Who said what now?
This morning I woke to the fragment of a dream about an interview with Patti Smith, who was about to play “People Have the Power.”
My head has been buzzing with website ideas: more so content than formatting. I can tell that I still think about the stuff as a species of print publication more than as a dynamic system of information. Last night I took in Tati’s “My Uncle” with Thor and Jeff. A screening at the modern and it looked like it was the same exact print I had run through the 16millimete projector at Bard in 1980. In other words, a faded mess. I can only think that this was because it was the English version rather than the subtitled French one. So maybe no one has been looking after the prints?
Tati is the kind of director that makes you so attuned to nuance that after you leave his films everything around you looks like one of his artfully choreographed jokes. After the film, the way we all lined up up at MoMA’s urinals looked suspiciously silly. Mon Oncle is a movie where very little happens, but everything is closely observed: the charm of a street that never gets swept, a fight that never comes off, or a couple of dogs peeing.
This afternoon I picked up a book that I put down a couple of months ago, intending to finish it and had the odd experience of feeling that I had lost the author’s voice. It made me aware that I build up a narrator for everything I read, each with different intonations and having abandoned this one in the middle of a page, and having heard any number of additional voices in the intervening weeks, I couldn’t find the one I’d laid aside. So the reading seemed oddly flat and disjointed, muddled with other voices. When I’m reading, I’m relating to an author, a presence made in the warp of the writing that is distinct from the voice of a character (Pace Roland Barthes). I don’t need that author to be the ultimate producer of meaning for me, but I do let myself be wooed by their skills. Here’s why I’ve come to dislike Stephen King: I feel bullied by his italics, which seem like the equivalent of someone you’re close too very carefully and loudly drawing your attention to a really cool thing they just found, when the two fo you are alone in a room. The presumption that I’d feel his emphasis as naturally my own causes me to draw back in protest, so I end up trusting him less.
It makes me sad, because I used to gobble his stuff down until I got to the point where I felt like he was nudging me in the ribs over and over. He curses good, but it ain’t enough.
In any event, I’m going to have to settle back into the voice of my abandoned author. And speaking of culture, I’ve been eating an awful lot of yogurt these days. Hold over from being on Sylt. It doesn’t seem to be doing me much harm.
Tags: daily photo, friends, movies, reading