"Zonked, bushed, or just plain hebetudinous, most readers will be glad to get to the end of 'A History of Fatigue.'"

"Its virtues are undeniable; it is stoutly industrious and inquisitive, and, in the corralling of evidence, Vigarello shows such dedication that he should seriously consider moonlighting as a homicide detective. Any corpse would give its eyeteeth to have him on the case. The problem is that Vigarello’s piling up of information becomes too much to absorb, and he’s so frantically busy thinking everything through, as it were, that he neglects to pause for thought. Compare one of his predecessors, the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso... [who began his own study of fatigue with these words]: 'One spring, towards the end of March, I happened to be in Rome, and, hearing that the migration of the quails had begun, I went down to Palo on the sea coast in order to ascertain whether these birds, after their journey from Africa, showed any of the phenomena of fatigue. The day after my arrival I rose when it was still dark, took my gun, and walked along the shore towards Fiumicino.'"

 
Writes Anthony Lane in "The Exhausting History of Fatigue/Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker).

The book under discussion is "A History of Fatigue: From the Middle Ages to the Present." by Georges Vigarello.

Yes, of course, it was "hebetudinous" that pushed me over the line toward blogging this.

"As a theme, fatigue is so extensive, and so intrinsic to the fact of being alive, that demarcating where it begins or ends is no simple task."

"One can imagine a Borgesian fable in which a fatiguologist, bent upon covering every aspect of the topic, dies of sheer inanition with the project incomplete. The more encyclopedic the mission, the stricter the boundaries that need to be set; if you’re expecting 'A History of Fatigue' to begin with the Iliad—whose protagonists are pre-wiped, having battled for nine years before the action of the poem gets under way—you are doomed to disappointment. Nothing about the ancient world, it would seem, appeals to Vigarello. He doubtless believes that everyone back then was brimming with juice and zip, and that if Achilles harried Hector three times around the walls of Troy it’s because both guys needed the exercise."

Writes Anthony Lane, "The Exhausting History of Fatigue Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker). Lane does not like the book, "A History of Fatigue" by Georges Vigarello, but I enjoyed the review, and fatigue is an interesting subject.

And I learned a word... or, at least, "inanition" seems like a new word to me. It is — according to the OED — "The action or process of emptying; the condition of being empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want or insufficiency of nourishment."

I checked the 19-year history of this blog, and "inanition" did appear once. It was in a quote from... you could almost guess and have a good shot at getting it right...

"'Spencer' is, in many ways, baloney, abundantly spiced with slander. It is contemptuous of those whom it accuses..."

"... of treating Diana with contempt. Although [her confidante] Maggie says to her, 'Don’t see conspiracy everywhere,' the film sees nothing but. I can’t decide what made me laugh louder: the dead pheasant, stiffly positioned on the road at the entrance to Sandringham, like a prop from a Monty Python sketch, or the Prince of Wales informing his wife that 'you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.' He sounds like a Pilates instructor.... For all its follies, I would rather watch it again than sit through further episodes of 'The Crown.' The sight of that show clawing toward the credible, without ever quite getting there, is painful to behold, whereas [Spencer's director Pablo] Larraín is somehow freed by the liberties that he takes with historical facts.... [H]e tunes in to Diana’s high anxiety; the camera is constantly on her, with her, and around her, as if drunk on her perception of the world...."

Writes Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, reviewing the new movie "Spencer," about Princess Diana, played by Kristen Stewart. Here's a trailer for the movie.

"'Bohemian Rhapsody,' the movie about Queen, lasts more than two hours, not a very long time by modern feature standards, even though it feels interminable."

"A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer. Those choppers may give you nightmares. And some of you who venture into the theater will surely be inspired to exclaim 'Mama mia, let me go!'"

Writes A.O. Scott (NYT).

ADDED: Here's The New Yorker's Anthony Lane:

Extra teeth. That was the secret of Freddie Mercury, or, at any rate, of the singular sound he made. In “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a new bio-pic about him, Mercury (Rami Malek) reveals all: “I was born with four more incisors. More space in my mouth, and more range.” Basically, he’s walking around with an opera house in his head. That explains the diva-like throb of his singing....

... Malek, mixing shyness with muscularity, and sporting a set of false teeth that would make Bela Lugosi climb back into his casket, spares nothing in his devotion to the Mercurial....

Not just for Justin Trudeau anymore: Fake eyebrows are worn by the fictional President of the United States in that novel "co-written" by Bill Clinton.

I'm reading that brilliant, hilarious Anthony Lane essay in The New Yorker, "Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s Concussive Collaboration/'The President Is Missing' contains most of what you’d expect from this duo: politico-historical ramblings, mixed metaphors, saving the world. But why is there no sex?" As the title suggests, the essay is jam-packed with great observations, but I'm just blogging enough to tell you about the eyebrows:

Jon Duncan is the President of the United States... “a war hero with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor,” not to mention a beguiling modesty... Duncan is facing possible impeachment... Another problem: a female assassin is in the offing.... There are also a couple of computer wonks, motives unclear: the first, “a cross between a Calvin Klein model and a Eurotrash punk rocker,” if you can picture such a creature; the second, a frightened fellow who arranges a covert meeting with the President at Nationals Park. Nail-gnawing stuff.

No wonder Duncan dreams of sitting there in the stadium, crisis-free, with a hot dog and a beer. And he knows which beer, too: “At a ball game, there is no finer beverage than an ice-cold Bud,” he says to himself. Not since Daniel Craig practically ruined “Casino Royale” by pimping his watch to Eva Green (“Rolex?” “Omega.” “Beautiful”) has a product been placed with such unblushing zeal.

The reason Duncan can attend the game, alone, is that he’s wearing a Nationals cap, plus thickened eyebrows and spectacles. Aided by this impenetrable disguise, he slips out of the White House and, bereft of a security detail, goes on the lam....

Google books let me get a screen grab and saved me from having to buy the Kindle text to show you this. Click to enlarge:

What if a great-looking actor showed off his dedication to his craft by gaining a lot of weight for a role...

... but you were just watching the movie not particularly knowing who that was and wondering throughout what's the deal with his pot belly? I mean, we're watching this movie (on TV) last night, and the main character strips down to his underwear early on and we are getting closeups of his distended belly. It's an unpleasant sight. Why are they showing us this? Later, we see him walking around with that belly straining against his too-tight shirt. Much later, there he is, walking — on another long trek from the forest to the city — and I'm so mystified at the unexplained importance of this belly that I'm saying out loud: What's up with the pot belly? It's like it's a character in the movie that nobody talks about. And who is this actor anyway? Is that supposed to be Colin Farrell?

The movie came out last year. I remember that it got a good review in The New Yorker, so I'd put it on my Amazon Prime playlist, but I'd forgotten what it was I was supposed to be watching and why it was said to be good and even how good it was said to be. This morning I see that it had a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, that was indeed Colin Farrell, and he'd deliberately packed on 43 pounds to do that role:

Yeah, I ate like my life depended on it. I put on quite a pile in eight weeks. About 43 pounds.

What was the motivation behind that?

Well, he [the character in "The Lobster"] wasn’t written that way. He wasn’t written with any physical definition at all. But myself and [director] Yorgos [Lanthimos] had spoken about it and because this world was so unusual I wanted to have some physical separation from what I was used to. I’ve messed around with my body for roles, whether it was losing a load of weight or bulking up for action films. And so Yorgos and I talked about me dropping a bunch of weight and looking quite famished. But then I said, “I bet this guy was something of a comfort eater.” He’s probably not someone who ever realized that there was such a term as “let yourself go,” because there really is no consideration of the self. But he might’ve liked his grub.

Well, I had never seen a Colin Farrell movie before, but I understand he's a very nice looking man. But I don't have any particular feeling about him, and I certainly wasn't watching the movie thinking that's the famous actor Colin Farrell who was so dedicated to his craft that he discerned that a character written without "any physical definition at all" was a man who "might’ve liked his grub" and undertook the drastic (yet common) stunt of getting fat for a movie role.

I've asked this question before: If a movie calls for a fat actor, why don't they just hire a fat actor? Is it some kind of anti-fat statement, that the audience needs to know this person is not really fat? There's a great-looking guy in there. Well, I didn't know. The stunt was lost on me. I didn't have the psychological boost of "seeing" the unseen handsome guy inside the artificially pot-bellied man. I was just distracted wondering why the filmmaker insisted on all the hey-look-at-his-belly shots.

And it could have been a plot point. Because this movie was about the formation of male-female relationships based on a single corresponding trait — a "defining characteristic." Much is made of a woman who gets nose-bleeds and a man who bashes his head on things so he'll have nosebleeds and thus be able to couple with her. But our main character does not attempt to couple by matching his pot belly to some woman's pot belly. His defining characteristic is that he needs glasses — he's "short-sighted." And the woman he finds is also short-sighted* and has no discernible potbelly whatsoever.


___________________

* SPOILER ALERT: And ultimately, she is beyond short-sighted — blind — and the man must decide whether to blind himself too so he can maintain the paired defining characteristic. See? "The Lobster" is a big old claw-snapping allegory.

"Look, I acted for a long time and, you know, I’m 56. I’m not the guy that gets the girl anymore. Well, yeah, I shouldn’t be the guy that gets the girl."

"But, look, if somebody’s got Paul Newman in The Verdict, I’d jump. But there aren’t that many like that. Acting used to be how I paid the rent, but I sold a tequila company for a billion fucking dollars. I don’t need money."

Only one person on the face of the earth can say that. George Clooney.

Meanwhile, his new movie "Suburbicon" is a real stinker.

From the Anthony Lane review in The New Yorker:

Suburbicon might as well be populated exclusively by Klansmen; not a voice is raised in the [black family's] favor.... Taking a wild guess, I get the feeling that, in Clooney’s opinion, the United States, in the epoch of Eisenhower, had a problem with racism. Jeez, who knew? The film’s indignation is clearly fuelled by the rancor that has persisted into the epoch of Trump, but there’s a hitch. So repelled is Clooney by the response of white suburbia to African-Americans, and so keen is he to insure that we share his outrage at what they endured, that he quite forgets to be interested in them. We learn next to nothing about Mr. and Mrs. Mayers (their first names are a mystery), nor do we listen to their conversations. The wife is charged twenty dollars for a carton of milk by the manager of a supermarket, and she hangs up her washing outside with a bevy of protesters banging drums and crowing, only feet away, but, while her dignity in the face of such taunts is noble, that’s all we know of her. It’s purely in relation to white contempt, in other words, that she is granted dramatic presence. To say that she and her husband are a backdrop would be going too far, but the black plot and the white plot scarcely touch. Is that what Clooney intended?

"Both as Wayne and as super-Wayne he seems indifferent, as the films themselves are, to the activities of little people..."

"... and to the claims of the everyday, preferring to semi-purse his lips, as if preparing to whistle for an errant dog, and stare pensively into the distance. Caped or uncaped, the guy is a bore. He should have kids; that would pull him out of himself. Or else he should hang out with Iron Man and get wasted. He should have fun."

"Batman's Bane," by Anthony Lane. (No Aurora massacre content.)

That link is worth clicking on just to get to the cartoon — a guy in a bar looking into his highball glass says: "I don't know anything about global warming, but these ice cubes are melting like crazy."

By the way, I read a plot summary of "The Dark Knight Rises," because I'm not going to see it — I rarely go to the movies anymore and I experienced the last Batman movie an unpleasant chore (not out of fear of massacre) — and because I wanted to understand the connection to "Occupy Wall Street" politics. Anthony Lane pooh-poohs the connection:

True, we see a handful of rich white men being ejected from fancy apartments, but then the film coughs politely and moves on, as if recalling that nobody is richer or whiter than Bruce Wayne, and that his apartment is, in fact, a castle. Also, the outcome is positively Victorian, in that its dread of disorder far outweighs its relish of liberty uncaged; the throng is faced down and tamed by ranks of growling police officers.

Lane fails to contemplate the possibility that the movie is against the Occupy side. Here's Rush Limbaugh working that theme — Batman is Romney! Batman/Romney is "the rich guy, milquetoast, boring, dull," but if he "puts the uniform back on," he "saves the day."

In fact, the producer -- or the creator, Chuck Dixon -- says that the villain in this movie is almost... I forget his exact words, but he links the villain in this movie to Occupy Wall Street. And yet the Democrats are out there trying to say Bane is Bain. I think this exposes the frailty of their position.

So, as I said, I read the plot summary. It looks incredibly dull and over-complicated when distilled into forthright sentences, but it was all quite meaningless to me. If the film says anything about politics, I'm not going to be the one to figure out what.

***

That's not meant to say anything about the murders, which I don't think should be inflated with political imagination. Let's resist the temptation to say things that might entice delusional people to make the decision to act out. You could suddenly one day be the most famous person on earth, whose face everyone will gaze upon, whose mind everyone will contemplate. You could make the presidential candidates suspend their campaigns and command everyone to pray and pray over the dramatic changes you have made in their puny little world. Let's resist the temptation to create that temptation.

News about "Alexander."

1. Those Greeks who were suing to vindicate Alexander's sexual reputation are calling it off until they get a chance to see the film. Critics caution against it.

2. Angelina Jolie reflects on her performance as Alexander's mother:

"I connected to her as a mother. I don't think I could have played her if I wasn't a mother... As a mother, I truly understand that you will do anything to protect your child. Yes, she is a dark, wicked person, but as an actress, you have to make the audience believe that her motives were pure. She always put her son first."

Judging from this article, motherhood has totally undermined the once-great entertainment value of Jolie's private life. Oh, well. 

3. Here's quite a sentence from Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker:

Farrell comes across here as twitchy, straw-haired, and buzzing with sexual mystification, as if he had researched the life of Anne Heche by mistake, and he seems bewildered by the film’s demands, uncertain whether to opt for a stiff-backed action man—an unironic legend, the sort of role that nobody has been able to master since Charlton Heston retired—or a tortured, more modern spirit, his taste for love dulled by his addiction to fame

4. The bogus homophobia angle appears in the Philippines press:

Would a big sector of our society raise hell about the film if it did not present without doubt the sexual and love choices of Alexander, the man? Look at all the tirades, they all point to things like the shaved legs of Farrell, his blonde locks and how they are wrongly dyed. One smells here the ether of homophobia rather than the essence of good taste.

Is anyone raising hell? I'm sure Stone dearly wishes hell had been raised.

5. Colin Farrell raises some hopes about the DVD version:

“I have no problem showing my ****,” says Farrell. “In fact, I did go naked in A Home at the End of the World, but they cut it out. During test audience screenings, they were advised it was too distracting. I don't know. I see my **** every day and am not distracted. But, hey, who knows? Maybe you'll get to see it in the uncut DVD version.”