20 minutes of Shame and the Knight of the Woeful Countenance

(I wrote the original version of this post yesterday, conscientiously using Word in case Blogger proved tricksy as it has with past drafts. Alas, my version of Word was suddenly possessed by a demon of deletion, which crashed the program just as I attempted to save my post. So I took a day to mourn its loss before trying again.)

I have just been bobbing along of late, trying to accomplish a plethora of irritating tasks (you know, minor ones, like submitting the final, revised copy of my dissertation, and trying to get a job). I have been devoting most of my time to preparing Don Quixote for class, which is equal parts delight and weight-lifting (both intellectual and physical), but I have also been trying to put my toe back in the water of blogging, blog-reading, actual reading, and movie-watching, after many months of starvation in all of those activities. Last night I finished off both The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Ingmar Bergman’s Shame while trying to get to sleep, and enjoyed them both tremendously. I will admit that my schedule is still crazy enough that I am forced to watch films episodically, rewarding myself for having completed fixed work goals with a short segment of film. This is hardly an ideal way to watch a movie, but it has created a rather odd feature in my work planning over the last several days: my To Do list has been dotted regularly with entries that read “20 minutes of Shame.”

So here are a few more notes before I have to return to the Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

~~~~~

Polaroid has announced that it will stop producing film, and Geoff Dyer writes a wonderful essay that reflects on the peculiarities of a form that is photographic but not endlessly reproducible - a photograph for which there can be only one copy in existence, and where you can be almost certain that every subject performed the exact same ritual mere moments after it was taken (flap flap flap – [peer peer] – “not ready yet” – flap flap flap). How often can you suppose such unity of experience for the subjects of any other art form?

~~~~~

Iliana at Bookgirl’s Nightstand was seeking suggestions for literary podcasts to listen to on her iPod, and this led me down the long procrastinatory lane of wondering which podcasts on a range of different subjects I would deem my favorites at the moment. (I am, you see, a mad podcast fiend. If there were a podcast den where people did nothing all day but listen to talk radio and its offspring on their iPods, I would be there. Actually, my podcast addiction mostly rears its ugly head when I am doing what I might call transitional tasks that preclude reading, like doing the dishes or walking to work.)

So, a list. What are my favorite podcasts right now?
1) On film: Filmspotting
2) On food: KCRW's Good Food (thanks for recommending this one, R!)
3) On poetry: alt.NPR: Poetry Off the Shelf
4) On journalism/media issues: On the Media
5) On literature/cultural events: Start the Week with Andrew Marr
6) On life: This American Life.

Does anyone else have a favorite podcast they would like to share with me, thus becoming an enabler of my rampant addiction?

~~~~~

Last, but not least, a delightful twist of form - a short story in footnotes by Gregory Norminton. I think I will put his novel Serious Things on my “to acquire” list.

Pot-bellied piglets and artistic access

A wee life update before moving on to more entertaining subjects: I found out this week that the job I really wanted (oh, it would have been perfect both professionally and personally) had been given to someone else. Someone else who had accepted the offer. So now I am down in the dumps. It seems that I will certainly be on the soul-destroying academic job market AGAIN next year, even if I get one of the very exciting short-term positions (Visiting Professorships and post-doctoral fellowships) that I have applied for.

And that may be why it made me so absurdly happy, as I was walking through Old Campus, to see a pot-bellied piglet (does the English language contain a more satisfying phrase than that?) wandering free, snuffling amongst the fallen acorns, and running up to people to wrinkle his expressive little snout at them communicatively. (Not to worry, this owner was supervising the piglet’s social life approvingly from nearby.) Perhaps I am just pet-starved (the second, and last surviving, of my two childhood pets died recently), but this was cuteness pigified. (The picture above is of one variety of domesticated pig, a kunekune sow and piglet.) So, of course I had to investigate the nature of pot-bellied pigs, and I discovered a site that assures me they are house-trainable and can be quite affectionate, but that “piglets can be quite aloof or fearful at first.” Let me just say that the piglet I just saw was at the opposite end of the spectrum from “aloof.” He was downright flirtatious and investigative!

~~~~~

In other news, Carrie Frye is right, Garfield minus Garfield is a font of delightful oddity. I wonder what other icons of comics kitsch could be transformed into avant garde koans by removing a character?

~~~~~

My favorite new word (learned from a New Yorker article called “Numbers Guy” by Jim Holt in the March 3 issue) is “numerate,” which I can only assume is a numerical equivalent for “literate,” that is “able to communicate numerical concepts symbolically.” Great word, although I can’t quite see how I am going to work it into my everyday conversation.

~~~~~

Natasha Tripney blogs about the problem of balancing accessibility and innovative uses of space in the theatre. Should experimentations with unconventional theatrical spaces (particularly those that require the audience to move through the space with the action) be confined by considerations of how mobile or comfortable their spectators will be? This seems to me something that individual theatre groups are going to have to balance the ethics of themselves. One of the characteristics of theatre is the impossibility of any individual viewer grasping it in its entirety, since each performance is different and (especially in these sorts of innovative environmental stagings) each vantage point is distinct. Perhaps, then, rather than limiting what can be accomplished with theatrical space to what can be made universally accessible, the solution is to reject the very notion of universal accessibility, and deny all your viewers (even and perhaps especially the most mobile ones) some portion of the show, playing up both its ephemerality and the unique but equally valid experience of each viewer. Just a thought.

~~~~~
While I’m on an ethical tangent: LibraryThing’s discussion boards have played host to many an argument about the ethics of buying and trading used books in a cultural economy that is already somewhat… financially harsh for authors. I have sympathy for this point of view, although I would temper it by saying that 1) as with teaching, there are more than just financial incentives for artistic creation, and the greater accessibility to art that libraries, used bookstores, book-trading sites, museums, etc. provide speaks to the other rewards this creation can reap, and 2) the circulation of used books contributes mightily to economies of prestige and esteem that, in the long term, result in higher book sales for authors. I have only anecdotal evidence for the latter, but I will say that there is many an author I would never have tried (because I don’t have an infinite budget for book-buying) if I hadn’t acquired a used book, but whose work I later bought new either for myself or for friends.


At any rate, Bookmooch has been pondering how it, as a book-trading community, can support authors financially, and it is conducting an “Experiment in Generosity." This experiment involves giving authors the opportunity to list books that are out of print, and print them on demand even as they are mooched. If the moocher likes the book, s/he would then make a donation to the author through PayPal (larger if s/he wanted to keep the book, smaller if s/he wanted to pass it on to other potential donors). Bookmooch is interested in hearing what you think about this new way of thinking about the economics of literary creation (click on the link above to tell them), and I would be too. Do you think authors could break even this way? It would certainly be good for readers if more out-of-print books could be made available this way.

Watched (on screen) in 2008 (Catching up)

An ongoing list of films and DVDs I watched this year (the new entries are #4-6):

1. Winter Light [The Communicants] (1962, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
   
• As my life has gotten steadily busier and more distressing I have found Ingmar Bergman a perplexing source of solace. This is the fifth or sixth I have watched recently, and I must admit that I have developed a quite a crush on Gunnar Björnstrand. So... this film, in which he plays a existentially despairing pastor incapable of giving comfort to his flock or returning the love of his mistress, was an all-too-real piece of heartbreak. It opens with a long, impressive scene lifted uninterruptedly from a Lutheran service, and as Björnstrand's minister moves anxiously about the church painted demons leer, mourning, over his shoulder from the hallowed walls. [January 3, 2008 ****]
  
2. Suddenly, Last Summer (1959, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
• The short play by Tennessee Williams that lurks behind this film is a well nigh perfectly crafted piece of claustrophobic storytelling, in which the tales crafted by a dead man's domineering mother and possibly-mad cousin are simultaneously deeply convincing and lushly, impossibly heightened in their affect. Mankiewicz's film opens well, but as it progresses much of this narrative intensity and literary vividness (a vividness which, like the bright, precise colors of a high definition tv, seems more real than real) is dispersed by changing scenes (unity of place served Williams *very* well in the original, if I remember correctly) or displaced by melodrama, a poor substitute. In part the film declines in strength because Katherine Hepburn (in one of her best performances - the unnerving power of the severe Violet Venable suits her talents better than any screwball role ever did), who dominates the film's opening, increasingly takes a back seat to the therapeutic relationship between her careworn niece and the doctor Mrs. Venable has called in to lobotomize the girl. This is also the case in the play (and to great effect), but unfortunately for the film both the doctor (Montgomery Clift, still shattered from his traumatizing car accident) and the questionably sane Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor, who demonstrates an enraging lack of control over her voice) turn in really poor performances. If I remember the play properly, the chilling ending is also thrown over in the film for a more maudlin choice. Ah well - it is all almost redeemed by the sight of Katherine Hepburn descending slowly like a god composed entirely of cheekbones into her living room in a contraption that more closely resembles a wrought-iron throne than an elevator. [Saturday, January 5, 2008 ***]
  
3. The Silence (1963, dir. Ingmar Bergman)
• Bergman does Antonioni, with all the revisions to that bleak and glossy worldview (a rather allegorical outlook, for instance) that one might expect. Two sisters (one cerebral, put-upon, and dying and one fleshly, spontaneous and vicious) and their wide-eyed innocent of a child (it is hard to say that one or the other is more maternal to him) prowl desperately about a desolate hotel in a country that in the midst of some unspoken civil unrest. The "silence" is famously a spiritual one, but what is fascinating is how little actual silence there is in the film, at first on the level of lack of noise (the world of The Silence is filled to brimming with the claustrophobic pressures of diegetic noise - clocks ticking lives away, crowds shuffling oppressedly, radios playing tinny Bach), and then later on the level of lack of conversation. The sisters delight in their linguistic isolation from the people of the hotel and town: without the local language their central characteristics are played up through interpersonal contact - intellectual attempts at connection through music or the acquisition of individual words in the new language for one sister, and a more bodily form of communication for the other. This is by far the bleakest Bergman film I have seen, and although it was interesting and beautiful, it was also the least enjoyable and most schematic. [Sunday, February 3, 2008 ***1/2]
  
4. Paisan (1946, dir. Roberto Rossellini)
• It took me months of watching to get through this relatively short set of Italian neo-realist films. Paisan, or Paisa, is a series of six linked short pieces about interactions between the American, British and German forces and civilians in Italy in the latter stages of WWII. They often raise interesting situations (like that of a black GI faced first with the racism and trickery of the Italian street urchins he comes into contact with, and then with their brutal poverty), but like many overworked short stories, they strive too hard for a poignant, dramatic ending or set-piece for which there hasn't been a sufficiently rich narrative foundation. [Feb 10, 2008 ***]
  
5. The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard (2007, mini-series)
• I had heard that this series (about a previously apolitical woman who stages a surprisingly successful run for the Prime Ministry of Britain on a common-sense and transparency platform) was a bit cheesy, but I was gamely enjoying it until the abrupt and undercutting ending. All this build-up of plot-lines for naught! We were just left hanging, as if they had intended a much longer series than they had been able to afford to make. (Is this in fact what happened?) I felt mocked and derided. (Yes, I take my television endings very seriously.) [Feb 13, 2008 **]
  
6. Vantage Point (2008, dir. Pete Travis)
• When I saw the trailer for this thriller in which a terrorist act is viewed from eight different "vantage points" I was filled with a desire to see it, not least because it is extremely well cast (also, I can love a good thriller with the best of them). However, it turns out that this is one of those films which has really found its highest form of expression in the trailer genre. Excruciatingly badly written, it was also remarkably short for its fragmented structure (I know this smacks of "The food was terrible and there wasn't enough of it," but in this case the brevity of each "vantage point" narrative was the source of a lot of the film's weakness). The result: we ended up seeing the same horrific acts over and over until we were numbed and even a little irritated by them (did they just want to get the most mileage out of expensive special effects?), but major characters played by famous actors were given little to no back story. Ugh. Excruciating. Half a star for a good cast, who were almost universally wooden and under-rehearsed. [Feb 28, 2008 *1/2]
  
7. What will be next? Who can say?