Saturday, February 23, 2008

Hey Jude

I expect the new addition to the Thompson family to be able to do this within two years - max.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Episcopal

Finally finished The Island of the Day Before, but I'm going to sit on it a day or two before I "review" it.

I'm on to the Book of Mormon now, which I'm giving myself more time for, obviously. I'll probably have smaller reviews of each book within, and then an overall review, since it was all written by the same guy anyway. Oops! I mean...written by many different people...thousands of years ago...not in the mid 1800s....Yup!

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Monday, February 11, 2008

Drip Down

Rumors, rumors and ill feelings. No matter who we're put together with, our own pride maybe, or expectations, or maybe the illusion of permanence, as the Buddhists think, make every kind of secret complaining or outright animosity spring out of initially stand-offish people. I've also heard that familiarity breeds contempt, which may be the case.

I think I may be cursed to apathy as well, controllable, but difficult to push back once it gets hold. It's just that once it gets going I have a damned time mustering the will to change it. All becomes bad and nothing good. If I can use the boredom and hatred, by historical figures, of their respective situations and occupations I still have to accept the revulsion of the present moment they must have experienced, and the suffering they must have endured for what we can justify in retrospect.

I'm also just tired of this shit.

The deployment was supposed to happen, then was canceled, then was supposedly pushed back a month. As of last week I found that, without being told anything, I had been replaced. Today, the verdict is, we're not sure, you might go.

I can't bring myself to be neutral about this place. Maybe malcontent would be a more accurate description. I just really hate what I'm doing. People have gone thru it with their chins up and bright prospects. That's just not me. And maybe I'm using this situation as an excuse to fan my coals of dissatisfaction. I can almost guarantee I am. I just choose not to put energy into finding the merits. Probably a poor response. I've really lost interest in determining that.

In contrast, here's a bit about the new Bond movie.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Sound in a Vacuum

Here lies this blog, found slumped over and starved in it's cage, dead from neglect. It once filled much the same role that the marmonts at the zoo do. Nice for something between other things. Not a main attraction, but every once in a while there'd be a chase for a piece of fruit, or one of the marmonts would flip out and just be pacing back and forth for no apparent reason, and the people going from here to there would stop and go, "Huh." and move on. But the marmonts' fur started getting haggard and their health went down, and eventually there were just lying around, panting - so the viewers got less, and less, and less, until one day, one of the zoo hands was sweeping up gum and happened to look in and see...nothing.
The wind blows sand around their limp, rotting bodies.

So maybe I can start a project to fill the void. Never made a new years resolution I really thought much of.
This year I said I'd read a book a week. A book a week! Six weeks in and I'm going, more or less strong, my current book may bleed into next week, but otherwise I'm caught up.
So I can probably do something like a review each week. Nothing very comprehensive, and mostly just to help my own understanding of what I'm reading.
Last week I read the play Waiting for Godot. I think it's what Waiting for Guffman is based on name-wise. It was recommended to my be an old friend from the good ole days in the Saugus High Playmakers. She's actually pursuing an education related to the dramatic arts.
Now, I'm guessing she read this play in a playreading or writing class, and they analyzed it and maybe even acted it out. It seems to me very awkward.
It's an English translation of an originally French play, translated by the author. I did my best to read out loud and put emotion behind some of the more awkward parts, but some, I still can't imagine them being acted out without the audience feeling uncomfortable by how unnatural the dialogue is.

That's probably part of the point. The characters are probably supposed to be archetypes of some kind, and with a stretch, I can put some kind of analysis onto it. The two main characters, from the get go are in a sort of barren landscape, and what they're doing is in fact waiting for someone named Godot. Spoiler alert: He never comes. The only other two main characters are what seem to be some kind of rich man, who goes blind in the second act, and his slave "Lucky." The slave hardly speaks except when told to "think" out loud, whereby he rambles on stream of consciousness style about what comes off as high-handed white noise (successfully annoying the actors and, I'm assuming the audience).

The end is hopeless, with the two main characters deciding to hang themselves.

The first parallel that springs to mind is that of The Second Coming. These characters' lives are poor and full of suffering. Their glint of light in the distance is this Godot man, who seems to me to be somewhat of a savior character. The message would of course be shown in that in the end, he fails them.

Still, the writer, Samuel Beckett, won the nobel prize for this, so I can't imagine it having such a controversial message.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, "Beckett tired quickly of “the endless misunderstanding. Why people,” he said – as far back as 1955 – “have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out."
It reminds me of "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." written at the beginning of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When I, in exasperation, quoted this back to my 10th grade honors English teacher after weeks of thematic analysis, he said, "But that's the great IRONY of Twain." If that's irony, color me rainbowy.

What are these writers playing at, if what he says is true? Is it like playing hard to get? Have they tapped the psyche of the populace to such a great degree, and do they believe their own works to be so significant as to con people into sucking meaning out of them like sucking water from sandstone? It seems like too much, to me. Too many games. This is the business of writing, not poker. It's like the Chinese guy in the prestige. Even outside his work, his whole life is an act. Somehow, I doubt it.

That said, even what Beckett saw as simple in his play, was way over my layman's head. I found it disconnected and monotonous. I know I haven't watched it and I'm no doubt not appreciating it on some level. I accept that, this is just what I've taken from it. A sense of hopelessness in present and in prospects. An inability, or unwillingness on our part as a species to take control of our own destiny, and the ultimate consequence of our impotence. That's what I took.

I'm happy I read it, though. It's a piece of our literary background, and obviously it means SOMETHING to lots of other people. But there's really not anything much deeper that I can say about it.

Saturday, February 2, 2008