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[proximoception]

LJ Interests meme results

1. august strindberg:
   He's genuinely crazy but I love reading him. Everyone's at each other's throats in his plays, either that or crying at each other's feet. Argument, lamentation, bitter ranting, invective, wild gestures, random violent actions. What more could you want in a play? Women should watch out, as the man had the mama issues. He's also a Gnostic, now and then, though usually of the "fuck this world" variety.
2. david cronenberg:
   I love eXistenZ and feel rather alone in this. (Naked Lunch and Videodrome I love also but laugh at.) I have enough little boy left in me to love gross things, I guess; gotta be able to get over all that to realize/care what an imaginative and skilled storyteller Cronenberg is, one of the best going in fact. The Fly was dumb though.
3. feminism:
   This is...an interest rather than a passion (as you might guess from those first two interests). Nearly everyone is wrong, in these dark arguments, because nearly everyone lets desire shape analysis--rather than the other way--on matters so close to home. I think the main reason is the I/We problem. We're social beasts, we feel most powerful when we represent the company; downside: when the company's attacked, we feel attacked. Well, no company is ever doing more than a few things right, so most any attack is justified. Almost every accusation leveled by one sex against the other is broadly true. As for that divide: gender's as fluid as any other human behavior pattern, can be changed under pressure, is itself being ever reformed by pressures. But the pressures exist, and some are older and realer than we are.
4. goethe:
   One of my very favorites, I think I've read all of his translated works except the autobiographies. You're going to love him or you're going to hate him (apart from Faust 1, where you're just going to love him). He's amazingly unhysterical, having found an inner calm so strong it calms the world. Anxious writers are more "exciting", they switch tracks and tricks a lot, feeling pursued. But Goethe builds things up, packs things in, gets things just right. Sticks to one thing at a time better than anyone since Sophocles, also.
5. johann wolfgang von goethe:
   See 4.
6. louis armstrong:
   I have amazingly shallow taste in general. Whoever's most famous and popular is who I tend to like, hopefully for the reasons that made them f&p rather than the fact of their being f&p. I love his love of life, his love of variations. He's like a happy tourguide who leaves the script and trail, says "let's go over here a while, come look at this."
7. philosophy:
   Jeez, dumb one. Don't follow this in any disciplined way (I have a lifelong allergy to reading lengthy "nonfiction", feels somehow like brainwashing), but I'm as interested as anyone in what the deal is and how to lie about it. I.e. philosophy.
8. robert frost:
   My favorite American poet, along with Bishop and Dickinson, though I've probably spent more time rereading Stevens. Many think him too easy, others too evil. It's that he has a great respect for the surface of things: the architectures of our depths rely on surface rays, which come and go in ways we have trouble predicting or recalling. Frost grasps and follows them, always for good reasons. Darkest and last to desert you, of the self-help poets.
9. titian:
   In painting I like realism--because I know how hard it is--and I like power, and I love when someone can fuse them. Make people big, make their heads big, put it all on their distinct expression, make them glow a bit, make the rest dark or simple, keep it about people, about what's strong in them. You go through galleries and these pictures are the ones that stick out, not vast twisty landscapes or squiggly ashtrays. Visual art doesn't get better than a great Renaissance portrait.
10. william faulkner:
    Been a while since I read him, actually. Faulkner's greatest gift is reminding you what it feels like when it feels absolutely terrible; not just the pain but the transfigured meanings, the visionary aspect of the shock-state. Can't think of anyone who touches him in this.

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Comments

2. David Cronenberg

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Dead Ringers

I also thought, with Cronenberg as one item, that there was something of a Canadian center of gravity in your interests.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

(Dead Ringers! of course!) I loved Canada a lot more before I came here. Mum's the word.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

I loved love eXistenZ, too. Some things I'm fond of are: the repeated gesture of grasping the back of a chair (because "chair" is such a typical example in a philossophical or maybe dorm-room dicussion of 'how do I know what's real?'); the smart idea to put the body, uneasily and ickily, into the disembodied cyber future.

[agoraphiliac.livejournal.com]

oops, i love it only once.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Never even noticed that about the chairs. A lovely thing about the movie, it's so thought through, yet seems so random.

[phronesis.livejournal.com]

william faulkner:
Been a while since I read him, actually. Faulkner's greatest gift is reminding you what it feels like when it feels absolutely terrible; not just the pain but the transfigured meanings, the visionary aspect of the shock-state. Can't think of anyone who touches him in this.

I agree entirely about Faulkner (not that I disagree with the others) - finishing a Faulkner novel gives me a very unique feeling physically accompanied by a chill that goes down my body into my toes - never has happened with anyone else.