A few links to get you started reading this Saturday morning. (I know it’s nice out, but I took my coffee out to my little backyard and am ignoring my cat’s mournful stares from the window, and encourage you to do so as well.)
At the Guardian, Tom Shone takes on the auteur theory — and its distinctly “male gaze.” “The carving up of the movies, a collaborative medium, into a series of solo acts, each bearing the unmistakeable imprint of an all-controlling “master”, most often male, is basically the great man theory of history transplanted into movie theatres – the swinging dick of film theories.” I hate balls metaphors but I hereby grant myself an exception to say that I respect the brass ones it takes to point this out. The way we talk about movies does have a self-reinforcing qualities. If the highest accolade we accord directors is that they have a “distinct worldview” and their “ambition,” then the James Camerons of this world are going to follow that garden path straight down into palm fronds and blue cat-people. No one, I think, wants more of that.
There’s a new musical at The Public about a literary roommates arrangement from (what else) Brooklyn. Called February House, the musical is set at 7 Middagh Street, which in the early 1940s was the home address of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and others. Gypsy Rose Lee dropped by for awhile too. The name “February House” came, allegedly, from Anaïs Nin. I haven’t seen the musical — it’s still in previews — but maybe I will, and report back. For now, read this lovely little bit at the London Review of Books blog about all the other 7 addresses Auden occupied, which may not have been an accident of chance, Jim Holt speculates.
This is an old one but a friend tweeted this Believer interview with Rebecca Solnit this week and I want it to be one of those things everyone reads and clasps to their chest and sighs with pleasure — a bit harder to do in the age of the laptop but you know, improvise. One good quote, and there are so many, is, “Public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context, saves you from drowning in the purely personal, as so many Americans seem to. I still think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.” Also: “That term public intellectual: all I know is that I stayed home alone for almost two decades, writing, before it became oddly visible and audible.”
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To read YOU one must commit to the vast array, from Rumpus, to Tumblr, to the outbound links and back. Damned exhilarating. This from Cowley”… the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.” dovetailed into this from Solnit, “… literacy is a peculiar mode of being.” For me it was Nietzsche who first introduced the idea of “having to,” the necessity to learn language and become literate. I have failed over and over and over again. I first quit graduate school to write. After a few months I realized I knew nothing and had nothing to say. I began to read with a vengeance, and at some point writing became a necessary habit, a way to be in the world: to see, hear, feel and think–to live. I’ve quit jobs, borrowed money, ended a marriage and relationships to continue. I have failed all along the way. Beckett’s words resonate for me in a way they cannot for those who have succeeded, “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” At some point I decided that any job I have or any person I love must allow for this need for solitude, of going alone, of spending routine tracks of time reading, thinking, reflecting upon and becoming literate (a never-ending, evolving process). The want of literacy, a kind of life-literacy, is not simply a peculiar mode of being but a necessary element for those who want to use their own words, to make their own meaning, to live and love in a different way.
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