Currently reading:

On Art and Life, John Ruskin
Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon
3rd bed #11
ArtNews/November 2006
Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino

Certain first purchase of the new year: The Complete Poetry

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Making plans, forgetting them, remembering tangents of, misplacing the tangents, remembering incorrectly the reasons.

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Robert Creeley's poem "There..." from his Away:


There is a world
underneath, or
on top of,
this one--and
it's here, now.

Watched Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, the six-hour version. As a document on marriage, on the silences between one another and what they contain, it is a seering, painful, honest, and unflinching look. But with the direct emotional conversations, I felt the cold light of it was almost too much. I didn't and don't trust the harshness, as was apparent many times throughout the movie, when the lead actor would state how much he hated his wife, then ex-wife, then lover again, and yet they would become intimate again shortly after. The dance of the passing emotions is really what's on display here, and for that I really love this film. No other films move toward such delicate gravity, such deep existential grief, such grainy fear, as Bergman's.

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Also finished the documentary on Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train. It's a collection of speeches and interviews and cut-up history, which is fine, engaging, and informative, but it seemed to have no real organization. Perhaps I'm not the one the documentary is intended for, as it functions as a kind of primer on Zinn. I was hoping for more.

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Not-so interesting how the Labor Department has released an extremely rosy picture of employment just a few days before the election. Lowest rates in five and a half years! I expect in another day Bush will find the cure for AIDS on one of his morning jogs.