IS: Can you get on a flight and come to Salento? South of Italy. D rented a house for fifteen but there are only five of us… I can send you more details, we are leaving now and will be there until Monday. The town is Depressa, which means “depressed woman.” There must be a direct flight from London to Brindisi.
If you can’t make it, I’m back in Paris on Sept 2-7, you should come down for the night 🙂 🙂
So now I live in London, which is “quite” weird. (I’ve learned to say “quite” a lot, because that’s how you fit in here.) And I’ve been busy… well, learning how to fit in, which means I haven’t blogged in thirteen days! A travesty. I was thinking to myself just before that there were things I had planned to write about but I had forgotten what they were, and then, lying in our lumpy bed in a corporate apartment, I remembered one: Westminster Choir School!
Husband’s birthday was on Thursday, so we went to Westminster Abbey, because he’s a bit of a history nerd. I surprised myself by being actually as interested as I usually have to pretend to be at historical sites, mostly because there were a number of elaborate tombs for people, and I adore elaborate tombs. Perhaps the funniest of the bunch were the tombs of Mary I and her sister, Elizabeth I, because Mary was an ardent Roman Catholic who succeeded in reviving interest in Catholicism during her reign, but then Elizabeth brought back Protestantism, and as everyone knows Brits hate Catholics, they opted to bury Mary underneath her sister. No doubt as to who won that battle, eh?
Anyway, here’s what I actually wanted to write about: during the audio tour, a butter-tongued Jeremy Irons tells us that young choirboys at Westminster not only sing there, but attend school there as well. After the tour, husband and I took a brief little walk around “Dean’s Yard,” as they call it, and I immediately hit upon a genius idea: a YA series that takes place at Westminster Choir School. Part Hogwarts, part Fame, throw in a little Mary Renault and a dash of Spring Awakening, if we want things to get real spicy, and I believe we have a few hits on our hands. Then again, with that admixture, what kind of audience would it attract?
You wish these had been your uniforms.
I’m moving to a different country in ONE WEEK, so I’m cleaning out my shit. I bought this postcard when I was in college because I saw it in the card store and started cackling out loud. It’s been over my desk or on my refrigerator making me giggle ever since. We’ve had a good run together, me and this postcard, but it’s time for it to go to the little postcard pasture in the sky, because New Country Me lives a minimalist life! (At least, for the first few months, before I acquire new stuff.)
Hashtag Cardeology!
Last summer, a friend and I went to visit the Living Museum, a decrepit building used as permanent art studios for current and former residents of Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens. Anyone can go visit, but you have to call for an appointment beforehand, so the doctor knows you’re coming, but when we got there, the doctor––who had a German name––seemed very blase about our presence. I wondered if I weren’t in my own personal version of Don’t Look in the Basement. There were a few vacant-eyed smokers sitting in an entryway and a cat slinking about; big fans moved the sweltering air around the room in whorls. Most of the art was weird and mediocre––outsider art, in my opinion, is so much more often miss than hit––but we found a very unexpected way to amuse ourselves: upstairs were a few empty studios and a number of file cabinets full of medical records and patient journals. Naturally we flipped through some, and each took a patient log home with us. Mine is the “work order log” of a James M. (patient confidentiality, people) who used this notebook from late May to early June of 1991. His handwriting is decent but not frighteningly neat like a serial killer’s, which is a good sign. On May 23, 1991, his notes from the “community” meeting were as follows:
(1) 9:20 Everybody sleeping. Wake up guys!
(2) M. wants to be transferred to another ward because he can’t even have beer on the MICA ward.
(3) L. wants to be transferred to a coed ward for sex.
(4) B: explains purpose of MICA.
(5) Discussion of coed vs. male wards.
(6) A. wants to go to a “nice ward” in building 73.
(7) Discussion of sociopathy
(8) A. about d/c plans, about relapse.
From a quick flip-through, it appears that the men had a number of discussions about sociopathy those three weeks.
Below, one of the funnier, if not finer, pieces of art at the Museum.
Alas!
I think that a magazine should hire me to go on a scuba diving trip a la Sail Caribbean, and write about it, because I went as a kid and I didn’t appreciate it and MAN I would give a lot for a redo of that fucker. But also, if the travel magazine had a sense of humor and scope, perhaps they could have the only people on the boat (maybe eight?) be people who went on said trips as teenagers and didn’t appreciate them. It will be touching and hilarious!
Wow, I am so glad I never had to interview Ingmar Bergman.
Torsten Manns: This time we’ve agreed to discuss some general motifs, not one particular film, but motifs which recur in many of them. Among other things, we’ve agreed on the child motif, sex, and censorship. How about taking the child-motif first? The fact is, we’ve one little film left; and that’s Daniel––a little scrap of a film from Stimulantia, 1966.
So I’ve arranged the child-motif in four types. First, as a catalyst for subconscious phobias, the trauma and the archetypes––here The Hour of the Wolf is a good example: the little boy there goes straight back to the old man in the cupboard who appeared in that play, ‘the little folk.’
The second is the child as an object of violence: The Devil’s Wanton, where a baby is murdered, The Virgin Spring where the raped girl is herself almost a child, The Shame––this little dead girl found by Liv and also the dream of children, where it’s smashed to pieces––and even the boy in Frenzy who arrives too late at the beginning and is told off by Gunnar Bjornstrand (of all people)––he too is a little exposed fellow.
The third––in dreams of continuation, of togetherness, as the rescuer of relationships––a patent solution, one might say, not peculiar to yourself, but implicit in the whole of this The Joy-Eva-Journey Into Autumn complex, where the woman begs to have a child with Ulf Palme, and he says: ‘I don’t want to have some poor little chap somewhere I can’t reach.’ In The Silence it’s less clear; but there the boy is definitely a means of communication between the two women. In So Close to Life, the motif is completely patent––it’s virtually a clinical film about children; about the three women’s attributes to childbirth.
Finally the fourth, the dwarf motif––we’ve pretty well exhausted that. In The Rite, Hans speaks of his children, but no child is actually seen. I should very much like to know what your attitude to children is, from every point of view.
Ingmar Bergman: My first reaction to all you’re saying is a dreadful feeling of oppression. Not specially aimed at myself, but a feeling of powerlessness. I can’t explain it. A feeling that it’s all so dull, that it will get duller, and what I’ve made, suddenly, is all dull and uninteresting too. I can’t explain it. I don’t know why it is, but as I sit here listening to you I feel furious––don’t misunderstand this, Torsten. I’ve nothing against you personally. That’s just how it is.
When someone pulls out a thread like this and says: ‘Yes, well, surely it’s this way? Aren’t things like this? It’s like this and it’s like that,’ I feel completely paralyzed. I can’t utter a word. Well, it’s possible, things may be that way, I don’t know. I’m not being cagey. It’s simply with me things don’t work that way.
I can’t discuss any leitmotif running through my films. Obviously I could hold a lecture on the humiliation motif––I even fancy we’ve gone through it rather thoroughly. But all this about children… I’ve eight children myself, so I’ve had a certain amount of experience of children and react according to certain patterns, which have changed over the years. But I don’t think it’s of any consequence, nor do I feel it has any place in this document.
(From Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns and Jonas Sima)
I think the most difficult thing about studying phenomenology would be having to say “phenomenological” at least twenty times a day.
Teach me your tichel ways.
So right, I’ve been gone, and you’ve been positively starved of witticisms, non-governmental conspiracy theories, and pictures of young Brooke Shields smoking cigarettes.
Seriously, what was WITH this girl’s mother?
While I was away, I read four––count ’em!––books, none of which I was too crazy about, to be honest. One of them was Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City. I haven’t read any reviews of the book yet, but I’m going out on a limb and guessing that my distaste for it is not exactly the majority opinion. As you all know, I suffer from micrographia, a handwriting affliction that generally points to a neurotic personality. It is the telltale sign of serial killers, depressives, and Nazi-esque obsessives. Yay! Gornick, it seems, has this same affliction, but she, while indeed being neurotic, is also unbearably smug, and so I’m left wondering… does this mean I’m doomed, neurotic AND smug? What the…
“It was a cold, clear morning in March. Having just finished interviewing a city official for a piece I was writing, I was sitting at the counter of a coffee shop across the street from City Hall, drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and writing down remembered snatches of the conversation I’d just had when a man sat down one stool away from me. He wore dark pants and a tweed jacket, looked to be in his fifties, and I took him to be a middle-rank civil servant. When I had finished eating, drinking, and writing, I stood up, and as I was gathering myself together, he said to me, ‘I hope you won’t mind, I haven’t been able to read a word you’re writing, but I’d like to tell you some things I know about you from your handwriting.’ Startled, I said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ I took a better look at him then and saw that he wore a large Native American turquoise-and-silver ring and a string tie. He leaned toward me and said slowly but intently, ‘You’re generous. That is, you are inclined to be generous, but circumstances don’t allow you to be. So you’re often not. You’re assertive. And a bit aggressive. And that small script… you’re very literate, very intelligent.’ I stared at him for a fraction of a second. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s a fine flattering portrait you’ve drawn.’ He looked relieved that I wasn’t somehow offended. Then I said, ‘Is my handwriting really so small?’ He nodded and said yes, it was, and small handwriting, he repeated, is the mark of the very intelligent. Of course, he added (very softly), there are people who have much smaller handwriting, and they… ‘Are the mad or the brilliant,’ I said, finishing his sentence for him. ‘Yes,’ he said, again softly, ‘they’re often very brilliant.’ I stood there, looking steadily, perhaps even gravely at him. He smiled and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, my handwriting is twice as large as yours.’ I did burst out laughing then, but the remark kept crawling around under my skin for the whole rest of the day.”
Oh right, I forgot: also aggressive, and possibly insane.
I’m back from my honeymoon and so. dead. tired. even though it’s only 8:30 in Venice (“Time for a drink!” says a funny friend of mine.) I actually had a whole blog post written earlier and then accidentally deleted it and I don’t have nearly enough energy to rewrite it, so instead, here’s a physical rendering of the sound of my name as said by my husband! Courtesy of the Hungarian Pavilian at the Venice Biennale.
Kinda looks like a tooth?
