22 December 2024

Some thots, quotes, reactions, and opinions

Dear diary,

Merry Christmas 2024. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. May God fill your life with joy & gladness this holiday season. Signed: President & Mrs. Tad Smattering, Saul Christ College.

I copied the above message verbatim from the card that I received in the mail today from my alma mater.

A while ago, I told you about my phone falling ill and going into shock and blacking out when people call it. I now report that this problem has been solved. The battery was failing; so I purchased an extra-long power-cord: Now I just keep the device plugged in, and it functions properly.

Hey, I overheard you listing several book titles that you hope to read, and then you said, “But I fear that I will not have time to get through all of these.” – I just want to say that I relate to this: it’s how I almost always feel; I’m normally pressed for time; but this year I took a break from all debauchery, which has freed me up to do much more reading than I’m used to. For the record, I think it’s more important to re-read deeply the books that mean the most to yourself, as opposed to rapidly inhaling zillions of new texts that will ultimately be forgetten.

I prefer to read books slowly and incrementally. Blake, Franz Kafka, the Bible: most of my best-loved books I treat this way. And poetry in general – it exists to be contemplated; I feel that I have not even given an initial reading to a poem until I’ve read it over and over. It might be best to say that a poem has not been truly read until one knows it by heart. Here is the understatement of understatements: Deep, slow, intensive reading is superior to skimming.

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Regarding The Godfather (1972), it’s easy for us United Statesians to relate to, because, for decades (centuries?), we have been governed by mobsters.

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Movies are obviously a team effort; so, when we speak of any film’s “author,” we’re basically making an assumption and engaging in guesswork about causation. The question is: Whose efforts bequeathed the project its defining qualities, essence or personality? But how can anyone determine which member of a congregation was responsible for any mass-task, let alone one so subjective as the identity of an artwork! And who’s to say that only a single individual is the culprit, in any case? The field is messy. Yet that’s what I like about it. My understanding is that some French critics from around the late 1950s to the late 1960s trumpeted an edict proclaiming the director to be the auteur of a film. Their idea makes sense to me, because the director is theoretically the only member of the crew who has power to veto any other member’s decisions. Of course, there are exceptions to it; but this is a helpful rule of thumb. What matters to me is being able to find the best movies fast; and that’s why I pay attention to the name of the director, and I follow the work of directors’ careers. So far, for me, this has passed the pragmatic test of improving my life; for I am constantly screening the finest films, night after night; watching sublime gems, poetic masterpieces, wild & daring works of genius; I’m in cineaste bliss – whereas all my friends and family, who follow actors instead of directors, are constantly frowning through tedious movies that stink.

Now you’re curious, so you ask: “Are there any actors who can get you to watch a film just because they’re in it?” – The only one I can think of is W. C. Fields.

But anytime I watch ongoing shows like ___________ (I honestly can’t think of any examples), I’m following a circus of performers rather than a single artist, because the director of each individual episode isn’t always even specified. As our dying culture’s art deteriorates into group-made miniseries overseen by financial executives, it will be increasingly difficult to locate the mind who’s most responsible for the SOUL of any given project.

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You think that you’ve noticed surrealism becoming more popular? That might be the case – either way, it’s fine with me. When something becomes popular, it doesn’t make it better or worse. The crowd follows fads, and sometimes a multitude of people will embrace a work of art that I too admire; but more often than not, I’ll find myself most enthusiastic about things for which there’s only a small audience: the happy few. It’s a good feeling to be in agreement with the rest of the population – I wish that the things I create and love were equally admired by the masses. When the majority is with me, they are a blessed congregation; when they’re against me, they’re just the herd. I don’t try to seek out that which is unpopular, and I place no value on being arcane or unknown; but if something strikes me as holy, while nobody else has the sense to perceive its magnificence, I will never let this lack of support infect my intuition.

The Lord said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.’ Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” [Isaiah 6:8-10]

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ALERT: just this instant, David Lynch released all the videos from his old website’s 2009 series called Interview Project: they’re now on YouTube in a playlist. David Lynch Dot Com was a pay site, and I never subscribed (not because of money: it was rather that my Internet connection was too slow, back in those days), so I never saw any of the parts of the Project when they originally were made. But now my sweetheart & I just finished watching them all – it took a few nights because there are more than a hundred total, with each episode on average being about 4 minutes long. I hold this as one of Lynch’s masterpieces: it’s among his very best works.

Interview Project is a 20,000-mile road trip where 121 people were found at random and interviewed. Those interviews were edited into short films and showcased on David Lynch’s website. When David took his site down, the Interview Project material was also taken down. To commemorate the 15-year anniversary of the original launch of the series, the Interview Project Team has decided to re-release all 121 of the original episodes in hi-definition.

That’s the description from the official page – the account’s name is DAVID LYNCH THEATER.

Now that we’ve finished our cinematic vacation, we’re resettling into our usual routine of following thru select directors’ filmographies. Next up are John Huston and Ingmar Bergman. Huston’s debut feature was The Maltese Falcon (1941); he also made Key Largo (1948) and The African Queen (1951). And Bergman directed countless favorites, including The Seventh Seal (1957) and Persona (1966). Each man’s career is immense, and, until now, although I’ve seen many pictures from each, I’ve never bothered to search out and screen all their works.

Since I just finished transcribing some dialogue from the last Bergman film we watched, I’ll share this little exchange from what was originally released in the U.S. as Frustration (1947):

[Johannes and Sally are standing on the shoreline.]
JOHANNES: Look! [points to a ship in the distance] Africa, America, India. . . . You don’t know what Africa looks like, coming in at night, slowly, after spending months at sea; coming in at night to a harbor full of light. . . . The water dark and calm. And the air smells differently from here – it has a wild smell. It makes you wild.
SALLY: How do you know about all this?
JOHANNES: I’ve read about it in books. . . . And the negroes stare at you with their white eyes. You hear languages you don’t understand. People are black instead of white. Everything is new and different.

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You say that you’ve been thinking about maybe reading some of the Wizard of Oz books. – I was thinking the same thing, myself, until I read a group of critical essays by various writers, all appraising the work of author L. Frank Baum; now I’m convinced that the great worth resides exclusively in the MGM film from 1939. That movie is magic – I sometimes think it’s the best ever made. Whereas the consensus among readers is that Baum’s books are OK but uneven. I’ll share the gist of a piece I found helpful – the following is from the chapter “L. Frank Baum and Oz” in the book Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White by Roger Sale . . .

Baum wrote quickly and never seems to have worried if he could sustain his interest for the length of a whole book. He seems to have known when he began a book how he wanted it to start, and perhaps where he wanted it to end, but he left the middle to be contrived as he went along. Rereading The Wizard, for instance, is always a strange experience for anyone who has come to know Victor Fleming’s movie. Book and movie each begin wonderfully and in different ways; the movie has its spectacular cyclone and shift from brown-and-white to color, and Baum’s matter-of-factness about Kansas, cyclones, and the Munchkins is winning. From then on, though, the advantages seem to belong to the movie. Baum’s admirers may complain about having the whole thing be a dream, but the movie makes the dream create its own kind of sense, by emphasizing two characters, the Wizard and the Wicked Witch of the West, whom Baum uses only as part of his zoo.

As you know, my sweetheart & I read aloud together daily from a handful of books. We’ve been enjoying a lot of so-called young-adult literature lately, because of our siblings’ children: There’s a selection of the Arabian Nights waiting for us, after we finish our tome of Hans Christian Anderson stories (we’re on page 977 out of 1,068; yes I regret the overkill), and then the tales of the Brothers Grimm. We also recently read A. A. Milne’s two books of Winnie-the-Pooh (which we deeply loved); Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (which we also loved – it’s surprisingly baroque); and Robert Louis Stevenson’s tenderly beautiful volume A Child’s Garden of Verses. Plus, on my own, just to compare it to Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, I reread Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. For many reasons, I prefer Just So Stories – THEY’RE the best.

P.S.

At the bottom of the back of the second page of your last e-prayer, you mention a variety of crimes that you think you’ve committed (“extremely poor penmanship”; “I’m more than two payments behind on my tithing”; etc.), for which you mock-apologize. But I say: Do not even mock-worry about any of these offenses. Remember, the Lord Christ died for everyone, and ALL is forgiven. Even those who hate God and reject His salvation will be saved.

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