movie

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Moody malaise means movie madness.

1. Hamlet 2
Wanted to be lifted up by Steve Coogan. (Would also like to be laid down by Steve Coogan, if anyone knows him). Steve didn't disappoint himself, but the movie was embarrassingly awful, on the whole. Catherine Keener can shrink balls with the lines she has. I wonder what drama teachers think of this?

2. The Strangers
I had to watch most of it on fast forward, because I am a total wimp. The Exorcist is the only horror film I can watch, and then it's only because I've seen it so many times. On FF, it was okay. Except that I agree with...AO Scott? Andrew Sarris? Whoever it was who said that the director, Bryan Bertino, is all kinds of skilled, but has used his powers for evil instead of good. It's such a nasty film. Who gets 'inspired' by the Tate/LaBianca murders and actually follows through? I mean, it's not really a cultural touchpoint for us anymore. Not that it should be forgotten, because as seemingly random post-hippie acid-induced cult slayings go, it is the benchmark, but we've had Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Columbine, bodies in vats, feet in harbours, and Paul Bernardo since then. I know we're supposed to fear the idea that people can kill not because they're sick or disturbed, but because they can, or they're bored, because that's not something we can contain or treat. But has that been borne out yet? Do rapists and murderers really go that far out of ennui and apathy and a kind of vulgar curiosity? Is this a post-Prozac movie? People need to stalk and stab total strangers in order to feel a spark of life? Seeing the masked killers push and twist the butcher's knife into the couple's bodies was really disgusting, gross, and hideous. It did suggest a clinical interest in the proceedings that perhaps the characters were supposed to have, but the audience isn't. Apparently there's a sequel already in the works.

3. The Dark Knight
Heath Ledger's Brando-sounding Joker is another soulless killer, although he has a touch more thought going on in the form of a love of anarchy and chaos. Did Bale's Batman always talk like that? Thank God for Maggie Gyllenhaal and the absence of Katie Holmes. Gary Oldman looks like an...oldman. Didn't realise Anthony Michael Hall was in it until the credits. Oldman has a terrible, rambling, melodramatic speech at the end. Ill-advised use of a small child.

I'm going to have mashed potato for dinner tonight and watch Lars and the Real Girl. I am this close to getting a mannequin myself.

End of 2008

Here's one selection out of the many sweet, painful verses on this breakup blog I found:

Choosing your words
Is incredibly daunting
When you say what you mean
But they hear what they're wanting

The blogger's name is LonePen.

Terrible Fish has been suffering the loss of her own relationship over the last few months. As well, she endured some blog bullying. Or whatever it's called (bullying might be too strong a word and sound too self-pitying) when you don't toe the party line and get flaming, snarky comments from other self-righteous commenters.

The relationship suffering is worse, I think.

DFW

What a terrible bummer this is. Writers like David Foster Wallace do noble work on behalf of the rest of us. They walk the treacherous paths, encounter the demons, and suspect the truths that we less skilled humans are unable or unwilling to do.

That's one way of looking at it anyway.

Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my

Le weekend

Went to see the Whitecaps on the weekend. Right now I can hear the Guantanamo Bay interrogation video playing. What a bunch of c*nts. OR good investigators - time will tell.
I hate mascots.

The Best Awful

So since last time I've had something to really be depressed about, as they say. It's not funny then and it isn't now. Mr. Fish finally decided to answer one of my queries about things being wrong or not (since he was making it plainly plain that they were) and it seems his unhappiness has reached the stage where even he is going to do something about it. Fast-forward through a few days of swollen eyes, drunkenness, cigarettes, and awkward talks, and it's decided: we're going to spend some time apart, him going back off into the wild to recapture the feeling he had earlier this year before suburban ennui and midlife crisis derailed him; me going to my homeland for 3 weeks to see family.

I intended to write right away, demanding to know what was so awful about his life? OK, I'm not that comfortable with this suburban child-having, hardware and homeware-loving culture either at times, but as I said, I felt it would be ungracious to complain too much.

At first I was bereft, shower-sobbing, vodka-swilling, moaning bereft; and then I made a mental list of "People Who Are/Were Worse Off Than Me" in the relationship stakes, which I'll now reproduce here digitally:

1. Mary-Louise Parker.

Hottie longterm boyfriend hooked up with ingenue blonde while she was 7 months pregnant - who the FUCK bounces back from that? (Her, of course, and I am aware of the fact that she is one of Mr. Fish's favourites).

2. Mia Farrow

It is not possible for me to discover nude pictures of my adopted daughter at my partner's house; nor will the world's media gain possession of all the sordid details.

3. The woman whose husband took her to the Grand Canyon and pushed her off because it was cheaper than getting a divorce.

This is true; see 'Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon' by Michael Ghiglieri.

It must be time for some Anne Sexton, or maybe some Plath?

Killing The Love

by Anne Sexton

I am the love killer,

I am murdering the music we thought so special,

that blazed between us, over and over.

I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.

I am pushing knives through the hands

that created two into one.

Our hands do not bleed at this,

they lie still in their dishonor.

I am taking the boats of our beds

and swamping them, letting them cough on the sea

and choke on it and go down into nothing.

I am stuffing your mouth with your

promises and watching

you vomit them out upon my face.

The Camp we directed?

I have gassed the campers.

Now I am alone with the dead,

flying off bridges,

hurling myself like a beer can into the wastebasket.

I am flying like a single red rose,

leaving a jet streamof solitude

and yet I feel nothing,

though I fly and hurl, my insides are empty

and my face is as blank as a wall.

Shall I call the funeral director?

He could put our two bodies into one pink casket,

those bodies from before,

and someone might send flowers,

and someone might come to mourn

and it would be in the obits,

and people would know that something died,

is no more, speaks no more, won't even

drive a car again and all of that.

When a life is over,

the one you were living for,

where do you go?

Monday

Depression ain't no picnic. The production of this and other 'no shit!' insights keep me from falling into a stultifying stupor, although last night I stared at the ceiling unable to move in a mini-version of the catatonic paralysis states I used to get into (for fun, in a weird, anxiety-releasing, akin-to-cutting way) in my early 20s.

Depression isn't now nor has it ever been singular and exotic. Even your doctor will refer to 'garden variety' depression, a tag that I feel should only be applied to snails.

POEM: Sylvia Plath's Mirror.

Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of the little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Having now reached my 30s, I see that the terrible fish might be lurking. Fuck that fish! I'll eat it before it eats me. Not having prolific beauty to lose, I'm perhaps less scared of the old woman than Plath was.

The words 'in me she has drowned a young girl'...reaching this age allows me to feel the irony of them. Just as Plath realises that she has spent too long searching the mirror and condemning the person she finds there, who is now dead and gone, I realise this too.

So: you've drowned (i.e. killed) the innocent, non-self-loathing you that perhaps once existed. It's a tragedy because killing young girls is wrong, especially if there's no clear motive. It's also banal - but does that make it less of a tragedy? If evil can be banal, can tragedy also?