a few of the loves gained and lost through the years

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Mar. 6

Last night, I streamed “The Handmaiden” (2016) which is amazing—and thanks to the stop-and-start option of streaming, one can be sure to not get frustrated by subtitle reading amid major action. Later discussing this feminist fable of duplicity will be fun.

Now, I’m going to stream “The Souvenir” (2019).

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Mar. 8

“The Souvenir” is well done. I read that it received highest honors at Sundance. I see why—but I didn’t like it. I recognized that I was seeing mature filmmaking that I didn’t like, then slept into Daylight Saving Time resenting Julie’s naïveté, her being seduced into a Rescuer role by her suave (and phony) boyfriend’s control of her. I became an impatient woman wanting Julie to grow up faster.

a muse

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1970: I graduated from university, living in an urban commune, doing mescaline (with “In Search of the Lost Chord” between my ears), reading Joyce, Sartre, Husserl (mygod)....

Tonight, I saw the video of “Joni Mitchell Live at the Isle of Wight Festival, 1970,” new for me, as someone who “worshipped” her, from circa 1971 through the mid-‘80s. [Insert biography of Gary, 1972—1985 in terms of Joni Mitchell songs.]

At the Isle, she’s not the jaded jazz voice, tending toward tonally oblique experimentalism. She’s the girlish folk singer (not looking 27 years old). The camera is commonly on her tightly when she’s at the piano (much closer than the photo here, performing for a crowd of 600,000!), though from a physical distance that would make the intimacy unknown to her, immersed in her songs. The camera’s intimacy feels almost invasive.

an image imagining me

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You know my confessional blog from years ago—so silly at times, but remediable. I ceased doing it in 2011, then wanted to continue in 2015, but barely did so. Well, why not do something with its non-embarrassing postings and begin anew?

mourning walk

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I saw again last night the Juliette Binoche film “Paris” (2009) that I’d seen when it was first released in the U.S., September 2009. I’d forgotten how depressive it could be for someone on the verge of suicide. But it’s not a suicidal movie; just the opposite! Latent to it is luscious validation of life. But someone on the edge of suicide could easily fail to see.

philologist saunters by glade

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There is no pure beginning.... The Oxford University Press 30%-off sale online caused me to see that there were no new books I have to have this week (a relief: I don’t know what to do with the ones I have, apart from the hundred-or-so supposed to be priorities for near-term prospecting). But I realized I really want to see what’s what with David Sobel’s From Valuing to Value, which is available at the library. So, out I went.

note to self: don’t be haunted

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Vanessa Redgrave plays Mrs. Dalloway well. She would.
(I streamed the movie last night.)

The soldier suffering delayed PTSD in Mrs. Dalloway suddenly, in front of his wife, lets himself fall out his apartment window and impales on the iron fence below, as if it was just an impulsive retort to a passerby on the street about the surreality of polite society after surviving Hell.

imaginary yarn

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Having lived through perhaps too many filmic transpositions
of Austenian voices to now avoid teasing your pique toward proper names as modifiers, I avow a persistence of Romanticism as everlasting love of remembering.

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