A Return; A Point to Fixate On and then Zoom-Out From like Many Shots in The Graduate; Here Me Blab
I subsumed — first I wrote ‘saw’ then ‘watched’ then ‘imbibed’ then ‘saw’ again, then finally ‘subsumed’ - this confused process further explained later on… — I subsumed The Graduate for the first time last night. I really enjoyed it, and would say it’s a great film. Very cool and different and innovative-feeling, and I felt it was about my favorite topic: Obsession.
Dustin Hoffman seemed to have a thematic core in his performances from the The Graduate/Straw Dogs days, namely: Anxious Smart Guy Goes Crazy. I love that core. I could watch it all day.
Straw Dogs is one of my favorite films.
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I am thinking so much about clearly articulating & ‘saying what I mean’ lately that I am beginning to feel numb in the language-centers of my brain, as if, struck in moments, I feel as if I could easily abandon the pursuit of putting words together on white screens and white paper and go plow a field 14 hours a day.
I won’t abandon the pursuit; I know this.
But the desire is there.
It always is there.
But now it nags.
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Related:
An excerpt from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus:
Well, damn. I can’t find the sentence that really hit me, so I’ll just give you two excerpts, just two although I want to retype everything I’ve read of it thus far because it’s all so on point:
I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts. There it found its bread. There it realized it had previously been feeding on phantoms. It justified some of the most urgent themes of human reflection.
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The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again.
(Bolded sentence being the one that really hit me.)
So, basically, Camus is right on point and hitting me again in the way I was hit when I first read The Stranger, when I was 16 or so, on a plane from _________ to _________; well, not necessarily in the same way, because I feel like the majority of what I’m reading so far in this essay is already in me, believed by me, but I feel now that this text is expanding and reinforcing a process that I maybe desperately need to return to in order to stay happy.
I am glad I am inked a reminder of Sisyphus.
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I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. –Thomas Jefferson
I have stopped listening to KCRW. I am infinitely the happier for it.
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I’m putting myself on a plane that will fly to Paris, soon. I’m excited about it in a way that is free of anxiety. It seems free.
Don’t rob my house while I’m gone.
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A healthy reminder — for me at least (this whole thing being ‘for me at least’) — is:
Language/art//belief/being is a process, not a product.
You can find more of me talking to myself here.
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