Jan. 23rd, 2011

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Where the trees stopped above the river there was an opening in the branches that changed shape as the wind milled the leaves raggedly edging it. And past that were more trees of the same kind on other hills, all in the changed colors of distance. This wind or another touched those too, and in more places, though to less effect.

The woman and man in the film said simple things under face-simplifying makeup. Their gestures were intelligible and sequential and framed like a painting, except there were no colors. There was a black tree behind their gray coats. They stood between the camera and the one patch of clear sky visible. Their eyes were narrowed, then those of one widened, followed by those of the other, and then both sets narrowed again and stayed that way until the scene was over.

They stepped out of their rectangle into color and smoked a few feet apart above the river. Their hats were really gray, but different kinds. In the movie she loved him but he loved another. Now no one loved anyone so everyone was friendly. They talked about the hills across the river, where one of them was from. They talked about the actress who played the another who'd hit her head on a swinging light and been hospitalized. They talked about the approaching holiday and where they'd go. There had been filming on a rowboat that morning and they still had bits of gnat beneath their fingernails, bits smearing their cigarettes slightly. And now they're both dead.

There would be names for the different colors of distance if we ever saw them together with these nearby. The leaves that blow about in front of those leaves being blown through across the river never touch them, or touch what touches them or even touch what that touches. They're not together. The color of the first hill isn't that of the taller behind it. There would be names for the types of distance if there were fewer of them.

We don't get enough credit for the care we take to stop naming. The leaky Platonism of language is a refuge, an opiate. Imagine how it would be to remember everybody.
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But nothing on television ever had me half as interested as Lost did at its peak.

I once thought life was too short to abide failure, in myself or elsewhere. But success is so accidental, so formal an advantage that you miss almost everything there is to miss if you chase it religiously. Lost failed overall and almost everywhere, but though that's enraging it's not important.
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Three allusions in a row in Troilus piqued my interest:

1. "Why, she is a pearl / Whose face has launched above a thousand ships"

Slight modification of the most famous line from Dr. Faustus. Shakespeare quotes "whoever loved that loved not at first sight" in Winter's Tale [Edit: As You Like It], but identifies that quotation with a further allusion to a sad [Edit: dead] shepherd: Marlowe's one surviving lyric being "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." And though I've found my Pavane, I'm still missing the allusion Shakespeare makes to the Jew of Malta's "but that was in another country and besides the wench was dead" arch-startlement which I can't seem to convince myself I hallucinated, along with passages from Proust and Tolstoy. You wonder if any other playwright even mattered to him.

2. "Paris, you speak / Like one besotted on your sweet delights."

"Sweet delight" is a phrase Spenser uses in his Garden of Adonis episode, then Marlowe in his Dr. Faustus prologue, Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece and apparently here, Webster in Malfi, and Blake much more famously in "Auguries of Innocence" and I think at least a couple other places? It's at least inclusively sexual everywhere but in Marlowe, where it refers to Faust's love of forbidden magic - which we later find, proto-Zuckerberg that he is, was about sex too. Are any two words together more sweetly delightful? Blake retired the phrase, we all just think of Blake now.

[Google finds it a couple times in The Mirror for Magistrates too. Maybe a classical source?]

3. "Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy."

Hector walks off-meter in that line so Ben Jonson, conceivably playing one of the characters on stage, has a second to completely lose it. Bloom's sure the 'Coast of Bohemia' in Winter's Tale was planted to give Ben a hernia. This one here couldn't possibly not be.
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That's a lot of misremembering in one post.

Who was talking about reading "misled" as the past tense of "to misle" a while back? I did that too, and know others who have. Another common one seems to be thinking the three kings in the Christmas carol share rulership of a place called Orientar. You wondered if decisions had to be unanimous or just two out of three.

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