(no subject)

Adjusted list of books to be read this term:

Long novels:

Uncle Tom's Cabin
The House of Mirth
The Grapes of Wrath
Native Son

Medium novels:

My Antonia
The Big Sleep
Revolutionary Road
Beloved

Short books:

Nature
Song of Myself
Benito Cereno
Miss Lonelyhearts
Goodbye Columbus
The Road (for two classes)

Non-fic books:

The Fire Next Time
Silent Spring
Dreams from My Father
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Zeitoun

Not sure if we're reading all the poems and maybe prose of both poets in the Bishop/Moore class, which also has us presenting on a monograph - I'll try to pick Questions of Mastery, which I get the sense is the most respected one on Bishop. So three or four more books.

Chunks of a whole bunch of other books are assigned, including Walden. And one course is assigning movies: The Dark Knight, When the Levees Broke, If God Is Willing & Da Creek Don't Rise.

Another "recommends" Birth of a Nation, Oklahoma, East of Eden, Wall-E, and An Inconvenient Truth (unless they meant the book?).

I'm worried most about the long novels, eye and time-wise. I read the first half of Uncle Tom a few years ago then skimmed the rest, so maybe I'll just do the reverse of that. House of Mirth I remember pretty well and should just skim too.

Might read all the little ones, despite extreme familiarity, as I love them and they're all pretty short. Goodbye Columbus I've already signed up to present on, so no skipping that.

(no subject)

2. Shoot the Piano Player
3. A Zed and Two Noughts

I'd forgotten almost everything about the first one - everything except there was a gunfight in the snow. Made me think of the Kierkegaard comment about walking away from any relationship the second you fall in love. It also had me thinking of Calvino's lightness essay, as did the fact I'd forgotten so much of it. He turned the knob up on the French bluffness of his actors to make everything seem okay, until even death in the snow is strangely light. Playing drama like comedy, that was big in the early New Wave films, now I think about it, I guess as an antidote to '50s segregation of seriousness and escapism or perhaps some rediscovery of the otherworldliness of cinema. The effect is strange now - I wonder how it was taken back then? I could watch any Truffaut movie any number of times but doubt this one's aged very well, aside from some of its surface entertainments - some of the things he's trying here he does better at the other end of the '60s in Mississippi Mermaid.

The Greenaway was baffling, not in what it was trying to do but that anyone would try to do it. I think in the end I may only like Belly of an Architect, of his, watchable as some of the others have been. Especially annoying was the dialogue, which relentlessly treated itself as clever and witty despite producing no laughter or admiration. Perhaps he was attempting light too but comparatively sucking at it? He seemed to mean a lot to people in the late '80s, early '90s, and did let you see many things you didn't elsewhere in movies. Maybe that's become cheapened by how much of everything we see all the time now. I'm not saying he's a narcissist, or even diagnosably OCD, but it feels like he gets something out of making these movies that's not very closely related to what a viewer does. I got his point - all there is for us here in the end is to flee from or study our own decay, and both enterprises finally fail because our decay doesn't. I just don't really care, as presented.

Maybe in both cases the filmmakers leave off from talking to audiences and just talk to their obsessions and I merely happen to share all of Truffaut's, very few of Greenaway's.