Geoff Dyer spends a goodly part of his In Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence writing about not being able to write about his chosen subject. He does write reams about travelling in Europe and the States, but his is not a travel book: I think. How did I get to Dyer's book? Well, round about. Back in December I went to see Jonez and Kaufman's film Adaptation, and that sent me back to reread Nicholson Baker's funny U and I: A True Story. Tooling around the web revealed a review of Dyer's book. Dot dot dot. It also mentioned Adaptation and some other books, one of which, I'm currently reading.
Dyer's is an Oblomovian kind of story told near the end of the universe, the end of writing, the end. He's a misanthrope, but not quite as talented as, say, Paul Theroux. Just kind of grumpy. Where Nicholson has his skin condition, which he at least shares with the object of his narrow desire, Dyer sits on a nudist beach contemplating masturbation. Now, I've not read any Lawrence, though I was exposed to Ken Russell's Women in Love back in the late '70s. (Watching Alan Bates and Oliver Read wrestle nude was enough to scar me for weeks.) I never even got around to Lady Chatterly's Lover, and -- truth be told -- I only read Catcher in the Rye a few years back. (It was a strange read at 40, and I cannot reconstruct what it would've been at 16. Helas.) Anyway, Dyer doesn't share anything with Lawrence, except maybe meeting an old lady who as a child used to deliver Lawrence's mail in the villa he rented from her family. He doesn't say aything to her, beyond "Buon giorno," he doesn't despair, but he does write about it. Sort of.
Ran across an interesting site the other day: seems that everybody's favorite search engine has become too damned popular. Keeping tabs on Google just might be a good idea. After all things are getting just too strange. Between websites tracking your online habits and the corner grocery store wanting to add you to their data warehouse before they'll sell you some bleach and condoms, it's enough to make you narapoid. But to fuel some real conspiracy theories, you can go no further than Lawrence Lessig's blog on the laws of Cyberspace.
When did I first read One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow? In 7th or 8th grade, I seem to remember. I was fascinated with numbers like googol (10^100), googolplex (10^googol), and aleph-null. There's a good book on how infinity drove Georg Cantor insane.
Read a bio of Andy Warhol over the weekend and then searched around the web for any survivors from the Factory days: Joe Dallesandro, Paul Morrissey, Billy Name, Ultaviolet, Mary Woronov. In the future, nobody will be conscious for more than fifteen minutes.
A while back I stumbled across the pages of film professor and critic, Ray Carney, and found myself exasperated at his bow-tied intransigence. Throwing out the likes of David Lynch, the Coen brothers, et al., while preserving the strange bedfellows of John Cassavetes and Frank Capra, just seemed too damned strange. Over the weekend, the pessimist in me came up with a theory of a theory of aesthetics: (à la Kracauer) any critic's aesthetics are reverse engineered from their favorite films. Not exactly rocket science, but how else to explain Capra and Cassavetes? (Perhaps filmmakers whose surnames begin with "Ca" ...) I like Cassavetes, both as an actor and a director, but I see no need to get rid of David Lynch and keep Frank Capra on theoretical grounds. Just too shrill. Kurt Krens, Peter Gidal, and Malcolm LeGrice, as well as David Lynch, Michael Curtiz, and John Cassavetes are all engaged in making films. Saying they're not and building a theory of aesthetics on these sandy wastes doesn't help me much. (And for the note, I like Frank Capra, especially Hemo the Magnificent ...)
Links that got me there and beyond: Cinema Electronica, Film and Philosophy, Filmmaker Magazine, indieWIRE, Millennium Film Journal.
The blog is back online. Hurrah!