"It can be hard for them to watch old-fashioned films with characters and plots like Atlantic City or Raiders of the Lost Ark, but two fellows shooting the breeze for two hours is so 2025!"
Thanks to everyone who emailed me this link. A lot of people know that "My Dinner with Andre" is my favorite movie. It's been my favorite movie since I first saw it, in a movie theater in 1981, long before before podcasting got off the ground. "The Joe Rogan Experience" began in 2009. I love "The Joe Rogan Experience," which might seem odd — I'm a 74-year-old female — but it's not at all odd that I fell in love with "My Dinner with Andre" when I was 30, so it all makes more sense now. Like those 19-year-old students, I too find it hard to watch "old-fashioned films with characters and plots."
I was stunned to see that in the top post of a search of my archive this morning, 2 days after re-watching "My Dinner With Andre," and one day after blogging "A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important...."
What do you think? Mystical and important?!
I don't know, but what I was searching for was the topic of habit. In the movie, there's some discussion — blogged here yesterday — of the problem of doing things out of habit. There is, one person thought, "a great danger" of "fall[ing] into a trance" and no longer "seeing, feeling, remembering."
Well, I was just wishing I'd created a tag for "habit," because it would collect some good material, and it's a topic I want to think about. I like my habits. I think my habits are good.
Tonya's talking about my profile: she hasn't read any of my favorite books and she hasn't seen any of my movies. She thinks I may even have made up a fake title in "Grave of the Fireflies." And she thinks the profile function would be a good way to find a boyfriend ... except that clicking on my movie links either gets you only me or gets a bunch of 18 to 21 year old guys. Guys younger than my sons. Guys who like geocaching, which actually sounds like fun but about which Tonya says "What the hell is that? Is Mark into some freaky stuff?" I think we can safely say Googling is not one of Tonya's interests.
If I wanted to use my profile to search for boyfriends, would I come up with this as a list of favorite movies? Note that it looks like I have a taste for madmen (My Dinner With Andre, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Dr. Strangelove) or maybe just geeks (Fast Cheap & Out of Control), or lovable old clowns (Limelight, It's a Gift), and I am a feisty outcast (Grey Gardens, The Nights of Cabiria) who enjoys immersing myself in the saddest movie ever made (The Grave of the Fireflies).
Several of those movies make it part of the way into my heart with music: My Dinner With Andre, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, Limelight, The Nights of Cabiria. To a lesser extent: Aguirre the Wrath of God, Dr. Strangelove.
Several of them affect me because they are about a person profoundly dedicated to art: My Dinner With Andre, Crumb, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, Limelight.
Three of them are about war, but very different aspects of war, all very moving in different ways: Aguirre the Wrath of God (delusional conquest in the jungle, looking for an unknown city, attacked by an unseen enemy), Dr. Strangelove (horrible, hilarious mistakes and nuclear weapons), The Grave of the Fireflies (the struggle to survive in the aftermath of firebombing and defeat).
Anyway, those really are my movies. (If I wanted to seem more serious than I really am, I wouldn't blog about American Idol all the time.) Of Tonya's recent favorite movies, I also love Election and Memento. (A couple other movies I love that are Memento-like are Fight Club, 12 Monkeys, and The Matrix.)
Tonya mentions Wonder Boys, but I have to steer clear of that because I loathe Michael Douglas. Why don't you like Michael Douglas, you might ask, but the question really should be: What is it about everything else you don't like that reminds you of Michael Douglas?
January 22, 2004
Writing about surrealism and coincidence makes me want to say something about my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre." Googling in search of the screenplay--hey, nice tribute to Year of the Monkey, Google--I ran across Lane's Shrine to "My Dinner With Andre." I approve of the idea, but, jeez, Lane, that background! That nearly set off a migraine.
I can't find a screenplay to link to. But there's a memorable discussion of Andre Gregory's collection of the surrealist journal Minotaur, made 40 years earlier, which he had opened to a page with the handprints of three surrealists named Andre. Wallace Shawn cannot accept Andre's belief that the journal was somehow made for him.
If you've never seen this film you should, even though you might hate it. I bought the DVD, but it is absolutely the lowest quality DVD. It really shouldn't be sold in this form. Somewhere in those 59 Amazon customer reviews is one from me ("from Madison, Wisconsin") complaining about this. If you've ever felt annoyed that a movie you care about hasn't been released on DVD, remember that it is much worse when they do this, because there seems to be little hope of getting something better later. It does have scene access, but with only nine scenes. The chapter titles--"soup," "soup finished," "entree," "dinner conversation continues," "entree ends"--are almost good for a laugh, a bitter scoff, perhaps.
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.
When those "Rocky Horror" events leave you feeling empty and questioning your very existence, it's time to move on to the Andre scene...
When André tells the story of his attempt to workshop a production of The Little Prince, and how he found himself eating sand in the Sahara desert with a Buddhist monk, eat some sand.
Throw a banana at the screen every time André mentions his wife Chiquita....
When André and Wally discuss the lamentable state of the theater and wonder if it’s possible to create a theatrical experience that would shake people out of their complacency, ask yourself: Is attending this screening/performance of My Dinner With André making you less complacent, or does it allow you to wrap yourself in yet another protective layer of ironic detachment? Is endlessly reenacting My Dinner With André a way for members of The MDWA Midnight Madness Troupe to hide behind a mask of performance and avoid exposing who we really are? Are we really saying anything with this show, or is it just an excuse for people to get drunk and dress up on a Friday night?
Treat yourself to a nice amaretto when Wally orders an after-dinner drink....
That was the challenge last night on "Top Chef," which this post won't spoil, but there are spoilers at here, where I read about it. (I haven't watched this season of "Top Chef." Maybe I'll catch up with it later. Is it good this time around?) Anyway, Jim Hu, at the link, thinks the contestants made pretty lame movie choices. They should have been less literal, more creative, and more cleverly knowing about the content of a good movie. His choices:
Wizard of Oz: Rainbow trout with artichoke hearts and a poppy seed crackers. Spartacus. Escargot... and oysters. Duck Soup. Perhaps an exception to the obviousness rule, but how can you not do this? The Godfather: Fish baked in parchment.
The main entree could be Dances with Wolves Buffalo steaks. Or you could do Silence of the Lambs, but only if you serve the lamb with fava beans Citizen Kane Rose sorbet
Commenters, surely you have some ideas! Me? Well, my favorite movie already is about dinner: "My Dinner With Andre." To be creative and knowing, we'd have to get past the potato soup and squab and come up with something from inside the stories Andre tells. Maybe something covered in coarse salt to represent sand — Andre eats sand in the Sahara Desert (and laughs). [ADDED: Actually, he doesn't laugh: "We weren't trying to be funny. I started, and then he started, and we just ate sand, and threw up. That was — that was how desperate we were."]
Let me go on to the rest of the favorite movies I list in my Blogger profile:
"Aguirre the Wrath of God." This should not be an opportunity to serve Spanish or Brazilian food. I'd be all about the seaweed. (When they're really hungry they pull algae out from between the logs of the raft.)
"Crumb." The first thing I think of here is a drawing of a can labeled "[unwritable word] Hearts." Next, I think of Maxon Crumb ingesting a long strip of cloth dipped in water (to clean out his innards). Let's skip this movie.
"Grey Gardens." Paté on crackers! [ADDED December 20, 2014, after watching this movie again: ice cream right out of the container, Wonder Bread, cat chow, and corn on the cob.]
"32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." Pills!
"Limelight." Hmmm. Limes? No, the lime in limelight is not the fruit.
"It's a Gift." Kumquats!
"Dr. Strangelove." To drink: nothing but distilled water. [AND: Pure grain alcohol!] Food: a big buffet table. And every night: a food fight. That's our restaurant gimmick: We encourage the patrons to throw food. "The Grave of the Fireflies." In this movie, a Japanese animation, children starve. Must skip. "The Nights of Cabiria." Too easy of an excuse to make Italian food. Nothing specific comes to mind. "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control." Well, we can't serve lions or mole rats. Robots are not edible. We'd have to come up with some way to make topiary shapes out of things. "Slacker." Sorting through my memories of this movie, I'm just seeing a lot of coffee.
IN THE COMMENTS: The name Ted Turner comes up, and there's a suggestion that his movie would be "Soylent Green."
Now, the more interesting question is how can you do something live after you already have it filmed? Before you say maybe they never did film this documentary but were always planning to say we're doing it live, look at the trailer, which seems to be evidence — albeit not conclusive evidence — that there was a documentary already made:
Key line in there: "I'm a total fraud."
It's said to be an extensive interview — Larry Charles interviewing Larry David — so what I'm hoping is happening is that they are following the "My Dinner with Andre" method. To make "Andre," 2 men had extensive, rambling discussions, then they edited it into a very tight conversation, which became the script, that they — actors, now — performed.
In this case, perhaps Charles and David filmed long interviews, and the idea may originally have been to edit the footage into a documentary, but then they decided it would be cooler to make a transcript of the edited footage and perform it as actors in one continuous live show.
"My Dinner with Andre" became a classy as hell movie, but LD is a comedian, so, for him, the highest form is speaking to a live audience.
I'd rather rewatch a movie I love than watch something new. Much as I'd like to add more titles to the list of movies I love, the rewatching experience is so much deeper and more pleasurable. You can't really see things the first time. The other night we were going to rewatch "My Dinner With Andre" (my most rewatched movie), but then we hit upon the somewhat similar "Coffee and Cigarettes" (which I watched -- and blogged -- a year and a half ago).
So, yeah, "Coffee and Cigarettes" turned out to be nicely rewatchable. I found new appreciation for the lesser scenes. Aware Bill Murray was going to be insignificant, I got so much more out of watching him drink that coffee straight out of the carafe. Knowing where the longueurs were, I relaxed and took in the luscious black-and-white photography -- all those checkered tablecloths and checkered tiles, seen from above with circular coffee cups and swirly cigarette smoke.
Speaking of photography, the "My Dinner With Andre" DVD is horrible. Every time I think of watching it again, I have to air the same complaint. At least this time, I had a new way to say it: It's like watching the movie on YouTube.
Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."
A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:
In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....
I opened this email from longtime commenter Howzerdo, and it's a list, and I'd just said I love lists.
So:
-grittiness of pre-Giuliani NYC -Wally is 36? Looks a decade older, awful hair -both look so shabby for such a nice place -nervous about who would pay? -Poland story a snooze-fest, felt sorry for Wally, how long will this go on? -The Matrix was maybe inspired by this? -Andre's experiences reminder of Don Quixiote / mushrooms -Andre’s name dropping seems pretentious (my husband didn't agree) -Wally chews with his mouth open - yuck -irony of mention about status v. them not paying attention to waiter -irony of mention of people not “seeing,” when they are oblivious to restaurant environment -sympathetic to Wally’s view, that why aren’t mundane daily tasks enough, even profound -cold coffee from night before? Ugh -dead fly / cockroach - ugh again -did they actually eat? -sympathetic to Ande’s view at same time, for the need to be “clear” -violence, trivia, etc. of mass media, art even more overwhelming since ‘80s -mid-life crisis of hip NYC folks -totalitarian reference reaction to Reagan's election? (I didn't think so, film may have been in works earlier) -so many Nazi and fascism references -moral conflict (reminded me of Rosenthal’s comments about what is our responsibility to starving people across the world in Kitty Genovese documentary) -in the taxi, Wally finally "sees" NYC streets at the end
***
Buy the DVD — here — and maybe you'll email me a list of what you talked about afterwards, perhaps over dinner in a restaurant, where you will be oblivious to your surroundings while talking about the importance of achieving heightened awareness.
I love trying to read a book in Kindle — after hours of reading this and that on the web — and arriving at a word — in this case “squunched” — clicking on it and, via Google, escaping back onto the web, going here and there, liberated by “squunched,” defying the order of things once again, not reading a book, unless you call that reading a book. But I will squunch myself back in there, in that Kindle book, just playing at trying to read until I see the sign for the next off ramp.
They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade.
When you take the off ramp marked Squunch, you get to a discussion of another sentence by the same author, and I have that other book in Kindle too and can tell you "squunch" comes up in 3 sentences. Taking a gander at the first of the 3 sentences should give you a feeling for why I read fiction looking for off ramps.
Let me give an example of something I am seeing. With 55K shares on Facebook:
That's so obtuse, in so many ways. Let's count:
1. "50 Shades of Grey"? Hadn't seen that talked about in a while. (Wait. There is this.)
2. Boasting of committing what sounds like criminal sexual assault is not the mere saying of words. The size of the outrage isn't about the words as bad words, but the words as evidence of actions allegedly taken.
3. The outrage isn't limited to women. Men, too, are outraged.
4. Many people — women and men — are fine with using the words "fuck" and "pussy" in private conversation.
5. The words "fuck" and "pussy" can be used in sentences that express contempt and disregard for other human beings, and the outrage against Trump's words has to do with what the words express in the sentences actually spoken. Many excellent sentences can be made using those words — sentences that can be received with favor by women who hate what Trump said.
6. People read novels and see movies about all sorts of things, including horrible things. Stories about murder and torture and all kinds of physical and psychological abuse are very popular. The effect is titillating, but that doesn't mean people want these things actually to happen to them.
7. You may love a particular character in a story, because he's interesting and exciting and transgressive, but that doesn't mean you want him to be President. I love the movie "My Dinner with Andre," but Andre Gregory would be a terrible President. Last night, I watched the movie "Willard." Willard is a fascinating character. Watching him bond with rats, train them, gather them into suitcases and carry them into the office to unleash havoc was fascinating... oh, watch out, pussy!...
... but Willard would not make a good candidate for President. Neither would Hannibal Lecter.
8. It would be interesting to see those rats overrun the White House... in a movie. But not in real life!
9. Fantasy time is over. Put down the novel. Turn off the movie. Face the grim reality of picking a suitable President.
10. I said it 2 years ago: I'm for boring. I mean for President. I'm not talking about novels and movies and sexual fantasies.
11. "OK. Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now..."
"... but has it ever occurred to you... that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival... but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"
I'd asked Meade (and Grok) about the adjectival phrase "thinking man's," which came up this morning in the comments on the post about Donald Trump's pardoning of Pete Rose, baseball being, some say, "the thinking man's sport."
Googling jogged my memory: "The Thinking Man's" is a Playboy phrase (apparently, you need to think to deal with women):
On seeing this news, I literally break down and cry for several minutes. The man was 89 years old.
ADDED: Let's look at the list of his films. Talk about the ones that meant something to you. I'll list the ones I remember seeing:
1. "Autumn Sonata." It's the subject of a wonderful discussion about art in (my favorite movie) "My Dinner With Andre." There's a line, something like: I could always live in my art, but never in my life. Ingrid Bergman says it to Liv Ullmann. Mother to daughter.
2. "Face to Face." Isn't this the movie in "Annie Hall" that Alvy Singer refuses to see because it's already started?
3. "The Magic Flute." Mozart! In Swedish.
4. "Scenes from a Marriage." I think of the scene with Liv Ullmann, playing a therapist, as she's listening to a patient describe her marriage. The patient talks about how the world has come to feel unreal to her. Perhaps she says it feels like paper, and we see a closeup of her hand trying to feel the edge of the table. Then we see a closeup of Liv Ullmann's eyes, with just enough terror showing.
5. "Cries and Whispers." Perhaps the best of them all. I think of the scene where they read "David Copperfield" to each other for some reason. And the broken glass and the blood.
6. "The Touch." Elliot Gould! In English!
7. "The Passion of Anna." I remember being bored. Sorry.
8. "Shame." Another one I saw and couldn't appreciate at the time. I should try again, I'm sure.
9. "Persona." This one is very sharp and simple. Great to rewatch.
10. "The Silence," "Winter Light, "Through a Glass Darkly." Hard to remember which is which now. These were the movies we saw in college and thought precisely exemplified what serious movies were.
11. "The Virgin Spring." Another one we saw in college days, but this one stood out as different.
12. "Wild Strawberries." This is the one they showed us in the dorm -- East Quad -- practically as soon as we arrived as freshmen in 1969. The message was: This is greatness in film. If you don't see why this is great, you have a problem you'd better fix!
13. "The Seventh Seal." Loved this at the time. Loved Woody Allen's spoofing of it in "Love and Death." Have it on DVD but only watched part of it. Let's watch this one tonight. It is about death.
14. "Smiles of a Summer Night." Beautiful, funny, and not that Bergman-y. Woody Allen has a beautiful tribute to it: "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."
“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”
The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.
“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”
His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:
“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”...
“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”
Much more at the link, including how he suffered from the fear of death and what completely cured him of that fear.
IN THE COMMENTS: My ex-husband Richard Lawrence Cohen writes:
Ann, after reading the NYT story my first impulse was to come here and find out your response, which is as perceptive and lively as I'd hoped. (I typoed "livly," which is a nice pun for the occasion!) My earliest Bergman experience was stumbling upon The Magician on WOR-TV in New York as a high school student. It was unlike any other movie I'd ever seen and it made me want to see every other movie like it -- movies that enchanted not only the senses and the emotions but the intellect and the aesthetic. Then Wild Strawberries during freshman orientation as you've noted: I thought I remembered that it was shown in the courtyard of the Quad, but maybe that was King Kong instead and maybe they showed Wild Strawberries in the little auditorium. Then several of his classics at Cinema Guild: among them, Smiles of a Summer Night thrilled me with its laughter-filled ideal of romance, and Virgin Spring with its sagalike bright medieval starkness. Just two weeks ago I rented Seventh Seal for my preteen kids because they were fascinated by the idea of playing chess with Death; they liked that scene well enough but it ended too soon for them and they kept asking, "When are they going to show more of the chess game?" before losing interest altogether. For me, the style of the movie felt a bit old-fashioned at this point but many scenes were still powerful, and I was especially taken with the character of the church artist who kept up a cheerful commentary while painting gruesome pictures influenced by the reality of the plague that was all around him.
A corollary memory: seeing Liv Ullman as Nora in A Doll's House on Broadway in the 1970s, with Sam Waterston as Torvald, Sam on crutches after an accident but still pacing back and forth across the stage, unrealistically, so that he could hit his marks.
Yeah, that was an insane Sam Waterston performance. At least he had historically accurate crutches.
"Wild Strawberries" was shown indoors in a fairly small room, where we had to sit on the floor -- which was one of the reasons I didn't enjoy it as much as I was supposed to.
AND: Richard, if the boys like chess movies, here's a list of 1,715 of them.
AND: In today's vlog, I talk about why reading about Bergman's death made me cry.
MUCH LATER: Having collected my "post-of-the-month" for each of the months of 2007 and chosen this for July, I settle down a reread this post, then go back to the top and read the first sentence and break down and cry once again.
Jacob of Television Without Pity explains why he "fucking hate[s] zombie things" — a propos of last night's Ford commercial on "American Idol," with Scotty, et al., made up as zombies:
... I hate zombie apocalypses, because they imply that other people are an obstruction to you getting through your day and would be better off getting shot through the head. The sweet release of just opening fire on a crowd of people because they're not as special and alive as you are: That is disgusting. That is actual misanthropy disguised as entertainment, appealing to the grossest things inside you, and I hate it....
[T]hink about the people you know that love zombies the most. Not the girls who pretend to like zombies and video games so boys will think they've found a unicorn, because those girls are worthless anyway; not the AMC dads or Twilight moms who are trying to be down with the kids these days. They have no effect on culture whatsoever.
I'm talking about your nerdy grumpy jerkoff friend who likes porn and zombies and dark shock-humor and hates women because he's scared of them and loves Tyrion Lannister more than anything and thinks his sarcasm is a defense or that being a cynic opts you out: That asshole. That's who you're being when you play along with the zombie bullshit. Don't do it. It's bad for the part of you that is still alive.
Hmmm... Jason seems to think he's more alive than those people he hates because they think they are more alive?
ANDRE: [W]e're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance! We're walking around like zombies! I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we're just going around all day like unconscious machines, I mean, while there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!
So is the current fascination with zombies because, in some ways, we feel like zombies — we identify or we want to scare ourselves into coming back to life? Or is it that we perceive others as the zombies, and there is something pretty sick about our misanthropy?
There's a lot of talk about puppies. Professor Jenna Bednar, a few minutes ago, said, characterizing the message of Barry's big book: "The Court is the People's puppy and the people hold it firmly by the leash." How does the Court feel that leash? That's a question. Can you answer it? The Court doesn't just do its own thing and say whatever the hell the law is. It must interact with public opinion and things evolve accordingly.
Another metaphor is marriage, which Barry quips he's an expert on because he's had 2.
He says: "Any good marriage requires confrontation." This has something to do with the Supreme Court. I'm sure you can extrapolate.
But in a marriage that works — which includes, presumably, his 2d — you derive the unspoken rules about what you can do without having to have a whole fight about it. He recites a list of things you can possibly do and get away with.
The only one I remember is coming in drunk at 2 a.m. with no explanation. One reason I can't remember anything else on his list was that I got distracted by how similar it was to something Andre Gregory says in "My Dinner With Andre":
You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. Well, I mean, you know, in the theater, if you get good reviews, you feel for a moment that you've got your hands on something. You know what I mean? I mean it's a good feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you don't know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm ground. You know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are different questions: does she enjoy the ears being nibbled, how intensely can you talk about Schopenhauer in some elegant French restaurant. Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth.
But, Althouse, are you live-blogging my remarks?
Yes, yes, because I'm the one who says what blogging is... subject to the leash-tugging of traffic, linkage, and the commentariat.
Let me take you to the heart — the skull — of Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize speech. He says that when he got the "surprising news" that he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he started thinking about William Shakespeare....
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well...
That's just me, quoting a Bob Dylan song. That's not from the speech. Here's the speech, the part I want to show you:
I would reckon [Shakespeare] thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”...
But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”
That bit about the human skull got me thinking about something in "My Dinner with Andre," a movie in which 2 men talk mostly about theater. At one point, Andre Gregory is talking about directing the Euripides play "The Bacchae":
Pentheus has been killed by his mother [Agave] and the Furies, and they pull the tree back, and they tie him to the tree, and fling him into the air, and he flies through space and he's killed, and they rip him to shreds and, I guess, cut off his head. My impulse was that the thing to do was to get a head from the New Haven morgue and pass it around the audience. Now, I wanted Agave to bring on a real head and that this head should be passed around the audience so that somehow people realized that this stuff was real, see, that it was real stuff. Now, the actress playing Agave absolutely refused to do it.
And the songwriter Bob Dylan refused to show up and receive the prize. There are always questions about life’s mundane matters.
Am I recording in the right studio? ≈ Is this speech meant for reading out loud in a Swedish ceremonial hall?
You've got to think about the right thing in the right place...
I love when summer ends. I love when it begins. Warmth is good, and all this unstructured time. But it's been too hot, and too many structureless days have melted into each other. So it feels good to get up at 5 a.m. and see that it's still dark. It reminds me of winter. Not that I'd put on a sweater or even long sleeves, but the air coming in through the window by the dining table feels cool.
Do I dart outside in my bare feet to pick the New York Times up off the front walkway? No! Today is the first day of my canceled subscription. I'd maintained that subscription since 1984 when I moved from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin. How happy I was back then to learn that you could get the Times delivered here.
In my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre," there's the moment of great relief when -- after an hour or so of Andre Gregory's rambling tales of avant-garde theater in strange places around the world -- Wallace Shawn finally asks if Andre would like to hear his response to all of that. And Wally's idea is that it doesn't make much sense to do all these unusual things in search of real life, because real life is right where you are in your real life. He says he can't imagine anything better than living with his girlfriend (Debbie), reading a book (specifically, the autobiography of Charlton Heston), and getting up in the morning to find his old cup of coffee (and it's pure bonus that no cockroach has died in it overnight). He exclaims:
Isn't it pleasant just to get up in the morning? The Times is there. You can read it.
And for all these years that I've had the New York Times delivered, I've thought of that line, that line that expresses the joy of ordinary life: "The Times is there. You can read it." But now, the NYT is not here.
It's here on line. And the truth is, I've been doing nearly all my reading of it lately on line -- often with the still folded paper right next to the laptop. But this symbol of real life, the paper, is gone. The coffee is real. It's not on line. The news is real. It was never in the paper. "What's in the newspaper?" is a funny expression. Or is "the news" only the human expression about things observed in the world? If something happened and no one reported on it, would there still be news? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Do we need that tree mashed into pulp to make paper to print the news for the news to be news? I think the news must be reported for it to be news, so, in fact, the news really is in the newspaper, but the newspaper doesn't need to be paper.
So I'll be reading on line now. Ironically, what pushes me over the edge to canceling the subscription is moving back to New York City. But I'm not in New York yet. I've got my keys to the apartment, but I'm still here in Madison, Wisconsin, where it's light out now, and life is real.
"She focused on exactly where to put her foot, her hand, alongside her fellow climbers. Then, peripherally to her right, she saw an orange flash. 'I see this sunrise that I will never forget as long as I live,' she reflected. 'The colors — it is just red, and then it is orange, and then it is yellow, and then the blue is coming. It was so incredibly spiritual for me, and beautiful.'"
So begins a NYT article that is not about going all the way to the top of Mount Everest or about taking the tiny trouble of gazing at a sunrise. It's about tomorrow's solar eclipse and the elusive human capacity to achieve awe:
“The whole thing is very awe-ful. A-w-e,” she said, meaning full of awe.
Ah, yes. Thanks for the sledgehammering. We might not have figured it out, just as we might not have experienced the spiritual dimension of the sunrise unless we were hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest.
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