proximoception | (no subject)

Actually I think the movie as a whole--a whole movie, I mean--wasn't as good as it was for me last time. That was the first time I saw the full version, though, a special gift, and it's only been three years [edit: six(!)]. Also I haven't been in a position to fully concentrate, which is perhaps part of why I've only been able to read Calvino for so long, since he's the best writer who never requires scrutiny, who reliably makes you feel he'll bring you in on whatever he's up to. I wasn't up to the work I was up to last time, the grateful reconstruction of a great whole from the unwinding sequence of fragments. But this time the film was more affecting, too affecting, frightening in a way films don't frighten me, and perhaps my losing sight of the structure, the edges, was part of why.

What was sleeping woke up when Isak told his story; it gave me a piece back, much the way getting to swim did. But what hit me even harder was the grandmother's description of loss, talking with the ghost of her dead son, which I'm sure I appreciated on previous viewings but was in no position to know just how right it is:

My feelings came from deep in my body. Even though I could control them, they shattered reality, if you know what I mean. Reality has remained broken ever since, and, oddly enough, it feels more real that way. So I don't bother to mend it. I just don't care anymore if nothing makes sense.

Funny how the pauses make it mean better, though the transcription still strikes me as exactly right, exactly what it's like.

Books are so clumsy with pauses, or rather readers are clumsy and the books are helpless to help.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I haven't read Little, Big, despite urging. I guess I'm saving it for a rainy day.

You're right to put F&A & Ordinary People together. Both have an intense, mean, unhappy parent who's shown to be functioning at the bare edge of capacity. The Bishop's desperation. One wants to ask, where does it come from? What did...you know, not anyone's bad behavior, what did just the order and the responsibility, what did the sheer impregnability of that house (just the house, not even the Church) do to make him?

And then there he is, scrawny in a nightshirt. He's totally pathetic. Which leads me to the thought that there's not many depictions of the pathetic. What do you need to depict that? Nerve, pretty obviously. What else?

Putting men in nightshirts seems to do the trick. I wonder why?

I take the medievalness and bleakness of the house as attacks on religion--putting paradise There inevitably drains it from Here.