood-happy endings. It’s a trick he’s adept at: If you restate it in plain language, the gist of what you watched would sound obviously negative; but, in the audiovisual moment, the way that it’s presented feels almost positive.

A bit more news from the reading front: I’ve been looking into works that were published near the beginning of the U.S. So I recently bought a copy of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which has many curious short texts, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

I also read through two early U.S. poets: William Cullen Bryant and John Greenleaf Whittier. And the early U.S. novel called The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. (Why are all early United Statesians called by 3 names? Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . . ) David Herbert Lawrence wrote Studies in Classic American Literature, which I’ve read before with great pleasure; but I never bothered to read the less-familiar books that he mentions, until now. That’s why I finally slew Cooper’s Deerslayer and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Lawrence, by the way, is in top form illuminating Franklin); also Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, which I found engaging . . . Then I re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and it was better than I remembered WHAT A PERFECT POEM; and I read also yet again The Blithedale Romance, which is Hawthorne’s fictionalized memories of living communally with a sort of socialist farm group. I read for the first time Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, which is a journal of time spent onboard a seafaring vessel collecting animal skins and working hard (that is, suffering). I’d like to read Melville’s early novels Typee and Omoo but I haven’t yet. I just finished Walden by Henry David Thoreau and was underwhelmed. Thoreau is weak sauce to us Emerson addicts. Oh, and I finally bought my own copy of the third edition (1860) of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I usually read Harold Bloom’s selection of Whitman from the American Poets Project, because THAT is the best by far.

My sweetheart and I have also been baking together: we have found a really tasty recipe for brownies, and one for chocolate chip cookies, plus a decent way to make pineapple carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I’d like to learn how to cook full meals, like dishes that could be served as the main course, but I’m starting with desserts because they’re easy and rewarding. It’s fun.

And the only piece of music that I’ve listened to lately is Eliott Carter’s “Concerto for Orchestra.”