Netflix

Hey fellas? What's cooler than cool?

White Heat!

It's damn good, but I still think The Public Enemy is my favorite Cagney.

#68

Easily one of the strangest novels I've read. Brian Leonard--a champion marksman, a biologist, and a pilot--is doing fieldwork, studying the movement of a group of cougars transplanted from suburban California and into Wyoming ranchlands. Brian is a strange guy, a 40-year old virgin with no emotional involvement of any kind with another human being. That in itself is not so strange, but rather the reason he became such a man is strange. When he was 13 he was masturbating while his lesbian sister and mother were arguing. He did this often, and got a charge from it. His mother would try to "cure" Diana by bringing men home to seduce her, and teenage Brian would jerk off listening to this regularly. On this particular occasion, his orgasm was perfectly timed with the self-inflicted gunshot that killed his sister. As a result Brian fears he's a potential sexual killer, and sublimates all emotional and physical desire into his marksmanship training.

Now, doing his cougar fieldwork, Brian is so desperately lonely that he decides to test himself by hiring a young woman to assist him. He teaches Leya how to fly a helicopter so she can steer while he shoots coyotes for money and tracks radio collars of big cats. She's your stereotypical tree-hugger lefty and can't abide what he does to pay her salary, but also she's been shabbily treated by her ex-husband and needs the work and companionship herself. Much of the book features her trying to get Brian to open up emotionally. He shoots things instead and refuses because he doesn't want to find out he can't get it up without shooting her. The give-and-take between frigid naive Leya and ultra-repressed Brian is terribly frustrating, but their exaggerated situations are not dissimilar to the problems apparent in many hetero relationships, which is one of the themes of this complex little book. Meanwhile cougars and coyotes prowl and mate and destroy foals without getting all worked up about it, and there's some intrigue with a local rancher who threatens violence if Brian doesn't help with an insurance scam, and the entire fraudulent give-and-take of polite sexuality is critiqued and ultimately exposed as a lame sort of capitalism. Because our sexual expectations and indoctrinations are so flawed, because of our complete sexual dishonesty, violence is practically inevitable between the sexes who otherwise fail utterly to communicate.

The author, Chris Mazza, is a post-feminist feminist according to her biography, and she has edited a series of books entitled Chick Lit. There's so much going on in Girl Beside Him that I'll certainly be reading more of her stuff.

Trapped

The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.

Borges, The Library of Babel

Pron

RIP, Chet Anuszek.

Bad Boys

A strange day. Left home a bit before noon because I'm taking a French class before work on Wednesdays--there was a cop in the yard a couple doors down just standing there. I waved at him, he didn't respond, then as I approached the staircase to York Road I said "How's it going?" and he started gesturing with his right arm for me to move quickly. Then I noticed he had his gun out. At the bottom of the steps were two more cops with hands on their guns, and a third was leashing a dog to get him out of a parked van. Then I heard the 'copter over head and figured somebody had escaped the Baltimore County Detention Center--somehow they always end up hiding in our neighborhood.

French class was surreal. After a summer of neglect I had to start thinking and communicating in a different language again. This should be the last undergraduate French class I need for my second BA. Who knows what's next?

I was joking with Eskimo today that I was sure nobody had volunteered for the new Liberry Director's committees, and that somebody would get volunteered for those open slots. Sure enough, I was roped into the Marketing Committee by my bossnot ten minutes later. Awful. The new Director said last week she wants to 'brand' the Liberry, and such talk makes me vomit. Next she'll tell us to "get our team together, think outside the box, and come up with some proactive solutions." Ugh.

Back to School

There's a tornado watch in effect here until 8pm. When I walked outside around 4pm the sky was rather alarming. When I returned to the Liberry at 5, however, everything looked clear and blue. We'll see. All I know is we badly need some rain. Some of the potential tracks for Ernesto have him crossing Florida and re-strengthening over the Atlantic before plowing straight up the Chesapeake. We don't need rain quite that much.

School is back in session, meaning I'm distracted by a lot of really fantastic T&A, much of it born the year I graduated high school. There have already been two major parties in our neighborhood. On Saturday the party in #4 was so large there was spillover into our yard and onto our porch, said spillover already having spilled over from yard #3, the abandoned house, where the kids from #4 had decided to set up their kegs. I can deal with noise, but stay off my lawn! I politely asked several people to get off my porch at 10pm. At 10:45 I again politely moved several people off my porch, this time with the help of a couple of the renters from #4 who were throwing the party and who saw the veins throbbing in my forehead. "All these kids in my yard are stepping on plants," I told them. Underfoot were some red maple saplings I'd been nurturing, the hostas (which are almost done for the year), and some rosebushes.

At 11:00pm I turned on the porch light again and saw a guy pissing on our porch. Behind him were two jocks wrestling on the lawn and some girls had the lid off my composter and were throwing empties inside. That did it. I called the cops and ten minutes later an enormous herd of rushing teens went crashing through the bushes between my front yard and the yard at #1; they were trying to get over his fence and left a swath of broken shrubs and empty Busch Light cans. I'd say there were more than 100 kids in front of our row of townhomes, all fleeing the four responding cruisers from Towson Precinct, the State Police barracks at TU, and a Baltimore County Sheriff's Deputy. In the alley behind our houses another 100 dispersed quickly into the neighborhoods. After the cops were done with them I gave the inhabitants in #4 a chewing out worthy of my worst nightmares--I've become what I detest. I felt like a fraud. I hate being The Man. The kids in #4 told me they'd buy me new trees and re-mulch the yard, and one sprayed the piss off my porch with a hose. I recall screaming at Matt, the kid who bought the house with his dad: "Your father told me if I ever had problems with you that I could kick your ass. I'm sorely tempted." I kept poking him with my finger like some old coot. Seemed to work though, because they cleaned up every scrap of trash from all the yards and were apologizing profusely all along. I guess this old nerd can be a bit threatening.

Last night #1 had a big party that went on until past 2am. I gave up caring and put in the earplugs I use when I use the wet-dry vac and read about Emptiness.

I have a job interview next Wednesday. Somebody actually read my résumé and called. How novel!

Netflix

Tarkovsky's films are cinematic triathalons. They exhaust me with their glacial pacing and suffocating sense of gloom. And yet, I keep watching them because they're magisterial and challenging.

The Mirror is Tarkovsky's attempt at autobiography à la 8 1/2, but instead of Fellini's witty Mediterranean joi de vivre in the face of life's little anguishes, we get punishing, Slavic ruminations and a dour absence of humor, with a bit of Bergman's Persona mixed in. It's fantastic, however, with many beautiful and astonishing dream sequences. Recommended only for viewing with Suicide Prevention Hotline numbers easily available.

Please note: The quality of this DVD is wretched. There are extended scenes of dialogue left unsubtitled. The faded over-bright transfer only hints at how visually amazing the original film must have been.

#67

I don't think I gave The God of Small Things sufficient attention. I started it during dreadful insomnia, read bits on trains and in a Manhattan hotel, gulped chunks in a West Virginia B&B, and finally finished it at the Liberry Service Desk. Halfway through I nearly gave up, and thought 'this won the Booker Prize'? Too much artless darting from past to present to foreshadowed future, too many characters crammed inelegantly into the first short chapters.

But it gathered strength, and paid off in a big way, despite my half-assed reading. The world's most populace democracy is a complex, chaotic whorl of contradictory moral systems and energetic cultural manifestations. So is Roy's novel, which delights and instructs and frustrates in equal measure.