Fingers Pointing at the Moon

By and large I reject the idea that understanding a magic trick makes it less wonderful; I was always the kid running the haunted house or telling the ghost story, and I was a devoted follower of Penn and Teller back when they focused on magic instead of rants. (It was always really Teller I loved - the cup and balls with clear plastic cups and wadded tissue; the lit cigarette trick where seen in one profile it seems like an ordinary man smoking and from the other side you see the elaborate sleight of hand that went into there never being a cigarette or a flame; the five cent koan*.) I've said many times that I find scientific explanations of stars and the origins of life infinitely more wondrous and awe inspiring than the notion of God's Mysteries, and that my awareness of how a film is lit or scored doesn't mean I'm less invested in the narrative than you - provided the narrative is good and not solely manipulative.

One of a few exceptions where I don't champion analysis is this: I hate it when people try to reduce absurdism to allegory.

I've been reading back through 40 Stories, by Donald Barthelme, which contains some of my all-time favorite short stories and had a profound influence on how I approach the medium as a writer. I got my copy in a college bookstore a decade ago, and it was secondhand, and in one of the stories, only one, a previous owner made very light notes in pencil. That story is "The Machine" and is almost a play, could be staged, is a series of brief dialogues interspersed with a featureless black square.

The pencil-written notes are light enough that I was able to simply tell myself not to see them during previous readings, but this time through, perhaps because I'm lonely or tired, I couldn't un-notice them. And I hate them. They doggedly try to deconstruct what aspect of society's relationship to mechanization and technology the machine represents in each short dialog, dialogues like:

Q: Is the novel dead?
A: Oh yes. Very much so.
Q: What replaces it?
A: I should think that it is replaced by what existed before it was invented.
Q: The same thing?
A: The same sort of thing.
Q: Is the bicycle dead?

And the note taker wrote in the margin some fool thing like "the machine as a vehicle for thought." I don't know; I've erased it. I've erased all of the pencil notes, finally, from "advantages of routine" to "apple represents Eve." Goodbye to the graffiti of an undergraduate who looked so hard for meaning she couldn't see the humor, the deliberate impermeability of a featureless black box, the elisions and tangents the author used to form a cradle for the sublime.

* Credited by this blogger as Penn and Teller, but in fact Teller. Some of whose fine essays can be found here.

Capsule Review: Social Network

Finally saw most of The Social Network (missed the very beginning). Some funny dialog, but overall I'm not impressed. I think the critics who touted it as an important film that will live on through the years have very poor perspective; I doubt it will stand out or age well. (Why is it everyone since Woodstock is terrified of missing the next generation's Woodstock? Not even Woodstock was Woodstock.) And I didn't really notice the score, which makes me sad; I love Reznor and it's the main reason I watched. Continue to think the real awards sweep last year should have been Inception; it was certainly the most ambitious.

Was a certain amount amused to be watching the week Google+ was all over the news.

Some guys get their girlfriend a whole bunch of balloons

It's disappointing when somebody comes up to me after I've shown a film or talked about film and tells me how it was nice but usually they watch comedies and what they like is comedies. This is a bit like announcing dessert is your favorite meal. Of course you like things that make you laugh and would like to feel cheerful and relaxed and entertained and relieved of the burdens of your life. Of course you like comedies. Of course I like comedies. I am in fact A Comedian.

But I really don't see what that has to do with whether dramas are worth watching, any more than wanting to read the Sunday comics section stops me from reading the rest of the newspaper, or liking ice cream means I'm going to stop eating food with fiber in it. This is just not something you have to choose between.