I put down Middlemarch temporarily. I’ve read like three other books since I started it; there are ~100 pages left, but I’ve taken up Main Street by Sinclair Lewis in the meantime. Reading an American novel is like a breath of fresh air. Happy Independence day, everyone. Fittingly, I am reenacting the American Revolution through my reading choices, and as in a mystery play entering into and partaking of that eternal moment; in a mystical recapitulation of it i am declaring my own independence from the domineering British literary canon. Indeed, I vindicate my nation through this individual act of will, and I throw a little pebble in the face of that implacable force which governs the fate of great events, and which must become a deadly hail if each patriot will know his duty and perform it, with knowledge of the necessity and propriety of supreme sacrifice for the good of the nation. Cry about it British people, you’re not important anymore. Now it is American empire which totters in your former place, and you don’t even have the satisfaction of watching from a safe distance because your doom is inextricably bound up with ours. Indeed, America goes as the icon and avatar of the whole West—we must all fall together, because we will drag you all down with us.
James Dean, who died in 1955, just landed a new movie role, thanks to CGI - The Verge We fetishize celebrity so hard--it makes us so horny or whatever--that those Hollywood psychopaths feel the need to dig up and reanimate a 50s film star, decades after the flesh has rotted off his bones, to make a movie. There are live actors without the pall of death on them, and you decide to make a digital zombie out of James Dean. It's sick. It's a sign of unhinged capitalistic excess; it's a desecration of the dead who ought to remain undisturbed; and as far as the entertainment industry is a bellwether of the vitality of our culture, it's a sign of a fundamentally decadent and moribund society at large. Vast parts of our culture are necrotic--that's the only way that this could be thought of--the only way James Dean could be reanimated as a digital flesh-puppet is if the society that he is to be propped up and jerked around in front of like a marionette is just as dead as he is. It's diseased and we live in hell. Somehow this isn't a satire on the excesses of the overly consumption-oriented, amoral, hedonistic cesspool called 21st century American society. Somehow what ought to be a very clever satire is actually real. What is satire in this hyperreal nightmare of a society? How can you make better satire of this culture than the satire that this culture makes for itself that isn't satire? You can't satirize the insane. I just want to burn it all down. Put a torch to Hollywood and shoot the Congress. Firebomb LA. I want to sit up there on top of the letter O and watch the flames eat the city. If this doesn't turn you into an anarcho-esoteric hyper traditionalist neo-fascist, then I don't know what will. ah, damn; this is from 2019. never mind i guess
I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now. I've been here a couple times in the past week. Last Saturday a guy from the community theater came in, handing out flyers and asking everybody "will you come see Pippin the musical?" Well, he just came in again, and now I have two flyers for Pippin the musical. It feels as if I'll be guilty of some grave impiety if I don't go see this production. A few weeks ago, when I was leaning over the sink to spit out my toothpaste, my crucifix necklace caught on the counter. The chain snapped as I brought my head up and it fell to the linoleum, but the crucifix disappeared. It literally disappeared. I looked everywhere for it, but there was nowhere where it could have gone. It vanished like Rumpelstiltskin. There's no scientific explanation for it. What does that mean? What does anything mean? I don't know, but I can almost feel the air around me crackling with pregnant events. There is some great convergence ahead of me: will I encounter it at Pippin the musical? Is this a deeply stupid and superstitious blog post? Perhaps.