Friday 9/27/24
Yesterday marked 3000 days without a drink. I could estimate how many drinks I might have had over those 3000 days if I had not stopped and if I lived for all 3000 of those days. What do I think about this? I don't know. Everything here is in a vacuum. I complete the best story ever written later today and it's just something here in this vacuum. But if anything is ever not just something here in a vacuum then those 3000 days would have played a part in that.
I mentioned the 3000 drink-less days on Facebook. Publishing people then defriended me. Again, that's what you're dealing with.
Red Sox were mathematically eliminated Wednesday. They'll probably spin it as, "We were in it until the last few games of the season."
M.R. James's "The Treasure of Abbott Thomas" is a slog. These cipher stories are always a bear to get through because they're not really about the story at all but rather the author trying to dazzle you with some labored puzzle for this tiny bit of narrative payoff. I shouldn't even say dazzle you--they're trying to prove that they can do this thing, too, that others have done. It's very "See? See? See? I'm doing it." Poe wasn't much of a writer and he was always chasing a buck so I understand why he did it, but James, a better writer, really had no reason to write this type of story. It wouldn't have worked well for reading it aloud to his friends at Christmas either.
Re: Poe: I'm certain all of the people who go online and say "Poe gives a master class in fiction" and say all of their automatic gushy but cliched comments about Poe have never read Poe.
Lovecraft is similar. Sit down and try to read most Lovecraft stories. You just want it to be over. You're not scared. He's a guy who can't help himself--usually--with overwriting things. And it's hard to take each "shewn" for "shown" and the like seriously. His letters are better, but talk about a defeatist attitude. I read those letters and listen to him whine about how all is doom and everyone is doomed and he's doomed and his correspondent is doomed, all to live this life of anonymity and misery, and here he was, this recluse, who wasn't that good, who becomes built up as this significant figure in a manner at odds with his actual work and automatically given all of this credit. The name helped. Notice how often that's a thing? We saw it all the way back with Wells Tower when I first mentioned it. You read through so much fustian with Lovecraft looking for something true and honestly rendered. Then there's "The Colour Out of Space," which does try to go somewhere.
Lovecraft the person would have been someone whom you thought raised some good points but also was taking these sorts of swipes at you so that you'd reduce your expectations for what you previously thought you could achieve and ultimately you'd think he was bad for you and would be better to separate from. He's someone who'd want you to be as down as he was if you were both men of letters--and Lovecraft didn't really speak/correspond with anyone else--to accept what he viewed as your fate. Thoreau would probably just want to be off on his own without anyone. Thoreau was very punk in his way. He gave a fuck by not giving a fuck.
Neither Poe nor Lovecraft got anywhere close to the level of William Sloane's To Walk the Night. The whole of their outputs added together doesn't contain nearly as much as the first three chapters alone of the Sloane novel.
Increasingly I don't think that film noir is a thing. It's used as this stylistic catch-all but so many of the so-called film noir films share few visual elements, or no more elements than any two movies from the time period. They're crime pictures, but that's a subject matter thing, whereas film noir purports to be all about a visual style and a prevailing fatalism. There may only be one film noir to my thinking, and that's Out of the Past.
Walking to the Monument the other day I authored what I am confident is the most offensive knock-knock joke ever which it possibly get me jailed if I ever said it to anyone.
Almost everything online that is said about movies is idiotic but everyone regards themselves an expert. I was looking at a discussion about the best acting performances. It's like every person can only discuss--because they only know--things from their lifetime and, most usually, only the adult portion of their lifetime. What's more, these people all know the same things that were talked about and hyped, which was often for reasons besides the quality of those things. All of these people sitting on their ass starting into screens, with everything--or a big percentage of it--available with simple searches and they check out none of it. They have no idea what exists beyond the very limited amount of things they've seen which they've all seen allowing that the others were also adults then. Are they really not aware that there's all this other stuff out there?
There are no actors in film, by the way, who have been better than William Conrad was in Gunsmoke and Bob Bailey in the Johnny Dollar five-parters on radio in all of the decades since. Conrad was an acting wonder. You talk about range. Easy to hear all of his work.
The irony is that when it was harder to see films there were more people who actually knew about film. When individual films themselves were much harder to see--that is, you were dependent on that chance revival or an airing on TV--more people managed to know about that film--I'm talking for someone in like 1961--than people are now when they could just type in the name of that film and watch it or look up something about film history and get a list of titles and watch them. Says a lot about where we're at now. It's so narcissistic to me to think that everything starts with your lifetime and when you were a certain age. And that's what people do. Enough so that I honestly wonder if they think anything was around before they were. You have all of these morons believing they're the ultimate main character in this idiot's story that is no different than any other idiot's story in which they're also the main character.
George Harrison's comment that Rubber Soul and Revolver are pretty much the same record to him, the songs and sounds of the one similar to the songs and sounds of the other, has always been a strange one to me. Makes me wonder how much he ever looked at the records as works or if for him it was pretty much just a matter of being there on and being on them. I suspect the latter.
My four-year-old buddy has been very concerned with death. She brings it up so much--especially at bedtime--that her mother finally just said she's never going to die. I can't help but feel that the Little Ghost Girl may have something to do with this, but I also don't feel bad enough about that--if it's true--that the LGG and myself won't be sending Amelia a Halloween card. I have it all worked out. I realize that my sister may censor this card when she reads it to Amelia and leave the LGG's note out of it (and my part about someone wanting to say hi), so I am going to depute the other two kids to make sure it's read properly.
My mother is babysitting for a few days, starting yesterday, and staying overnight. She will be tired when she's done. She's probably tired now. Amelia may be a unicorn for Halloween. I pitched my idea on her being the Wicked Witch of the West and Lilah being Dorothy which would have been hilarious. And Amelia looks up to Lilah so much I suggested she could be Lilah for Halloween. Nothing is final yet.
Unsure where I left off fitness-wise. I did five circuits of stairs in the Monument both days over the weekend plus the expecting walking and push-ups. Hardly any stairs--1000--at City Hall on Monday, then 3000 on Tuesday--and then five sets of stairs the last two days in the Monument, with all of my push-ups each day. Need to do better with planks.
Found a download of Green Day's Dookie box set and an audio file copy of the soundboard recording from Oasis's first night at Knebworth.
I saw where someone wrote that she and her mom love watching the colorized version of Scrooge. I don't mean this cruelly, but people are just so low-class. You have this film in which the black and white photography is central to everything about film. It's not the film without it. You might as well take out Alastair Sim if you're going to colorize the picture. And these attempts to colorize black and white films always look so tacky. It's not like flipping a switch and turning them into actual color films like they'd originally been made that way. People are incredibly unsophisticated. Okay, there can be more to the story. Maybe the colorized version was the first they saw together that Christmas after mom had been declared cancer free so it has this sentimental value and is now their special tradition. But it's probably not something like that, is it?
I've been writing so much lately. Picked up a couple assignments yesterday because I need money and I need to get more assignments.
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